“Me?” Constance said. “What am I supposed to do? Predict the stupid weather?”
The others looked at one another, stymied.
“Maybe you should look around,” Reynie suggested. “Maybe the answer will come to you.”
“Give me a break!” said Constance, feeling very much on the spot. She glanced up and down the corridor. “I see lockers. That’s it.”
“No patterns?” Sticky asked.
“Hmm. The lockers do seem to be arranged in numerical order,” Constance said sarcastically. “I wonder if that’s important.”
Kate had begun transferring the money from the locker to her bucket. “You’re joking,” she said, “but maybe the numbers are significant.” She tapped the number on the locker door. “Maybe ‘37’ means something.”
“It probably means the first thirty-six lockers were taken when Mr. Benedict rented this one,” said Constance.
“It isn’t a bad idea,” said Reynie. “Let’s think about it.”
But no matter how hard they all thought about it, they couldn’t find any significance in the number. Constance, meanwhile, began to pace back and forth. For Constance this was unusual behavior (it was more like Reynie), and Reynie watched her closely, trying to imagine how Mr. Benedict expected them to figure out this clue. If anyone was sensitive to Constance’s volatile moods, Mr. Benedict was. It seemed unlike him to put such pressure on her. True, he hadn’t predicted so much would be riding on this clue, but even so, he probably hadn’t intended for Constance to figure it out all by herself.
Constance had stopped pacing now, and Reynie suddenly realized she was staring hard at him.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“You’re figuring this out,” Constance said. “I can tell.”
“I am?” Reynie said. “You can?”
Sticky and Kate exchanged glances. They could tell something important was happening.
“Maybe it’s a look in your eye,” Constance said, “or maybe it’s your expression, or the way you breathe, or . . . I don’t know. I can tell, though. You’re about to come up with the answer.” She continued to stare at Reynie, her eyes searching now, half hopeful and half afraid.
Reynie tried to keep his composure. He knew Constance needed him to remain calm, but in fact his heart was racing. It was very strange indeed to have his thoughts revealed like that. For his thoughts on the matter had just shifted a little, had they not? He’d begun to broaden his perspective on the clue, to consider how he might look at it in a different way . . .
“There!” said Constance, just as Reynie’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth to speak. “You figured it out!”
Reynie’s mouth snapped shut. He took a deep breath. “Okay, that’s pretty unsettling, Constance.”
“Tell me about it,” said Constance. “Think how it is for me.”
Kate couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “What is it, then? What’s the answer? Tell us, for crying out loud!”
“It’s the pendant,” said Reynie, pointing to Constance’s new necklace. “Mr. Benedict didn’t mean ‘gift’ as in ‘talent,’ he meant ‘gift’ as in ‘present’!”
Kate laughed. “Well, what do you know? Your present was a clue in disguise! Come on, Constance, let’s have a look!”
Constance unclasped the necklace and held the pendant in front of her, turning the miniature globe over and over in her fingers. She gazed at it sadly, admiring anew its rich greens and blues and its brilliant little crystal. “The world is your oyster,” Mr. Benedict had written in her birthday card, and now they all understood that he’d had more in mind than it first appeared. He’d been planning this exciting trip around the world, unaware of the danger into which he was about to fall — and into which Constance and the others would follow him.
Constance thrust the pendant toward Kate. “Here,” she said in a choked voice. “Look at it all you want.” She turned and walked a few paces down the corridor, visibly upset.
The others looked after her with concern, but there was little they could do to comfort Constance right now. They still had to figure out where to go next, and it wasn’t proving as easy as any of them hoped. The continents and oceans on the globe pendant were clearly depicted, but there were no markings anywhere to indicate a destination, and the crystal was set in the middle of the Pacific — no apparent help.
“Any thoughts?” Kate asked.
Reynie was scratching his head. “Mr. Benedict wrote that the world was her oyster, right? I think this oyster must have a pearl inside. The question is how we get to it. Maybe there’s some kind of internal mechanism. Try pressing on the crystal.”
Kate pressed the crystal. Nothing happened. She tried moving it up and down like a switch, then twisting it like a dial. The crystal was firmly set, however, and wouldn’t budge. She turned the globe, inspecting it carefully. There were no discernible seams, no secret hinges. Kate glanced down the corridor at Constance and whispered, “Do you think we have to crack it open?”
Sticky grimaced. “I hope not. She’s upset enough as it is.”
“Mr. Benedict wouldn’t do that to Constance,” said Reynie. “There must be some other way.”
“I could pry the crystal off with my knife,” Kate said. “Maybe there’s a hidden catch or something beneath it. We can have the crystal reset later.” She shrugged. “Assuming, you know, that we survive long enough.”
Sticky covered his face. “I hate it when you say things like that.”
“Can you do it without breaking the pendant or scratching it up?” Reynie asked.
“I think so,” Kate said. She peered closely at the edges of the crystal to see exactly how it had been set. “Wait a minute, there seems to be something . . .” She held the crystal right up to one eye and closed the other. “Whoa!”
Constance hurried back to them. “What? What is it?”
Grinning, Kate handed her the pendant. “That crystal’s not exactly what it seems. Don’t just look at it. Try looking through it.”
Constance covered one eye and held the pendant very close to the other. She started. “Whoa!” She jerked the pendant away, looked at it as if she’d never seen it before, then brought it close to peer into the crystal again.
The crystal, as the boys soon discovered for themselves, was a magnifying glass. Looking through it revealed a map of Holland hidden inside the pendant. The map was smaller than a postage stamp but perfectly legible when seen through the crystal. A bright red X marked a city called Thernbaakagen, and at the bottom of the map was the name of a hotel and a street address.
“I saw that city on the schedule board!” Sticky said. “There’s a train leaving for there in ten minutes!”
“Then it’s time to catch a train,” Reynie said.
As the members of the Mysterious Benedict Society hurried to catch their train, Jackson and Jillson — less hurried but every bit as purposeful — entered the station. With frowning faces they scanned the crowd. Neither was especially methodical by nature, and their search, at first, was haphazard. After a few minutes of fruitless looking, however, Jackson had the idea of starting at one platform and walking slowly along all the platforms until they reached the other side of the station. He told Jillson that this was what they would do.
“I don’t like being told what to do,” said Jillson.
“Maybe not,” said Jackson. “But you don’t like making decisions, either.”
“That’s true,” Jillson said, and she started walking, shoving aside a young businessman who dropped his newspaper and almost fell. “So you tell me what to do, Jackson, but you don’t tell me why. For the last time, why are we at the train station?”
Jackson ignored her. They had just come to the first platform. “You look that way, into the station,” he said, pleased with himself for having devised a system, “and I’ll look this way, toward the platforms.”