The Littlest Bigfoot (10 page)

Back at home, with two copies of the story tucked in his backpack, still feeling hot-eyed and strangely unsettled, Jeremy ate two peanut-butter-honey-banana sandwiches, then sat down in front of his laptop. He'd just started looking up “Milford Garrison Carruthers” and “Standish” and “Bigfoot” and “Lucille” when his screen turned blue. He winced, thinking he'd fried the computer, maybe permanently, when a sentence he hadn't typed appeared in the top right-hand corner.
Greetings, seeker! Want to play a game?
it read.

Jeremy stared at the words, and then shuddered. Maybe he'd been too deeply immersed in the world of space aliens and hidden monsters, but his first thought was that he'd somehow gotten in touch with the ghost of Milford Carruthers . . . or maybe even the ghost of poor Lucille.

The words just hung there, inviting.
Greetings, seeker!
And then another sentence.
Click yes or no.

When he clicked
yes
, a pattern appeared on his screen: nine dots, in three rows of three.
Connect all nine dots without lifting your pencil using just four lines,
read the instructions.

Jeremy stared, considering. When he touched the cursor,
more words appeared:
Think carefully. You will only have one chance
. Jeremy decided to draw out the dots on a piece of paper, tried out different possibilities, and finally realized that the trick was to draw the first line through a row of three vertical dots, then extend it out past the grid before angling it back on the diagonal, to swipe two more dots. Then extending out of the grid again, a horizontal swipe back across, and a diagonal stroke, until the finished puzzle looked a little like the sketch of a bow tie. Four lines, running through all nine dots. “I'm thinking outside the box,” he said.

Nice work,
flashed on the screen. Then another puzzle appeared, this one a word problem.
A lily pad grows in a pond. Each day the number of lily pads doubles, until, after ten days, the lily pads cover the entire pond. On what day did the lily pads cover half the pond?

Luckily, Jeremy had heard that one before. If the number doubled each day, then on day nine, half the pond would be covered. Double half, and on day ten the lily pads had taken over. “Day nine,” he typed, and wondered
if this would actually lead anywhere and who was asking these questions.

What stays in a corner but travels the world?
asked the screen.

Jeremy tried to type the riddle into Google and found that whoever he was playing this game with had disabled the feature. It took him two hours, and help from his brother, to come up with the answer: “a stamp.” The screen barely paused to congratulate him before spitting out the next riddle.

What starts with the letter
t
, is full of tea, and ends with
t
?

That one was easy. “Teapot,” Jeremy typed. The next riddle appeared.

“What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?” Jeremy read aloud.

“A towel,” called Suzanne, who was working in her office. After he typed in that answer, a rebus appeared.

Jeremy stared, then yelped, “Space invaders!” He typed it in. Another problem popped up.

“Corporate downsizing?” said Martin, peering at Jeremy's screen on his way to the dinner table with his magazine tucked under his arm. “Hey, kiddo, you've got to come eat.” Jeremy typed in the answer, gulped down his chicken and biscuits, and raced back to his computer, which was showing yet another puzzle:

“No
u
turn,” Jeremy typed. He was, he thought, getting the hang of it.

After a dozen more riddles and math problems, Jeremy's screen turned blue.
Congratulations!
read a banner on top, as silvery confetti fluttered down. Then a string of numbers appeared, and just like that, his computer was back to normal. “See if they're GPS coordinates,” Noah suggested, after Jeremy had puzzled over the digits for hours, trying
to see if they were some kind of code, if each number represented a letter that would spell out a word.

Of course Noah was right. The coordinates led to a spot right there in Standish, deep in the forest. Jeremy walked for an hour with his phone set to its compass feature and found, balanced on a tree trunk at the precise coordinates he'd received, a cube composed of brightly colored squares, nine on each side: a Rubik's Cube. When Jeremy solved it, with a final click, the cube twisted into two pieces, and a folded square of paper fell into his hands. It was a note with an address written on it . . . and, on the other side, a copy of the illustration Jeremy had seen in the old newspaper: Milford Garrison Carruthers posing proudly next to the creature in a cage. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he read the single word handwritten beneath the illustration: “real.”

The address turned out to be not far from his school: a single-story bungalow, painted gray with white trim.

Jeremy rang the doorbell. His backpack was full of everything he'd learned or discovered: three Bigfoot notebooks along with printouts of the story about Milford Carruthers; every subsequent newspaper mention of Carruthers, Lucille, or the circus she'd been sold to; and every story about anything—from crimes to Girl
Scout cookouts—that took place in Standish's forests. He had a copy of the footage he'd shot that day in the woods, transferred to a thumb drive, and a copy of the Patterson-Gimlin film, along with a drive containing every tabloid cover that had ever mentioned Bigfoot.

He wasn't sure who, or what, to expect when the door swung open. At first he saw nothing. Then he looked down. A girl sitting in a fancy aerodynamic office chair, with glossy black hair gathered in a ponytail that stuck out of her Red Sox baseball cap, stared up at him. Jeremy saw that she was about his age, and that she did not seem to be entirely pleased.

“You're a kid!” she said.

“So are you!” said Jeremy. He hadn't realized until that moment that he'd half expected whoever had been playing those games with him to be a sixty-year-old man who smelled like cats—not just a grown-up, but a weird grown-up.

“Well,” said the girl, without getting up. “You're Jeremy Bigelow, right?” When he nodded, she looked him up and down. “I thought maybe it'd be Noah. We used to go to school together.”

Jeremy felt his heart descend toward his knees. Everyone wanted one of his brothers. Nobody ever wanted him.

“But Noah's not into the paranormal,” the girl continued.
“And if you were smart enough to solve my riddles, then you're smart enough to be here.” She set her hands against the wall, and pushed. The chair spun, then rolled over the smooth wooden floors down the hallway, into the house. “By the way, my father works from home. He's very big and very strong, and very protective of me.”

Jeremy raised his hands to show how harmless he was, then realized the girl whose chair was rolling ahead of him couldn't see him.

“I'm Jo,” said the girl.

The house was small but airy, with high ceilings, white walls, and pale-green and light-blue furniture. He followed Jo past a living room and a dining room and a kitchen before they arrived at a glassed-in sunroom that had been converted into what looked like Bigfoot Central, or maybe the Pentagon's war room.

“Welcome to the Batcave,” Jo said. Jeremy looked around. A detailed map of Standish covered an entire wall and was studded with pushpins in red and green and blue. On the opposite wall, a bookshelf was stocked with everything that had ever been published about Bigfoots. Photographs were layered on a corkboard—color snapshots, movie stills, fuzzy black-and-white images, pictures taken with infrared light that depicted what
looked like nothing more than big greenish blobs.

Jo spun her chair around again to face him.

“You're wondering how I found you,” she said.

Jeremy had been wondering all kinds of things, including whether Jo was crazy and whether he was safe here. Instead of saying that, though, he just nodded.

“I run Believeinbigfoot.com. Every IP address that visits the site gets a cookie embedded in the hard drive so I can track who's been there.”

“Is that legal?” Jeremy wondered.

Jo sounded the tiniest bit smug when she said, “You clicked ‘yes' when the site asked your permission to leave it. Anyhow, I set up the cookie to trigger the array when—
if
—anyone ever typed in a string of search words about Standish and Bigfoots and . . .”

“Milford Carruthers,” Jeremy finished for her.

Jo nodded. “You were the first person since I started the site to ask questions about Bigfoots here in Standish. Did you see one?” she asked him without preamble.

Jeremy gulped. “One what?”

“A Bigfoot,” she said, in a tone as calm as if she'd asked him whether he'd seen a squirrel on his walk over. She must have noticed his shocked expression, because she frowned and said, sounding almost apologetic, “I know
that's probably not the preferred term. Probably they call themselves something else.” The right half of her mouth quirked upward in a sort of smile. “The differently footed, maybe.”

“You think they're real?”

“I know they are,” said Jo. She gestured toward the walls—the maps, the books, the photographs. “I know they're real, and I know they're here. Nearby. And I know that I'm going to find them. Now,” she said, clapping her hands together, “I want you to tell me everything about your sighting.”

“I—I have pictures,” Jeremy stammered. He pulled off his backpack and reached for the thumb drive, still trying to make sense of it. Jo held out her hand. Her face was very calm, but her eyes were shining in a way Jeremy had seen in his own mirror. He'd found someone who believed him. More than that, he'd found someone who wasn't looking past him in order to see his brothers or using him to get to Ben or Noah.

Jo didn't care (he hoped) how smart Noah was or how Ben had scored more goals than any soccer player in the town's entire history in his freshman year of high school.