Dungeons & Detectives Read online

Murph made the same face his Scream mask had and dropped the map like it was about to bite him.

  “From the faded coloring, they’re really old ones too,” I said.

  “Like, 1970s old, if you ask me,” Frank said knowingly as he pointed to the large, seriously unstylish old-fogey shirt collar sticking to the dead guy’s clavicle. “That’s about the last time a collar like that was in vogue.”

  “Who do we know of who went missing in the 1970s and was known to tear pages out of every copy of Sabers and Serpents he could get his hands on?” I asked rhetorically.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Frank agreed.

  “Whoa! You mean this pile of bones is Filmore Johnson?” said Murph, turning a shade greener.

  “That’s my guess,” Frank said. “Somehow Lucky must have picked up the comic’s scent and discovered the remains of Filmore still clutching the missing pages from the incomplete copy Robert found.”

  “It’s almost as if he tore the pages from the comic during a violent struggle at the very moment of his death.” I shuddered at the thought. I shuddered again at the next one. “And instead of calling the police, someone went to the trouble of dressing the body in an ancient suit of armor to cover it up and left him secretly entombed in a forgotten wing of Angus’s castle.”

  “I think we might have to have another conversation with Angus,” Frank said with a gulp. Murph had stopped listening. He was on his hands and knees, staring intently at the map.

  “Look at this, you guys!” he said excitedly, snatching it off the floor and flipping it over. It hadn’t taken him long to get over his shock at rummaging through Filmore’s quite possibly murdered remains. “I was right!”

  Frank and I leaned down to look over his shoulders as he turned the map back over to the front side. The right side of the page was too obscured by stains to really read, but on the other half it was easy enough to make out the shape of an island labeled Lost Isle, with various landmarks like mountains and villages. Freaky-looking serpents and sea monsters danced in the water off the coast.

  “It’s a map of an island like Angus told us, but I don’t see anything about a treasure,” I said.

  “That’s because we haven’t examined the other side of the page yet,” Murph said, turning it over gently. His collector’s mind seemed to have come back to him.

  And there it was. Now the left side of the page was covered by the stains, but the right side showed an illustration of a close-up of the northeast corner of the map, drawn in a different style—while the other side looked like it had been drafted by a cartographer or someone who knew how to professionally draw a map, this one looked like it had been hand sketched.

  “This totally matches up with the notes from the smuggler’s inventory listed in the 1700s McGalliard shipping ledger that showed up at auction with Filmore’s stuff,” Murph said enthusiastically.

  There was a cove labeled Loch Raven toward the top and a small cottage on a round, hilly peninsula overlooking the ocean farther down the coast. The cottage had two defining features: a well, and more amazingly, a windmill—just like Murph had originally predicted. Written above the windmill was the same coded three-letter Gaelic word Murph had shown us before.

  This was a treasure map, all right. Only the “spot” wasn’t marked with an X. It was marked with a windmill and the code word for gold.

  17 DISGUISES

  FRANK

  THE TREASURE IS REAL!” MURPH exclaimed.

  Could Murph have been right all along? Could the missing map from the make-believe comic book truly lead to a real treasure? From the clues we had, the facts added up.

  “When we talked to him, Angus confirmed that he and Filmore copied the map in the comic straight from one that was tucked inside an old ledger he found in the castle,” Joe said. “It’s gotta be the same Paul Magnus ledger Murph tracked down.”

  “And the guy who first drew that map meant for it to lead to eight crates of smuggled gold,” Murph insisted. “We could be holding the directions to a real fortune!”

  “According to Angus, that’s what Filmore thought too,” I said, gesturing to the scattered bones at our feet. “Angus dismissed it as fantasy. If he’d taken the time to study the ledger like Murph and Filmore probably did, he’d know it wasn’t total nonsense, but that doesn’t mean he was entirely wrong about it leading nowhere. Even if it had been real at one time, it’s still hundreds of years old and shows a Scottish island he said didn’t exist on any map.”

  Joe didn’t seem in the least bit discouraged, though. This wouldn’t be the first case we’d been on where hidden treasure was involved, and I recognized that look in his eye. He wasn’t just in plain old detective mode anymore. He was in treasure-hunter mode.

  “But what if Filmore was partially right too? What if it was real, but they were just looking on the wrong side of the ocean?” Joe suggested.

  “Whoa. What if it wasn’t a Scottish island at all?” said Murph, eyes going wide with the implication of Joe’s query.

  “PMG would have been running his operation out of Bayport once he immigrated, not Scotland,” Joe continued, referring to Angus’s and Robert’s Colonial merchant ancestor Paul Magnus by his initials.

  “Like maybe it could be off the coast of Bayport!” Murph chimed in.

  “But there’s nowhere around here called the Lost Isle,” I pointed out. “And the cove it shows is named ‘Loch Raven.’ A loch is what they call a lake or a sea inlet in Scotland. You normally wouldn’t find that word used to describe a body of water on a map of someplace in America.”

  “Yeah, but we know PMG was using codes, and he was obviously trying to make the treasure hard to find,” Joe theorized. “What if it was just disguised as a map of a Scottish island but it was really here?”

  “We run right into the same problem Filmore and Angus had when they tried to find it on maps of Scotland,” I said, gently turning the map back over to the side that showed the whole island—I was wearing gloves as part of my costume, which not only made preserving evidence easier, but also made holding a dead guy’s map a little less icky. “The eastern half of the island is obscured by the stains, but I’ve studied the geography of the Bayport coast enough on other cases to know there’s no island anywhere near Bayport that looks anything like this one.”

  We’d hit a dead end. All three of us sagged a little.

  Joe looked down at the bones still sticking out of the suit of armor. “Well, if it was Angus who, um, knighted Filmore, then we know he was telling the truth about thinking the treasure map was bogus. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left it in Filmore’s hand when he stuffed him in the suit of armor.”

  “Something’s still not adding up,” I agreed. “We pretty much came to the same conclusion Angus did about the map. But what would make Filmore so obsessed with the map that he’d burn down his own business to keep it hidden? Did he just have a breakdown and lose touch with reality entirely?”

  “Or did he know something we don’t?” asked Joe.

  We all fell silent. If there was an answer, it might have gone to the grave with him. I turned the map back over to the close-up of the northeast corner of the island, where the cottage’s windmill was marked with the encoded Gaelic word for gold.

  There was something about the way the coastline above the cottage curved in the shape of an S, with Loch Raven at the top and the cottage on the peninsula down at the bottom, that seemed familiar. As I looked closer, the shape of the loch started to ring a mental bell too. It took me a second to realize why I recognized them.

  “I think you guys are onto something about it being disguised,” I said eagerly. “Only, what if it wasn’t just a Scottish island disguised as an American one? What if it isn’t an island at all?”

  Joe and Murph stared at me, trying to put the pieces together for themselves as I studied the map scale drawn at the bottom of the page to help you measure distance.

  “Based on the scale, how many miles would you say it is from the loch
to the cottage?” I asked.

  “Just over two,” math-minded Murph said right away.

  Just over two. The same distance as it was between two notable landmarks a lot closer to home.

  “Loch Raven might make a nice place to put a harbor, don’t you think?” I prompted.

  I could see the wheels turning in Joe’s head.

  “What do you notice about the cottage?” I asked.

  “It’s small?” Murph responded. He didn’t get where I was going, but Joe did.

  “It’s the same distance from the Inner Harbor on a hill overlooking the coastline!” he asserted. “And the windmill tower and the well are next to each other to the structure’s right!”

  “I want to be excited too!” Murph complained. “Why is the little cottage with the windmill important?”

  “They’re wearing Halloween costumes,” Joe answered enigmatically. “The cottage is really a much larger house in disguise.”

  “Um, how much larger?” Murph asked, still confused.

  “As big as a castle,” I said with a smile.

  The same thing that must have dawned on Filmore forty years ago had just dawned on us. The island on the map wasn’t an island at all—it was a disguised map of Bayport leading to the very castle we were standing in!

  18 AXED

  JOE

  LOCH RAVEN IS REALLY THE Bayport Inner Harbor, and the cottage on the peninsula is actually Castle McGalliard! Paul Magnus didn’t just code the ledger, he coded the map, too!” Murph proclaimed. “Based on the town records, he died in 1774, just a couple months after his last entry in the ledger, so if he had hidden eight crates of gold in the castle and no one else found it, it should still be here!”

  “What was that line again in the ledger above the code for gold?” I asked eagerly.

  “ ‘Beneath the windmill I lay awaiting, a drop in the bucket and a chain afar,’ ” Murph recited.

  “I bet that’s the directions to where the original McG hid it!” I said. “If the windmill is really the castle’s tallest tower in disguise, then it’s gotta be under Angus’s tower. That’s where the symbol for gold is.”

  “The tower is to the east on the other side of the castle from where we are now,” Frank said.

  He held the map up against a wooden beam on the wall and took a step back to appraise it from a new angle.

  “ ‘A drop in the bucket and a chain afar’ must be a riddle, and I bet it tells us the exact spot under the tower where it’s hidden,” Frank speculated.

  “What in the world does ‘a chain afar’ mean?” I wondered.

  Frank’s eyes lit up. “Well, ‘afar’ indicates distance, and it just so happens that a ‘chain’ was a common measure of length used in the British colonies! They would unfold a sixty-six-foot-long chain to measure land when they were building towns and making maps.”

  “Um, how did you know that?” I asked. Frank had a pretty good data bank in that noggin of his, but this seemed like a particularly random piece of knowledge.

  “Math class,” he said proudly. “I saw it in a conversion table in our textbook and asked our teacher why they called it a chain. I knew the things I learned in class would keep coming in handy on cases.”

  Murph had zoned out and was looking down at Filmore’s scattered bones. “Guys, maybe we should tell the police about this.”

  “We will, but there’s no cell phone service in the castle,” I said. “So there’s not much we can do until we get back upstairs to the party.”

  “Well, I don’t think Filmore is going anywhere,” Frank said.

  Murph continued to stare at the bones. “Do you think he figured the whole thing out before, um…?”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I replied, looking around the chamber at the corridors leading off to either side. “I wonder if one of these brings us toward Angus’s tower.”

  The chamber went quiet as we pondered the question, only it didn’t stay quiet for long.

  THWANG!

  SMACK!

  I heard the crossbow release before I saw the ancient bolt shoot from the shadows and pin the map to the wall.

  Frank yelped in surprise, yanking his hand away.

  Murph took his Scream costume to the next level with a terrified shriek.

  I lowered my head and started running toward the direction the bolt had come from to try and tackle our assailant before they could reload. I didn’t make it far.

  POOF!

  A smoke bomb landed in the center of the chamber and enveloped me in a hissing cloud of thick gray smoke. I covered my mouth and nose with my shirt and tried to fan the smoke away from my eyes with my hand. What I saw didn’t make me feel any better about our predicament.

  Another suit of armor appeared in the haze, and this one was running straight at us, swinging a large battle-ax.

  19 THE DARK KNIGHT

  FRANK

  THE ANIMATED SUIT OF ARMOR running through the smoke toward me was like something from a nightmare. Jet-black, glowing red eyes, curved horns rising from its helm. What looked like blood was smeared over the twin blades of its ax.

  I sucked in a deep breath as the knight rushed Joe with the ax raised. It didn’t swing, though, just shouldered him out of the way and rushed me next. No, it wasn’t rushing me! It was rushing the map!

  If I’d been thinking rationally, I would have leaped out of the way. Unarmed, with nothing protecting me but a wool coat, I didn’t stand a chance against the fully armored knight. Instinct took over, though, and I grabbed the end of the crossbow bolt now pinning the map to the wall and tried to pry it out before the assailant could reach the map.

  The knight jabbed me in the ribs with the butt end of the ax, knocking me aside easily.

  A second later he vanished into the smoke, along with a very valuable piece of evidence.

  “He’s getting away with the map!” I gasped, climbing back to my feet.

  The knight had fled and Murph did the same—right out of harm’s way and back through the chamber door the way we’d come. Only it turned out someone else was blocking his exit. I heard an OOF followed by another Murph scream as a figure tumbled out of the shadows into the smoke-filled chamber. This one was wearing a long robe, a pointy hat, and a big, cockeyed, fake white beard. It was the wizard with the cool costume Lucky had knocked over at the party.

  The wizard didn’t stop to chat. He bolted down the corridor to the left, his beard coming undone and floating to the floor behind him. I picked myself off the floor with a groan and bolted after him. I’d lost sight of the knight and wasn’t about to let the same thing happen with his magical, and now unmasked, lurking accomplice.

  The wizard must have known the way, because he didn’t bother with a flashlight. I didn’t have the same luxury. My little key-chain flashlight didn’t cast a very large beam, and the wizard had enough of a head start that I couldn’t see him. All I had to follow was the soft patter of his shoes against the stone floor. And then that went silent too.

  I had no way of knowing if the wizard had gotten away, or if he was simply lying in wait to ambush me. I’d run off down the corridor without bothering to wait for Joe, and now I was regretting it. I had no backup and no idea where on the western side of the castle I was. And neither did anyone else.

  I continued cautiously until the beam of my flashlight revealed a doorway off to the right. I approached slowly, hugging the opposite wall in case the wizard was lurking just out of sight. What I found wasn’t an ambush. It was a steep, curving stairwell descending even deeper under the castle.

  I couldn’t tell if my heart was beating from the chase or from fear, and I was about to head back to find Joe when I heard the groan and clank of metal down below. It went silent a second later, but the sound had given away my quarry’s location. If I turned back, the wizard would get away and we might never find out who’d stolen the map. I took a deep breath, shut off my flashlight, and made my way as silently as I could down the steps in the da
rk, feeling my way along the wall as I went. With a little luck, I’d be the one to surprise him this time.

  I knew I was near the bottom when a faint flickering light appeared in the distance. The wizard must have thought he’d gotten away, otherwise he surely would have blown out the light. If I was careful, I might be able to spy on him, or maybe even take him by surprise and apprehend him. I crept silently toward the light, my hand brushing against the wall to guide me through the darkened tunnel, my heart thudding in my chest.

  Strange shadows moved across the floor ahead of me, but I couldn’t make out what was casting them. I swallowed the urge to run and inched slowly forward.

  Bad idea.

  There was another creak of metal, only this time it was behind me. I swung around just in time to watch a heavy iron gate drop into place with a massive clang.

  I’d walked right into a trap.

  I grabbed the rusty iron bars and tried to push the gate open, but it wouldn’t budge. There was a muffled groan from deeper in the room behind me. Reluctantly, I flicked on my flashlight, dreading what I might see. I was right to be scared.

  I was locked in the castle dungeon. And I wasn’t alone.

  By the dim light of two candles burning in ancient wall sconces, I could see that I was in the central room of a dungeon that had smaller cells along one wall and what looked suspiciously like medieval interrogation devices on the other. Two of our suspects were tied to chairs with tape over their mouths—one in the main room with me and one locked in one of the individual cells.

  “Trick or treat,” a voice said from the other side of the gate.

  I turned to see a match spark to life, illuminating the face of my captor as he lit another candle. It was just about the last person I expected see in the castle’s dungeon, although it probably shouldn’t have been.

  “I always dreamed of having a real dungeon,” Dungeon Master Dennis, still in his wizard robe but minus the beard and pointy hat, said perkily. “Pretty cool, right?”