Free In Too Deep - 39 Clues 06 by Jude Watson Page B

load so I am including this jacket as well. GP has been instructed to pass it along to you.
    Tomorrow we go on to Lae. Then it is off across the Pacific to Howland.
    I'm sorry to report that I failed to find our assassin H, or any real c lues to his whereabouts. I was able to get to Batavia from Bandung and managed to find our contact.
    He told of a "scarred white man" who the natives believed had escaped the mountain. His body was intact but not his mind. What he had endured was terrible enough to break it.
    Here in Darwin our informer turned out to be a dead end. It was soon clear that the gentleman -- and I use the term loosely, because he was quite a charlatan-- was just looking for another payoff. All he offered was riddles.
    He even had the audacity to try to sell me a ring -- it will bring you luck, he said, so I bought it in hopes it would gain me information. It didn't. When I asked again if he knew H, he said both of them were in a hole but not to worry. Then he cackled a laugh and that was the end of it. Clearly he enjoyed giving me no information ... and making me pay for it. I am off into the blue. No more strongholds to penetrate. Only sky. AE"I don't get it," Dan said. "Who do you think AE is? Some Australian dude who flew a plane?"
    "Not a dude," Amy said with dawning excitement.
    She sprang up and ran to Shep's bookshelves. Naturally, she'd already checked out his library. Shep had whole shelves dedicated to aviation history. It didn't take long before she found what she was looking for.
    She thumped the book down on the surfboard table.90Dan hurried over. "Amelia Earhart?""It's got to be!" Amy said.
    "Her last flight was right around that time." One of Amy's childhood heroes had been Amelia Earhart. Grace had given her a biography of the flier when she was eight years old. "She was amazing. She was the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic.
    She broke records for speed and altitude. She didn't let anything stop her."She flipped to the index and looked up "last flight." Then she turned to the page and read through the itinerary. "Look," she said, pointing to the page.
    "She was in Darwin, Australia, on June 28, 1937. She was trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world, and by the longest distance. And Dan, look at the rest of her stops!"
    She placed the paper with her parents' itinerary next to Amelia's journey. Her parents had hit many of the major stops."They match," Dan said. "But why would Mom and Dad be following where Amelia Earhart went about a bazillion years before?""About sixty years before," Amy corrected. She tapped the paper. "Isabel said something to me about the Lucian stronghold in Karachi. I bet all these cities are strongholds for other branches, too.""So what happened after she left Darwin?"
    "She flew to Lae, New Guinea, for refueling. Then she took off for Howland Island which is basically a speck in the middle of the Pacific-- but she never made it. Her plane was nev er found. There were all sorts of rumors that she survived, but basically everyone believes that she and her navigator couldn't locate the island and ran out of gas. But before that happened, it looks like she had a secret agenda.
    Do you realize what this means? She was a Cahill!""So who was GP?" Dan asked.
    Amy searched through the book.
    "It must be George Putnam, her husband. They shipped the parachutes back because they would be useless over water.
    But whoever she trusted to ship the jacket didn't do it. Even then, it would have been valuable as a souvenir. It must have just stayed in Darwin. Mom must have had some kind of lead to it....Our assassin H,'" Dan read. "Do you think it could be Bob Troppo? Maybe she's using the word assassin in a funny way because he hit Mark Twain with his cane. She says he has scars, just like the photograph."
    "It has to be!" Amy said.
    "The Cahills have been looking for him for a long time, I guess. I wonder why." She reread the letter. "I wonder where Bandung