The Secret of the Skeleton Key (2 page)

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Code Buster's Key Book & Solutions

*
To crack the chapter title code, check out the CODE BUSTER'S Key Book & Solutions on pages 202 and 208.

D
akota—Cody—Jones had just finished creating a puzzle for the Code Busters Club to decipher when she heard three quick taps on her upstairs bedroom window. She sat up at her desk and turned her head, listening intently.

Three more taps—this time spaced a beat apart.

Then three more quick taps, like the first three.

Cody darted to the window the minute she recognized the SOS call. In the dim light of the street-lamp, she spotted Quinn Key, a member of the Code Busters Club, clinging halfway up the giant ash tree by her window, his black spiky hair covered by a UC Berkeley baseball cap. The only thing missing were the sunglasses that he always wore.

He was holding a long stick.

Cody pulled up the window and stuck out her head. “Quinn, what are you doing?” she whispered. A breeze flipped the end of her red ponytail.

Quinn fumbled and dropped the stick. Cody watched it land several feet below.

“Quinn! Be careful!” Cody said.

“Come out!” he said. “I have to talk to you. It's important!” Cody held up a finger to show “one minute.” She closed the window, put her hoodie on over her cat-decorated flannel pajamas, and tiptoed down the stairs. Her mother sat on the living room couch, riveted by an episode of
CSI
. Cody had no trouble slipping past her and out the front door.

“This better be important,” Cody said to Quinn, crossing her arms to keep the fall chill out. “My mom will ground me until summer if she catches me out here. Or send me to jail.” Cody's mother was a Berkeley, California, police officer, and Cody often teased her mom about locking Cody up in the local jail when she got into trouble.

“Look.” Quinn nodded in the direction of the run-down Victorian opposite Cody's home. “Something weird is going on at Skeleton Man's house.” Cody glanced across the street at the weed-infested yard and paint-chipped house, which was eerily lit by the soft glow of the streetlamp. “Looks the same to me,” she said, shrugging. “Same weird sculptures in his yard. Same creepy junk on his porch. Same dirty curtains in the windows.”

Quinn pointed to the second-floor window on the right. “Watch that window.”

Cody gazed at Skeleton Man's tattered, yellowing curtain for a few seconds. A shadowy light glowed inside. “I don't see anything,” she said, glancing back nervously at her front door. “My mom is—”

“Just wait!” Quinn whispered. He was staring up at the window as if expecting to see a ghost appear. “There! Did you see it?”

Cody gasped.

The curtain had fluttered.

A clawlike hand pulled the fabric back from the filthy, streaked window.

“So? He's looking out the window again. He's always doing that. You always say he spies on us, remember? But my mom said—”

Quinn cut her off. “Shh! Keep watching!”

Cody saw what looked like a bent, bony finger trace a line down the dirty glass pane. Another line appeared. Then another.

“Doesn't it look like he's writing something?” Quinn asked.

Cody strained in the semidarkness to see. “I guess so.”

“I saw him drawing something on the window when I went outside to get my bike.” Quinn lived on the other side of Skeleton Man and had been insisting for weeks that the old hermit was spying on them. Now he seemed to think that their neighbor was up to something else suspicious. But Quinn tended to see a mystery everywhere he looked.

In fact, that's why Quinn had started the Code Busters Club. During the first week at her new school, Cody had spotted a coded sign on one of the bulletin boards.

10-15-9-14 20-8-5 3-15-4-5 2-21-19-20-5-18-19 3-12-21-2

Ever since she'd learned sign language to communicate with Tana, her deaf sister, she had loved being able to talk to people without others knowing what she was saying. Sign language was kind of like a code in that way. She'd quickly figured out that the message Quinn had written was in a math-based code called alphanumeric code. Each alphabet letter had been replaced by a number, beginning with A = 1, then B = 2, C = 3, and so on. To see what the message translates to, go to
Code Buster's Solution on p. 204.

Being the new kid at Berkeley Cooperative Middle School, Cody had shown up hoping to make some friends. Quinn was the first person she had met, and they had hit it off immediately. She was especially excited to learn that he lived right across the street from her. He shared his code name with her—Lock&Key—and helped her make up her own: CodeRed, a combination of her name and her red hair. In the following weeks they had become great friends. When they weren't creating codes, they played puzzle-solving video games together with the other Code Buster members, M.E. and Luke. And Quinn was always coming up with something interesting to do, like now.

“Skeleton Man's never done that before,” he continued, shaking his head. “Maybe he's trying to tell us something.”

Cody squinted, trying to turn the lines into letters, but they didn't make sense. “They look more like drawings than letters. Stick figures,” she said.

“Watch out!” Quinn grabbed her arm and pulled her to a squatting position beneath the big ash tree, nearly knocking her over. “Someone else is up there. Look!”

Cody saw the unfamiliar face of a woman at the window, peering out. She hoped she and Quinn hadn't been spotted—although they weren't doing anything wrong. Other than spying.

Moments later a puffy hand appeared at the window and swiped at the glass, blurring the carefully drawn lines. The curtains were suddenly jerked closed.

Cody looked at Quinn, who was scrunching up his nose. “That was weird.”

“Seriously,” Quinn said. “I thought Skeleton Man lived alone. Who was that person?”

Before Cody could answer, Skeleton Man's front door sprang open. She signaled Quinn to be quiet with a finger to her lips. A large woman with curly blonde hair, wearing a shapeless flowery dress, stepped onto the junk-filled porch. Frowning, she glanced around as if searching for something. Or someone?

Cody recognized her as the face at the upstairs window.

Seconds later, a short, skinny man squeezed out from behind the woman. Not Skeleton Man. The woman said something to the man, but Cody couldn't make out the words.

Quinn waved his hand forward—the military signal for “move out.” He was an expert at military codes and had taught the club members not only signals but military time codes.

Trying not to make noise, Cody and Quinn hunched down and scuttled to the curb, avoiding the streetlight beams. When they reached the street, they ducked behind Cody's mom's red Mini Cooper. Cody could hear the two people talking now.

“I
told
you to be careful, you old fart,” the woman was saying. The man mumbled something just as a car drove by, muffling his words. Then the woman pointed toward Cody's house and said, “—sure I saw some kids over there… ”

A chill ran down Cody's back. They'd been spotted! Suddenly, she felt hairs rubbing against her leg.

Punkin! One of Skeleton Man's many cats had seemingly adopted Cody and was now curling around her ankle. Cody loved cats, but she wasn't allowed to have pets because of her four-year-old sister's allergies. Still, that didn't stop her from pretending that the orange cat was hers. Yesterday she'd bought it a collar and had written the name “Punkin” on it in black marker. She stroked the cat while she strained to hear the two people talking on the porch.

“—we'll find it…got to be hidden around here somewhere…,” the man said.

The large woman elbowed him sharply. “Shut up, you stupid old windbag! Somebody'll hear you. You wanna ruin everything we've worked for?” The woman squinted toward Cody's house, sending another shiver down Cody's spine.

“Dakota?” came a voice from behind her. It was her mom, calling from the front porch. “Are you out there?”

The sound of her mother's voice made the cat flee and Cody freeze. If she answered, she'd give away their hiding place, and those two weirdos across the street would know that kids
had
been spying on them. But if she didn't, she could be in real trouble with her police officer/mom.

“Cody! What are you doing behind my car?”

Too late. They'd been spotted. And those two weirdos across the street would know for sure they'd been spying on them.

“Come in here,” her mother said. “It's a school night! You know you're not supposed to be out after dark.”
Having a cop for a mom really has its disadvantages,
Cody thought, rising up from behind the car.

She glanced in the direction of Skeleton Man's porch, certain they'd also been discovered by the two strangers.

But the porch was empty.

She glanced up at the second-story window. It was dark.

“Coming, Mom,” Cody called to her, then said to Quinn, “I've got to go. Set up a meeting with the Code Busters Club. There's something strange

going on, that's for sure.”

Quinn gave her a thumbs-up and headed home.

Cody headed inside, gave her mom a good-night hug, and got ready for bed, knowing there was no way she'd be getting any sleep tonight—not with Giant Flower Lady and her half-pint sidekick lurking around. She took a last glance out her window, looking for a sign of Skeleton Man or his visitors.

The house stood dark and the doorstep was empty.

The only movement was a flutter of the upstairs curtain.

T
he screech of sirens woke Cody from a nightmare early the next morning, even before her alarm sounded. She'd been dreaming of mysterious symbols that she couldn't decode. She ran to the window. Although the sky was still dark, the whirling lights of two fire trucks lit up the street.

Skeleton Man's house was in flames!

Cody heard a loud rap on her bedroom door.

“Cody!” Her mom opened the door and peered in. “Good, you're up! Please wake your sister and get her dressed for preschool. I have to help out across the street.” Her walkie-talkie squawked as she headed downstairs.

Because of her job, Cody's mother often got emergency calls in the middle of the night or early morning. When she had to leave on a moment's notice, she left Cody in charge of Tana until their dad could get there from his condo across town. It was just another complication After the Divorce. Cody's mom had taken the cop job in Berkeley and had moved the family there from Jamestown in the California Gold Country. Her dad, an attorney, had followed a month later to be closer to them.

Cody could barely tear herself away from the window. The billowing smoke and raging flames held her hypnotized. She watched as half a dozen firefighters leaped from the two trucks. Seconds later, forceful torrents of water arched over the roof, sending up more clouds of smoke into the semidark sky.

Spellbound, Cody saw a fireman ax his way through the front door. Smoke poured out of the house as he and two other firefighters in full protective gear—heavy-duty suits, helmets, face masks, gloves—disappeared inside. An ambulance sped up and four EMTs—emergency medical technicians—sprang out.

Cody spotted her mother down below, dressed in her navy-blue police uniform. She stood in the middle of the street directing traffic and ordering the gathering crowd of onlookers to keep back. Moments later the firefighters reappeared at the front door of Skeleton Man's house. One of them carried a slumped, pajama-clad body over his shoulder. The paramedics rushed over with their equipment, gently guided the man onto a stretcher, and placed an oxygen mask on his ashen face.

Skeleton Man.

Before Cody could tell whether he was still alive, the EMTs hoisted the gurney into the ambulance and sped off, sirens wailing and lights flashing. She felt a wave of sadness for the old man, a hermit hiding away in his own house. She wondered if any of the rumors about him were true…

Cody snapped out of her daze and ran to Tana's room.

She gave the little girl a gentle shake. “Wake up, Tana,” she signed. Because Tana was deaf and couldn't hear the sirens, she had no clue what was going on outside. Cody signed to Tana using Finger spelling:

Code Buster's Key and Solution found on pp. 202, 204–205.

She helped Tana into a pink T-shirt and hoodie, blue overalls, and tennis shoes, then hurriedly dressed herself in jeans, a red T-shirt, and a matching hoodie. Taking Tana's hand, Cody led her down the stairs and out the front door for a closer look at the scene. She wasn't surprised to see Quinn standing in his front yard next door to the burning house, mesmerized by all the action.

The fire appeared to be nearly out by the time Cody reached the street. Still holding Tana's hand, she crossed over to Quinn's yard, where he stood with his parents, both math professors at UC Berkeley. Clumps of neighbors, once huddled together, now began returning to their homes.

“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.