The Secret of the Skeleton Key Read online

  “Any idea how the fire started?” Cody asked Quinn.

  He shrugged. “No clue. I heard the sirens, saw the fire from my bedroom window. An ambulance came and took Skeleton Man… ”

  Cody frowned at the memory of the scene, then asked, “Hey, what about those other two people?”

  “No sign of them,” Quinn said.

  Quinn’s parents called to him as they headed back inside their house. He glanced at them, then back to Cody. “I’ve got to go. I’ll set up a meeting with Luke and M.E. Check your secret hiding place later.”

  Cody nodded, spotting her mother walking toward them. She didn’t look happy.

  “Cody! Take Tana inside!” her mother said. “You two shouldn’t be out here.”

  Cody nodded. As she crossed the street with Tana, she took a last look at Skeleton Man’s blackened house. Suddenly, she caught a familiar face watching her from the sidelines.

  Matt the Brat.

  What was he doing all the way over on her street? Being nosy, of course. Her dad would have called him an ambulance chaser—always gawking at other people’s troubles. Her mother had warned her to stay away from him. She’d been called to his house a couple of times—once because he threw a ball through a neighbor’s window, again, and once because he was dumping trash cans in the neighborhood. But Cody couldn’t avoid him— he sat right in front of her in class.

  Some time later her father arrived early to take Tana to preschool. Cody greeted him with a hug and kiss and filled him in on the fire. When she realized it was time to get ready for school, she ran upstairs to get her backpack, but her head was still filled with questions. How had the fire started? Was Skeleton Man still alive? Who were those two mysterious people they’d seen at Skeleton Man’s house last night?

  And where were they now?

  She paused, staring at the scorched house across the street. Glancing at the second-story window, she noticed the singed curtains lay still.

  But she spotted something else that gave her goose bumps.

  Clearly drawn on the windowpane in black marker were four stick figures.

  Chapter 3

  Cody stood on her front porch with her backpack, still shocked by the sight of the half-destroyed house across the street. Through the charred shell she could see that the fire had almost gutted the inside. A few firefighters still combed the area for smoldering ashes, and the air reeked of acrid smoke. Even the weedy yard had burned, leaving Skeleton Man’s strange metal sculptures of trees and cats eerily discolored.

  Cody had a sudden thought: Where was Punkin?

  With the chaos of the fire, she’d forgotten all about the orange cat. She glanced over at Skeleton Man’s singed yard for a sign of movement. The old man had more than a dozen cats—she’d actually counted them. Where were they now? And where was Punkin? What could have happened to him?

  She checked her watch: 7:25 a.m. No time to search before school. M.E.—MariaElena, another member of the Code Busters Club—would be along any minute. Cody yawned. She’d been up for nearly two hours and was starting to feel the lack of sleep. With only a few minutes left before M.E. arrived, she walked over to her secret hiding place in the towering ash tree—the one Quinn had climbed the night before. Inside a knothole, in the secret spot where other Code Busters members knew to leave messages for her, she found a folded note.

  Removing it, she studied the outside of the palm-sized message, which was addressed to her code name. A large orange dot, code for “Orange Alert,” indicated its level of importance—the second highest just under “Red Alert.” Cody unfolded the origami-style envelope. The discolored paper looked a hundred years old, with black smudges and ragged edges.

  Almost as if it had been singed in a fire.

  She glanced across at Skeleton Man’s fire-scarred house and shuddered.

  “Nice touch, Quinn,” Cody said aloud, then looked around to see if anyone—like those two strangers from last night who had mysteriously appeared and then disappeared—had heard her.

  Returning her attention to the note, she thought, Leave it to Quinn to make it look super mysterious. Quinn was gifted, thanks to his parents’ supergenes. He had already designed computer games for the club, full of puzzles and codes, like Mutant Zombies from the Cafeteria and Escape from Principal Grunt’s Torture Chamber. And his coded messages were always fun to decipher. Although Quinn was on the shy side, he was full of creative ideas and was the unofficial leader of the club.

  She smiled at the detail in his latest note. The paper had probably been soaked in tea, then wrinkled and darkened at the edges with dirt or ink to make it look really ancient. It reminded her of some of the old papers she’d seen during a school trip to the Gold Country Museum.

  Before the Divorce.

  That’s how Cody saw life now. Before and After the Divorce.

  A wave of longing for her old house and her old friends shot through her, creating a hole in her stomach. Moving to Berkeley—or Berzerkley, as her old friends in Jamestown had called it—had been a big change for her, After the Divorce. She remembered the day her mom and dad had called her into the living room and had told her that they would be living apart. Cody had barely heard the part where they had said the usual “reassuring things,” like “We’ll still be your parents” and “You didn’t cause this.” Blah, blah, blah.

  Cody shook away her memories and studied the coded letters. She knew that if the note fell into the wrong hands—like Matt the Brat’s, who was always snooping around—it wouldn’t be easy to decipher. That’s why all of the club’s messages were written in code—so their secrets remained secret.

  She leaned against the leafy tree. Checking her watch again, she wondered what was keeping M.E. Had she received a note, too?

  Unlocking her Case Files Codebook with the key she always wore around her neck, Cody flipped to a blank page. She decided to work on Quinn’s coded message until M.E. arrived.

  Treating the codes like a math problem, Cody quickly recognized a pattern in this message. A smile spread across her face, creating dimples in her freckled cheeks. Easy one, she thought. It was based on the sequence of the alphabet. The Code Busters Club called it the ABC code.

  “Ame bet cme dat eth fec glu hbh iou jse kaf lte mrs nch ooo pll qoc rka snd tke uyv wxyz.”

  Using her red pen, she crossed off the first letter in each group of letters, in sequence. Removing the “a” left “m e,” the “b” left “e t,” the “c” left “m e,” and so on. When she was finished, she scanned the note again. The last several letters— vwxyz—she knew were just leftovers. She drew a line through them and looked over the letters that remained.

  “me et me at th ec lu bh ou se af te rs ch oo ll oc ka nd ke y”

  She rewrote the letters, fixed the spacing, and added punctuation.

  Code Buster’s Solution found on p. 205.

  Cody refolded the note. She already knew Quinn had planned to call a meeting, but had he learned something more about the fire—or those two strange people at Skeleton Man’s house?

  She looked up at the odd drawings on Skeleton Man’s window. Turning to a fresh page, she quickly copied them down to show the other club members. They seemed like stick figures standing in different positions.

  “Dakota Jones!” her mother called from the front porch. “Get going! You’re going to be late for school again!” Her dad was getting ready to leave so he could drop off Tana before he went to the law firm where he worked.

  Startled, Cody closed her notebook and moved to the sidewalk. “I’m still waiting for M.E., ” she called back. Her mother stood at the front door, one hand hooked in her leather belt, the other over her gun holster. Cody’s sister Tana stood next to her, a miniature carbon copy of her mother. Both were blonde, blue-eyed, and sturdy. Cody had inherited her father Mike’s genes—his fiery red hair (a constant source of teasing), green eyes, and slim form. And freckles.

  Cody waved to Tana as she and her dad headed for his car. Their mom was
walking toward her Mini Cooper.

  Tana signed, “Bye bye,” to Cody through the car’s side window. Cody signed back, “I love you,” holding up the shortcut sign—the American Sign Language (called ASL) letters I, L, and Ycombined. It was their morning good-bye ritual.

  “Get to school,” Cody’s mom called out. “And be careful.” The daily warning had become her mother’s good-bye ritual.

  As they all drove off, Cody gazed across the street, hoping to spot Punkin. There didn’t appear to be any life in Skeleton Man’s yard. Where had all his cats gone? And who would feed them when they came back, now that Skeleton Man was…

  “Hey, Cody!” a high-pitched voice called from down the street.

  At last! Cody spotted M.E.—MariaElena Esperanto—running to meet her, her long dark hair swaying as she walked. She grinned at her friend’s glittering pants, purple peasant top, SpongeBob cartoon knee-highs, and black hiking boots. M.E. always wore creative outfits. She lived with her big family one street over—where she spoke mostly Spanish—and had met Quinn and Luke in a summer camp called Cryptology for Kids. They’d been great friends ever since.

  M.E. gawked at the house across the street, her mouth wide open at the sight. “Oh no! I heard the sirens and smelled the smoke, but my parents wouldn’t let me check it out. What happened to Skeleton Man’s house?”

  “It caught on fire early this morning,” Cody said. “The paramedics took him to the hospital in an ambulance.”

  “Wow. Is he…all right?” M.E. asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m sure my mom will find out.”

  M.E. spun her lettered Code Bracelet around her latte-colored wrist as she stared at the burned-out house. It was her habit when she was nervous or worried. Cody wore a bracelet just like it. They’d made the bracelets together—following the instructions on an Internet site—by stringing lettered beads onto elastic thread. When they wanted to send each other secret messages, they wrote down numbers on a piece of paper using the Caesar cipher—a decoder wheel—where each letter of the alphabet correlates to a number. Then they’d translate the code by matching the numbers to the correct letters.

  “Did you get a secret message from Quinn?” Cody asked.

  “Yeah,” M.E. said, snapping out of her trance.

  “What’s it mean? Something to do with the fire?”

  “Maybe more,” Cody answered. As they began the five-block trek to Berkeley Cooperative Middle School, Cody filled M.E. in on the events of last night—Quinn’s Morse code tap, the mysterious drawings on Skeleton Man’s window, the two strangers and their odd disappearance after the fire.

  “Weird,” M.E. said.

  Cody looked at her friend, puzzled at her quiet demeanor. Usually M.E. was full of energy and talking a mile a minute, sometimes breaking into Spanish and losing Cody entirely. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” M.E. said, sighing. “I’m just a little bummed. When I heard the sirens this morning, I thought maybe the school was burning down— I’m not ready for the test in social studies today. But no such luck.”

  Maybe not lucky for M.E., but definitely not lucky for Skeleton Man, Cody thought.

  Or had the fire really been just bad luck?

  Chapter 4

  Cody and M.E. arrived at school just in time for the first bell. By the second bell—the “late bell”—Cody was in her seat behind Matt the Brat, studying the stick figure sketches she’d copied into her Case Files Codebook earlier that morning. The first figure held its right arm out to the side, the left across its chest and down at a forty-five-degree angle. The second figure held its right arm straight down, the left up and out. The third’s right arm was pointing down at an angle, and the left pointed up at the opposite angle. The fourth one held a right hand straight out and the left one straight up.

  What did the figures mean? Was Skeleton Man sending some sort of message? Why had someone tried to wipe them off the windowpane?

  And what was up with those two creepy people?

  “Dakota Jones?”

  Ms. Stadelhofer’s husky voice startled Cody from her thoughts. Her teacher’s bushy brown hair bounced as she shook her head in irritation. Stad was a pretty cool teacher most of the time, even though she always wore a ridiculous themed vest with her outfits. Today’s vest featured apples, rulers, and miniature blackboards—the classic schoolteacher theme.

  “Uh, here!” Cody said a little too loudly as her hand shot into the air. Everyone in class turned to her and giggled. She felt her face flush, certain she was lit up like a freckled fireball.

  She scrunched down in her seat and looked out the window, her swinging ponytail tickling her back. As the teacher finished calling roll, Cody returned to her daydream about the stick figures, mulling over the positions of their arms, but when Stad’s vocab lesson began, Cody tuned back in to the classwork.

  Cody didn’t mind school. That’s because she viewed each subject as a puzzle to solve. To her, spelling was just coded letters, and math was coded numbers. Even social studies was full of mysteries to be solved—puzzling sphinxes, lost civilizations, and mysterious dinosaur disappearances. But she’d never let the other kids know she liked school. Not cool.

  “Hey, dipwad,” said Matt the Brat, twisting around in his chair. Matt was a wannabe skater and wore the outfits to match. Trouble was, he didn’t know how to skateboard. Today he had on a skull T-shirt, baggy jeans, and ginormous, multicolored athletic shoes, worn without laces. His breath reeked of peanut butter—he was always eating the stuff straight from a jar he kept in his backpack. He would have had nice eyes if he wasn’t always using them to spy on people.

  When Cody didn’t answer, Matt looked down at her vocab paper. “Writing another one of your secret messages?” he asked.

  Cody had quickly learned that Matt was a bully. He liked to pick on the new kids at school. He had been held back a year, making him bigger than the other seventh graders. Sometimes she caught him staring out the window, and she wondered where he’d gone in his mind. She felt sorry for him, knowing how hard it must have been for him to see his friends move on. But he was always in her face—with that peanut-butter breath. And always snooping around the Code Busters Clubhouse and making fun of them. Her mom had said his behavior had to do with his home life, but since he sat in front of Cody in class, thanks to their last names—Jeffreys and Jones—Cody had to deal with his school life.

  Before she could pull her paper away, Matt scribbled an ugly monster over her vocab words. He wasn’t half bad when it came to drawing monsters, but she didn’t appreciate it when he defaced her work. She jerked the paper away, tearing a hole in the middle of it in the process. Great, she thought. Now I’ll have to recopy the whole paper. Matt laugh-snorted, leaned sideways in his chair, and lifted one leg.

  Oh no, no, no. The Silent but Deadly.

  The smell nearly knocked her out of her seat. She tried to fan it away. She held her breath to concentrate on rewriting her vocab list, but it was nearly impossible. The school day had barely started, and already she felt as if it would never end.

  Halfway through first period, Lyla, the girl who sat behind Cody, tapped her on the back. When she turned, Lyla handed her a folded note. Slipping her arm across her chest and her hand behind her back, she took the folded message, then tucked it under her math homework.

  “Dakota Jones! Is that a note?” Cody looked up to see Stad frowning at her.

  She froze.

  Busted!

  “No, Sta— Uh, Ms. Stadelhofer. I…was just going over my math homework. See?” Cody held up the homework sheet with one hand, covering the note with her other hand.

  “Well, put it away. It’s not math time yet,” Ms. Stadelhofer said before continuing her lecture. Matt the Brat turned around, smirking.

  “Matthew Jeffreys, turn around or it’s the principal’s office for you,” Ms. Stadelhofer threatened.

  Matt stuck his tongue out of the side of his mouth

  to Cody before turni
ng back.

  Cody let out a breath.

  Close one.

  When she was sure Stad was no longer watching, she quietly unfolded the note. It was written in Caesar’s cipher, decipherable only if you had the corresponding decoder wheel.

  3-2-12-8 21-2-9-22-4-8 8-2 15-4-4-8 15-4 16-8 8-19-4 21-13-16-22-23-2-13-4 16-21-8-4-9 7-1-192-2-13

  15.4.

  She checked the clock again. Only a few seconds to decipher the note before the bell rang. Pulling out her decoder wheel from another compartment of her backpack, she slid the dial around to each of the numbers and jotted down the corresponding letters underneath.

  It took only seconds to translate the code.

  Code Buster’s Key and Solution found on pp. 203, 205.

  The bell rang.

  “Yooou got in trou-ble,” said Matt the Brat in a singsong voice as he grinned broadly. He stood up, blocking her way down the aisle with his bulk.

  “No, I didn’t.” Cody hoisted on her backpack, then swung around, bumping Matt out of the way.

  Ms. Stad looked up from the pile of spelling papers on her desk. She eyed Cody. Before Cody could escape, the room filled with the familiar sound of static on the loudspeaker. It was the deep gravelly voice of Principal Grunt.

  “Attention, students! This is Principal Grant speaking. I don’t want to alarm you, but we’ve received a notice from the Berkeley Police Department that a mountain lion has been sighted in the hills near the campus.”

  Several students gasped.

  “There’s no need to panic, but stay alert, and away from the hills until further notice. Thank you, and have a pleasant afternoon. Go Eagles.”

  Cody rolled her eyes. That’s all I need, she thought. First a fire. Then Matt the Brat. And now a mountain lion on the loose.

  Could it get any worse?

  The rest of the day passed as slowly as first period had. When the final bell rang at the end of school, Cody raced to join M.E. at the flagpole, their usual meeting place. Her friend looked as sparkly and as radiant as she had that morning.