Free Once Upon a Midnight Eerie: Book #2 (Misadventures of Edgar/Allan) by Gordon McAlpine Page A

a feeling that show’s not going to run for long,” Edgar said.

    The next morning, plan B worked like this:
    With Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith breakfasting with Em and Milly’s parents back at the hotel, the Poe and Dickinson twins stood near the front of the line as the New Orleans Pirate Museum opened its doors. Once inside, they browsed the centuries-old skull-and-crossbones flags, the rusty swords, and the weathered treasure chests, trying to look like ordinary tourists.
    But, of course, the Poe and Dickinson twins were in no way “ordinary.”
    “Ready?” Milly asked the boys.
    Edgar and Allan looked around the museum. The crowd had thickened, this being the opening day of the show.
    Allan nodded. “It’s time.”
    The quartet moved from the first room to the larger, windowless room where the wax figures of the Lafitte brothers stood.
    “Time for you to get yours,” Edgar muttered to Pierre’s wax figure.
    Nearby stood a glass case containing personal items that had once belonged to the murderous Pierre: comb, razor, compass, hat, sword.
    “You think that’s the sword he used to run through our friends?” Em asked.
    “Could be,” answered Allan.
    Edgar turned to Milly. “Ready?”
    She nodded briskly and produced her phone. Then she tapped on the keyboard, entering a string of Internet commands to reach the control panel of the museum’s power and security system. Next, she bypassed the password, which she’d cracked the night before while the boys were occupied in the cemetery.
    “The password is, ‘Ahoy Matey,’” she whispered, disgruntled that it had been so easy. “An amateur could have broken in. I feel kind of insulted.”
    “How long will we have?” Allan asked.
    “We’ll have fifteen seconds between the time the power goes down and the backup generator kicks in, so we’ll have to act fast,” Em said. “Everybody ready?”
    Milly showed the phone to Edgar and Allan. “How does this algorithm look to you?”
    “Great,” the boys said.
    She grinned and pushed the button.

    Later that afternoon, the Poe and Dickinson twins sat in the otherwise unoccupied lobby of the Pepper Tree Inn, watching local news on an old console TV.
    “What’s so important on the tube?” Uncle Jack inquired as he came downstairs from a nap.
    “Current events,” they muttered.
    “Hi, kids,” Aunt Judith said, walking into the lobby with the Dickinson twins’ parents, Blossom and Claude, who were philosophy professors at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
    “So, is everyone well?” inquired Mrs. Dickinson, who the boys had noticed upon first meeting had a cool Phoenician symbol tattooed on her neck.
    The two sets of twins answered with nods, their attention still on the TV.
    Mr. Dickinson, who was bearded and wore a black turtleneck sweater, said, “Now, you girls know we allow
no television
.”
    The Poe family had no such rules.
    Just then the TV news show cut to a big graphic that read:

    Instead of turning off the TV, the Poe twins turned it up.
    A serious-looking newsman announced:
    “This is Ryan Holborn with new details about this morning’s shocking invasion of the New Orleans Pirate Museum. According to New Orleans police, intruders vandalized a wax figure and broke into a glass case during a momentary power outage.”
    The TV cut to a shot of the figure of Pierre Lafitte, dressed not in his pirate garb but instead in the striped outfit of a jailed convict (bought the night before by the Dickinson twins at a costume shop near the Pepper Tree Inn).
    “But the wax figure is not what makes this story so shocking,” continued the news anchor. “It’s that the unknown suspects took nothing from the museum, but instead
left behind
a valuable, pirate-related artifact, which has been authenticated over the past few hours. Live with us now is the New Orleans Pirate Museum’s curator, Ellen Payne. Thank you for joining us, Miss Payne.”
    The news feed cut to a live shot of a blonde woman