“I think Bob has hit on something,” Jupiter said, rousing himself. “What’s your other clue, Bob?”
“I also looked up archery and old English bowmen,” Bob continued. “They used to use wood from the yew tree a lot in making their bows. So if we said that old English bowmen loved yew, we have another word. Y-e-w is pronounced exactly the same as y-o-u.”
“Bob, I think you’re right,” Jupiter said, after a pause for reflecting. “Before Aunt Mathilda calls us to dinner, let’s go into Headquarters and have another try at that message.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Pete asked. But he got up and followed when Bob and Jupiter started towards Tunnel Two.
Five minutes later they were grouped round the desk with the first mysterious message spread out before them.
“The first line of the message says,
‘Just a word of advice, politely given’
“I suggest you,” Pete exclaimed, forgetting his weariness. “That does start out like a sensible message after all. Okay, Jupe, what’s the fourth word?”
“The clue is,
” Jupiter said. “Meaning some body of water smaller than an ocean. That could be a river, a pond, a lake or a sea.”
“Sea!” exclaimed Bob. “Meaning s-e-e. That must be it. Now we come to the fifth clue,
“Let me try!” Pete spoke up. “There are 26 letters in the alphabet. Number 26 is the letter Z. Does that fit?”
“It does if we just use the sound of it,” Jupiter told him. “Z sounds like ‘the.’ And ‘the’ fits into the message. Now we just need the last clue,
“What sits on a shelf?” Pete asked. “Like an elf?”
“The word elf is just another word to confuse us,” Jupiter said. “Bob, you spent the whole day looking at shelves. Didn’t it occur to you what sat on them?”
“Books!” Bob yelled. “And every one of them full of words. You could say they were well-fed — with words.”
“I’m sure we have the message now,” Jupiter said. “I’ll write it out.” He did, and got:
I suggest you see the book.
“Wow, we did it!” Pete cried. “But what does it mean? What book are we supposed to see? And when we see it, what do we do with it?”
“There are two more messages to be solved,”
Jupiter said. “When we — ”
He was interrupted by Mathilda Jones’s voice.
“Boys! Dinner! Come and get it!”
“I guess that means we have to stop now,” Jupiter said reluctantly. “We’ll try again tomorrow when we’re fresh. We’ll make better progress then, anyway.”
During dinner the boys discussed the meaning of the message they had just unravelled. It suggested they see a book. But what book? They had no idea.
“Could it mean the Bible?” Pete ventured. “That’s known as the Good Book by a lot of people.”
“I don’t think so,” Jupiter said, taking a second helping of dessert. “Though it might. Maybe the next message will tell us more.”
“What project are you boys working on now?” Titus Jones asked from the head of the table.
“We have some mysterious messages to decipher, Uncle Titus,” Jupiter said. “So far we’ve just made a beginning.”
“You boys and that club of yours!” Mathilda Jones exclaimed, cutting another piece of cake for Pete. “I declare it’s a good thing I give you some work to do and keep you out in the open air or you’d spend all your time working puzzles.”
As the boys had once had a puzzle-solving club, which had later become The Three Investigators, Mrs. Jones had it firmly in her mind that their chief activity was still solving puzzles. “Well, I’m not solving anything more tonight,” Jupiter said with a yawn. “You kept us out in the open air all day, Aunt Mathilda, and I’m going to bed early.”
“I’ll buy a double helping of that,” Pete agreed, and he yawned, too. “It was a great dinner, Mrs. Jones, but if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll ride home now and turn in.”
Pete and Bob both said good night and departed. After riding together for a block or two, they separated to go to their own homes.
Neither of them noticed a small delivery van which followed them slowly and when they separated, continued to follow Bob.
Jupiter meanwhile was helping his aunt clear the table. However, he yawned constantly.
“Heavens to Betsy,” his aunt exclaimed. “You must really be tired, Jupiter. You go on up to bed. Scoot, now.”
Jupiter went gladly and tumbled into bed. But as soon as he was in bed, he started wondering about the other mysterious messages.
He got dressed again and went downstairs. His aunt and uncle were watching television, and they looked up in surprise.
“Mercy and goodness, Jupiter!” his aunt said. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I started thinking about something,” Jupiter said. “A — well, a sort of puzzle. I left it out in the salvage yard. I’m going to go get it and have a last look at it before I go to sleep.”
“I certainly do hope you don’t wear out your brains with all these puzzles,” Mrs. Jones sighed.
Jupiter crossed the short distance to the front entrance of the salvage yard. The gates were padlocked; however, he had his own entrance which he used when necessary. He walked along the gaily painted fence until he came to two boards painted green.
Jupiter pushed his finger against a special spot, and the two boards swung silently back, revealing a narrow entrance. This was Green Gate One, one of several secret entrances and exits to the yard known only to The Three Investigators. Jupiter squeezed through and found himself in the special workshop section.
He now proceeded to the printing press, found the piece of iron grillwork at the back, and moved it, revealing the entrance to Tunnel Two.
He scrambled through Tunnel Two, pushed up the trapdoor, and entered the office.
He had left the secret messages in a drawer of the desk. Switching on the overhead light, he got them out. The first message, the one that said
However, after he had read it a couple of times, Jupiter began to get some ideas. Solving the first message had shown him the right way to proceed. Each line was a clue to a word, rather like the clues in crossword puzzles.
The first line said to take
Triumphantly Jupiter rubbed out the three letters, thereby “killing” Eli. What he had left was ONLY.
“Only!” Jupiter exclaimed to himself. “That’s it! Now the second line says,
‘Take a broom and swat a bee.’
“
He stopped and pinched his lip. Suppose the word father was meant to suggest, something more. Father Christmas? No, that didn’t seem to fit. Father Time? This whole business was about clocks, so that must be it.
Only a room where Father Time hums
Or if you mean a clock, it ticks by, unless…
“That’s it!” Jupe exclaimed to himself. “All those clocks in Mr. Clock’s study are electric, and they all hum. That’s a room where time really hums.” Now he had two complete messages.
3–27 4–36 5–19 48–12 7–11 15–9.
Ordinarily they wouldn’t have meant anything at all to him. But since the messages he had already solved mentioned a book, he thought he understood. A very popular type of code; message involves using a book. The sender of the message picks out words in the book which fit the message, then writes down just the page and the word number, and sends only the numbers to the receiver. The receiver of the message has a copy of the same book, and by looking up the page and word number he can easily read the message. These numbers almost surely referred to pages and words in some book.