The Ghost in the Mirror by John Bellairs

Author:John Bellairs [Bellairs, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101659700
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1994-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

A good deal of time went by before Heinrich finally had an opportunity to slip the sheet of fraktur writing out of its hiding place in the family Bible. In a household as large as that of the Weiss family, someone was almost always around to notice you slipping into someone else’s room. Rose Rita nagged at Heinrich to hurry up, but the poor boy just couldn’t find an opportunity, and days passed without his getting the prize.

Rose Rita spent four of them traveling around the valley to the various farms. She confirmed that the closer the farmers lived to the grouchy old Mr. Stoltzfuss, the more they seemed to hate Grampa Drexel. Other than that one single fact, there seemed little else to learn. Since Rose Rita really wasn’t accomplishing very much, she stayed on the Weiss farm after that. Mrs. Zimmermann still wavered between being lucid and being slightly out of her head, and Rose Rita had to protect her against making any terrible mistakes, like asking Mrs. Weiss what she thought of President Truman. But then about the middle of March, Heinrich finally smuggled the mysterious paper out to the stables, and together he and Rose Rita inspected it.

The fabulous coded message disappointed Rose Rita. The paper was old and heavy, creamy brown and dusty smelling. The message was done in red, black, and green ink, in a fancy script with lots of flourishes and curliques, which made it hard to read. The same inks had been used to draw a complicated floral frame around the words. Rose Rita wasted some time in studying this, thinking that maybe the border was some kind of tricky chart.

She finally decided that it was just a bunch of flowers and vines, and the clues must be in the poem itself, not in the floral border around it. But the message was not a map, like in Treasure Island, or an obvious code, like in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold Bug.” Instead, with Heinrich’s help Rose Rita read a rather poorly done poem:

To the Sons of Liberty, That They Mite

Discover the Welth of Freedom

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