Summer Island Read online

  “Second letter is an O,” Isla said. Sai put an O beneath the second set of dots.

  Marly squinted again. It was hard for her to see those small dots. “This is going to take forever,” she said as she rubbed her unpatched eye. They’d only done two letters. There were at least fifty to go on the first paper, and then there was a whole other paper to do.

  Isla glanced at her curiously. “Are the dots bothering your eyes, Marly? If you want, Sai and I can translate the two papers and you can write the messages into the notebook,” she suggested.

  Marly gave Isla a grateful smile. “Yeah, that would be nice,” she said, reaching for the notebook.

  “Next is U,” Sai said. “Then S.”

  Marly wrote them down.

  “The last letter in that word is an E,” Isla said.

  “So . . . HOUSE,” Marly said, leaning back against the small couch. “Keep going.”

  They did. And twenty minutes later they had all the words on the first paper decoded: HOUSE, YOUR STAY, BIKES, THEY ARE, WHILE YOU’RE, DOWN, BEACH DON’T, AND METAL, GET TO, YOURSELVES AT, and SUMMERLING.

  Sai wrinkled his nose. “That doesn’t make sense. Do we have to rearrange the words, too?”

  “Let’s do the other paper,” Isla said. “Then we can figure out what comes next.”

  “Okay,” Sai said.

  He and Isla went back to work, comparing each new set of dots to the chart in the encyclopedia while Marly wrote their translations in the notebook.

  When they finished with the second paper, they had: WELCOME TO, I HOPE, YOU’LL, UNDER THE, FOR YOU, HERE TAKE, TO HIDDEN, FORGET YOUR, DETECTOR, THE BEACH, HOME, and HARRY.

  “Again, it’s just a bunch of random words,” Marly said, studying the notebook.

  “What if we swapped the pages?” Sai said. He carefully ripped out the pages of Marly’s notebook and switched their order. Together, the papers read:

  “There’s definitely another paper to find. And I bet it goes right in between these two papers,” Isla said.

  “Agreed,” Marly said. “All that’s missing between Harry and Summerling is a P.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can find it,” Sai said, hopping to his feet.

  They searched drawers and cabinets all over the cabin. Upstairs and downstairs. They searched under furniture. Finally, Sai lifted one of the bike helmets that hung on a wall beside the front door. A paper with two straight edges and two jagged edges fluttered to the floor.

  “Aha!” Sai said, picking it up. He turned it over and revealed another message written in dots. They raced back up the stairs and gathered around the encyclopedia, which was still open to the braille chart.

  “First letter is an S,” Sai said.

  “Then a U,” Isla said.

  Now that they’d done this a couple of times, Isla and Sai were faster at recognizing patterns. It didn’t take nearly as long to decode this third paper: SUMMER, YOU ENJOY, FIND THREE, PORCH, TO USE, A RIDE, BAY, MAP SHOVEL, WHEN YOU, MAKE, and P.

  When they put all three papers together in order, the jagged edges matched up perfectly. Marly wrote the full message, with proper punctuation, in their notebook while Isla read it out loud.

  “ ‘Welcome to Summer House. I hope you enjoy your stay. You’ll find three bikes under the porch. They are for you to use while you’re here. Take a ride down to Hidden Bay Beach. Don’t forget your map, shovel, and metal detector. When you get to the beach, make yourselves at home. Harry P. Summerling.’ ”

  Sai rubbed his hands together. “Guess we know what we have to do now: go to Hidden Bay Beach and dig for treasure!”

  “Yeah, but where’s Hidden Bay Beach?” Marly asked.

  “Let’s check the map,” Isla said. “I think I left it in the ATV yesterday.”

  Marly closed the notebook and put it in her tote bag. Then they all trooped down the stairs and out the door.

  Stella glanced up from her book as they raced past her on the porch. “Where are you three off to in such a hurry?” she asked.

  “For now, we’re just getting the map,” Isla told Stella.

  Sai hoisted himself through the window of the ATV’s back seat. “Found it!” He waved it in the air and hopped back down to the ground.

  Marly and Isla gathered around him. “There it is!” Marly pointed at Hidden Bay Beach on the map.

  “There are supposed to be bikes under the porch,” Sai said.

  “Where?” Marly asked. The whole area under the front porch was blocked off with some sort of lattice fencing. Sai handed the map to Marly and she slipped it into her bag along with the notebook. Then they walked around behind the porch steps.

  “There!” Isla said as a door came into view. She opened it and revealed a little storage space beneath the porch. There were several bikes tucked away under there, along with some old flowerpots, wire fencing, and gardening tools.

  “A shovel,” Sai said, grabbing it. “We need that, too. And your metal detector, Marly.”

  “That’s in the cabin!” Marly said.

  They wheeled the bikes out from under the porch and then Marly ran inside to get her metal detector.

  When she returned, Isla was asking Stella, “Is it okay if we ride these bikes to Hidden Bay Beach? That’s what our puzzle says to do.”

  “Sure,” Stella replied. “Maybe you want to make yourselves some sandwiches and have a picnic on the beach while you’re there.”

  “That sounds nice,” Marly said. “Assuming there actually is a beach there.” They hadn’t seen anything that Marly thought of as a “beach” since they’d arrived. The whole island seemed to be nothing but rocks and trees.

  “I don’t think it would be called Hidden Bay Beach if there wasn’t a beach,” Sai said.

  “Well, let’s find out!” Marly said.

  “See? Told you there’d be a beach,” Sai said an hour later when they arrived at Hidden Bay Beach. He took off his helmet and hung it from his handlebars.

  The tall evergreens had disappeared almost as soon as they took the turn toward Hidden Bay Beach. Now a wide, sandy beach scattered with large driftwood logs stretched before them. Marly grinned. This was what she’d expected Summer Island to be like.

  She shaded her eye and gazed out at the water. There was another, much smaller, island not too far from shore. It had a single tree on it.

  “Look over there!” Sai pointed at a small driftwood structure near some tall grass down the beach.

  “Oh wow,” Marly said, taking a few steps toward it. “I wonder who built that.”

  “Mr. Summerling?” Sai suggested.

  “You think?” Marly asked.

  Sai shrugged. “Who else? Captain Joe said there isn’t anyone else on this island.”

  “We could eat our lunch in there and figure out what to do next,” Isla said as she unfastened the picnic basket from her bike.

  “We already know what to do next,” Sai said. “Run the metal detector over the entire beach.” He sighed. “It’ll probably take us all afternoon to do that.”

  “At least we’ve got a metal detector,” Marly said. “Imagine if we had to dig up this whole beach without one.” They grabbed their things and trudged toward the driftwood structure. Sand quickly filled their shoes, but Marly didn’t mind. The sun was bright. A warm breeze came in from the water. And the air smelled fresh and clean.

  “This is so cool,” Isla said, bending down to enter the structure. It was nice and shaded inside. All that was in there was a tree stump table and three tree stump stools.

  “This reminds me of our tree house,” Marly said as she stowed her bag and metal detector in a corner.

  “Me too!” Sai said. “Except the tree house has windows.”

  Marly kicked off her shoes, dumped out the sand, and tossed them over by her metal detector. Isla opened their
picnic basket and passed around peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chips, carrots, and apples.

  “Have you ever noticed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches taste better outside?” Sai asked as they sat down to eat.

  “Totally,” Marly agreed.

  Isla turned to Marly. “You brought our notebook, didn’t you?”

  “Of course,” Marly said, her mouth full of peanut butter. She didn’t go anywhere without their notebook. “It’s in my bag. Why?”

  “I want to see that three-part message again,” Isla said.

  Marly grabbed the notebook from her bag and handed it to Isla. Isla immediately opened to the page she wanted and stared at it while she slowly chewed her apple.

  Sai helped himself to a handful of chips. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “This,” Isla said finally. She set the notebook on the table and pointed at the line that read: MAKE YOURSELVES AT HOME. “What is this?” She gestured all around them. “Where are we?”

  “In a house?” Sai’s voice rose like he was asking a question.

  “A home,” Isla corrected.

  “Oh,” Marly said, curling her toes in the sand. “We don’t need to walk the metal detector across the whole beach. What we’re looking for is probably somewhere in here. Buried in the sand.” That wasn’t such a large area to search.

  Sai kicked over his stool in his rush to get to the metal detector. “How do you turn this thing on again?”

  Marly showed him where the On/Off switch was, and the machine let out a low hum as soon as he turned it on. He swept it back and forth in wide arcs across the sand.

  “Go slower,” Marly suggested.

  Sai slowed down. He crept across the sand, holding the metal detector like it was a dog on a leash in front of him. All of a sudden, the noise from the machine grew louder and more high-pitched. Then, just as quickly, it returned to a low hum.

  “Go back!” Isla waved him backward. “I think there was something there.”

  Sai took two steps backward and the high-pitched noise returned. He turned off the metal detector and leaned it against the wall. “We need to dig right here,” he said, stomping on the sand.

  Marly grabbed the shovel and started digging. Isla and Sai helped with their hands. Their hole was about a foot deep when Marly felt her shovel strike metal. She dug some more and uncovered a familiar-looking blue metal box.

  “That must be the treasure!” Sai helped Marly pull it from the sand. “I can’t believe we found it already.”

  “Don’t be too sure about that,” Isla said, sitting back on her heels. “It could just be another puzzle.”

  Marly unclipped the box and lifted the lid. Inside was a single sheet of paper. She found it odd that, like the clues they’d found in the cabin, it didn’t have the From the Desk of Harry P. Summerling header. But no doubt about it. This was another puzzle.

  “Yay! We know how to solve that one,” Sai said, rubbing his hands together.

  “We do?” Isla twisted her hair.

  “Yes! Don’t you recognize it?” Sai tilted his head in surprise. “It’s that tic-tac-toe code that we found in the phone booth outside my parents’ store.” That was way back when they were searching for the first treasure.

  “No, that was pigpen.” Isla shook her head. “This doesn’t look like pigpen to me. There are no X’s in it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no X’s’?” Sai asked.

  Marly knew what Isla meant. She grabbed the notebook and flipped pages until she found the one where they’d worked out the pigpen code. “Remember? We wrote all the letters of the alphabet inside tic-tac-toe boards and X’s. Isla’s right. This isn’t the same code. Unless there are no S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, or Zs in the whole message.”

  Sai shrugged. “Maybe there aren’t.”

  “Easy enough to find out,” Isla said. “The first letter matches the upper right corner of a tic-tic-toe board. The one with the dot in it.” She held the new code next to the pigpen key in their notebook.

  “That’s L,” Marly said. She marked the pigpen code page with one hand while turning to a blank page with the other hand. She put an L on the blank page.

  “Next one is a square with a dot,” Sai said.

  Marly checked the pigpen page. “That would be an N,” she said. “So, L-N ?” She scratched her forehead. “That’s not a word.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sai took a closer look at the new puzzle. “All of these symbols have dots in them. Do you see that?”

  “Yeah. I think Isla’s right. This isn’t pigpen,” Marly said. She crossed out the L and the N and set her pencil down.

  Isla twisted her allergy bracelet. “It could be something similar, though,” she said.

  Sai’s foot twitched. “Sometimes the dot is way on the left, sometimes it’s in the middle, and sometimes it’s way on the right,” he said.

  “So?” Marly said.

  “So, maybe it still has something to do with tic-tac-toe,” Sai said. He took the notebook from Marly. “What if we draw it like this?” He drew a tic-tac-toe board that took up the whole page, then put an A, B, and C in the top left square, a D, E, and F in the top middle square, and a G, H, and I in the top right square. He kept going until he ran out of letters in the bottom right square. “Okay, maybe not,” he said with disappointment. “There’s only two letters left for the last square.”

  “It’s still worth checking out,” Marly said, glancing back and forth between the puzzle and Sai’s tic-tac-toe board.

  “Agreed,” Isla said. “That first symbol looks like the top right box and the dot is way over to the left, which would make this first letter a G.”

  Marly wrote a G below the first character of the code.

  “Next one is an O,” Sai said.

  Marly put an O below the second character. This is already looking better, she thought.

  “Then T,” Isla said.

  “Another O,” Sai said.

  “I think this is right,” Isla said.

  Marly nodded.

  They continued letter by letter. When they finished, the message read: GO TO HIDDEN ISLAND FIND ANOTHER HOUSE.

  Sai left the driftwood house and tromped through the loose sand. “I bet that’s the hidden island right over there.” He stood at the edge of the water and pointed at the small island with the tree.

  Isla and Marly hurried over to him. “You think so?” Isla said, shading her eyes.

  “It’s not exactly hidden,” Marly pointed out.

  “Well, it’s right by Hidden Bay Beach,” Sai said. “And if you’re out on the ocean on the other side of this island, you wouldn’t be able to see it. So then it would be hidden, right?”

  Marly thought that was a bit of a stretch, but they also didn’t have any other leads. “How do we get there? It’s too far to swim.”

  Just then, a freezing-cold wave washed over their feet.

  “Ahh!” They all screamed and leaped back out of the water.

  “It’s also too cold to swim!” Isla said.

  “We need a boat,” Sai said.

  “I don’t know,” Marly said. She didn’t like the idea of the three of them paddling a boat by themselves. Weren’t there currents in the ocean?

  Isla didn’t like that idea any better than Marly did. “That seems dangerous,” she said. “Remember what happened to Mr. Summerling?”

  “Yeah. He got caught in a storm,” Sai said. “But it’s not going to storm now.” He tipped his head back and let the sun warm his face. “There isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

  “Maybe not,” Marly said. “But we still could end up way out in the ocean.”

  “We could,” Isla agreed.

  Sai wrinkled his nose. “Well, we don’t have a boat anyway,” he grumbled.

  They gazed at the water and the island, e
ach lost in their own thoughts. There had to be a way to get over to that island. A safe way.

  Marly watched the waves come in and go out. Which gave her an idea! “Hey, this is the ocean, so there are tides, right?” she said. “Maybe we have to wait for the tide to go out, and then we’ll be able to walk there.”

  “Oh, I saw that in a movie once,” Sai said.

  Isla crossed her arms. “I don’t think the tide is going to go out that far,” she said. “If it does, it’ll take hours.”

  “Or you know what else could happen?” Sai’s eyes gleamed with excitement. “Maybe there’s an island we can’t see right now because it’s under water, but when the tide goes out, it’ll show up?”

  “That would be pretty cool,” Marly said.

  “Now that would be a ‘hidden’ island,” Isla said.

  “Why don’t we hang around for a while and see if anything changes with the tide,” Marly suggested.

  “Ack!” Sai shrieked as he darted to the side, practically knocking Isla over.

  “What?” she asked, rubbing her elbow.

  “B-bee!” Sai pointed and Isla slowly backed away.

  Marly squinted. “Where?”

  “Uh . . . ,” Sai said, looking around. “I don’t see it anymore.”

  “Neither do I,” Marly said.

  “Hey, I’m the one who’s allergic to bee stings, remember?” Isla raised her arm so Sai could see her allergy bracelet. “But you’re the one screaming and running into people?”

  “I may not be allergic, but I still don’t want to get stung,” Sai said.

  “No one does,” Marly said. But if there were any bees hanging around, neither she nor Isla ever saw them.

  For the next few hours, the three of them ran up and down the beach, built a sandcastle, and when they got tired from the sun, they went back inside the little driftwood house.