This Isn't What It Looks Like (33 page)

“They’re shutting down our post office, what with all the cutbacks these days, and somebody was about to have it hauled away,”
the postman continued. “Then I noticed this old tag—”

He fingered a cracked and worn leather tag affixed to the top of the trunk. It looked so old it was a wonder it hadn’t disintegrated
altogether.

At the bottom was the name of her town.

“I figured you’d be much older, seeing as the tag was written so many years ago. But by the looks of it, you weren’t even
alive yet! You have any idea how somebody could have known you’d be here so long ago? A mother or grandmother with the same
name maybe…?”

Cass shook her head. Over the years, many unusual things had been left on her grandfathers’ doorstep. Their antique store
was like the neighborhood attic (or maybe the town dump). A taxidermic moose. A broken unicycle. A life-size portrait of Elvis.
Most memorably, of course, Cass herself had been left on their doorstep, a newborn baby in a cardboard box. But never before
had an item arrived that seemed so accurately to predict the future. It was certainly mysterious.

“Well, all I can say is, this beauty’s been around. Here’s the manifest, if you want to look at it,” said the postman. He
started unrolling what looked like a long scroll with many attached pages. The most recent sections were typewritten, the
older handwritten. Some of the oldest bore royal crests and wax seals.

“It took me an hour just to read through it. Can
you believe this trunk has traveled to all seven continents, including Antarctica? It’s been on Spanish galleons… warships.
It was even on the
Mayflower
…. It’s been in museum collections… royal treasuries… And guess what, as far as I can tell, nobody’s ever opened it—not even
once!”

He looked at Cass and Max-Ernest, waiting for a reaction.

Cass didn’t say anything. She was thinking too hard.

“Wow” was all Max-Ernest could manage.

The postman laughed. “I guess that means you won’t be opening it in front of me, huh? Shucks. Can’t blame a guy for hoping….
Well, just sign right here and I’ll be on my way.”

He pointed to the top of the manifest and handed Cass a pen.

“And you be careful now. Never know, there might be some old bones in there. Old trunk like that, it could be cursed!”

New loot, especially new
old
loot, usually proved irresistible to Cass’s grandfathers. But Wayne was so absorbed in his record player, and Larry so fast
asleep, that neither came running when Cass and
Max-Ernest hauled the trunk inside. The two young people were free to put their considerable detective skills to work on
the trunk, uninhibited by the older men.

“I wonder how old it is,” said Max-Ernest. “It seems like that tag with your name on it was there from the beginning. How
’bout that?”

“I think it’s about five hundred years old, actually,” said Cass, her ears tingling with excitement.

She had just recognized the trunk. Underneath the layers of paper and grime, the trunk in front of her was the bandits’ treasure
chest. She remembered the large brass lock that resembled a coat of arms. One of the bandits had broken the lock with his
axe. If nobody had opened the trunk in the years since, somebody must have rebuilt the lock—and reinforced it many times over.

“It’s from the Jester—it has to be,” she said, lowering her voice so her grandfathers wouldn’t hear. “I told him the fire
station didn’t exist yet—I mean, in his time. He must have left instructions for it to circle around the world until closer
to our time.”

Together they examined the brass lock. It had an intricate pattern of diamonds and
fleur de lis
etched into it, but the basic design was simple. What had looked to Cass like a coat of arms was in fact four circles inside
a square. On closer inspection, each of the four circles turned out to be a movable dial, two on top, two below. Each dial
was marked with all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

“It’s obviously some kind of early combination lock,” said Max-Ernest. “But I’ve never seen a quadruple one like this.”

“It looks like we only have to pick four letters. That shouldn’t be so hard.”

“Oh yeah? You want to try all 456,976 different combinations?”

“There can’t be that many.”

“Wanna bet? Put it in a calculator. Twenty-six times twenty-six times twenty-six times twenty-six.”

“All right. You made your point. So we have to narrow it down.”

“You know the Jester. What letters would he put? Like names of his kids or something.”

“He didn’t have any kids yet when I knew him.”

“Well, anybody else? Think of it like we’re trying to find the password for his computer.”

“There was Anastasia. But that’s too many letters.”

“How about
your
name? That has four letters. At least your nickname does.”

They tried it every way they could:

And so on.

None of the variations worked, but Max-Ernest noticed the faintest of faint clicks when he tried A and S as the top two letters.

“I think the A and S on top might be right,” he said excitedly. “Can you think of anything they might stand for? Maybe A is
Anastasia and the other letters are for other people?”

They tried a few letters at random; predictably, they did not work. Then Max-Ernest noticed the time. He was late to relieve
PC’s babysitter—his father.

“I really don’t like to go into overtime,” Max-Ernest explained, heading out the door. “Then I feel
like I have to pay them more. Plus, it’s just sort of disrespectful of the babysitter’s time.”

“Your dad is not a babysitter,” Cass protested. “He’s your dad. And PC’s dad!”

Max-Ernest shook his head. “One day you’ll understand. Life is different when you have a kid.”

Cass watched the door close behind him, feeling bereft. She very much wanted to open the trunk before her grandfathers saw
it, but she couldn’t imagine finding the right combination without Max-Ernest’s expert code-cracking help.

Well, there was always the possibility he would call with another inspiration when he got home, like he did with the lodestone.

The lodestone! That’s it, she thought. The lodestone is the key.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.

Max-Ernest was always telling her you had to read clues in different ways. Sometimes secret messages were more about language
than anything else. And she suspected that was the case now. She’d been right about the Jester; for him,
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
didn’t have any deep meaning. It wasn’t about alchemy. It was about the words: the word
AS
above the word
SO
.

Trying to keep her hand steady, she turned the bottom two dials to the correct letters.

For a moment, it seemed like this combination didn’t work, either. But that was only because the chest hadn’t been opened
in so long. Eventually, the latch released—and she was able to lift the lid.

Treasure.

It was the last thing she’d seen in the chest; it was the last thing she’d expected to see again. And yet there it was. The
coins and jewels, the goblets and candlesticks, they glistened and gleamed just as they had when the homunculus first lifted
the tarp to show her the bandits’ hoard.

Of course, there wasn’t nearly as much now. The bandits had given most of their bounty to the poor, but there was still plenty.
Cass would be wealthy beyond measure—if she kept it all, that is. (Already,
in her head, she was pushing aside thoughts of expensive vacations and fancy cars and thinking instead of the causes that
she could donate her riches to: the environment, disaster preparedness, child slavery… not to mention the Terces Society.)
Cass was pleased, thrilled even, that the Jester and Anastasia cared enough for her to leave her their fortune. At the same
time, she felt oddly disappointed. Was this all there was to the Secret? Gold? The treasure made her feel a little like a
bandit herself.

She dug down into the chest. Perhaps she would find a note at the bottom. Or some other object that contained a clue about
the Secret. She experienced a momentary spark of hope when she spied a corner of what looked like a piece of yellowing paper.
But when she pulled it out, she found not an ancient Egyptian papyrus but a familiar parchment scroll.

Cass unrolled it to reveal a crude sketch of a girl with pointy ears—her self-portrait. She looked wistfully at the drawing,
thinking that Anastasia must have left it for her to find. Cass had traveled into the distant past in part to find out who
her biological parents were. The Jester had been right: the quest made no sense, chronologically speaking. But in meeting
the Jester and Anastasia, perhaps she had found the roots she was looking for anyway.

*     *     *

“I have a present for you,” said Cass to her mother later that night when they were together in their kitchen.

She pulled her now-flattened self-portrait out of a folder in her backpack and handed it over. Her mother smiled in delighted
surprise.

“Cass! Did you draw this?”

Cass shrugged. “I guess, I mean, if you could call it drawing. It’s more like a scribble.”

“Thank you. I don’t remember the last time you gave me a drawing that you did. Probably when you were six years old. This
is wonderful!”

“No, it’s not. You don’t have to say that,” said Cass, embarrassed and already half regretting the gift.

“I know I don’t. I’m saying it because it’s true. It’s very expressive and I think it captures the essence of you… although
of course you’re much prettier!”

“You don’t have to say that, either.”

Melanie shook her head. “What am I going to do with you, Cassandra? It’s a very important skill to know how to accept a compliment.”

“Oh well, I guess I’m not very skillful, then.”

“Terrific—now I’m insulting you?” Melanie held Cass’s drawing up to the light. “This paper looks so
old. Almost like parchment. Did they give it to you at school?”

“No… I found it at the fire station,” said Cass, semi-accurately. “I don’t think Larry and Wayne even knew it was there.”

“Well, I’m sure they would be glad to see it used so well…. What’s this tiny little scrap of paper glued to the other side?”
asked Melanie, turning the parchment over. “See here at the bottom. I think there’s something written on it. It almost looks
like hieroglyphics—”

“Let me have that—!”

Cass snatched the drawing out of her mother’s hand.

“I just decided, I have to take the drawing back,” she said, not yet daring to look at it. “It’s, um… I just don’t think it’s
finished yet and I’m afraid you’re going to put it up or something. Sorry.”

Leaving the flabbergasted Melanie alone in the kitchen, Cass flew up the stairs to her bedroom and slammed the door shut

“Cass, what did I do?” her mother shouted from downstairs.

“Nothing! I love you, Mom!” Cass shouted back.

Then she locked her bedroom door for good measure.

*     *     *

Her hand trembling, Cass turned the parchment over.

Sure enough, there was a little scrap of rough woven paper stuck to the bottom of the page. Cass was certain this was it—the
papyrus on which the Secret was written. There was only one problem. The papyrus was rapidly turning to dust.