Never Say Genius (20 page)

“This is perfect for
Amazing but True
!” Mrs. McDonald kept saying as she snapped pictures. “My readers will love this!”

The history of Hoover was called (naturally) “Sweeping Changes.” Display cases were filled with antique vacuums, old ads, and even a recording of Hoover salesmen singing the company theme song from the 1920s—“All the Dirt, All the Grit.”

“I wish I had that song on my iPod,” Coke remarked.

“This is like the history of
dirt
,” noted Pep with a giggle.

“I had no idea that disposable vacuum cleaner bags could be so interesting,” said Mrs. McDonald. “And who knew that Hoover came up with the vacuum cleaner headlight?”

The family spent over an hour in the museum, until they felt that they knew just about everything there was to know about vacuum cleaners.

“That
was
fascinating,” Dr. McDonald admitted as they piled back into the RV. “Maybe instead of writing about President Hoover, I should write a book about the history of vacuum cleaners.”

“That book would really suck, Dad,” Coke remarked.

W
hen the McDonald family climbed back into the RV after the vacuum cleaner episode, there was a six-by-nine-inch manila envelope on Coke’s seat. He didn’t think anything of it at first and put it aside. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that he realized the envelope had not been there before. He tore it open. Inside was a sheet of lined paper with this written on it:

Another
cipher.

“Oh no,” Coke muttered out loud.

“What is it, honey?” asked his mother from the front of the RV.

“Nothing, Mom,” Coke said. “I just … dropped something.”

Silently, he handed Pep the sheet of paper. His photographic memory was very powerful, but when it came to deciphering secret messages, he was pretty much useless.

Pep looked over the paper. There were no obvious patterns. Backward, the letters meant nothing. Skipping letters didn’t work. None of the usual strategies she knew seemed to fit. Embedded words—like BET—were always a distraction.

She could solve some ciphers almost instantly. This one was not easy. It would take some time.

Dr. McDonald suddenly pulled off the road into a strip mall.

“Why are we stopping, Ben?” asked Mrs. McDonald.

“I saw a cell phone store,” he replied. “We need to get new ones for the kids.”

“Oh yeah…”

You, dear reader, who has been paying careful attention and perhaps even taking notes, certainly recall that Coke’s and Pep’s cell phones were ruined—they had been soaked in ice cream, hot chocolate sauce, and water back at the amusement park in Sandusky. While the twins didn’t really
need
to have cell phones, Dr. McDonald considered it a safety issue. If for some reason the family got separated, they would be able to get in touch with one another if they all had cell phones.

After they picked out phones, Coke and Pep ducked outside the store while their parents worked out the details with a clerk.

“Did you figure out the cipher yet?” Coke asked his sister.

“You just gave it to me, like, a
minute
ago!” she replied, annoyed.

“Do you think you’ll be able to figure it out?”

“I don’t know,” Pep said irritably. “I’ll do my best.”

Coke paced nervously back and forth outside the store, worried that they were getting closer to Washington.

“Where are Mya and Bones?” he asked. “They were supposed to help us, protect us. Some help they are. When was the last time we saw them? In that motel? We’ll probably never see them again. They abandoned us.”

“Look, they said they’d meet us in Washington,” Pep told her brother. “I believe them.”

“Yeah, they also said we could relax and have fun until we got to Washington,” Coke said bitterly. “But Archie Clone almost killed us at the amusement park, and Mrs. Higgins almost killed us at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Maybe they’re working together. Mya and Bones were nowhere in sight. And now we’re getting all these ciphers that make no sense at all.”

“You need to calm down,” Pep said. “We’re going to need you to be sharp when we get to D.C.”

She was right, and Coke knew it. Usually it was Pep who was the nervous one. But the closer they got to Washington, the more anxious Coke had become. He reminded himself to stay strong, stay focused. One slip and it could be all over for both of them.

“Okay!” Mrs. McDonald said as she came out of the cell phone store and handed the twins their new phones. “You kids need to be careful with these. We don’t want to replace them again.”

“Now let’s put some miles away today,” Dr. McDonald said. “Washington, here we come!”

Soon they were cruising at seventy miles per hour down Interstate 76, a superhighway that starts near Akron, Ohio, and goes all the way to New Jersey. They had been in the state of Ohio for a long time. But soon this sign appeared at the side of the road:

“Woo-hoo!” Coke shouted. “The Keystone State! We can get some keystones here.”

“What’s a keystone?” asked Pep.

“I have no idea,” Coke said. “But I do know that Pennsylvania is a state of firsts. They had the first hospital in America. The first library and zoo. They had the first newspaper, the first TV and radio broadcasts. Pennsylvania had the first capital of the United States. And most importantly, the banana split was invented here!”

“You are such a wealth of totally useless information,” Pep said.

“You wish you were me,” her brother replied.

Dr. McDonald pushed his foot down on the accelerator just a little bit harder. The speedometer nudged past seventy, well above the speed limit. He hoped he wouldn’t get a ticket.

All four McDonalds looked out the window. After they had crossed the Pennsylvania state line, there was the definite feeling that they had finally reached the eastern part of the country. They were just 287 miles from Washington now. It no longer felt like a distant land.

Two weeks earlier, Coke and Pep had been on the beach of the Pacific Ocean. Now, the Atlantic Ocean was just a few hours away. Soon they would be in the nation’s capital. As they looked out the window and watched the world go by, they wondered what awaited them in Washington.

“H
ey guys, guess what?” Mrs. McDonald said excitedly. “It says here that there’s a flying saucer parked in a field in Mars, Pennsylvania.”

“No!” shouted Dr. McDonald. “We’re not going!”

He had nothing against flying saucers or visiting the town of Mars, Pennsylvania. But Dr. McDonald was anxious to get to Washington. He had never been to the National Air and Space Museum. The World War II Memorial had not been built the last time he was in the nation’s capital. The McDonalds weren’t planning to spend a lot of days in Washington, and one of them would be taken up by his sister-in-law’s wedding. So he didn’t want to waste time looking at flying saucers in Pennsylvania.

Mrs. McDonald continued to leaf through her guidebook.

“There’s a zombie museum near Pittsburgh,” she noted. “It’s in the mall where they shot the movie
Dawn of the Dead
.”

“No!” said Dr. McDonald.

“We could visit Mister Ed’s Elephant Museum in Orrtanna,” she said. “It has over six thousand—”

“No!”

“In North Huntingdon, there’s a McDonald’s that has a fourteen-foot-tall Big Mac—”

“No!”

“They have a Big Mac Sauce Gun—”

“No!”

“There’s this place called the House of Oddities near Pittsburgh—”

“No!”

“It’s only a few miles out of our way—”

“No!”

Dr. McDonald had been pretty flexible and understanding up until this point. He had agreed to stop at just about every ridiculous tourist trap as they made their way cross-country. They had visited museums devoted to Pez, yo-yos, mustard, and cannibals. They had visited the largest ball of twine in the world. They had even visited the
second
largest ball of twine in the world. But now he felt the need to assert himself—especially after the Hoover Historical Center turned out to be about the vacuum cleaner instead of the president. So he drove on.

In Pennsylvania, Interstate 76 is called the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It extends 359 miles across the state. Some people call it the “Tunnel Highway” because it goes through a number of tunnels that were blasted in the mountains.

There was little traffic on the turnpike, and they were making good time. But eventually driver fatigue set in and Dr. McDonald pulled off I-76 near Somerset, Pennsylvania. It was just a few miles to Pioneer Park Campground, at the foot of the Laurel Ridge Mountains.

After a quick dinner, the family went their separate ways for a while. Dr. McDonald bought a newspaper and found an empty hammock where he could read. Mrs. McDonald updated the
Amazing but True
website. Coke went to check out the lake, where some kids were fishing. Pep worked on the latest cipher they had received, with no success.

The McDonalds had enjoyed a lot of togetherness over the last two weeks, and everybody was starting to feel the need for a little alone time. As darkness fell, they all returned to the RV to go to bed.

In the middle of the night, Coke began talking in his sleep.

“Don’t wanna go to Washington,” he grunted, almost incoherently. “Mrs. Higgins … bowler dudes… Archie Clone… Don’t wanna go… Wanna go home…”

Eventually, the noise woke up his parents. They climbed out of bed to make sure Coke was okay.

“Don’t wanna go… D.C.… Don’t wanna go… Wanna go home…”

“He’s having a nightmare,” Dr. McDonald whispered.

“I guess he
really
doesn’t want to go to my sister’s wedding,” Mrs. McDonald whispered back.

“Boys hate getting dressed up,” said Dr. McDonald. “I’ll bet that’s it. When I was a kid, I’d do anything to get out of wearing a jacket and tie.”

“Shhhh,” Mrs. McDonald whispered as she tucked the covers in around Coke. “Everything will be fine, honey.”

In the morning, they were back on the turnpike by nine o’clock. Pep looked at her new cell phone and announced that it was the first of July. Three days until the big wedding. Two days until …
something
was going to happen in Washington. She had no idea what it was going to be.

He had driven about thirty miles when Dr. McDonald noticed the needle on the gas gauge was only slightly above
E
. At the next rest area—in Bedford, Pennsylvania—he pulled into the gas station to fill up the tank.

While his father took care of the gas and his sister went to buy a pack of gum, Coke went off to use the restroom.