The Genius Files #4 (16 page)

“I had no idea that bowling could get so physical,” marveled Mrs. McDonald.

C
oke and Pep weren't laughing. There was no doubt anymore. Something had happened. Something had changed. Mrs. Higgins and the bowler dudes were out to get them again. Maybe Dr. Warsaw had recovered from his meltdown and decided to resume his quest to eliminate them. Whatever had happened, their lives were obviously in danger.

It had been a
long
day. The twins weren't in any mood to make chitchat in the car. Dr. McDonald pulled into a drive-through joint for burgers and
then got back on the road, heading west on I-30 from Arlington. His plan was to get on I-35 and stop somewhere at a motel for the night.

Mrs. McDonald was looking through her guidebook, as usual. Just as they were about to pull off I-30 at the exit for I-35, she shouted, “Ben, stop the car!”

Dr. McDonald slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Fortunately, everyone had a seat belt on. They were all getting used to this kind of thing.

“What is it?”

“We have to go to the washing machine museum!”

“Are you out of your mind?” Dr. McDonald shouted at his wife. “I almost caused a huge accident just then! You could have gotten us all killed!”

“I had to stop you before you took the exit,” Mrs. McDonald explained. “My readers would never forgive me if I didn't tell them about the washing machine museum.”

“There's
really
a museum devoted to washing machines?” Pep asked.

Coke just shook his head. Nothing surprised him anymore. Dr. McDonald let out a sigh.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“Mineral Wells,” Mrs. McDonald replied. “It's only an hour west of here.”

“Bridge, it's been a
long
day . . .”

“That's for sure,” Coke said.

“. . . and now you're asking me to drive an hour out of the way—to go to a museum about
washing machines
?”

“It's free, Ben,” said Mrs. McDonald.

“Of
course
it's free!” he exploded. “Nobody wants to go there. Nobody's going to pay good money to look at a bunch of old washing machines! I wouldn't go if they paid me.”

“You don't understand, Ben,” said Mrs. McDonald gently. “The museum is just a part of a regular laundromat. All the clothes we bought back in Memphis are dirty now. We've got to do a load of wash anyway. We might as well do it at the washing machine museum.”

Dr. McDonald took a minute, closing his eyes. Bridget McDonald was a wonderful woman. She was bright, funny, dedicated, and beautiful. But she wasn't easy to be married to.

“Okay, okay,” he finally grumbled.

Instead of turning off at the exit, Dr. McDonald continued west on I-30. Shortly after passing a small airport, the road split and he got on Route 180, which goes directly to Mineral Wells. Route 180 is also called West Hubbard Street, which happens to be the street
where the Laumdronat is located.

Yes, that's how it's supposed to be spelled—Laumdronat.

It was a plain white building. Dr. McDonald found a parking spot down the street and popped open the trunk. The rest of the family gathered up their dirty clothes.

“I can't believe we're going to a washing machine museum,” Pep said as they opened the door.

Laumdronat is essentially a regular laundromat that has a display of vintage washing machines. On a shelf above the modern machines are old-time tubs, washboards, and laundry accessories dating back to the days before most homes had electricity. Hanging from the ceiling are some ironing boards. There are also signs that say
LAUNDRY
, which are, for some reason, upside down.

“It's the history of laundry!” Mrs. McDonald enthused. “Isn't this fascinating?”

No,
was the unanimous silent response from the rest of the family.

“Believe it or not, there's
another
washing machine museum, in Colorado,” she told them.

“If we have to go there,” said Dr. McDonald, “I'll shoot myself.”

“Oh, you people are no fun at all,” Mrs. McDonald
said as she began separating the darks from the lights.

A few other people were doing their wash, but there were plenty of machines available. Once the clothes were inside and swishing around, Mrs. McDonald started taking pictures and jotting down notes for
Amazing but True
. There were a couple of ancient Pac-Man games in the corner, and Coke dug some quarters out of his pocket so he and Pep could play. Dr. McDonald pulled up a chair and read his newspaper to kill time. The dryers were huge, so when the clothes were done washing, Mrs. McDonald was able to fit all the darks and lights into one machine.

When the dryer clicked off, everyone helped to fold and carry the clothes out to the car. They were about to drive away when—

“Dad!” Coke yelled. “Stop!”

“What
now
?”

“I'm missing a pair of my underwear.”

“Well, go get it,” his father said wearily.

Coke hopped out of the car and ran back inside the Laumdronat. It was empty now. He went over to the dryer they had been using and looked through the round window. Spinning around in there were his missing Fruit of the Looms. He opened the door.

As he leaned inside to grab the underwear, Coke was taken by surprise. The two bowler dudes came
out of nowhere, shoved him from behind, and pushed him headfirst into the dryer.

“What the—”

See? I
told
you that Coke would be shoved into a spinning clothes dryer! You just had to be a little patient.

The dryer door slammed behind him, and then the whole world began to spin.

“Stop!” Coke yelled as his body spun around. “Ouch! Let me out!”

The dryer was spinning fast, but not fast enough for the centrifugal force to hold Coke's body against the inside of the drum. He tumbled around until he reached the top, and then he fell to the bottom with a thud.

“Ooof!”
he grunted. “Oww! Turn it off!
Helllllp!
”

As he spun around, Coke caught a glimpse of the two bowler dudes, their smiling faces pressed against the round window. He could hear their cackling laughter as they held the dryer door closed.

Within seconds, Coke started to feel dizzy from the spinning, and he realized he had to do something quickly or he would lose consciousness in there. If that happened and his head were to bang hard against the drum, it could be all over for him.

As he spun around and around, he got himself into position, gathered up the strength he had left, and slammed his right foot against the door the same way he had been taught to kick in karate class. The door flew open and the machine slowed to a stop.

Coke climbed out of the opening and fell on the floor. He tried to look around, but the world was still spinning. By the time he was able to see clearly, the bowler dudes were out the front door and running down the street.

Coke struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily back to the car.

“What took you?” asked Pep. “I was worried about you. How long does it take to get a pair of underwear out of a dryer, anyway?”

“I went for a spin,” Coke replied.

All in all, it had been one lousy day. In fact, it may have been one of the worst days the McDonald twins had ever experienced.

Coke thought about everything that had happened to him since he woke up that morning. He had nearly been run over by two motorcycles. His shoes had been poisoned. He had been attacked by maniacs with bowling balls. And he had been pushed into a spinning clothes dryer. It was amazing that he was still alive.

Oh, and a cow had nearly fallen on his head. He'd almost forgotten.

Dr. McDonald drove east on Hubbard Street until he passed the Budget Host Mesa Motel near Lake Mineral Wells State Park. It was late, and the vacancy sign was blinking. He pulled in and got two rooms.

Wearily, the twins brushed their teeth and laid out the clean clothes they would wear the next day. As Coke picked up the Fruit of the Looms he had retrieved from the back of the dryer, he noticed something unusual. There were some letters written inside the waistband—letters that had not been there before. . . .

QBUXPOXKDBO

“Oh no,” he said to his sister, “guess what?”

“What?”

“We got another one,” he told her.

But both of the twins were too tired, too sore, and too frustrated to even think about solving the cipher. They crawled into their beds and went to sleep.

W
hen he woke up on the morning of July 16, Coke felt sore all over, but a little better in his head. There's something about getting a good night's sleep that helps to put yesterday behind you.

The McDonald family got back on the road. Route 180 headed east and merged with I-20. From there, it was a straight shot south on I-35 all the way to Waco, Texas. It doesn't sound like much, but it was a long drive, over two hours.

Most drives in Texas
are
long drives. It takes about
twelve hours to cross the state. That's with no rest stops. About 740 miles. Do you know how long it takes to drive the highway across the middle of New Jersey? Forty-five minutes. About forty miles. Don't believe me? Look it up.

Of course, the speed limit in some parts of Texas is over
eighty
miles per hour. And forget about driving the speed limit. If you drive the speed limit in Texas, the other cars will be all over your back bumper like cheese on macaroni. Dr. McDonald liked driving fast, and now he had a car that liked it just as much as he did.

Pep pulled out her notepad to work on the latest cipher. She felt a renewed urgency now. Somebody was out to get them. Her brother's skills were effective, but they weren't enough. She would have to use her wits to survive. Solving the cipher could be the key.

While their parents were flipping around the radio stations in the front seat, Pep took the letters
QBUXPOXKDBO
and did just about everything she could do to crack the code. She looked at the letters backward. Upside-down. Sideways.

QBUXPOXKDBO

“Oh man!” Coke said as he looked over her shoulder. “That looks
impossible
.”

“You're intimidated by the
Q
and the
X
s,” Pep told him. “It doesn't matter what the letters are. They just represent other letters. Let's break it down. Eleven letters. This is probably two words, maybe three.”

“So?”

“The only letters that appear twice are the two
X
s and two
B
s, see?” she continued. “So they very possibly represent
E
and
A
.”

“Why do you say that?” Coke asked.

“Because
E
and
A
are two of the most commonly used letters,” Pep replied.

She studied the cipher for a long time, occasionally furrowing her brow or wrinkling up her nose as she worked on it silently.

“I can almost see the wheels turning in your head,” Coke said as he watched her.

Pep stopped for a moment.

“That gives me an idea!” she said as she turned to a clean page in her notepad and drew a circle. “This could be a shift cipher.”

“Shift cipher?” her brother asked. “What does that mean?”

Pep didn't bother answering. Instead, she wrote the letters of the alphabet around the circle, going clockwise.

“You shift all the letters of the alphabet by a fixed amount,” Pep explained. “Back in Roman times, that's what Julius Caesar did to keep his messages secret.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Coke asked his sister.

“I know some stuff, and you know some stuff,” Pep replied. “Look. Let's say the two
B
s are actually
E
s. That would mean that all the letters have been shifted counterclockwise by two. And if that's true, the two
X
s are
A
s.”

Pep wrote the cipher out again, with the new letters. . . .

QEUAPOAKDEO

“That doesn't help much,” Coke remarked.

“No,” Pep said, “but it might if we shift
all
the letters counterclockwise by two.”

With that logic, the
Q
became a
T
, the
U
became an
X
, and the
P
became an S. Pep wrote them down.