Petula watched with interest as Molly put her sneakered foot on the picture frame and broke it in half. Outside, a distant crack of lightning seemed to echo the splintering noise.
Molly studied the wood. “It’s solid. Not hollow. Nothing in it.” She sat heavily on the sofa. “It was only a hunch, wasn’t it? I mean, there are quills and feathers everywhere. Maybe we should be looking down in the stuffed-bird rooms.”
Micky sat down beside her and glanced up at the hundreds and hundreds of books.
“Why would there be a quill picture? It must be to show that this room is special. There’s something in here, there must be.”
Minutes later Molly and Micky were up on the balcony level of the room, rifling through the library’s shelves for a box that might hold Molly’s crystals or a book that might contain a good clue as to where the Logan Stones were. The books were organized alphabetically. Molly and Micky ran their flashlights along their spines, reading their titles.
“Ancient Civilization,” Micky read. “The Andes. Annihilation of the World’s Population and Other Extreme Ways Forward.” Micky shook his head in revulsion. “That sounds like a Hunroe sort of book, but not the next one. Apple Picking. The Aztecs. Botany of the Amazon.” Micky frowned while he thought.
“Damn!” Molly despaired. “This is hopeless. The clue might be in a map or in a poem, or it might be deep in a math book written in a code in numbers!”
Micky turned around and leaned over the ledge of the balcony, surveying the mess of the picture frame below. They’d never be able to cover their tracks now, for the frame was unfixable.
At that moment a huge flash of lightning exploded in the sky. Petula froze with fear. And, as though some sort of giant hundred-foot-tall paparazzi photographer had his camera directed at them from outside the window and had detonated its flash, white light blasted in through the window. It flooded the room, and something extraordinary happened.
Passing through the window’s stained glass, where the strange shapes were, and using the etched lines there, the light and shadows formed a picture and some words on the white wall, where the picture of the quill had been.
The apparition was on the wall for only a second, but it was enough.
“WOW!” Micky gasped.
Eighteen
Molly and Micky stared at the wall in amazement. Every time a flash of lightning lit up the sky, the light of it shone through the stained-glass windowpane, past the etched lines there, and threw up defined shadows on the wall above the fireplace.
Quickly they ran down the balcony’s spiral staircase and waited for another burst of light.
“Come on, come on,” Micky urged. “Don’t let the storm stop now.”
Rain slapped against the window and thunder rumbled.
“Here we go,” said Molly. And then there was an enormous crack, as though two monster marbles were smashing into each other in the air above the museum. Petula hid under a sofa. The sky filled with white light. Again and again, white light lit up the Earth, and Molly and Micky were able to read the wall.
“It’s a map!” Micky declared. “With a sort of picture code. But the question is…is that shape a country or a city or a village or a small area of land?”
“And what do the pictures inside the shape mean?” Molly asked. “The first thing looks like a cloud. Then…are those trees? Is that supposed to be a wood? Put the two things together, and you get cloud trees or cloud wood. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Cloud forest does, though,” Micky interjected. “There are places called cloud forests very high up in mountainous places where the trees are covered with cloud.”
“Where?”
“South America, I think. But we could find out for sure.”
“And those four tear-shaped things are definitely the Logan Stones,” Molly said. “Then there’s…” Molly waited for a flash of lightning to light up the wall again. When it did, she pointed to a shape. “There’s that. It looks like a spring—like a metal spring. Then there’s the word COCA, with that squiggly line after it. Coca. That must be a place.”
“No, it’s not a place,” Micky said authoritatively. “It’s a river. The Coca River. I know it’s a river. I remember reading about it when I was six and thinking how it was a river made of chocolate, of cocoa. And that spring shape is exactly that. A spring—you know, as in the origin of a river. A spring. That whole thing means, ‘the spring of the Coca River.’”
Molly gasped. “Where is the Coca River, Micky?”
Micky frowned. “Let me think. What are the countries in South America? Um.” He paused and thought hard. Then he stared up at the wall as though for inspiration. Some lightning flashed into the room again, lighting up the wall. “I’ve got it,” he practically shouted. “That shape there is the shape of Ecuador. I know it is. This makes sense. Those books in the bookcase upstairs. Quite a lot of them were about South America, weren’t they?”
Molly nodded. “The Andes. The Aztecs. Weren’t the Aztecs the people who used to live in South America?”
Micky shrugged. “I think we’ve nailed it, Moll. Come on. Let’s go up there and see whether there’s anything else that can help us.”
Quickly the twins hurried back up the staircase to the bookshelves and found an atlas. They turned its pages to find its index. They searched for the word Coca. There was only one entry.
“The Coca River!” Molly read. Micky flicked back through the atlas’s pages while Molly held the flashlight.
“Page thirty-three, two C.” His fingers found the page. “This is extreme,” he announced. “It’s in northwest Ecuador.”
He pointed on the map to an area that was colored gray. “See all that? That area is the Andes Mountains. And see that? That’s a volcano. Look, there’s the Coca River. There’s where it starts. And you can bet that it’s all cloud forests in the high mountains there. So that’s where the Logan Stones are! In a cloud forest place, high in the Andes Mountains, near the spring of the Coca River.”
“Crikey,” Molly said. She looked outside at the terrible weather. “How are we going to get there?” The light outside again broke the darkness and showed the strange coded map on the wall.
“It’s amazing,” said Micky. “Somehow Hunroe worked out the clue to here. Then she must have found all of this”—he pointed to the wall—“and got so excited that she made the natural history museum her headquarters.”
“And our great-great-grandfather Dr. Logan,” Molly added, “must have hidden the clue there in the window glass in the first place.”
Just then, Petula began to growl. She smelled chocolate cookies, and the lavender smell was getting stronger. She poked her nose out from under the sofa and began to sniff. There was a noise from beyond the library door. Someone was making their way along the central aisle of the filing-cabinet room. They were carrying an umbrella or a walking stick, for their footsteps were accompanied by the tap tap tapping of something else that hit the floor as they walked.
“Quick!” Micky said.
“Petula!” Molly whispered.
Molly and Micky scurried down the balcony stairs and whipped across the downstairs room to the door. If they could slip behind it, they could just sneak out as soon as whoever it was out there entered. But there wasn’t time. The door opened. The light came on. They ducked behind the sofa.