Molly Moon & the Morphing Mystery

blossom flickered through the hall as though someone wearing it had recently walked by. Sensing that the coast was clear now, though, Petula tapped Molly on her leg with her paw, nodded, and stepped forward.

“Petula seems to think it’s all right. Glad we brought her.” Molly put her hand under Micky’s elbow, and they both crept forward. Cautious as timid mice, they slipped through the shadows and climbed the staircase. They moved quietly along the upper balcony until they were finally up at the door to the botanical library.

Turning the doorknob, they went through, tiptoeing down the dark archive room, past its shelves of books and towering filing cabinets, to the column of drawers at the end that hid the secret entrance to Miss Hunroe’s lair. Molly pushed the filing cabinet and the secret door opened and they went through.

Petula wondered what the twins were looking for. She supposed it was the book. If it was a bottle of lavender perfume, they were heading in the right direction. The scent was drifting through the cracks along the edges of the door in front of them like heat escaping from an igloo.

Molly gripped the filing-cabinet handle and got ready to push. “Here goes,” she said.

The door nudged open, revealing another dark room—this time, the library. Nothing had changed. The layout of the furniture was the same. The three sofas stood in a horseshoe configuration with the book-laden coffee table between them. There was the tall window with the stained-glass patterns on it.

Micky tapped Molly on the shoulder. “Look,” he whispered, “there’s the feathery tree picture. And it’s not a feathery tree, is it? You were right, Molly—it’s a quill.” He turned on his flashlight.

Molly joined her brother beside the fireplace. “Where there is a quill, there is a way,” she said. “Do you think there’s something behind it?” She reached up to lift the old picture from the wall. Micky helped her as they hauled it down. As they did, they saw that the wall where it had been was plain, without writing on it or a safe embedded in it.

“It’s heavy!” Molly whispered.

“Do you think there’s something inside it?” Micky suggested.

“Crumbs. Bet there is,” Molly agreed.

The twins turned the picture over and, in the light of Micky’s flashlight, saw that the frame’s wooden back was taped down. Quickly they stripped off the tape and peeled the wood away from the frame, revealing the back of the quill drawing.

“Nothing here,” Micky decided, disappointed. The dark sky outside seemed to growl, as though warning the children to behave themselves. Micky pulled out the paper. It was simply a drawing. Nothing more. “Maybe it’s got secret writing on it.” He shone his flashlight through different parts of the parchment, to see whether any watermarked writing was hidden there, while Molly picked at the frame itself.

“Perhaps something’s hidden inside the wood,” she said. “Shall we break it and see? I’ll take the glass out first. I mean, I know it’s not good smashing things up and all that, but this is an exception.”

Petula watched with interest as Molly put her sneakered foot on the picture frame and broke it in half. Outside, a distant crack of lightning seemed to echo the splintering noise.

Molly studied the wood. “It’s solid. Not hollow. Nothing in it.” She sat heavily on the sofa. “It was only a hunch, wasn’t it? I mean, there are quills and feathers everywhere. Maybe we should be looking down in the stuffed-bird rooms.”

Micky sat down beside her and glanced up at the hundreds and hundreds of books.

“Why would there be a quill picture? It must be to show that this room is special. There’s something in here, there must be.”

Minutes later Molly and Micky were up on the balcony level of the room, rifling through the library’s shelves for a box that might hold Molly’s crystals or a book that might contain a good clue as to where the Logan Stones were. The books were organized alphabetically. Molly and Micky ran their flashlights along their spines, reading their titles.

“Ancient Civilization,” Micky read. “The Andes. Annihilation of the World’s Population and Other Extreme Ways Forward.” Micky shook his head in revulsion. “That sounds like a Hunroe sort of book, but not the next one. Apple Picking. The Aztecs. Botany of the Amazon.” Micky frowned while he thought.

“Damn!” Molly despaired. “This is hopeless. The clue might be in a map or in a poem, or it might be deep in a math book written in a code in numbers!”

Micky turned around and leaned over the ledge of the balcony, surveying the mess of the picture frame below. They’d never be able to cover their tracks now, for the frame was unfixable.

At that moment a huge flash of lightning exploded in the sky. Petula froze with fear. And, as though some sort of giant hundred-foot-tall paparazzi photographer had his camera directed at them from outside the window and had detonated its flash, white light blasted in through the window. It flooded the room, and something extraordinary happened.

Passing through the window’s stained glass, where the strange shapes were, and using the etched lines there, the light and shadows formed a picture and some words on the white wall, where the picture of the quill had been.

The apparition was on the wall for only a second, but it was enough.

“WOW!” Micky gasped.

Eighteen

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