Molly and Micky stared at the wall in amazement. Every time a flash of lightning lit up the sky, the light of it shone through the stained-glass windowpane, past the etched lines there, and threw up defined shadows on the wall above the fireplace.
Quickly they ran down the balcony’s spiral staircase and waited for another burst of light.
“Come on, come on,” Micky urged. “Don’t let the storm stop now.”
Rain slapped against the window and thunder rumbled.
“Here we go,” said Molly. And then there was an enormous crack, as though two monster marbles were smashing into each other in the air above the museum. Petula hid under a sofa. The sky filled with white light. Again and again, white light lit up the Earth, and Molly and Micky were able to read the wall.
“It’s a map!” Micky declared. “With a sort of picture code. But the question is…is that shape a country or a city or a village or a small area of land?”
“And what do the pictures inside the shape mean?” Molly asked. “The first thing looks like a cloud. Then…are those trees? Is that supposed to be a wood? Put the two things together, and you get cloud trees or cloud wood. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Cloud forest does, though,” Micky interjected. “There are places called cloud forests very high up in mountainous places where the trees are covered with cloud.”
“Where?”
“South America, I think. But we could find out for sure.”
“And those four tear-shaped things are definitely the Logan Stones,” Molly said. “Then there’s…” Molly waited for a flash of lightning to light up the wall again. When it did, she pointed to a shape. “There’s that. It looks like a spring—like a metal spring. Then there’s the word COCA, with that squiggly line after it. Coca. That must be a place.”
“No, it’s not a place,” Micky said authoritatively. “It’s a river. The Coca River. I know it’s a river. I remember reading about it when I was six and thinking how it was a river made of chocolate, of cocoa. And that spring shape is exactly that. A spring—you know, as in the origin of a river. A spring. That whole thing means, ‘the spring of the Coca River.’”
Molly gasped. “Where is the Coca River, Micky?”
Micky frowned. “Let me think. What are the countries in South America? Um.” He paused and thought hard. Then he stared up at the wall as though for inspiration. Some lightning flashed into the room again, lighting up the wall. “I’ve got it,” he practically shouted. “That shape there is the shape of Ecuador. I know it is. This makes sense. Those books in the bookcase upstairs. Quite a lot of them were about South America, weren’t they?”
Molly nodded. “The Andes. The Aztecs. Weren’t the Aztecs the people who used to live in South America?”
Micky shrugged. “I think we’ve nailed it, Moll. Come on. Let’s go up there and see whether there’s anything else that can help us.”
Quickly the twins hurried back up the staircase to the bookshelves and found an atlas. They turned its pages to find its index. They searched for the word Coca. There was only one entry.
“The Coca River!” Molly read. Micky flicked back through the atlas’s pages while Molly held the flashlight.
“Page thirty-three, two C.” His fingers found the page. “This is extreme,” he announced. “It’s in northwest Ecuador.”
He pointed on the map to an area that was colored gray. “See all that? That area is the Andes Mountains. And see that? That’s a volcano. Look, there’s the Coca River. There’s where it starts. And you can bet that it’s all cloud forests in the high mountains there. So that’s where the Logan Stones are! In a cloud forest place, high in the Andes Mountains, near the spring of the Coca River.”
“Crikey,” Molly said. She looked outside at the terrible weather. “How are we going to get there?” The light outside again broke the darkness and showed the strange coded map on the wall.
“It’s amazing,” said Micky. “Somehow Hunroe worked out the clue to here. Then she must have found all of this”—he pointed to the wall—“and got so excited that she made the natural history museum her headquarters.”
“And our great-great-grandfather Dr. Logan,” Molly added, “must have hidden the clue there in the window glass in the first place.”
Just then, Petula began to growl. She smelled chocolate cookies, and the lavender smell was getting stronger. She poked her nose out from under the sofa and began to sniff. There was a noise from beyond the library door. Someone was making their way along the central aisle of the filing-cabinet room. They were carrying an umbrella or a walking stick, for their footsteps were accompanied by the tap tap tapping of something else that hit the floor as they walked.
“Quick!” Micky said.
“Petula!” Molly whispered.
Molly and Micky scurried down the balcony stairs and whipped across the downstairs room to the door. If they could slip behind it, they could just sneak out as soon as whoever it was out there entered. But there wasn’t time. The door opened. The light came on. They ducked behind the sofa.
The room was suddenly lit with the warm glow of its orange lights. Molly stared at Micky and put her hand on Petula. In only a matter of seconds, the person would see the smashed picture frame. They listened to the person putting something down on the far table. They breathed heavily as they moved.
“Miss Suzette?” Micky mouthed the name to Molly and puffed his cheeks out. “Fat!” Molly smelled lavender in the air and nodded. She hoped so. Miss Suzette was small enough to handle. Molly imagined Miss Suzette eyeing the room and discovering the mess, then seeing the disturbed bookcase upstairs. She hoped Miss Suzette would climb the balcony stairs to inspect. Once she was up there, they could escape. But as she was imagining this, a horrible thing happened.
Miss Suzette’s large, fat face peered over the top of the sofa. “YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!” she bellowed.
Like birds set to flight, Molly and Micky moved up and away. Dodging Miss Suzette’s pink-fingernailed grasp, and the swishing of her mother-of-pearl walking stick, they ran.
“Come on, Petula,” Molly cried as she dashed over the broken frame, the wood crunching under her feet. Micky jumped on the coffee table, smashing a flower-filled porcelain vase and slipping on a pile of magazines. He hurdled the other sofa. It was Petula who got stuck. Miss Suzette reached out and seized her around the waist. She lifted Petula up, tipping her at a very uncomfortable angle, pinching her skin with her pincerlike grip. With a furious bark, Petula sank her teeth through the old woman’s lacy dress sleeves and into her forearm.
Miss Suzette shrieked like a banshee, “Aaaaah! You ghastly dog!” and dropped her.
Petula leaped onto the sofa and ran along it to the other end, where Molly caught her. Micky picked up Miss Suzette’s sopping-wet raincoat, bunched it into a ball, and threw it at her so that it hit her in the face like a slop of seaweed.
“Hah!” Micky laughed. Miss Suzette tottered backward and fell in a heap on the floor, her petticoats puffing up to reveal huge lacy knickers. “Hope that makes you think twice before you hurt an animal again!”
And not wanting to hang around any longer in case Miss Suzette decided to morph into any of them, Molly, Micky, and Petula were away. They sped down the archive room and raced to the upstairs passageway. They skidded over the polished floors, Petula’s claws skittering as they went. They long-jumped down the main stairs. And then they sprinted down the stuffed-bird corridor that connected the museum to its other side.
“Hope there aren’t any more of Hunroe’s friends here,” Molly said, panting and breathless, eyeing a stuffed owl.
The twins and Petula arrived at the side entrance. Behind them, they could hear the far-off echoing sound of Miss Suzette’s clipped footsteps as she puffed her way down the museum stairs after them.
Molly paused by the night watchman, who stood like a soldier awaiting orders.
“Thank you!” she said. “After we’re gone, you will no longer remember any of Miss Hunroe’s hypnotic instructions to you. No one will ever be able to hypnotize you again. And you will forget us, and you will be hypnotized no more by me, except you will do something for us. When Miss Suzette, the woman who’s chasing us, arrives, you will stop her from leaving the building. Thanks.” Molly turned to leave, then stopped. “And I seal all of this in with the password…”
“Frilly Knickers?” Micky suggested.
“Yes, with the password ‘Frilly Knickers.’”
With that Molly, Micky, and Petula burst out of the building into the wet night. Rain drenched them so that they climbed into Black’s car dripping.
“Got what we need?” Black asked.
As the car screeched away, Molly looked back at the museum’s side door.
Through the football-sized porthole there, she could just make out the puffy figure of Miss Suzette and the night watchman blocking her path. He had her wrists in his hands and was shaking his head solemnly while she was struggling and shouting as though a demon possessed her.