Free The Romeo and Juliet Code by Phoebe Stone Page B

us. And how would we get there anyway? It’s almost impossible to catch a boat to America.”
    Danny went to the office the next day. It was on Baker Street, the same street where Sherlock Holmes lived in all his books. Winnie seemed very nervous, pacing about while he was gone, embroidering late into the night by candlelight. A few days later, Danny came back from Baker Street looking very sad and cheerful, which was Danny’s way, really. He said, “Okay, it’s all been figured out. We have a new plan and it’s rather extraordinary. A new approach entirely .”
    And so it was decided. We would be leaving London. I went to Lily Jones’s flat to have tea and say good-bye. The whole time I was there, her little brother, Albert, held Wink. He was terribly fond of him and almost cried when I had to take Wink back. Lily Jones put her yellow canary in its pretty cage next to us by the table and for our special good-bye, we ate a whole tin of jam. Then Lily let her canary out of the cage and it was the loveliest thing to see it flying round the room in its brilliant yellow coat, darting this way and that, singing all the while.
    The very next day, Winnie and Danny and I took a train. We got the seats with a table in front of us, and Winnie and Danny were drinking ginger beer the whole way. The train was going to Southampton, where the huge boat the HMS Queen Anne was leaving the port that night in secret.

A small box arrived at the Bathburn house from overseas in mid-July, and while I didn’t actually get to hold it and look at it, I could tell it was from Portugal by the way Uncle Gideon made off with it like a rugby player who finally has his hands on the ball. He tried to make light of it, horsing about in the parlor later, saying he had finally received those shoes he had ordered.
    “From Portugal?” I said.
    Uncle Gideon winced then and backed up as if a seagull had somehow swooped into the house and had flown too close to his face. Well, that only made me more certain.
    I forgot to say that Uncle Gideon was a sixth-grade teacher at the elementary school in town when it wasn’t summer, and he was always drinking coffee and shuffling papers, working on his lesson plans. If The Gram asked him to tidy up the kitchen after tea, he always said, “Sorry, old thing, school’s starting soon and I’ve got work here,” and then he’d wave his papers about. (As soon as I got to Bottlebay, he started calling everybody “old thing.”)
    “Shall we eat on the porch, old thing?” I heard him say to The Gram a little later. We were going to be having Grammy’s Clammy Stew for dinner. It was a great Bathburn favorite. For me, I couldn’t believe how much food was in Bottlebay, Maine. In London, we’d had very little to eat. And I was wondering all the while in a wistful sort of way what my parents would have sent to Uncle Gideon. And why was there nothing for me?
    I was sitting upstairs with Derek in the dark bedroom. He had a pencil behind his ear and a pad of paper on his desk. He was looking at me and thinking out loud. “The first thing we have to do before we figure out the code is figure out what ‘a favorite in Miami’ is,” he said. “Hmmmm, do you think they mean Miami, Florida? And what sort of things are favorites in Florida … seashells? Pink flamingoes?”
    “Derek,” I said, looking over to see if he was willing for me to drop the Captain part. “Derek,” I went on. “I have been thinking and thinking. It can’t be Miami, Florida. It has to be Miami Bathburn. Aunt Miami.”
    “Oh, of course. Of course,” said Derek. “Flissy, you are showing brilliance.”
    “Don’t forget the long division,” I said.
    “Oh, right,” he said. I got another Derek-coal-fire smile then, the kind that tingled all through me and went straight to my toes and then came swimming back round to the top of my head.
    “What would be a favorite with Miami?” said Derek. He was whispering now, which was a good thing