Free The Tell-Tale Start by Gordon McAlpine

to speak.” He chuckled at his own joke.
    Aunt Judith slid out after him. “Won’t Roderick be glad to see his boys! It’ll be just a couple hours now.”
    Edgar and Allan still hadn’t moved from the booth. Their brains had begun working to process this latest, strangest message:
    Typos…
    “Let’s go,” Uncle Jack said. “We haven’t come all this way just to sit in a diner.”
    “Boys?” Aunt Judith pressed.
    As if in a dream, they rose as one and followed their aunt and uncle out of the restaurant, their brains humming in perfect coordination.
    Typos
…
    Then they stopped.
    Might some of the recent mysterious messages have contained typos
?
    “Oh no,” they said in unison in the parking lot.
    In a flash, they grasped what this latest communiqué meant.
    “Wait!” they cried as their aunt and uncle opened the car doors to climb in.
    “What is it?” Uncle Jack asked.
    The boys processed it, working backward. They substituted letters here and there for every word in every mysterious message they’d received. One ordinary brain would have taken hours to go through all the possibilities—but Edgar and Allan, working together, took mere seconds.
    They turned pale when they realized that changing two letters under their old photo in the brochure turned a happy invitation into a dire warning: “Stay far away!” And worse, the “brilliant trip” to the farm was really a brilliant
trap
!
    Edgar and Allan looked at each other.
    Wasn’t this just about picking up the family cat from a kindhearted animal lover? Unless…
    The boys remembered the poster of the sleeping kitten: “Beware the cat napping.” Remove a space and the two words become one:
catnapping.
    Clear as moonlight.
    Roderick Usher had been catnapped to lure Edgar and Allan to the Gale Farm, a trap from which they should stay far away!
    But who wanted to trap them? And why?
    Uncle Jack stood impatiently beside the driver’s side door. “Get in, boys. What’s wrong with you?”
    Danger and deceit…That’s what was wrong.
    But how to explain this to their aunt and uncle?
    Even more pressing: what to do about it?
    Edgar and Allan knew there was still time to persuade Uncle Jack to turn the car around and safely return home. (Even if he refused, they could always reprogram the car’s GPS at the next gas station and be halfway back to Baltimore before Uncle Jack realized he was driving in the wrong direction.) But what then would become of Roderick Usher? The boys would
never
abandon their best friend.
    This journey, which had started as a mere retrieval of their cat, was now a full-blown rescue mission, requiring the boys to walk with eyes wide open into some kind of trap.
    Hadn’t they always wanted to match wits against an opponent more formidable than their school principal?
    “Why are you two acting so strange?” Aunt Judith asked with concern.
    The boys looked at each other. They knew that the disconnected brains of Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith didn’t work as fast as their own. So how to make them understand? Or might their guardians, natural worriers, be better off not knowing? Worry only made things more difficult. Besides, how truly dangerous could a villain be whose lair was a broken-down
Wizard of Oz
amusement park?
    “Oh, nothing to fret over,” Edgar and Allan said in unison.

    The gravel road that led from the highway to the Gale Farm and OZitorium twisted into a dense cornfield,winding among eight-foot-high stalks until soon all that was visible from within the car were walls of corn.
    “It’s like being in a maze,” Edgar said nervously.
    “Maize,” Aunt Judith remarked, turning and grinning at them. “We’re in a maze of maize. You know, M-A-I-Z-E? The Native American word for corn. It’s a pun. Do you get it, boys?”
    Of course they got it. But that didn’t mean they thought it was funny. Still, Aunt Judith had given it her best shot. So they forced crooked smiles.
    She beamed.
    Soon the stalks thinned, and