The Mystery of the Pirate's Treasure Read online

  EGMONT

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  First published by Egmont USA, 2013

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © Penny Warner, 2013

  All Rights Reserved

  www.egmontusa.com

  www.pennywarner.com

  www.CodeBustersClub.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Warner, Penny.

  The Mystery of the Pirate’s Treasure / by Penny Warner.

  pages cm. — (The Code Busters Club; case #3)

  Summary: When the Code Busters visit the Carmel Mission, a series of coded messages set them on the hunt for long hidden pirate treasure.

  ISBN 978-1-60684-457-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-60684-458-8 (ebook) [1. Cryptography—Fiction. 2. Ciphers—Fiction. 3. School field trips—Fiction. 4. Mission San Carlos Borromeo (Carmel, Calif.)—Fiction. 5. Bouchard, Hippolyte—Fiction. 6. Pirates—Fiction. 7. Buried treasure—Fiction. 8. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W2458Hi 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012045855

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright holder.

  v3.1

  To my treasure hunters: Bradley,

  Stephanie, Luke, and Lyla

  READER

  To see keys and solutions to the puzzles inside, go to the Code Buster’s Key Book & Solutions on this page.

  To see complete Code Busters Club

  Rules and Dossiers, and solve more puzzles and mysteries, go to

  www.CodeBustersClub.com

  CODE BUSTERS CLUB RULES

  Motto

  To solve puzzles, codes, and mysteries and keep the Code Busters Club secret!

  Secret Sign

  Interlocking index fingers

  (American Sign Language sign for “friend”)

  Secret Password

  Day of the week, said backward

  Secret Meeting Place

  Code Busters Club Clubhouse

  Code Busters Club Dossiers

  IDENTITY: Quinn Kee

  Code Name: “Lock&Key”

  Description

  Hair: Black, spiky

  Eyes: Brown

  Other: Sunglasses

  Special Skill: Video games, Computers, Guitar

  Message Center: Doghouse

  Career Plan: CIA cryptographer or Game designer

  Code Specialties: Military code, Computer codes

  IDENTITY: MariaElena—M.E.—Esperanto

  Code Name: “Em-me”

  Description

  Hair: Long, brown

  Eyes: Brown

  Other: Fab clothes

  Special Skill: Handwriting analysis, Fashionista

  Message Center: Flower box

  Career Plan: FBI handwriting analyst or Veterinarian

  Code Specialties: Spanish, I.M., Text messaging

  IDENTITY: Luke LaVeau

  Code Name: “Kuel-Dude”

  Description

  Hair: Black, curly

  Eyes: Dark brown

  Other: Saints cap

  Special Skill: Extreme sports, Skateboard, Crosswords

  Message Center: Under step

  Career Plan: Pro skater, Stuntman, Race car driver

  Code Specialties: Word puzzles, Skater slang

  IDENTITY: Dakota—Cody—Jones

  Code Name: “CodeRed”

  Description

  Hair: Red, curly

  Eyes: Green

  Other: Freckles

  Special Skill: Languages, Reading faces and body language

  Message Center: Tree knothole

  Career Plan: Interpreter for UN or deaf people

  Code Specialties: Sign language, Braille, Morse code, Police codes

  CONTENTS*

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Code Buster’s Key Book & Solutions

  Acknowledgments

  * To crack the chapter title code, check out the CODE BUSTER’S Key Book & Solutions on this page and this page.

  Students, your attention, please,” Ms. Stadelhofer announced to her sixth-grade class. “Do any of you recognize this book?”

  Dakota—Cody—Jones was about to raise her hand to answer when Matt the Brat, the kid who sat in front of her, turned around in his seat.

  “Is that your baby book, Cody-Toady?” Matt teased. His breath smelled of peanut butter.

  Cody glared at him.

  “Matthew Jeffreys, turn around and pay attention,” Ms. Stad said sharply.

  “Sorry, Stad … I mean, Ms. Stadelhofer,” Matt said.

  Cody could tell that he didn’t mean a word of his apology.

  Ms. Stadelhofer held up the book again. “How many of you learned Mother Goose nursery rhymes when you were little?”

  All the hands in the class shot up—except one: Matt the Brat’s. He’d never admit to knowing such babyish stories.

  “Do any of you remember this rhyme?” Stad asked. She began to read from the large picture book:

  “Sing a song of sixpence

  “A pocket full of rye …”

  Cody’s best friend, M.E.—MariaElena Esperanto—waved her hand. Cody knew M.E. loved poetry. It wasn’t surprising she’d know nursery rhymes.

  “Yes, MariaElena?” said Ms. Stad.

  “My tía used to sing that to me every night at bedtime,” M.E. said proudly. “I know the whole thing by heart.”

  “Would you like to recite it for us?” Ms. Stad asked.

  M.E. stood up by her desk and cleared her throat as if she were about to sing an opera.

  “Sing a song of sixpence

  “A pocket full of rye

  “Four and twenty blackbirds

  “Baked in a pie.

  “When the pie was opened

  “The birds began to sing

  “Was that not a tasty dish

  “To set before a king?”

  The class burst into applause.

  “Nice job, MariaElena,” Ms. Stad said. “Now, do you know what the rhyme means?”

  M.E. frowned. “Uh … somebody baked a pie full of birds for the king? Sounds yucky to me.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Believe it or not,” Ms. Stad said, after the laughter died down, “many of the nursery rhymes are actually about real historical events and have secret meanings.”

  Cody’s ears pricked up.

  “Sometimes the rhymes made fun of the royal family or the political events of the day,” Ms. Stad continued. “Commoners didn’t have free speech back then, like we do today. If they criticized the government, they could have been arrested, or worse.”

  Cody shivered. Imagine being arrested—or worse—for just talking.

  “Many of the coded references in the rhymes are about wars, plagues, and injustice. Most people didn’t read or write, so they memorized rhymes. Believe it or not, even pirates used rhymes to pass on secret messages.”

  “Pirates?” Matt the Brat blurted, forgetting to raise his hand. Ms. Stad shot him a warning look. Quickly, he held up
his hand, then bent it into the shape of a hook and added, “Arrg!”

  Cody could just picture Matt wearing an eye patch and swinging a sword—right before he tripped and fell off the gangplank into crocodile-infested waters. She smiled at the image.

  But the word pirate had definitely caught Cody’s attention, too. Cody loved adventures and had read everything from Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe to Island of the Blue Dolphins and Little House on the Prairie.

  As Ms. Stad gave Matt her usual lecture about staying focused and using good manners, Cody jotted down a coded note for M.E. using her Caesar’s cipher wheel. M.E. and Cody were members of the Code Busters Club, along with Quinn Kee and Luke LaVeau from Mr. Pike’s class. They’d formed the club because they all loved creating and cracking codes, and they had built their own clubhouse in a nearby eucalyptus forest. The four kids had made their own ciphers by cutting out two circles, one larger than the other. They’d written the alphabet around the edge of the outer circle, and then they’d done the same on the rim of the inner circle but had mixed up the letters. It was one of Cody’s favorite ways of sending secret messages. After lining up the letter Z on the inner circle with the letter A on the outer circle, Cody quickly coded the message by substituting the corresponding letters. That way no one could read it if it fell into the wrong hands—like Matt the Brat’s.

  She located the first letter of her message on the outer circle—I—then wrote down the corresponding letter underneath it—X. She continued to code each letter until the sentence was complete:

  X HBRVDC XP UJDCD’I Z KXCZUD LBVD?

  Code Buster’s Key and Solution found on this page, this page.

  Using origami, Cody folded the sheet of binder paper into a hidden square within a square, with the message inside. She passed the palm-sized note to Becca behind her, who passed it to Susan, who passed it to Lyla, who passed it to Stephanie, who passed it to M.E.

  “Quiet down, please,” said Ms. Stad, calling the buzzing students back to attention. “You might be surprised to learn that the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ was actually a message that pirates used to recruit crew members for their ships. ‘Sing a song of sixpence’ refers to the amount of money the pirates would earn for the trip. ‘A pocket full of rye’ is about how they spent their money. ‘Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ meant the pirates planned to lure other ships in range, then launch a surprise attack. ‘When the pie was opened’ meant the attack itself, and ‘the birds began to sing’ was about the pirates who fought in the attack.”

  Ms. Stad paused for a moment, looking out at her students, who were mesmerized by her story. She grinned. “Can anyone guess who ‘the king’ refers to?”

  A few hands went up. “The king of England?” asked Bradley in the back row.

  “No,” said Ms. Stadelhofer.

  “The king of Spain?” asked Jodie.

  Ms. Stad shook her head.

  Hands slowly went down. “Give up?” she asked. The students nodded. “Actually, ‘the king’ doesn’t refer to a real king at all. It refers to Blackbeard the Pirate!”

  “Cool, too bad there aren’t any pirates like Blackbeard anymore, Cody thought.

  “Class,” Ms. Stad said. “I have a special ‘pie’ of my own to share with you. But this will be a good surprise.”

  Everyone sat quietly, waiting. Cody wondered what it could be. A Pirate Day in the classroom? A lesson on how to talk like a pirate? Or maybe Ms. Stad planned to teach them a real pirate code?

  “Did you find an envelope inside your backpacks yesterday?” Ms. Stad asked.

  Cody nodded and noticed the other students nodding as well.

  “What was inside?” Ms. Stad asked.

  Hands shot up. Ms. Stad called on Becca.

  “There was a long, rectangular piece of paper shaped like a mission building,” she answered, “with small windows and a bell tower.”

  “Was anything written on the paper?”

  “No, it was blank,” answered Bradley.

  “Was there anything else in the envelope?”

  “Yeah,” answered Lyla. “A pen, but I think the ink was dried up. I tried to write with it, and there was nothing there.”

  Cody’s hand went up. “It was an invisible-ink decoder pen. If you colored over the paper, a bunch of letters showed up.”

  Ms. Stad held up a larger version of the grid:

  Code Buster’s Solution found on this page.

  “Duh,” said Matt. “I did that, but the letters didn’t make any sense.”

  “It was a puzzle,” M.E. said. “Like a hidden-word search. You had to solve it to figure it out.”

  “She’s right,” Ms. Stad said. “There are words hidden in the grid. They run horizontally, vertically, and even diagonally. They relate to a theme.”

  Cody and her friends had quickly figured out what kind of puzzle it was when they’d found it. They made puzzles like this for one another all the time. Five of the hidden words jumped out at Cody immediately—the ones along the edges of the puzzle. The Code Busters had circled the words when they spotted them, then written them all down. Soon they had a list of twelve random words. All of the leftover letters—the ones not circled—were in alphabetical order.

  Ms. Stad went to the whiteboard. “All right, class. Those of you who found the hidden words, please raise your hands and I’ll call on you to share them.” Stad wrote down the words as they were called out.

  “It still doesn’t make any sense,” Matt argued. “It’s just a bunch of random words.”

  Cody raised her hand. “It’s a word anagram,” she said. “You have to rearrange the words in order to make a sentence.”

  “Right, again!” Ms. Stad said. “So which word comes first?”

  “Who!” called out Stephanie.

  “Raise your hands, please,” Ms. Stad reminded the class. She wrote the word Who on the board. Once the words were placed in order and the puzzle was solved, Ms. Stad read the sentence out loud.

  “Awesome!” Bradley said. “I love searching for pirate’s treasure. This is going to be totally fun.”

  Matt the Brat turned and frowned. “Dude, there’s no such thing as hidden treasure in California. They only find that kind of stuff at the bottom of the sea.”

  Ms. Stad grinned at the class. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough. As you know, we’ve been studying our state’s history and the settling of the American West. We’ve also just learned about mapping. We may not have the battlefields of the South or the fishing ports of the Northeast, the pioneer trails of the Midwest, or even the pirates along the East Coast. But we do have our unique California missions—you learned about them in fourth grade—and we’ll be taking a field trip to the Carmel Mission. There, you’ll learn about mission life in the 1700s and visit the tiny room where Junipero Serra, founder of the mission, lived. Father Serra helped explore and colonize the area that became our home state, California.”

  The class cheered at the idea of a field trip. But Cody felt a little disappointed. The Carmel Mission? It was hardly Gettysburg or Plymouth Rock or even the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.—places she’d always wanted to see, where history really came alive.

  Ms. Stad seemed to read her thoughts. “You’ll be seeing real California history on this trip, class. The missions are among the oldest buildings in the state, constructed between 1769 and 1833. If it weren’t for the missions, we might not be here today. Each mission was built thirty miles away from the last—a day on horseback, three days on foot—so that travelers could stop, rest, and have a meal before moving on to the next mission.”

  Cody couldn’t imagine walking three days from one place to the next. Things had really changed.

  Ms. Stad rang a bell to get the students’ attention again.

  “Bells were important back in the mission days. They were rung at mealtime, as calls to religious services, during births, and at funerals. Bells were also rung to warn people of danger. O
ne of your assignments during our trip will be to identify all the mission bells you can.”

  Cool, Cody thought. This would be like a treasure hunt. She wondered what other kinds of bell codes there were. Maybe the Code Busters could make their own. One bell for “Listen!” Two bells for “Come quick!” Three bells for “Danger!” Ms. Stad rang the bell again to quiet the kids. “Also, we’ll be camping overnight and hiking the Mission Trail Nature Preserve.”

  More cheers from the students.

  “And that’s not all. Matt, you said there were no pirates and no buried treasure in California. But that’s not true. We do have one pirate—the only known pirate in California. His name was Hippolyte de Bouchard. He and his men landed in the Monterey Bay to search for treasure that was rumored to have been hidden by the missionaries!”

  A pirate named Hippolyte? Cody thought. A hidden treasure at a mission? An overnight field trip? A hunt for mission bells? This is going to be awesome!

  After school, Cody and M.E. headed for the Code Busters Clubhouse. The girls trudged up the hillside talking excitedly about the upcoming field trip to the Carmel Mission.

  “I’ve never been to Carmel before,” M.E. said, her long dark braid swinging down her back as she walked. Dressed in pink jeans, a Tinkerbell T-shirt, and rhinestone-embellished flip-flops, she looked out of place among the thick foliage and towering trees. But then, so did Cody in her jeans, blue T-shirt, and red Chuck Taylors. Luckily, the fall weather was still mild, even in the shadowed forest. And at least Cody had on shoes that gripped the slippery, needle-laden path, instead of M.E.’s slippery flip-flops.

  “My mom and I went to Carmel a few weekends ago to visit my aunt Abigail,” Cody said. “She lives in this little cottage with seven cats. It reminds me of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ She took us to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where we saw a bunch of sharks. Pretty awesome.”