The Mystery of the Gold Coins

Table of Contents

 

As they walked past a large wooded area, Cam heard the sounds of twigs breaking. Eric stopped walking so he could rest. Cam stopped, too. So did the sounds. Cam turned around, but no one was there.

“Did you hear anything?” Cam asked Eric.

“No.”

Eric said he was ready. He picked up the sundial, and he and Cam began to walk. Cam heard the sounds of twigs breaking again.

“Did you hear that?” Cam whispered.

“Yes. It sounds like something moving in the woods. Maybe it’s an animal.”

“Stop for a minute.”

Eric put down the sundial, and the sounds of footsteps stopped.

“It’s not an animal,” Cam whispered. “An animal wouldn’t stop whenever we do. Someone is following us.”

DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE YOUNG CAM JANSEN
SERIES FOR YOUNGER READERS!

PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group,
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, Inc., 1982
Published by Puffin Books, 1991
Reissued 1998
This edition published by Puffin Books,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004
9 10

Text copyright © David A. Adler, 1982 Illustrations copyright © Susanna Natti, 1982

All rights reserved

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE 1991 PUFFIN BOOKS EDITION
UNDER CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 90-53036

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-07605-7

 

 

RL: 2.2

To My Niece, Shira, And To Her Parents, Felice and Mark

Chapter One

Cam Jansen and her friend Eric Shelton were carrying their science fair projects to school. Cam had made a box camera. Eric’s project was a big, heavy wooden sundial.

Cam looked at Eric. His face was turning red.

“I think we should stop here and rest,” Cam said.

“No. I can go a little farther.”

Eric took a few more steps. Then the sundial started to slip from his hands.

“O.K.,” Eric said. “We can rest now if you want to.”

They were standing close to a bus stop. Eric put the sundial down quickly, before it could fall. Then he sat on the bus stop bench. Cam sat next to him. She put the black cloth bag she was holding on her lap. The camera was inside the bag.

“You didn’t have to make your sundial so big,” Cam said.

“I made it big so we could put it in the garden after the science fair. My mother said she’ll plant ivy around it.”

Eric looked at the cloth bag Cam was holding and asked, “What are you going to do with your camera?”

“I’ll keep it, of course.”

“Why? Your mental camera takes better pictures than any real camera. And your mental camera never needs film.”

Cam’s mental camera is her memory. She can look at a scene and remember every detail. It’s as if she had a photograph of the scene stored in her mind.

Whenever Cam wants to remember something, she looks at it carefully and says,
“Click.”
Cam says
“Click”
is the sound her mental camera makes when it takes a picture.

When Cam was younger, people called her Jennifer—that’s her real name—and “Red,” because she has red hair. But when they found out about her photographic memory and heard her say,
“Click,”
they started calling her “The Camera.” Soon “The Camera” was shortened to “Cam.”

“I know that my mental camera doesn’t need film,” Cam told Eric, “but I can’t show people the photographs stored in my brain. And I can’t put my mental photographs in an album. So I need a real camera, too.”

Just then a bus stopped. A young couple got off. They looked at Eric’s project.

“What’s that?” the man asked.

“It’s a sundial.”

“Can it really tell time?” the woman asked.

“Sure. If the arrow is pointed north and the sun is shining.”

“And you carry that around all the time,” the man said. He laughed. “It must be heavy. Wouldn’t it be easier to wear a wristwatch?”

Eric started to explain that the sundial was for the fifth grade science fair. But the man wasn’t listening.

“I should have asked him how he winds it, or if it tells time underwater,” the man said to the woman as they walked away, laughing.

“Let’s go,” Cam said to Eric, “before someone asks you what time it is.”

Eric stood behind his sundial. He straightened his collar and smiled.

“First take my picture.”

Cam stepped back a few feet. She looked straight at Eric and said,
“Click.”

“No. Use your real camera.”

It was a bright spring day. The sun was behind Cam. “With this camera, you have to stand perfectly still for five seconds,” she told Eric. “If you move, the picture will be a blur.”

Cam took the camera from the bag. She held it with both hands. She pulled a string that lifted a cardboard flap. Then she counted, “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi.” She let the string go and the flap fell down again.

“Do you think it will come out?” Eric asked.

“If I aimed the camera right, you’ll come out. You stood still. But behind you will be a blur. A car drove past. A man came out of one of the stores, and someone walked by with a dog.”