“Could it mean the Bible?” Pete ventured. “That’s known as the Good Book by a lot of people.”
“I don’t think so,” Jupiter said, taking a second helping of dessert. “Though it might. Maybe the next message will tell us more.”
“What project are you boys working on now?” Titus Jones asked from the head of the table.
“We have some mysterious messages to decipher, Uncle Titus,” Jupiter said. “So far we’ve just made a beginning.”
“You boys and that club of yours!” Mathilda Jones exclaimed, cutting another piece of cake for Pete. “I declare it’s a good thing I give you some work to do and keep you out in the open air or you’d spend all your time working puzzles.”
As the boys had once had a puzzle-solving club, which had later become The Three Investigators, Mrs. Jones had it firmly in her mind that their chief activity was still solving puzzles. “Well, I’m not solving anything more tonight,” Jupiter said with a yawn. “You kept us out in the open air all day, Aunt Mathilda, and I’m going to bed early.”
“I’ll buy a double helping of that,” Pete agreed, and he yawned, too. “It was a great dinner, Mrs. Jones, but if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll ride home now and turn in.”
Pete and Bob both said good night and departed. After riding together for a block or two, they separated to go to their own homes.
Neither of them noticed a small delivery van which followed them slowly and when they separated, continued to follow Bob.
Jupiter meanwhile was helping his aunt clear the table. However, he yawned constantly.
“Heavens to Betsy,” his aunt exclaimed. “You must really be tired, Jupiter. You go on up to bed. Scoot, now.”
Jupiter went gladly and tumbled into bed. But as soon as he was in bed, he started wondering about the other mysterious messages.
I suggest you see the book. That was the first message. What book? Did the second message tell? He tried to remember the second message.
The harder he tried to remember, the wider awake he became. Sleep got further and further away. At last he came to a decision. He would have to try to solve the second message before he could get any sleep.
He got dressed again and went downstairs. His aunt and uncle were watching television, and they looked up in surprise.
“Mercy and goodness, Jupiter!” his aunt said. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I started thinking about something,” Jupiter said. “A — well, a sort of puzzle. I left it out in the salvage yard. I’m going to go get it and have a last look at it before I go to sleep.”
“I certainly do hope you don’t wear out your brains with all these puzzles,” Mrs. Jones sighed.
Jupiter crossed the short distance to the front entrance of the salvage yard. The gates were padlocked; however, he had his own entrance which he used when necessary. He walked along the gaily painted fence until he came to two boards painted green.
Jupiter pushed his finger against a special spot, and the two boards swung silently back, revealing a narrow entrance. This was Green Gate One, one of several secret entrances and exits to the yard known only to The Three Investigators. Jupiter squeezed through and found himself in the special workshop section.
He now proceeded to the printing press, found the piece of iron grillwork at the back, and moved it, revealing the entrance to Tunnel Two.
He scrambled through Tunnel Two, pushed up the trapdoor, and entered the office.
He had left the secret messages in a drawer of the desk. Switching on the overhead light, he got them out. The first message, the one that said I suggest you see the book, he put off to one side. The second message, which he and Pete had obtained from Gerald Watson, he spread out in front of him. On the face of it, it was very mystifying. The six lines of the message said:
Take one lily; kill my friend Eli. Positively number one. Take abroom and swat a bee. What do you do with clothes, almost. Not Mother, not Sister, not Brother; but perhaps Father. Hymns?Hams? Homes? Almost, not quite.
However, after he had read it a couple of times, Jupiter began to get some ideas. Solving the first message had shown him the right way to proceed. Each line was a clue to a word, rather like the clues in crossword puzzles.
The first line said to take one lily. He did this by writing the words down on a sheet of paper, so that he had: ONE LILY. He stared at it for a moment. Where did Eli come in? Then he saw it. The three middle letters of the two words spelled ELI!
Triumphantly Jupiter rubbed out the three letters, thereby “killing” Eli. What he had left was ONLY.
“Only!” Jupiter exclaimed to himself. “That’s it! Now the second line says, ‘Positively number one.’ In the first message, number twenty-six stood for the letter Z. Suppose number one stands for A? That fits fine. The message starts
“Only a — ”
Without even stopping, he wrote down BROOM, from the third sentence, and erased the B, for the line said, ‘Take a broom and swat a bee.’ What was left was the word ROOM.
Jupiter now working with increasing excitement, talking to himself as he sometimes did when working alone.
“ ‘What you do with clothes, almost.’ Well, what do you do with clothes? You wear them, naturally. What word is almost ‘wear’ but not quite? How about ‘where’? That has to be it. Now the message is, ‘Only a room where —’. That makes sense so far.”
He wrote it down, and then tackled the fifth line.
This gave him more trouble. He tried different words for father, such as “Dad,” “Pop,” “head of the family.” But none of them made any sense.
He stopped and pinched his lip. Suppose the word father was meant to suggest, something more. Father Christmas? No, that didn’t seem to fit. Father Time? This whole business was about clocks, so that must be it. Father Time!
Now he dashed off the last line. What sounds almost, but not quite, like hymns, hams, and homes? There were only two likely words, hems and hums. Hems didn’t fit. Hums did. With a feeling of triumph he wrote down Only a room where Father Time hums. But time doesn’t hum. It just passes by silently.
Or if you mean a clock, it ticks by, unless…
“That’s it!” Jupe exclaimed to himself. “All those clocks in Mr. Clock’s study are electric, and they all hum. That’s a room where time really hums.” Now he had two complete messages.
I suggest you see the book. Only a room where Father Time hums. The room had to be the room in Mr. Clock’s house where all the screaming clocks were. He had no idea which book was meant. However, he might get some clue to that later. Now he took out the torn sheet of paper which contained the first part of the message they had obtained from Mrs. Martha Harris. Jupiter studied the first line of numbers. 3–27 4–36 5–19 48–12 7–11 15–9.
Ordinarily they wouldn’t have meant anything at all to him. But since the messages he had already solved mentioned a book, he thought he understood. A very popular type of code; message involves using a book. The sender of the message picks out words in the book which fit the message, then writes down just the page and the word number, and sends only the numbers to the receiver. The receiver of the message has a copy of the same book, and by looking up the page and word number he can easily read the message. These numbers almost surely referred to pages and words in some book.
Only Jupe didn’t have a copy of the book, didn’t know what book it was, and in any case only had half the page and word numbers!
But he had done enough for one night. He put the messages back in the desk and was about to let himself down into Tunnel Two when the phone rang. Surprised, he picked it up.