Strong Like the Sea, стр. 56

He checks the calendar. “It’s too early for me to say. If you haven’t figured it out by the end of the week, I’ll tell you what I know.”

Dad basically figured out the last clue for me, so no way am I gonna let him do this one too. “I can do it.”

“I never doubted that you could,” Dad calls as I carry the envelope, airplane, and paperback to my room.

With my notes all taped up on the walls to dry, my desk sits bare except for my computer, which is pushed to the side—it’s easier to pretend it’s not there right now. A few pages of notes curl at the corners from water damage, but most made it through Sarge’s swim with only a few drops. That’s pure luck, though. If I’d been another minute or two later, the small leak would have filled the whole backpack and ruined everything in it. I sit in my roll chair, swivel my knees under the desk, and lay out each new item.

Other than Mom’s note saying “Almost done,” the envelope seems pretty normal. But with a sneaky brain like hers, anything could be part of the puzzle. I set it aside in case it hides another invisible message made of lemon juice or something.

The airplane holds more promise, with parts of numbers and lines poking out from seams like cockroach antennae got caught in the creases and smashed inside when Mom made the plane. Slowly, I peel the layers apart and lay it flat.

Spread across the paper, a bunch of numbers line the edges of a circle that sprawls across the page. A ring of numbers? No, not just a ring—it’s a clock. Where the numbers of every hour should be to mark the time, three small groups of numbers cluster around each mark. I try substituting them for letters, or dashes or dots, and all sorts of things, but none of it works, and the clock seems to laugh at me.

After another hour, it’s pushing bedtime, and I’m starting to really hate that clock. I give up on the time thing, turn the book over, and scowl at the smiling kid on the cover. I’ve already searched the pages for any notes or codes written in the seams anywhere, but even though the outside is worn enough to be used for a teddy bear, the inside seems pretty clean except for the inside cover.

I bend the book a little and run my thumb across the edge of the pages, letting them slip by in a blur in case some sneaky stop-motion animation pops out at me. Backwards and forwards, I watch the page numbers race past, growing bigger and smaller, but there’s nothing else there. No missing pages. No highlighted words . . . Maybe I’m supposed to actually play a Battleship game so the boats or misses can make a pattern?

“Ugh,” I grumble in a voice that would do Uncle proud. “What’s the point of hiding this in a book if it doesn’t make any—oh!” The page numbers sync with the clock inside my head. I must still be tired or I’d have seen it right away. It’s not a code, it’s a cipher. The numbers have to mean page numbers, how many lines to count down, and how many words to go across—like a map to find the word Mom wanted me to find inside the book. Using the first group of numbers I flip to the page number, count down, and slide over till my finger rests on a word: Pony.

I circle it with a pencil, and write the word down on scrap paper.

Hmm. One by one, I count off page numbers, lines, and words then circle whatever I find. I add squirrel, together, family, goose, parent, child, sheep, father, and mother, to the list.

A family of animals? Other than Sarge and the geckos, my family doesn’t have pets. My grandparents on the mainland have cows and stuff on their farm, but not sheep. It’s got to be something else.

After a while, Dad peeks in. “You ready for bed?”

“Almost.” I brush my teeth and flop onto the mattress. Why have the animals on a clock instead of a line? What kind of sense is that to have a clock with no hands? Everyone knows they move clockwise, so maybe the hands aren’t important? I yawn. “But still, why no hands to go round the clock?”

An echo stirs in my head. “Which way does the clock go round?”

I sit up and stare at my notes on the walls. Mavis Batey’s boss said something about looking at things from a different point of view, ’cause a clock goes clockwise for everyone except the clock. A view from behind the hands would make them move backwards. Counterclockwise.

I fall asleep still puzzling it out and dream of animals trotting around a clock with little battleships shouting, “A3 to J6!” But it’s not till morning sunlight hits my origami flock that any of it makes sense.

Every string that holds an origami creation is hanging perfectly spaced from every other—all of them together forming a square grid. And at the corners, moving counterclockwise, are a pony, a squirrel, a goose, and a sheep.

My flock must represent the grid for the numbers from the inside cover of Mom’s book—like how a chessboard marks all the squares with both a letter and a number. I read the clue again. A3 to J6. A dragon hovers in the A3 square, but I can’t move her to the J6 spot because that’s where the origami bat hangs.

I flop onto the bedcover again. What I really need is a blank grid I can move all the origami figures to. A flat surface with empty squares. A regular chessboard would be way too small, because my paper flock can’t fit onto such a tight space. I need something bigger with huge squares, like . . . my eyes fall on the