All-American Adventure Page 7

  “Months later, when they thought it would be safe, that sergeant and six of Mosby’s best men rode back to recover the loot. But, before they could reach the secret location, they were captured by Yankees, and hanged outside Fort Royal in 1864. Mosby, himself, was never able to return to look for the treasure.”

  “So, it’s still out there!” I said. “And we’re gonna find it!”

  “How much loot are we talking about?” asked Beck.

  “Estimates put the value of the Civil War–era treasures at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” said Storm. “Of course, those were 1864 dollars. Today, the treasure would be worth about five and a half million dollars!”

  Tommy whistled.

  “Children?” said Uncle Richie. “Let’s go find those two pine trees in Fairfax County, Virginia!”

  After stopping for some delicious In-N-Out burgers (I got a Double-Double, fries, and a chocolate shake), we cruised into the Salton Sea Airport. It was nearly dusk. The air was cooling down. The sky darkening. I saw Uncle Richie’s 1971 Piper Aztec airplane parked in front of a hangar where a mechanic in coveralls was wiping the sand off its windshield with a soiled cloth.

  “Ah! Ms. Pamela Johnston! Finest aircraft mechanic in the contiguous United States!”

  We pulled closer to the plane.

  I thought Tommy’s eyeballs were going to pop out of his head.

  “You know her?” he asked. “That angel in the coveralls with the billowing blond hair wafting in the breeze? You actually know her?”

  “Indeed, I do,” said Uncle Richie. “She is a true friend to treasure hunters everywhere. She’s the one who rented me all the gear we needed for our exploration.”

  “She’s also beautiful,” said Tommy. “I think I want to marry her.”

  Beck, Storm, and I rolled our eyes. Here we go again.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Hiya, Poppie,” said the mechanic as she walked over to meet us. She tilted her head and gave us a wave.

  “Greetings, Pamela,” said Uncle Richie. “These are my fellow treasure hunters, the world-famous Kidd family. Bick, Beck, Storm, and Thomas. They are also my great-nieces and nephews.”

  “Howdy,” said Ms. Johnston.

  “Well, hello,” said Tommy. “Are you a magician? Because when I look at you, everyone else disappears.”

  “Cute,” said the mechanic, wiping her hands on a rag.

  “Thanks,” said Tommy. “I’ve been saving that one for a special occasion.”

  In the distance, I heard a familiar whump-whump-whump.

  “Collier!” I said, pounding my fist into my open palm.

  “You guys know Nathan?”

  “We sure do,” said Beck. She was about to spit on the ground when Pam the mechanic hit her with a follow-up.

  “How about his new sidekick? Dirk McDaniels. Handsome, am I right, ladies?”

  Storm snorted. Beck laughed.

  “Is Nathan Collier Treasure Extractors using this airport, too?” I asked.

  “Uh, yeah,” said Pam. “It’s the only one in the area.”

  “We mustn’t let them spot us,” said Uncle Richie. “Pamela, would you be so kind as to let us hide in your hangar?”

  “Sure, Poppie. I’ll put it on your tab.” Along with the equipment rentals.

  “Our tab?” I said. “You’d charge us to hide in your hangar?”

  She shrugged. “Girl has to make a living.”

  “Well that’s the most—”

  “Bick?” said Uncle Richie, shaking his head. The helicopter was approaching fast.

  “The most ingenious thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Quickly now,” said Uncle Richie. “Into the hangar!”

  We all rushed into another rusty Quonset hut and pulled the door tight behind us.

  “When they land,” said Ms. Johnston, “I’ll go out and offer to refuel them. Help them tie down for the night.”

  “But you shan’t tell them we are here?” said Uncle Richie.

  “Of course not, Poppie. My silence is included in the Complete Hangar Hiding package.”

  “And how much does that cost?” asked Storm.

  “Five hundred dollars,” replied Ms. Johnston. “Per hour.”

  “You drive a hard bargain,” said Uncle Richie. He held out his hand. The mechanic shook it. “Deal!”

  She left. We took turns peeking through the grease-smeared window in the hut’s door.

  “That’s Collier himself!” I said. “I’d recognize that oily spit curl on his forehead anywhere.”

  “McDaniels must’ve called for reinforcements after Tommy bluffed him into flying north,” said Uncle Richie.

  Collier and McDaniels were gesturing at Uncle Richie’s twin-engine airplane. Ms. Johnston shrugged.

  I got the feeling they were asking her about us and she was playing dumb, earning her $500 an hour.

  Finally, McDaniels and Collier left the airfield.

  “But,” Ms. Johnston told us when she returned to the hangar, “they put a tracker on your plane.”

  “So?” said Tommy. “We can rip it off and bury it in the sand!”

  “You do that, they’ll know you were here and that I told you about the tracker. Collier might pay me more than five hundred dollars an hour to talk.”

  “But we need to fly to Virginia,” I said.

  “Really?” said Ms. Johnston, arching an interested eyebrow. “What’s in Virginia?”

  “Uh, our parents,” said Beck. “Actually, they’re in Washington, DC. But that’s really close to Virginia.”

  “Well, you can’t take your plane,” said Ms. Johnston with a sly grin. “Not if you want to get the slip on Nathan Collier and Dirk McDaniels.”

  “Then how do you suggest we get there?” asked Uncle Richie, sounding like he already knew the answer.

  “Simple, Poppie. Charter a private jet.”

  She gestured with her thumb over her shoulder. At a private jet. With AIR PAMELA painted on its side.

  CHAPTER 30

  Uncle Richie and his friend Ms. Johnston hammered out a deal.

  “You can have thirty-three-and-a-third percent of whatever treasure we find in northern Virginia,” he told her.

  “Aha!” said Ms. Johnston. “I knew it! You guys are going on another treasure hunt!”

  “Doh!” said Uncle Richie. “That was supposed to be a secret!”

  Beck and I looked at each other. Maybe what Professor Hingleburt said about Uncle Richie outside that bookstore was true. Maybe he wasn’t the sharpest treasure hunter in the toolshed.

  “You have to keep it hush-hush,” Tommy told her.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “My lips are sealed.”

  “Oh. Too bad. It’s a long flight. I was hoping to kill some time with some serious smooching…”

  “Ewwwww!” Beck and I said at the same time.

  “Can we hurry up and get out of here before I hurl my Double-Double?”

  “Yes, indeed, Bick,” said Uncle Richie. “Time is of the essence.”

  We loaded our duffel bags into the sleek jet.

  “Can I help you fly it?” Tommy asked.

  “No,” said Ms. Johnston, totally shutting Tommy down.

  “I’ve already done one landing—”

  “No!”

  I was starting to like Ms. Johnston more and more.

  We took off a little before midnight. Ms. Johnston’s fancy little jet had wi-fi so we were able to do an early morning video call with Mom and Dad back east.

  We didn’t tell them anything about Nathan Collier or the Enlightened Ones. We figured they had enough to worry about back in Washington. Turns out we were right.

  “Dr. Hingleburt found another lost copy of the Bill of Rights,” said Mom, sounding skeptical. “The First Amendment reads the same way as the first one he found.”

  “Implying,” said Dad, “that Congress should make laws limiting the freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly.”

  “Have
you studied the document?” asked Storm.

  “Yes,” said Mom. “Professor Hingleburt finally allowed a few of us to spend thirty minutes with the first document he discovered. If it is a forgery, it’s a darn good one!”

  “To make matters worse,” said Dad, “he’s been all over TV, telling whoever will listen that, ‘It’s time for a new America! The true America. One founded on the founding fathers’ visionary curbs on freedoms!’”

  “No one’s listening to him, though,” I said. “Are they?”

  Mom and Dad both sighed.

  “They’re starting to,” said Mom.

  “And this discovery of a second identical document is lending credence to Professor Hingleburt’s claim that the Bill of Rights enshrined in the National Archives is the true forgery.”

  After that, the rest of the flight across America was kind of quiet.

  “I wish we could help Mom and Dad,” Beck whispered to me.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  Unfortunately, we couldn’t. Unless, of course, we could dig up another one of the missing copies of the Bill of Rights. Maybe Colonel Mosby had stolen one of those, too.

  When we landed in northern Virginia (smoothly—Tommy was snoozing in the copilot seat at the time), a strange, computerized voice that sounded like it gargled with gravel started talking to us through the ceiling speakers. It wasn’t our pilot, Ms. Johnston.

  It was one of the Enlightened Ones.

  CHAPTER 31

  “Congratulations, whoever you are,” said the deep and creepy voice. “We know that, somehow, you bested Dirk McDaniels and his colleagues in the quest to find the Lost Ship of the Desert. We also know that you have taken up our challenge and embarked on your second test: finding Mosby’s treasure.”

  “How do they know that?” I asked.

  “They have spies everywhere,” said Beck. “Remember?”

  “Be advised,” said the computer-altered voice, “this time you are searching for something that we, ourselves, could not find. The coded clue in the document will take you only as far as we were able to proceed. Finding the buried treasure? That will be up to you. If you successfully locate it, kindly text photographic evidence to the number noted in the thumb drive file. Once you do, we will contact you again with further instructions.”

  “Can we talk back to this Darth Vader dude?” asked Tommy, rubbing his fingertips along the ribbed speaker in the ceiling, looking for some kind of switch to flick.

  “Since you cannot talk back or ask questions of me at this time…”

  “Bummer,” mumbled Tommy.

  “… I will attempt to answer the question you are most likely asking: What’s in this game for you? Why should you keep finding these hard-to-find treasures for us?”

  “Exactly!” said Tommy, tossing up his arms. “You read my mind, bro.”

  “Complete these tasks and you will prove to us that you are, indeed, the finest treasure hunters in all of America.”

  “Not to mention the world!” added Tommy.

  “Pass these tests, and we will immediately offer you an opportunity to earn twenty million dollars. Happy treasure hunting. We hope to hear from you again, soon. Whoever you are.”

  “I’m Tommy,” said Tommy. “Tommy Kidd.”

  “Um, they can’t hear you,” I reminded him.

  “Interesting,” said Uncle Richie, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. I figured he was imagining all the card games he could enter with his share of twenty million dollars.

  “What’s one third of twenty million, Poppie?” said Ms. Johnston as she steered the jet off the active runway.

  “I believe our deal was for whatever treasure we found here in northern Virginia, Pamela.”

  “Well, we’re in northern Virginia. And this new treasure just found you. I’m tagging along for the full ride.”

  “Fine by me,” said Tommy, wiggling his eyebrows.

  “You guys?” I said. “The twenty-million-dollar deal only happens after we find Mosby’s treasure.”

  “Bick’s right,” said Beck. “We need to stay focused.”

  “Which I have been doing this entire flight,” said Storm.

  I noticed she had several paper coffee cups stacked up inside each other in her seatback pocket. I don’t think she slept a wink on the whole five-hour flight from California.

  “I figured out the clue in the document. It tells us where we need to go next.”

  “Where?” asked Tommy.

  “Dixie Dipper Frozen Treats. An ice cream place.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “That’s kind of random,” added Beck, raising an eyebrow.

  Storm shrugged. “Sorry. But that was the answer to the substitution cipher in the E-1 document that I have been working on for the past five hours. To crack it, I realized I needed to add up the numerals in the phone number they want us to text if we should prove successful, then divide the number of digits in that number by ten. The answer told me how many letters I needed to skip forward in the alphabet to find the coded letters’ replacements.”

  Dumbfounded, the rest of us just nodded. Very, very slowly.

  “So, uh, where is this Dixie Dipper Frozen Treats?” I asked.

  “At the intersection of Routes Twenty-nine and Two-eleven in Warrenton, Virginia,” said Storm. “Right in the heart of Mosby’s Raiders’ territory.”

  CHAPTER 32

  We rented a van at the airport and set off for Warrenton, Virginia.

  We also stopped off at a home supply store to pick up a pair of shovels and one of those rock-prying bars. We Kidds are like the Boy Scouts. “Be prepared” is our family motto.

  “Warrenton is very close to where many suspect Mosby hid his treasure,” said Storm.

  “Now we just need to find two really tall pine trees marked with Xs near this Dixie Dipper Frozen Treats place,” I said.

  “So, what do you think we should do, Bickford?” said Beck. “Hike through the forest, looking for trees?”

  “Not just trees, Rebecca—pine trees!”

  Yep. You guessed it. Groggy from our transcontinental flight, we exploded into Twin Tirade 2003.

  “Oh, that narrows it down!” said Beck.

  “It definitely does!” I told her. “Pine trees are easy to spot.”

  “So are lamebrains like you!”

  “Pine trees are evergreens, sis. That means they’re always green!”

  “Just like your breath and your boogers.”

  “My breath isn’t green!”

  “No, it’s just toxic. Like swamp gas.”

  Ms. Johnston was gawking at us. She’d never witnessed a twin tirade before.

  “Give ’em a minute,” said Tommy from behind the wheel. “It’ll blow over.”

  “Hey, what color is swamp gas?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. But there’s a library.” Beck pointed out the window at the Warrenton Branch of the Fauquier County Public Library we’d just passed. “They’d know.”

  “They might also know something about Mosby’s treasure.”

  “Librarians know everything.”

  “And, even if they don’t, they know how to find it.”

  “Good point, Bick.”

  “Thanks, Beck.”

  And that’s how we ended up in the library, talking to Barbara Rhodes, a research librarian who’d grown up in the area and knew all the Mosby legends. We spent the whole afternoon with her.

  She showed us all sorts of maps and old photographs.

  “Oh, there are so many stories about where that burlap sack is buried,” Ms. Rhodes told us after we’d been doing research together for almost eight hours. “But, the one I like best, probably because I live here in Warrenton, is that the hiding place is right up the road, at the intersection of Routes Twenty-nine and Two-eleven.”

  “Um, isn’t that where the Dixie Dipper Frozen Treat stand is located?” I asked.

  The librarian smiled and nodded.

  “Do you think it’s, like, bu
ried in their basement?” asked Tommy.

  “That’s always been my hunch.”

  “So why haven’t you tried digging it up?” asked Beck.

  “Can’t say for sure. Maybe because, for me, the legend is more precious than any treasure. If we find Colonel Mosby’s buried burlap sack, the story’s over.”

  True, I thought, but we’d also be one step closer to twenty million dollars!

  We took pictures of some of the photos and copied several of the maps.

  “We can’t thank you enough for your kind assistance,” Uncle Richie told Ms. Rhodes. Then he doffed his hat like a prince would and kissed her hand. “If there is ever anything I can do for you, please do not hesitate to call.”

  He handed her a crisp business card.

  Ms. Rhodes tittered.

  Tommy whipped out his phone and recorded a voice memo. “Note to self. Order business cards to hand out to the ladies.”

  It was dark when we left the library. Brain-dead from all those hours in the stacks, we decided to head to Dixie Dipper for some dessert.

  And maybe we’d check out their basement, too.

  CHAPTER 33

  “Where you folks from?” asked the gangly guy behind the cash register as he rang up our ice cream cones.

  (I got soft serve vanilla dipped in chocolate. Delish.)

  “Oh, all over,” replied Uncle Richie, very grandly. “For you see, good sir, we are treasure hunters!”

  “Is that so?”

  “Indeed, it is.”

  “Find anything interesting lately?”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Tommy. “You ever heard of the Lost Ship of the Desert?”

  “There was a ship?” said the cashier. “In the desert?”

  “It was lost,” said Beck.

  “But then,” said Tommy, “we found, like, this treasure map, and—boom!—there it was, buried in the sand.”

  “You folks down here looking for Mosby’s treasure?”

  “Maybe,” said Beck. “We usually don’t talk about our quests until they’re complete.”