The Tell-Tale Start (10 page)

“We tried that,” the night clerk said, fighting off a yawn. “We called it Parents of Ordinary Students. But nobody wanted to join, even for the discount.”

“Why not?”

“Who wants to be in an organization called the POOS?”

Uncle Jack didn’t want to hear any more. “Enough. We’ll take two adjoining rooms.”

Allan and Edgar turned away and walked over to
the postcard rack. They started to spin it, attempting to identify the greatest possible velocity at which centrifugal force would not send the cards flying off into every corner of the office. Faster, faster, faster…

“Wait a minute, your names wouldn’t happen to be Edgar and Allan, would they?” the night clerk called out.

The boys stopped spinning the rack (though the rack continued spinning for some time without them) and returned to the front desk. They peered over the top. “Yes, we’re Edgar and Allan.”

“How did you know their names?” Aunt Judith asked.

“Somebody found a book this morning on the table here next to the doughnuts,” he answered. He disappeared under the front desk. The Poes could hear him rummaging around. “I could swear those were the authors.” More rustling among junk. “Let’s see, it’s got to be around here somewhere. Ah! Here it is.” He stood up and showed them the book.

“Oh, this explains it,” Uncle Jack said. He read the title aloud. “
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
by Edgar Allan Poe. This book’s written by Edgar Allan Poe, the famous author. Not Edgar
and
Allan Poe.”

The clerk narrowed his eyes. “But look what it says inside.”

Uncle Jack opened the book.

Edgar
and
Allan Poe? Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith looked at each other.

“Oh, that’s just a misprint,” Uncle Jack said.

“A typo,” Aunt Judith added. “A coincidence.”

But the boys didn’t believe in coincidence.

Edgar took the book.

“We’d like to keep it,” Allan said.

“Haven’t you two already read that?” Aunt Judith asked.

Naturally they had. And while some of the words their great-great-great-great granduncle used were old-fashioned, the stories were grievous, shuddersome, and horrific—in other words, perfect. The twins thought “The Black Cat” had the ideal plot, “The Masque of the Red Death” was outstandingly spooky, “The Pit and the Pendulum” utterly frightening, “The Cask of Amontillado”…well, Edgar and Allan thought that every story in the book was the best of one thing or another.

“We’d like to read it again,” they said.

But there was more to it than that.

Fifteen minutes later, Edgar and Allan sat cross-legged in their motel room on one of the two beds. The other bed was already a shambles, its covers and blankets tossed and scattered and the mattress crushed in the middle as a result of the boys using it like a trampoline, testing the elasticity of the memory foam and the torque of the box springs. The ceiling above the bed had been cracked by Edgar’s head—no damage done, as Edgar’s head was quite hard.

Now the boys held the book between them. It was heavy in their hands.

“This clearly contains a special message for us,” Allan said.

“Yes, but if you consider all the writing in it, there are thousands of messages,” Edgar observed.

“So how do we figure it out?”

Whoever had left it behind had used a tourist brochure, like those in the motel office, as a bookmark. The volume opened to a story called “The Purloined Letter.” It began with a short quote in Latin:

Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio.

Of course they knew the translation: “Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.”

They looked at each other.

“That can’t have anything to do with us,” Allan said.

Edgar agreed. “We’re clever, but not
excessively
clever.”

“Actually, we’re just clever enough.”

They kept reading.

“The Purloined Letter” was one of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s most famous stories. In it, a detective is challenged to locate a valuable stolen letter that has been hidden in a particular room. Experts have already searched the room, tearing it apart but finding nothing. The detective immediately realizes that the letter must be hidden in plain sight. And he is right—there it is, in a rack full of visiting cards below the mantelpiece, not hidden at all. Simple! And yet only a genius would think to look in the open for a “hidden” object.

Just as only a genius would look in the open for a “hidden” message.

The twins looked around the room for whatever wasn’t hidden.

The problem was that
everything
they saw wasn’t hidden.

“It’s not so easy when you don’t know what you’re looking for,” Edgar said to his brother.

Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio
, they thought.

“Yes, maybe we
are
being ‘too clever,’” Allan said.

“OK, so what’s the most obvious thing in this room that the message of ‘The Purloined Letter’ is pointing us to?” Edgar asked.

They looked again at the open book.

Why had it opened to that particular story
?

The bookmark!

Might the tourist brochure be more than just a bookmark? Might it be the actual object they were supposed to notice? Might it be the “purloined letter,” the message? They set the book down and picked up the brochure:

THE AUTHENTIC

DOROTHY GALE FARM & OZITORIUM

Coincidence? No way.

The boys recalled the grainy, black-and-white fax from Professor Marvel that their aunt Judith now had in her purse. This glossy, full-color brochure had a different headline:
THIS YEAR CELEBRATING THE CENTENNIAL OF L. FRANK BAUM’S CLASSIC,
THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
! Edgar and Allan knew the vital facts about most major American
books, so they knew in a flash that this brochure dated back twelve years.

Edgar read aloud: “‘Visitors will discover on our grounds no mere reproduction of the home of Dorothy Gale, famous heroine of the beloved Oz books, but the
actual
house that Dorothy inhabited…’”

Same baloney as the fax.

“Wait, look there,” Allan said. He pointed to one of the photographs, which had been taken at the entrance to the OZitorium, a small, ordinary-looking theater. It showed a smiling group of tourists—among them, a young man and woman each holding an identical infant. The couple bore more than a mere resemblance to Mal and Irma Poe.

“Is it them?” Edgar asked.

“It looks like them.”

“Then that would make the babies in the photo—”

“Us!”

For a moment, the boys were silent.

“Gee, Mom and Dad sure look happy here,” Edgar said quietly.

“Too bad we can’t remember being with them that day,” Allan said in a small voice.

“Yeah.”

Edgar looked at Allan.

Allan looked at Edgar.

Each had one small tear in the corner of his right eye.

After a heartbeat or two, the boys wiped them away.

“Look what it says underneath the picture,” Allan remarked.

“Cool,” they said.

Later that night, they took from the desk drawer in their room a complimentary Wagon Wheel Motel postcard (photographed decades before, when cars had tailfins and chrome bumpers) and wrote to their friends:

WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW…

LETTER SENT SEVEN YEARS EARLIER FROM THE

BOYS’ FATHER TO PROFESSOR S. PANGBORN PERRY