Chapter Text
Constance was not one to show emotions like worry. She was too strong for them, or rather, had put up too many protective barriers around herself to show anything that felt to her like a weakness.
However, her voice through the phone definitely sounded worried when she said, “They’re all gone.”
“Who is ‘they,’” Kate replied, attempting to remain calm but about to lose her mind over whatever was bad enough to have Constance freaked out, “and what do you mean by gone?”
“Mr. Benedict. Rhonda. Number Two. Milligan. They’re all missing.”
That was the next red flag—the lack of any creative and somewhat insulting nicknames for the adults of the Mysterious Benedict Society. “Tell me you’re joking,” Sticky said anxiously. But she wasn’t. With this tone of voice? She couldn’t be.
“I’m not. You guys have to come, now. You have to.”
“Are you panicking?” Reynie asked incredulously, partially to cover the fact that he was panicking.
“No!” Constance denied quickly. “But they’re missing, and that’s a bad thing, and I can’t fix it on my own.”
Constance saying she needed help?
Yeah. They were in massive trouble.
“I’ll get Miss Perumal to drive me,” Reynie promised, hanging up before Sticky and Kate could tell Constance their plans for transportation to Mr. Benedict’s residence.
—
“And he didn’t leave any sort of note?”
“No,” Constance said, back to her usual self now that she was reassured by the presence of the rest of the society. “Nothing. I’ve searched.”
“Well, let’s search some more,” Kate said definitively, setting her bucket upside down on the floor.
“Looking for notes?” Constance looked offended. “I looked. This wasn’t a plan. They were…”
Taken.
Kidnapped.
Constance couldn’t make herself finish the sentence.
Kate pretended not to hear her, getting on top of her bucket and running her hands along the top of the bookshelves.
“Why are you looking for notes on the ceiling?!” Constance screeched.
“Constance is right,” Reynie said, a very rare occurrence. “If she already looked for a note and it wasn’t there, they probably didn’t plan this.”
Kate didn’t listen, checking on top of the ceiling fan and underneath each leg of the couch.
“Look, I get looking in the higher places that Constance can’t reach,” Sticky said logically, though Constance scowled. “But there’s no point looking in places where a note has no place being. I doubt Mr. Benedict wanted to freak us out.”
Kate ran her hands along the ceiling, hoping every now and then and using the rope she was holding to drag her bucket forward with her, allowing to reach. “What are you looking for?” Reynie asked, wondering what she could possibly hope to find on the ceiling.
“They can’t have been taken. Not again. They just can’t,” Kate insisted.
“Denial is the first stage of grief,” Sticky admitted.
“We don’t have to grieve anyone because they aren’t gone,” Reynie reminded them. “Just… temporarily missing.”
“Aha!” Kate exclaimed. “A crevice in the ceiling!”
“There is not a note in a crevice in the ceiling,” Constance drawled.
Kate pulled tweezers out of her bucket, reached into the crack so small it was hardly noticeable, and pulled out a white envelope.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Constance sulked.
Sure enough, the envelope had all four of their names on the back. “Why did he hide it in the ceiling?” Sticky wondered. “That’s not a very Mr.-Benedict-esque place to hide a note.”
“It was probably Number Two’s idea,” Reynie suggested. “And none of us were going to look for the note except Kate. Maybe this is some kind of challenge that forces us to have all the members of the team, and we needed Kate to get to the first step.”
“In which case,” Sticky said encouragingly, “Constance did the right thing calling us!”
Constance’s face hardly changed, but they knew her well enough to know that she felt better about having not found the note hearing that.
DEAR REYNIE, STICKY, CONSTANCE AND KATE,
LOOK BETWEEN LETTERS AND MEDITATE.
IT WILL BE THE LIGHTEST AMONG ITS KIND
STUDY THE CUBES AND CALL WHAT YOU FIND.
“And it’s a riddle,” Kate said with a sigh.
“No, this is a good thing,” Reynie said optimistically. “If this is a clue of some kind, this means that this was planned, and that it’s something of a scavenger hunt for us. Which means there’s nothing to worry about!”
“I can’t believe he’s asking us to meditate,” Constance groaned.
“He was probably just looking for an appropriate rhyme with Kate’s name,” Sticky suggested. “I doubt he actually meant for us to meditate. Do any of you guys know where he has a stash of letters?”
“There’s a stack of unsent letters in the library,” Constance offered. “I’m not supposed to touch those, though.”
“And you listened?” Sticky asked, incredulous that Constance had actually done what she was told.
Constance’s face hardened. “Mr. Benedict never asks me to do anything. So when he said to not touch his letters, I didn’t touch his letters!”
Chastised, Sticky looked down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed you’d disobey.”
“He probably didn’t want you to discover the scavenger hunt before it started,” Reynie suggested. “And if I’m correct and we’re all supposed to play a role here, that’s knowledge only Constance could have, because she lives here. I’d say we’re supposed to look in those letters.”
“I agree,” Kate said eagerly. “To the library! Or, well, room where books go to die.”
“They don’t die, he reads them,” Constance corrected. “They just pile up in a not-so-neat fashion.”
—
“These are not addressed to us,” Kate said definitively, stacking them back up. “And there’s nothing between them.”
“Maybe they meant something else by ‘between,’” Sticky suggested. “Do you think we should open up the letters?”
“Probably not, if they aren’t addressed to us,” Kate said, though she sounded unsure. She looked to Reynie to see what he thought, but he was staring at a stack of dictionaries on a table off to the side. “Um, hello? Reynie, what do you think about the letters?”
“I think we’re not supposed to be looking at the letters at all,” Reynie said excitedly. He rushed towards the stack. “Look. Almost all of these dictionaries are dark colored, but this one is white. One of the lines was ‘it will the the lightest among its kind!’”
Kate hummed, unconvinced. “What about looking between the letters and meditating?”
“It’s not like Mr. Benedict to organize things,” Constance pointed out. “He must have stacked all those dictionaries together for some reason…”
“Well, ‘letters’ starts with an L, and ‘meditate’ starts with an m…” Reynie began to flip through the book’s pages.
“I don’t think I get what you’re saying,” Kate said blankly. “Why does that matter?”
“Because,” Sticky said, catching onto what Reynie was saying, “they’d be close to each other in alphabetical order. And if there’s a page in that dictionary where the first word on one page is ‘letters’ and the last word on the next page is ‘meditate,’ then those two words would be at the top of the pages—”
“And we’d be looking between those two pages!” Reynie finished, flipping to the spot he was looking for. Sure enough, there were two pages with the words “letters” and “meditate” at the top to guide the user of the dictionary. “That was why it had to be this dictionary—so those exact words would start and end the page.”
And right in between, there was another envelope addressed to them.
“Reynie, you’re brilliant!” Kate cried, grabbing the letter. “Maybe this will tell us how to look for the cubes and call what we find?”
“If we’re supposed to call what we find,” Reynie suggested, “perhaps it’s a phone number.”
But when they opened up the envelope, the number on the paper was most certainly not a phone number:
636056000
268336125
23838140152
“Okay,” Constance drawled, “how exactly are we supposed to call that?”
“We haven’t looked for the cubes,” Kate suggested. “Maybe we have to look for the cubes first.”
They all looked to Constance, but she just shrugged. “I don’t know where Mr. Benedict keeps any special cubes.”
Reynie hummed. “Maybe it’s a cipher—a special sort of cipher, and there are cubes somewhere that will show us how to decode it. Like every number is a letter, or something.”
“Alright everyone,” Kate said, “get to looking for cubes, everybody!”
Constance threw her arms open. “Where? And what kind?”
Sticky was squinting his eyes at the numbers. “Not the physical kind, I don’t think.”
“What do you mean?” Kate asked, settling back down. “Did you crack the code? What does the message say? Is it something we can call?”
Sticky shook his head. “Let me think. I’m still doing the math.” And so, with much suspense, the Mysterious Benedict Society watched the gears turn in Sticky’s mind as he stared at the paper.
“Cubes!” he finally exclaimed. “They’re all perfect cubes!”
“I do not know what that means,” Constance said, crossing her arms. “Care to translate?”
“I’m with Constance on this one,” Kate agreed reluctantly.
“He means like a math perfect cube,” Reynie explained, looking at the numbers. “For each of these numbers, there’s another number that when multiplied by itself three times results in this number.” He looked up at Sticky. “That’s some really impressive mental math.”
Sticky fidgeted, as bad as ever at taking praise. “Um, thanks.”
“All I got from that is that by some math magic, each of these numbers actually represents a different number,” said Kate.
“Thank you, Kate, for actually translating,” Constance said, less of a” thank you” to Kate as a jibe at Sticky and Reynie.
“So what are their cubed roots?” Reynie asked eagerly.
“860…645…2878!” Sticky exclaimed. “That’s the right number of digits for a phone number!”
“So now we call what we found!” Kate exclaimed triumphantly. “I wonder if that’s the whole scavenger hunt,” she mused.
“I doubt it. It was a bit short for a Mr. Benedict scavenger hunt,” Reynie pointed out as Sticky got out the cell phone his aunt had gotten him for his birthday. Sticky didn’t use it often, scared by the studies he’d read on the internet about getting addicted to social media and ruining your brain by staring at the screen. None of the Society was sure how to tell Sticky that he was in no danger of getting addicted to social media.
Sticky typed in the phone number, but didn’t hit call. “Can someone else do the actual calling part? We don’t know who’s going to answer.”
“We’ll all make the call,” Kate decided. “Put it on speaker phone.”
Sticky obliged, and pressed “call.”
—
An incoming call from an unknown number on Maxine Liu’s phone was something of a red flag. Not very many people were allowed to have this phone number ever since her best friend, Avery, had become the richest teenager in the world. She wondered if someone she used to marginally know had found her new number somehow and was calling for the same reason everyone had called before she’d gotten her new phone: they thought she was a ticket to getting a piece of Avery’s new fortune.
“I shouldn’t answer this,” Maxine said aloud, turning to Xander with the full knowledge he’d enable her dangerous curiosity.
“Answer it,” her boyfriend said, giving her a valid excuse to answer the call and take the blame off herself if it was a disaster.
She and Xander had done this song and dance before—it was part of what made them such a good couple.
She put it on speaker phone, drawing Xander into the loop. “Hello?”
There was some movement on the other end of the line, and then the voice of a young boy—probably no older than twelve—answered. “Hello,” the boy said cautiously. “So… what’s our next clue?”
Max looked to Xander, wondering if he knew anything about what they were talking about. After all, the word ‘clue’ was one she was well acquainted with ever since moving into the Hawthorne House. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” Max said. “You must have the wrong number.”
“No, we definitely have the right number,” said a more confident young girl’s voice—though again, she couldn’t be older than twelve or thirteen. “It was hidden in cubes.”
“Perfect cubes,” another young voice corrected.
“Yeah. That. It was, like, the perfect code. We were definitely supposed to call this number. Are there no more clues? Did we solve the puzzle?”
“I really think you have the wrong—”
“No,” Xander interrupted. “Look, Max, I don’t know anything about whatever game they’re playing, but if they’ve followed a trail of clues that somehow led them to a contact inside the Hawthorne House? That’s no accident.”
Uncertain, Max spoke to the kids on the phone again. “Give us one minute. You might actually have the right number.” She put the phone far enough away that they couldn’t hear the two of them. “You’re right. Puzzles and clues are a very ‘Hawthorne’ thing. But I don’t know those kids at all, and I don’t think you do either.”
“But they have the right number. They must,” Xander insisted. “It’s not a coincidence that they’ve been decoding puzzles and riddles and ended up contacting us.”
“Then what do I tell them? I don’t have whatever their next clue is supposed to be,” Max reminded Xander.
“I think we are the next clue,” Xander replied. “And the answer is the Hawthorne House. Whatever is happening, those kids are supposed to come here.”
Max picked back up the phone. “Actually, we’ve got the answer to your next clue, and it’s us. So in that case, I’ve got two questions for you: what is your location, and what’s your favorite color of private jet?”