Clocks and Robbers (3 page)

Sylvester snorted, trying to contain his laughter.

Viola said, “But look: The picture in the little window is a cherry.”

“Yesterday,” said Rosie, “at the library, I noticed the image was the same as last Saturday — it was still a maple leaf. Then, this morning, I was helping my mom run some errands. We drove up Maple Avenue, and I noticed the picture on that clock had changed to the cherry.”

“The images on each clock must turn at the same time,” said Viola. “I think it’s also safe to assume that they rotate on a weekly basis — every Saturday morning. That seems to be when we’ve noticed the difference.”

“Yeah,” said Woodrow. “And the numbers where the minute hands get stuck change too. On Friday of last week, they were on the eleven. Since last Saturday morning they’ve been
sticking at the four. I wonder what the number will be today?”

“We can wait here to find out,” said Rosie. “It
should
take less than an hour.”

In the meantime, Sylvester shared that he’d officially moved into his family’s basement, since his grandmother’s belongings had arrived in the middle of the week. She hadn’t brought too many things with her from her old house. The ugliest item was an old ratty couch, which his mother hated. It was bright yellow and the cushions were puffy crushed velvet. Sylvester agreed with his mom—it was bizarre! — but Hal-muh-ni insisted they make room for it.

“She must really like that couch,” said Woodrow.

“I guess.” Sylvester shrugged. “Old people are so weird.” Rosie threw him a dirty look. “Sorry,” he said quickly, “I mean they are so …
particular.”

“Bam!” Viola shouted, pointing at the clock. “The minute hand was stuck at seven minutes past the hour—between the one and the two. It just jumped ahead five minutes.”

“Okay,” said Rosie. “This is definitely not a coincidence.”

“There’s a definite pattern,” Viola agreed, wandering around the clock, looking at it from all angles. Then, she flinched, as if she’d been
struck by a bolt of lightning. “Wait a second!” She opened her notebook and flipped through the last few pages. “I didn’t think of it until I actually saw the image of the cherry here today. The three images aren’t just random nature pictures. The cherry, the acorn, and the leaf. They
do
mean something. And it has to do with where we’re standing.”

“We’re surrounded by plants,” suggested Sylvester, nodding at the forest past the small stone wall. “Maybe they’re the same kind of plants that we noticed on the clocks.”

“I don’t think so.” Viola shook her head. “It’s something else.
Does anyone else want to guess?”

The group stared at Viola in confusion. “Oh, come on!” she said, waving her arms wide. “What street are we standing on?”

“Oh my gosh!” said Rosie. “Cherry Tree Lane!”

Sylvester still looked confused. “So? What does this street have to do with the clocks?”

Woodrow nudged Sylvester in the shoulder. “The symbols … They represent where each clock stands.”

“A cherry, a maple leaf, and an acorn?” Sylvester tried to work through it. Finally, it all clicked, and he gasped. “Oh yeah, Cherry Tree Lane. Here we are. And the clock in front of the library is on Maple Avenue. Weird! But what about the acorn? I don’t know any street in this town called
Acorn.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rosie. “But an acorn doesn’t stay an acorn.
Which street around here might be represented by an acorn?”

“Well, thanks to you, I now recognize that an acorn grows into
oak
tree,” Sylvester said with a smirk. “Oakwood Avenue! That’s where the train station is.”

“Nice job,” said Woodrow. Sylvester nodded a modest
thank-you.

“So we know what the symbols represent,” Rosie said. “But there’s another part of this puzzle we haven’t considered yet.”

“The numbers?” said Viola.

“Exactly. This whole thing is starting to seem like a code, don’t you think? It’s as if Mr. Clintock was sending out a message to someone in the town using his clocks. I’m pretty sure the numbers are just as significant as the symbols.”

“In what way?” asked Sylvester.

Woodrow glanced up and down the street. Beyond the campus wall, college students were wandering in groups, chattering loudly, their voices echoing past the stone gatehouse. He snapped his fingers. “We’ve already figured out that the symbols represent different roads in Moon Hollow, so if the numbers mean something too, they could be related to those streets.”

“Hey, I know!” said Sylvester. “The numbers are a locker combination!”

“But which locker?” said Rosie. “How would we find it?”

Woodrow smiled at the group, teasing them with another question. “You guys aren’t listening
to me…. If what we’ve found is actually a code, how would the series of numbers correspond with Mr. Clintock’s symbols for the streets of Moon Hollow?”

“They’re addresses,” said Viola.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking!” said Woodrow.

“Hold on,” said Rosie. “In the last week or so, we’ve seen the minute hands stuck at the eleven and the four. Those numbers make sense as addresses. But today it was stuck in between the one and the two.”

“Can an address be one and a half?” asked Sylvester.

“You’re thinking in terms of the numbers that are written on the clock faces,” said Viola. “Those numbers represent the hour. But you should be thinking smaller.
What other numbers might the hand be pointing us to?”

Rosie snapped her fingers. “It’s the minute hand that sticks. So we should be thinking in terms of the minutes, not the hours!”

“Right,” Viola said. “So the minute hand pointing to the number eleven on a clock face translates to fifty-five.”

“I get it now,” said Sylvester. “The four on a clock is at the twenty-minute mark.”

“And we’re not looking for one-and-a-half Cherry Tree Lane,” said Viola. “The clock was stuck at
seven
minutes past.”

Woodrow pointed across the street. “Look at the gatehouse. The entry’s address is posted in bright green copper right there on the side of the building: Number Seven Cherry Tree Lane.”

“Whoa,” said Viola, Rosie, and Sylvester at the exact same time.

“If it
is
a code,” said Woodrow, “right now, it’s pointing at this spot.” He glanced up and down the street. “What are we supposed to be looking for?”

After their discovery, the Question Marks were eager to learn the locations of the other addresses hidden in Mr. Clintock’s code: fifty-five and twenty. When Mr. Hart finished with his meeting, he found the group where he’d left them outside the campus. They all piled into his car, and he drove them home.
The kids raced into Viola’s house, to the den where the family’s computer sat. They had their answer in no time. “Well, that was obvious!” said Viola. “The library is at
fifty-five
Maple Avenue. And the train station is at
twenty
Oakwood Avenue.”

“I don’t get it,” said Rosie. “Why would P. W. Clintock mark the addresses of these three buildings within the clockworks he donated to the town?”

“Good question,” said Viola, leaning back in the desk chair where she sat. “I also wonder why the addresses change every week.”

“Yeah,” said Sylvester. “And if he
was
sending out a message, who was it for?”

“Hmm,” Woodrow said. He was sitting on the floor next to Viola. He tapped his fingers on the metal desk’s legs. “We do have another path to search. Rosie, did your mom ever find out anything else about those people whose pictures are in the Clintock Gallery at the library?”

“No. She said she hasn’t had time.”

“Fine.” Woodrow stood up. “We can do it ourselves instead.”

The group asked Mrs. Hart to drop them off in front of the library, and she was happy to oblige. She had work to do at home and wanted some quiet.
The four wandered around the library clock for a short while, watching it as if it might reveal another clue to them. The cherry shone brightly from the opening below the clock’s hands.

Inside, the group headed to the Clintock Gallery, where the eleven portraits hung on the wall. In her notebook, Viola recorded the names of the people in the pictures. “At least now we know what their names are,” she said. “We should probably figure out what they did. Let’s go look them up.”

Rosie led everyone toward the computer room, but Sylvester hung back. “We already know what they did,” he answered. “It says it on the wall.” He pointed at the brass plate that read
The First Principles.
“They were school principals.”

Woodrow laughed and called down the hall. “No, they weren’t. You’re talking about two different words, spelled two different ways. ‘A principal is your
pal’
… We learned that in, like, first grade. Remember?”

Sylvester blushed and ran to catch up with the rest of them. “Never mind,” he muttered.

Rosie was able to finagle her way into getting two computers for the four of them. She and Viola worked on one, Woodrow and Sylvester used the other. They divided the list of names and were able to uncover the identity of most of the people in the portraits. When they were finished, the
four came back together at one of the circular tables near the computer desks and shared what they had learned.

“They each have two things in common,” Viola said. “The first is that they were all wealthy members of the Moon Hollow community during the twentieth century—bankers, lawyers, a professor, an heiress, an artist, a politician. The second is … they’re all dead.”

“That’s really creepy,” said Sylvester. He shuddered. “Do you think someone murdered all of them?”

Viola shook her head emphatically. “It’s much simpler than that. Judging by their birth dates, what happened to them was natural. They grew old.”

“Are their pictures on the wall simply because they were generous?” Rosie asked. “Or are they connected more specifically to Mr. Clintock and his clocks?”

The group was quiet for a moment, considering Rosie’s question.

“Maybe the answer lies in the words on each of the picture frames,” Viola said. “Truth. Idealism. Merit. Eternity.
The First Principles.
Do they tell us anything else about how they were connected?”

Woodrow jolted upright and slammed his hand on the table. The large room went silent as all eyes suddenly turned on the group of four
kids. “Sorry,” Woodrow whispered, “but what Viola just said gave me an idea.”

“Well … are you going to tell us?” asked Sylvester, leaning forward.

“If Mr. Clintock embedded a message in the clocks he donated to the town,” Woodrow said, “it would make sense that he might leave messages in other places too, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” said Viola, starting to clue in.

“That gallery is named the Clintock Gallery, right?” said Woodrow. “So, it’s likely that Mr. Clintock had some control over whose pictures hung there, what words would be associated with each photo, and even what the group of portraits would be called.” Woodrow paused and bit at his lip. “I think that
The First Principles
isn’t just a title for the portrait series. It’s a clue about how to decode another secret message.”

“Another secret message?” echoed Rosie. “What do you mean?”

“Like an anagram?” asked Sylvester.

“Sort of,” said Woodrow. “This one
is
another play on letters. Use the clue ‘The
First
Principles.’ And think about each word associated with the portraits in the Clintock Gallery.
Can you puzzle out Mr. Clintock’s second message?”

Sylvester, Rosie, and Viola sat at the table racking their brains. Woodrow leaned back and watched. Viola had her notebook lying open and was scribbling furiously. Together, the three whispered and fretted until finally they looked up, satisfied. “The First Principles,” said Viola, “tells us to look at the
first letters
in each word. Truth. Idealism. Merit. Eternity. When we look at their first letters only, we get a new word:
time.”

“Exactly!” said Woodrow. “Nice work, you guys.”

“You were the one who figured out the code,” said Sylvester, patting his friend’s shoulder.

“So what’s the rest of the message?” Woodrow added.

Rosie read the last part aloud. “Knowledge. Exemplar. Empathy. Purity. Evolution. Reason. Service. The first letter of each spells out:
keepers.”

“Timekeepers?” said Viola, shaking her head. “What have we stumbled on here?”

Rosie glanced over her shoulder at the computer desk. She nodded. “Let’s find out.” The group followed Rosie and gathered around a single screen. This time, she entered the word
timekeepers
into the Internet search engine. There were way too many solutions to even begin looking through. “We need to narrow the search.”

“How about trying
Moon Hollow
and
timekeepers,”
said Viola.

When Rosie searched again using Viola’s suggestion, she gasped at the result. The first website that popped up had to do with obscure secret societies. She quickly read through it. “According to this site, in the mid-twentieth century, there existed a little-known social club right here. They called themselves The Timekeepers of Moon Hollow. But no one knows who the members were.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Viola in wonder. “Did we just uncover the identities of an old secret society in
this
town? Could the members be the people whose pictures are hanging on the wall in the other room?”

“That’s got to be who they are,” said Sylvester. “Wow.”

Rosie turned to the group. “What exactly is a secret society?”

“My grandfather was a member of the Masons, a really famous secret society,” said Viola. “The societies are kind of like any fraternity or sorority at a college. Basically, they are organizations who keep their goings-on … well … secret.”

“Why?” Rosie asked. “Are they doing illegal stuff?”

“I don’t think so,” said Viola. “My grandfather
was a pretty normal guy. I think mostly, his group was a bunch of close friends.”