Free Legend of the Book Keeper by Daniel Blackaby Page B

Island hotel looked strangely at the man before him. Something about the peculiar man gave him chills. This night just keeps getting weirder and weirder . Already he had seen two young teenagers dash franticly into his lobby, demanding a room. Probably runaways he had thought at the time. Even in Vegas, it was unusual to rent a room out to such young customers.
    Now the man standing before him had something unusual in his appearance, but he couldn’t quite place what it was. The customer leaned over the desk and whispered, even though they were the only two men in the lobby, “I need a room. Just for tonight. Anything on floor fifteen perhaps?” The attendant looked strangely at the man in front of him, “Um, one second, Sir. Let me check the records.” Running his hands expertly across his keyboard he brought up the floor plan for floor fifteen. There was one room available. He opened his mouth to inform the odd customer, but stopped short. That particular floor was the very floor he had just checked the two teenagers in only half an hour earlier. Something doesn’t feel right .
    The man in front of the counter sensed the hesitation. Rea ching into his jacket pocket he produced a large wad of bills and dumped it on the counter. The attendant looked from the bills to the computer screen, and then back at the customer, “Yes, Sir, there is one room available. Just give me a moment while I make you a key.”

     
    “Are you sure?” Cody could not believe his ears; he had abandoned hope of ever unearthing the mysterious message behind the riddle. Jade nodded adamantly, “Yes, yes. It’s actually very straight forward; we just were going about it wrong from the beginning.” She paused, being pulled into thought again. Cody clenched his fists. “Well . . . where is it?” he demanded, pulsating with anticipation. Jade grabbed the letter off the desk and pointed to the first line. “You see, we’ve been doing the math wrong the entire time.” Cody felt offended. He recognized his academic prowess wasn’t equal to that of his friend, but even he was able to handle a simple mathematical equation such as fifty-three minus four. Jade noticed the dejected look on her friend’s face and smiled.
    “Don’t worry, buddy, I missed it, too. You see, we were so caught up on the simplicity of the question that we jumped right over the word until . Do you get it now?” Cody nodded his head in affirmation, although in truth he had no idea where she was going.
    Jade continued, “The subtraction is only the first half of the problem. It says until the rite does write . Forty-nine isn’t the answer —it’s the way to find the answer. Like a formula! It tells us that there are forty-nine more times, until a particular event takes place. The number we need is how many occurrences have already taken place . All we have to do is determine how many total occurrences there will be in the end, when that event takes place, and then simply subtract forty-nine from it. That’s how we get the answer we need.”
    Cody’s head strained to wrap itself around his friend’s explanation. Math had never been his strong suit, but he was beginning to understand. “Well, that’s great. But we don’t know what the numbers are adding up to, so the number is still useless.”
    Jade pointed back to the riddle. “That’s where this next part comes in. Until the rite does write . What do we know about Wesley?” Cody was confused by the random question. He knew a few things about Wesley: he had apparently lived a creepily long time, he was completely crazy, he had been brutally murdered, and he had apparently missed the memo that medieval swords were no longer fashionable. But none of these seemed to be of any relevance to the problem.
    “Um, I don’t know. He was tall?”
    Jade grabbed her forehead in frustration. “No, you thickhead, he was British! ” She let the statement hang in the air a moment, as though it alone solved the mystery.