Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile Page 2

  Except, of course, by our judge.

  “Let me state, for the record,” the judge proclaimed, “that I am appalled that these four children have been attempting to take charge of their lives without any adult supervision. Children are incapable of responsible behavior. Therefore, I hereby grant Timothy Quinn full and complete control over all their financial affairs.”

  That was when Storm stood up and marched over to the judge. She was furious.

  “May a condemned child speak prior to her execution?” Storm demanded.

  “Which one are you?” asked the judge.

  “That’s Stephanie,” said bogus Uncle Timothy.

  Storm’s eyes became darker than thunderclouds bristling with lightning bolts when Uncle Timothy insulted her like that. Yep. That was why Mom and Dad nicknamed Stephanie “Storm.”

  “If it pleases the court, you, sir, are not worthy to be a judge of other people. You have no compassion and, actually, you don’t seem all that smart, either. I rest my case.”

  Storm sat down.

  The judge banged his gavel again.

  “You need to learn a lesson, young lady,” he decreed. “You all do! Therefore, the Kidd family sailing vessel known as The Lost and all its contents shall be sold at auction, posthaste, with any and all proceeds from that sale being applied to the tuition, books, and boarding fees for Chumley Prep’s four newest students.”

  And that was that.

  We were going to school. The Lost was going to the highest bidder.

  Justice wasn’t just blind that day. It was totally unfair, too.

  CHAPTER 3

  Saturday morning we headed down to the docks to say good-bye to the only home we had ever known.

  The Lost.

  The ship that sailed us around the world. Twice. The boat that was a huge part of our family’s most exciting adventures.

  Watching the vultures descend on her decks and strip her of everything she had—even the stuff hidden inside some of the supercool, secret compartments Dad had built into the masts, hull, and deck—was too much. Beck and I erupted into what our parents used to call a Twin Tirade.

  Of course, the first time Mom and Dad called our screamfests a “tirade,” I had no idea what the word meant. So Mom (our onboard ELA instructor) made me look it up: “ti·rade: a long, angry speech of criticism or accusation.”

  Basically, there’s lots of shouting and namecalling (the names I come up with are way better than Beck’s). But our Twin Tirades are never really “long.” In fact, they usually last about sixty seconds and then we’re done. They’re sort of like the big finale in a Fourth of July fireworks show. Lots of explosions, with sparks flying off in every direction and then—poof!—a minute later, it’s over. There’s nothing left but a few puffs of smoke and a sky full of stars.

  Twin Tirade No. 442 started when I said watching scavengers strip The Lost was the worst thing to ever happen to us.

  “Oh, really?” said Beck. “What about the night Dad died?”

  “He didn’t die.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “No, he did not.”

  “Um, excuse me, Bickford, but if Dad’s so alive, why hasn’t he sent us some kind of message?”

  “Uh, he already did, Rebecca. Remember?”

  “Oh, you mean that bogus e-mail you sent us in North Carolina?”

  “Dad sent that.”

  “No, Bickford, you did.”

  “Says who?”

  “Me, you dummy!”

  (See what I mean about Beck’s name-calling abilities?)

  “So what if you say I wrote it?” I snapped back. “You’re nothing but a demented ink dribbler!”

  “I’m also your twin sister, Bickford. That means we’re totally connected. So I know every time you even think about doing something sneaky.”

  “Really? You do?”

  “Totally.”

  “Wow. So you knew I wrote that e-mail?”

  “You did?”

  “What? Yeah.”

  “Ha! I knew it.”

  “But you didn’t before?”

  “Nope.”

  “That was actually sneaky, Beck.”

  “So? Didn’t you know I was going to trick you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Huh. Me neither. Guess we’re not as totally connected as I thought.”

  “Yeah, I guess not.”

  And then we were done.

  Of course, Beck now knew that I had faked the e-mail from Dad and that I had absolutely no proof our father was still alive.

  Until one of the boat scavengers ripped open some deck planks up in the bow.

  CHAPTER 4

  “What’d you find, Rizzo?” asked the ship hunter’s partner.

  “Another one of them secret compartments.”

  “Anything good inside?”

  “Nah. Nothin’ but a stupid yellow rain slicker like that guy on the fish sticks box wears.”

  “That’s my dad’s!” I shouted. Then I grabbed a rope line and swung aboard The Lost, piratestyle. “He was wearing it the night of the storm! It’s not for sale.”

  The scruffy-looking man named Rizzo nodded like he understood. “Sentimental value, huh, kid?”

  “Yeah.”

  And he handed me the yellow rain slicker.

  “Hang on to it, kid. Maybe one day you’ll be big enough to wear it.”

  “Thanks.” I bundled the jacket up tight and clutched it against my chest.

  On the night of the big storm, when waves the size of rolling mountains nearly swamped The Lost, my father had been wearing this very same slicker.

  So I had to ask myself: Why did he take it off and hide it in a secret compartment none of us even knew existed?

  It had to be some kind of a message from Dad!

  Maybe he didn’t get washed overboard. Maybe he really did get rescued off the deck of our ship by a CIA helicopter, which was the story I’d made up for that fake e-mail Beck had just busted me on.

  I searched through the rubbery jacket’s pockets, hoping to find a quickly scribbled note.

  Nothing.

  I turned it inside out.

  Nothing. Just a label in the collar: MADE IN CHINA.

  The slicker was so old a couple of the letters in the word made had been worn down and practically rubbed away.

  But that was it. There was no message except the obvious one: If, on the night of the terrible storm, Dad had taken the time to stow his rain gear in a safe hiding place, he must’ve known he’d be coming back to wear it again.

  I smiled for the first time in days.

  Because the rain slicker was the first solid clue any of us had found that Dad was still alive!

  CHAPTER 5

  So did losing The Lost mark the end of the Kidds?

  Are you kidding?!?

  We laugh in the face of defeat. Ha, ha, ha!

  And, sometimes, defeat laughs at us, too. Like on our first day of school at Chumley Prep.

  Hee, hee, hee.

  That was defeat laughing its butt off because Tommy and I had to wear these dorky blazers with Chumley Prep patches stitched over the breast pocket. We also had to wear white shirts and striped ties. Worst of all, we had to wear neatly pressed pants.

  Hey, a lot of the time on board The Lost, we’d run around in swim trunks or shorts. Pants itch. Especially gray woolen slacks. I don’t know why sheep don’t scratch their legs all day long.

  As bad as Chumley Prep was for Tommy and me, it was even worse for Beck and Storm. They had to wear plaid skirts and blouses with frilly collars. They were supposed to wear plaid bows in their hair, too, but the lady in charge of the girls’ dormitory lost that particular stare-down.

  Long story short, school was miserable.

  See, we Kidds are a lot like the wild things in that book by Maurice Sendak, where the wild things roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth. Beck even has wild thing hair. I think I got the terrible teeth.

&
nbsp; Putting the Kidd kids in a school with structure and attendance and having to raise your hand every time you needed to go to the bathroom was a lot like taking those wild things and locking them up in zoo cages. We lived for action and adventure, not rule following and test taking. And trust me, you can learn a lot more about the colonization of the New World by swimming around inside a sunken Spanish galleon salvaging conquistador helmets than you’ll ever learn from a world history book.

  I’m sure school is fine for a lot of kids, but not The Kidds. It was crushing our spirits, forcing us to spend time with teachers who were smart but not half as much fun as our mother and father.

  And then there was Mrs. McSorley, an ancient librarian who kept bugging Tommy about an overdue library book he swore he never checked out.

  “We’ve only been here a week,” he told her when she confronted him outside the headmaster’s office. “I don’t even know where the library is yet.”

  “Your name is Thomas Kidd, is it not?”

  “Totally.”

  “And did you not, on October the thirteenth, nineteen hundred and eighty-two, check out The World’s Greatest Treasures by Sir Walter Quinn?”

  “Um, don’t think so. See, I wasn’t even born in 1982.”

  “A likely story. Bring that book back to the library, Mr. Kidd. Or I will mention this matter to the headmaster!”

  After Mrs. McSorley stomped away, Tommy and I realized something: Dad, the original Thomas Kidd, was probably the one who had checked out that book!

  “He must have taken it out way back when he was a student here,” I said.

  Tommy just nodded and got a far-off look in his eye—I mean more far-off than usual. (Mom and Dad called Tommy “Tailspin” because he always looks a little confused.)

  “Huh,” he said. Then he said it again. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Well, the book is called The World’s Greatest Treasures. And when I was little, back before you and Beck were even born, Dad used to say, ‘Tommy, if I ever found the world’s greatest treasures, I’d hide them where no one would dare look—inside the boys’ room of my old prep school.’ ”

  “You think he meant the book?”

  “Only one way to find out. We need to round up Beck and Storm. It’s time for an indoor treasure hunt!”

  CHAPTER 6

  Meals at Chumley Prep were served in a giant dining hall that looked a lot like the one in the Harry Potter movies, minus all the magic.

  And we still had to wear our stupid school uniforms.

  But dinner was the one time every day when all four of us were able to be together in semiprivacy. None of the other boarding students wanted to sit with us—not after Beck and I had Twin Tirade No. 445 about which fork you’re supposed to use first and who gets which bread plate.

  “You guys up for a treasure hunt?” Tommy whispered to Storm and Beck as we all pushed around our dull mashed potatoes, peas, and meatloaf.

  “What’s the treasure?” asked Beck.

  “A book!” I blurted.

  “Oh, wow. A book. Awesome.” That was Beck being sarcastic.

  “It’s one we think Dad checked out when he was a student here,” I explained in a hushed voice. “The World’s Greatest Treasures by Sir Walter Quinn. He used to tell Tommy about it all the time.”

  Storm nodded. “Like if he ever found ‘the world’s greatest treasures,’ he’d hide them where nobody would dare look?”

  “Chyah!” said Tommy. “Inside the boys’ room of—”

  “His old prep school,” said Storm. “He told me the same thing.”

  “That’s this place,” said Beck, finally catching on. “It could be a clue!”

  And so, that night, a little after midnight, the four of us snuck out of our dorm rooms and met up in the central hall underneath the dark oil portrait of Cornelius Chumley, the dead guy with bushy sideburns the school was named after.

  “There’s a boys’ room on every floor,” whispered Tommy as I passed around floor plans of the school. I had marked each of our target bathrooms with a big red X.

  Storm raised her hand.

  “Yeah?” said Tommy.

  “Can Beck and I go into the boys’ bathroom? Isn’t that both against the rules and supergross?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “The teachers and janitors are all asleep or have gone home.”

  Storm stared at me blankly. “Worrying is what I do best, Bick.”

  “You and Beck can wait outside while Bick and I go in,” said Tommy.

  “No way,” said Beck. “I’ve always wanted to see what’s inside the boys’ room. I mean, besides the filth and stench.”

  So the four of us quietly tiptoed up a staircase to the fourth-floor bathrooms. Tommy, Beck, and I went in. Storm stood guard in the hall.

  After a quick search of the sinks, urinals, towel dispensers, and toilet stalls, we found nothing. Well, nothing you could call a treasure, unless you have a thing for ancient limericks carved into wooden doors.

  The same thing was true on the third floor.

  But, on the second floor, we hit pay dirt.

  CHAPTER 7

  Believe it or not, the missing book was sealed inside a half-gallon-sized Ziploc plastic bag and jammed up behind the old-fashioned elevated toilet tank in the middle stall.

  We took the treasure package into the hall, where Storm was.

  “Open it up!” said Beck.

  Tommy pried open the Ziploc seal. The book inside was a musty, wrinkled mess. Decades of toilet-tank moisture had taken their toll on the paper pages, even though they had been sealed in plastic. They were completely stuck together.

  “I think we owe the school a new book,” I said.

  “What’s that?” asked Storm, pointing to a rusty, antique key attached to a narrow band of leather that was poking up behind the warped book’s front cover.

  “Looks like a bookmark,” said Beck. “Or a really awkward key chain.”

  Tommy managed to pull the bookmark free of the water-damaged book’s grip.

  Chunky block letters had been hammered into the side of the faded leather strip to spell out an inspirational message: READING IS THE KEY TO ALL OF LIFE’S TREASURES.

  “Sweet,” said Tommy, passing it to Beck so she could look at it.

  “Yeah,” said Beck. “Dad probably bought it at a Hallmark store when he was feeling sentimental—or maybe just mental.”

  “Or,” I said, taking the bookmark from Beck, “it could be a clue.”

  “To what?”

  Suddenly all the lights in the hallway snapped on.

  “To what you four should be doing instead of skulking around the school corridors in the middle of the night: Reading!”

  It was the headmaster. And the librarian.

  “Ah-hah!” said Mrs. McSorley, marching over to Tommy to snatch the book out of his hands. “I see you found my missing Quinn. The fine for overdue library books at this school is twenty cents per day. Therefore, Thomas Kidd, you owe me…”

  She twiddled her fingers while she figured it out.

  “Two thousand three hundred and thirty-six dollars.”

  “Um, we’re kind of broke,” said Tommy.

  Now the librarian sniffed the moldy paper, then tried to pry the book open.

  “This book has been damaged! You must purchase a replacement.”

  “Put it on our tab,” cracked Beck.

  “Oh, we will,” said the headmaster. “And we’ll send the bill directly to your legal guardian and financial custodian.”

  Uncle Timothy.

  The slippery spook in the sunglasses who had all our money while we had nothing.

  Except, of course, Dad’s old leather bookmark, which I had tucked into the back pocket of my itchy woolen pants back when Mrs. McSorley was playing her air calculator.

  CHAPTER 8

  To prove how NOT defeated we were by all the bad stuff that’d been happening, that night, after the librarian took away Dad’s hidd
en book, the four of us held a quick family meeting and decided that we needed to start planning our next real treasure hunt.

  Not another indoor bathroom excursion. Something epic and exciting, full of high risk and big reward.

  By the way, where do you think we should go next?

  (And no, Beck, “math class” is not the kind of answer I’m looking for here. “Far, far away” isn’t helpful, either.)

  Anyway, we were more or less focused on four big moneymakers. Yes, we love archaeology, but, thanks to fake Uncle Timothy, we had what they call a “cash flow” problem. We needed money, and we needed it fast, so we couldn’t necessarily be as picky as we wanted to be with our next hunt. The plan had been to go straight for King Solomon’s Mines, but it looked like we might have to cast a wider net.

  Our top four choices were in or around Africa, based on some of the hunches that Mom and Dad used to talk about:

  1. King Solomon’s Mines. During wise King Solomon’s long reign in the tenth century BC, the kingdom of the Hebrews was extremely wealthy. Trading expeditions would return to the capital city of Jerusalem with all sorts of exquisite stones (diamonds and rubies) from mines rumored to be somewhere in the middle of Africa!

  2. Kruger’s Hidden Millions. We’re not talking about Freddy Krueger. The legendary Kruger Millions is the treasure hidden by Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, the guy with a lot of names who was state president of the South African Republic (Transvaal) and led the Boer Resistance against the British during the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Despite its name, the war was very exciting. When Mr. Kruger fled the city of Pretoria, he took a ton of gold bullion with him. At today’s prices, it’d be worth $243 million. No one has ever found it.

  3. The Ming Dynasty’s Artifacts from Zheng He’s Treasure Fleet. In the early fifteenth century, the Ming Dynasty in China sent out a fleet of mammoth treasure junks (each boat was four hundred feet long) that made seven epic voyages from Nanjing to India, Arabia, and East Africa. Once, off the coast of Kenya, pirates attacked several of the humongous Chinese treasure ships. Zheng He fought back and won—but not before one of his supersized jumbo junks, loaded down with treasure and tribute, ended up as jumbled junk at the bottom of the sea.