Ghosts Don't Wear Glasses Page 7

  “There’s no heir,” said Bryce. “People who know how to find heirs looked and they didn’t find one. You’re telling me you just did?! No way.”

  “Go inside and see if you don’t believe me.”

  Bryce’s eyes darted to the overgrown trees and the old house looming darkly through them. “Even if you did meet someone who said he’s the heir, he’s not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because my dad is buying that house no matter what you say, loser!”

  “Oh, yeah?!”

  Bryce rolled his eyes. “Whatever, Dork Breath. You didn’t get the harpoon, so you lose—which means I win.”

  Roger and T. J. looked at me. I looked at Bryce, my face getting hot, the way it does when I start to get mad. I was about to start yelling about how we weren’t losers and we would so find the harpoon, but then I thought about Wallace and how sad he was about his dad and his family. I thought about my mom and Venus talking about how the house was a special landmark in our town.

  “You know what, Bryce? I don’t care. A harpoon is nowhere near as important as an heir. We’re going to prove Wallace is the rightful heir, and then your dad won’t be able to buy the one-legged whaler’s house and destroy it.”

  “You’ll never prove it, loser,” said Bryce.

  “Oh yes, we will. . . .”

  Roger and T. J. looked at me, their eyes wide. No one had found proof of Hannibal Royce having another family, not even historians and librarians and the experts who research inheritance laws.

  “No one beats my dad,” Bryce said, turning on his cool yellow scooter and revving the engine. “He always wins!”

  “Not this time!” I yelled over the sound. “Just you wait and see. . . .”

  THE SECRET OF THE STINKY SOCK

  “April Day! April Day!”

  I knew that little voice. Feenie sounded scared. I had to help her. I tried to move, but my arms and legs were bound by firm ropes. All of a sudden, a green and yellow light appeared. An orb! And it was heading down the long dark tunnel—right for Feenie.

  “Look out for the ghost, Feenie!”

  “It’s not a ghost, silly, it’s a fairy,” Feenie said. Then she sneezed: AH-CHOO!

  I woke up with a start. I wasn’t in a long, dark tunnel. I was in my sleeping bag on the floor of Roger’s basement.

  I wiggled my head out so I could breathe. What a strange dream. It reminded me of Feenie’s nonsense message from the Captain. Only now I realized it wasn’t nonsense.

  “Rog! Rog! Wake up!”

  I nudged Roger, who was sleeping next to me.

  “Ugh . . . can’t you see I’m sleeping?”

  “If you’re talking, then you’re not sleeping.”

  “I’m sleep talking.”

  “Listen. Remember the two hundred raisins on a hill and the—”

  “I hate word problems when I get them for homework during school, so why would I want to solve one just for fun during summer vacation?”

  “It’s not a word problem,” I said, sitting up. “It’s a message. Feenie said the Captain said AH-CHOO. I thought that meant he sneezed. I think what he really said was SNAFU, which sounds like AH-CHOO.”

  “Oooooookkkkaaaaaayyyyy,” yawned Roger. “What’s SNAFU again?”

  “Situation Normal All Fouled Up. It’s Navy slang for a big problem. So then he said two hundred raisins on a hill, which was really an address.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Roger.

  “It means he was letting me know there was a problem at the one-legged whaler’s house, which is at 200 Raven Hill . . .”

  “. . . which sounds like raisins on a hill,” Roger said. “Wow! Good duct-tape reasoning, Oh, Great Brainio.”

  “Deductive reasoning, not duct-tape reasoning,” I said.

  “I know,” said Roger. “Where’s your sense of humor? Did you leave it back on Raisin Hill? Now can I go back to sleep?”

  “How can you sleep at a time like this?”

  “It’s seven o’clock on Sunday morning, when all normal people sleep.”

  “Do I smell pancakes?” T. J. said from the other side of Roger.

  “Nah, it’s just the tangy aroma of the Great Brain’s brains frying themselves from thinking so hard,” said Roger.

  “Oh,” said T. J. Then he fell back to sleep on top of the empty bag of cookies we’d eaten last night.

  “Wake up, Teej!” I started pacing. “You too, Roger.” I poked him with my toe. “We have to go see the Captain. He must know something important about the one-legged whaler’s house that he wants to tell me. He probably said Mayday, which is a distress signal, since time is running out. Feenie said April, but she meant May. She gets the months mixed up. She still thinks there’s a month between June and July called Julune.”

  Roger faked loud snoring sounds.

  “The Captain would only say Mayday if something was really wrong and it was really important. Come on, guys. Let’s go.”

  “It’s too early,” said Roger. “The Captain will be sleeping.”

  “No, he won’t. He always gets up at five o’clock. He had the dawn watch in the Navy.”

  T. J. and Roger burrowed back into their sleeping bags, so I had no choice. I grabbed the pillows off the couch and started throwing them.

  “Pillow fight!” yelled Roger, lobbing his pillow at me.

  I ducked and it hit T. J., who sat up so fast I tripped over him, knocked into Roger, and landed on an unopened bag of seaweed crisps, the snack option provided by Mrs. H.

  The bag exploded. Seaweed crisps popped out all over the floor. They smelled salty and fishy, kind of like Uncle Norman’s tackle box. “Hmm,” said T. J., eating one. “Not bad.”

  After we cleaned up Roger’s basement, we hopped on our bikes and headed down my driveway.

  “So, Great Brain, how exactly are we going to prove Wallace is the heir?” said Roger. “By finding some secret documents no one ever found before, that not even Ms. Valen knows about?”

  “Um . . . yeah . . . something like that,” I said. In the light of day, it was kind of a crazy idea, but we had to do it. We had to prove Wallace was the heir. Some way. Somehow.

  Like my dad always says, what’s right is right. And this was right. We had to save the one-legged whaler’s house. I had a feeling that was exactly what the Captain wanted me to do. Hopefully he had something that would help.

  It was a hot, steamy morning, and I was sweating by the time we got to Red Fox Lane. T. J. ran in to tell his mom we were going to the Captain’s. When he came out, he was chomping on another big wad of gum. He blew a bubble. It was orange and green and smelled like a pot of my mom’s gravy with lots of oregano and tomatoes. Weird.

  “I feel like I’m eating a slice at Tony’s,” said Roger.

  “That’s because it’s pizza-flavored gum,” said T. J. as we turned toward Whale Rock and pulled up to the Captain’s house.

  There was a car parked in the driveway beside the old rusty Range Rover the Captain drives. It was a silver hatchback with Texas license plates. It had a bumper sticker that read NURSES MAKE IT ALL BETTER!

  “Go home, y’all!” called a woman’s voice with a twangy accent.

  “Hi, Ms. Worth,” I said, walking toward the front door, where the Captain’s daughter was standing with her hands on her hips. She was wearing a pair of hot pink scrubs and her bright red hair was piled up on top of her head. “It’s me, Fish. We came to see the Captain, and—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” she said. “Don’t any of y’all come one step closer!”

  “Ms. Worth, we just want to talk to—”

  “I said not a step closer, and I meant it!” She shook a finger at me.

  “But why?” I said. “I know the Captain would like to see me, ma’am.”

  “The Captain isn’t seein’ anybody right now. He has contracted walking pneumonia.”

  “I didn’t know you could get sick from walking,” said T. J.

  �
�It’s not from walking,” said the Captain’s daughter. “It’s called that because you don’t know you have it, so you walk around as if you’re well when you one hundred percent are not. My father will dig himself into an early grave if he doesn’t listen to me.”

  Roger and T. J. looked at me and shrugged.

  “Now, you three scoot so you don’t catch it.”

  “We didn’t bring a net, so we can’t catch it,” said Roger.

  “Funny boy. Listen here, the Captain needs his rest. So off you go.” Ms. Worth closed the front door with a bang.

  “Now what are we going to do?”

  A red flare suddenly streaked over our heads. The Captain, wearing a bathrobe, his blue-and-gold captain’s hat, and a pair of black knee socks, was standing on the widow’s walk on top of the house. He was waving his arms wildly and pointing to the backyard.

  “Let’s go!” I said.

  The three of us biked across the grass to the back of the house.

  “Admiral Royce left this clue!” The Captain called down to us, waving a piece of yellowed paper in the air. He was a little pale, but besides that he looked okay. That walking pneumonia sure was a sneaky illness. “It tells where to find Hannibal Royce’s whaling log and diary.”

  “Why did he hide a—”

  “It’s a search-and-recovery mission, men. The admiral was a secretive old chap and he was convinced that someone might steal what he had come to believe was proof that there was another branch of the Royce family. I didn’t realize I had this until a few days ago. It was mixed up with other papers he gave me. Plus, at the time, I must admit I didn’t know whether to believe him, because he was a little, shall we say, crazy, on the subject. . . . Anyway, move out on the double. Time is not on your side.” Then he pointed to his eyes. “Eyes only.”

  “Where is this log?”

  “In the study, where you usually find books,” said the Captain.

  “Captain, we think we might have found the heir,” I said. “He had this rocket harpoon ad his father left him ’cause Hannibal Royce was in his family tree, and he—”

  “Welcome?” asked the Captain.

  “Thank you?” said Roger.

  The Captain frowned down at us. “The W is for Welcome.”

  “The T is for thank you,” Roger called back.

  The Captain shook his head so hard, his captain’s hat fell off. “Welcome is the name—”

  “Peepaw, what are you doing up there?” Ms. Worth’s voice was so loud, we could hear it all the way out in the backyard. “You come down this instant.”

  The Captain’s eyes darted from us to the piece of paper.

  “Peepaw, I mean it!”

  SKKKRRRREAK! came the sound of a window being opened.

  The Captain quickly bent and pulled off one of his socks. He folded the piece of paper and shoved it inside. Then he tossed the sock down to us.

  “Get it, guys!” I said as we got set to catch the Captain’s flying sock.

  “Ace outfielder Fast-Hands Huckleton dives for the ball. And he’s got it,” said Roger. “The crowd goes—PEE-YEW!” He tossed the sock at me.

  “I can smell it all the way over here,” said T. J.

  I held on to it with two fingers. The guys were right. The sock smelled like rotten eggs and leftover Brussels sprouts. The Captain must have really sweaty feet. He could sure use those Odor-Eaters pads my dad wears in his work boots.

  The last thing I wanted was to stick my hand in there, but I couldn’t wait to get a look at the mysterious clue Admiral Royce had left behind.

  “Hurry up, Fish,” said Roger, scrunching up his nose. “PEE-YEW! This waiting around sure stinks, if you know what I mean.”

  I pulled the clue out with one hand and held my nose with the other. Carefully, I unfolded the piece of paper. It was graph paper. On it the Admiral had drawn twelve rectangles of different colors. One was all white with a red square in the middle, one was half blue and half red, one was made up of four smaller yellow and black rectangles, and one was half red and half white. Others were different combinations of the same colors in triangular, square, and star shapes.

  “Huh?” said Roger. “The secret of the stinky sock remains a secret to me. What kind of code is that?”

  “It’s like those paintings we saw that time we went on the field trip to the museum and Two O hurled on the bus ’cause he ate all those Red Hots,” said T. J.

  “Nasty,” said Roger. “How could I forget, since I was his seat partner?”

  “Guys, please,” I said.

  “Remember those paintings?” said T. J. “They were all different colors in different shapes. Some were even just drips of paint, like—”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Roger.

  “Guys, come on. Let me think.”

  “There was that one of the American flag,” Roger went on. “But the stars were just blobs of white paint and the stripes were all wiggly. It didn’t look like any American flag I ever—”

  “That’s it! All those symbols look like flags.”

  “They don’t look like the flags of any countries I know,” said Roger.

  “Those aren’t country flags,” I said. “I think they might be nautical flags. I mean, Admiral Royce was in the Navy, so it makes sense that he would use a nautical code. I remember reading about nautical signal flags in a book. I don’t remember how you use them and if each flag is a letter or a word or what they represent exactly.”

  “So, how are we going to read the message?” said T. J.

  “We need to do some research,” I said.

  “Research and summer vacation are two words that just do not go together,” Roger sighed.

  “That’s three words,” said T. J.

  “Exactly,” said Roger. “My brain is on vacation till September.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “Remember, we’re going to the library tomorrow anyway. It’s the perfect place to wake up your brain. . . .”

  THAR SHE BLOWS!

  We got to the library as soon as it opened. Roger wanted to look up nautical flags on the internet, but I headed straight for the encyclopedias. In the MNO volume, I found what I was looking for.

  “Guys! Come here!”

  T. J. and Roger were huddled over a computer across the room.

  “I’m telling you, nautical is spelled n-a-w-t-i-k-a-l,” T. J. said. “Remember phonics?”

  “You mean, remember inventive spelling?” said Roger. “The real way to spell it is n-a-u-h-t—you know how they slide in those silent letters just to confuse us on spelling tests.”

  “Guys, I got it.”

  Roger and T. J. hurried over. “Look! I was right. It’s an international nautical signal code. Each flag corresponds to a letter. There are twenty-six flags for the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. So that red-, white-, and blue-striped one is T. And the red-and-white one is H.”

  “The sixth flag is the same, so that’s another H,” said T. J.

  “Woo-hoo! Wonder what it says?” Roger hopped up and down.

  I pulled out my notebook and pen and started writing down the letter for each of the nautical signal flags in the Admiral’s message.

  “Hurry up, Fish!” said Roger.

  “I’m hurrying,” I said, writing down the last two letters.

  T-H-A-R-S-H-E-B-L-O-W-S

  “Thar she blows,” said Roger.

  “I feel like I’ve heard that before,” said T. J., blowing a purple bubble with his gum. The smell of Banana Berry Blast bubble gum filled the air.

  “Teej, no blowing bubbles in the library,” I hissed, making sure no librarian had spotted us.

  POP!

  “Thar she blows!” said Roger, nudging T. J., whose bubble had popped all over his face.

  “Guys, will you be serious? We need to figure out this clue. ‘Thar she blows’ is what sailors used to say when they spotted a whale as water was shooting out of its blowhole. I don’t understand how that will lead us to the whaling log’s hiding place
.”

  “Maybe it’s the name of a book,” said T. J. “Since the Captain said it was in the study.”

  “But the whaling log is a book, so how can a book be in a book?” I closed my notebook. “Let’s go see Ms. Valen and start our research on Hannibal Royce. Maybe the research will give us a clue.”

  I led the way down a long wood-paneled corridor to the door with the gold writing that read SPECIAL COLLECTION. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. We knocked, since we didn’t have an appointment.

  “How can I help you boys today?” Ms. Valen said, opening the door for us to come in.

  “We’re looking for information about Hannibal Royce,” I said.

  Ms. Valen smiled. “Thinking about the mysterious gravestone old Mrs. Osborn mentioned and the long-lost heir?”

  “We found a secret pass—” began T. J.

  “You never know what secrets you might find when you do research,” I said, glaring at T. J. We couldn’t tell Ms. Valen about the secret passage, because then we’d have to tell her we had snuck into the house and snooped around.

  “There isn’t much information,” she said, pointing to a shelf where there was one fat brown leather-bound book and two much thinner black ones. “Nineteenth-century records were not kept very well. And we don’t have any of his whaling logs or ship diaries. Those are very useful because captains, like Hannibal Royce, wrote in them about everything that happened on board ship, including what the crew ate, whale sightings, and the weather. They often jotted down their own personal thoughts, too.”

  She put the books on the table along with three pairs of white cotton gloves. “Put these on first.”

  “To check for dust, like those commercials on TV where the lady runs her finger over the furniture to make sure it’s clean?” said T. J.

  “No, it’s to keep the oil in your skin from getting onto the pages. Oil can damage the paper because it’s so old.” Ms. Valen pointed to the thin black books. “One is the birth records for Whooping Hollow from 1700 till 1850, and the other is the death records, which is really a catalog of cemetery headstones from that period.”