Page 31 of No Escape

A few minutes later, Tito called. “Lexi, I’m at the nine stone.” Another minute later, my dad shouted he’d made it to the X stone marker. If I triangulated their voices with my location, the stone with VIII should be somewhere in the middle and straight ahead of me. I headed quickly down the path, tracing an arc along one of the seemingly infinite number of similar curves.

I found nothing. The VIII stone remained elusive.

I stopped in the middle of the path, unsure what to do next, when I heard a slight whispering sound. The breeze picked up slightly, and I lost it. I circled the area once more, standing downwind and straining my ears. At last, I heard it again, slightly louder as the wafting breeze carried the sound to me more clearly.

It sounded like a trickle of running water.

“Has anyone seen a fountain or heard water running?” I shouted.

“Not me,” Mom shouted back. “Did you find something?”

“Maybe,” I yelled. I tried to push forward on the hedge where I could hear the sound, but it was too thick and dense.

I needed some help, and fast. “Everyone, come toward my voice again. Now.”

Chapter Seventeen

Lexi Carmichael

When everyone was assembled again, I spoke. “Listen carefully and see if you can hear anything.”

Everyone fell silent, listening.

“I hear it!” Mia shouted first. “It sounds like water dripping, and it’s coming from that hedge, right there.”

“You mean the one without an entrance,” I said wryly. “We need to find a way through. Everyone, take a section of this hedge and go piece by piece to see if there’s a door or an opening we’re missing.”

We lined up about six feet apart and began going down the hedge, painstakingly searching and poking at it. A couple of minutes later, Tito called out, “I found it!”

We all raced toward him, but he’d vanished.

“Tito?” I called out. “Where are you?”

We studied the hedge, but it appeared impenetrable. With a laugh, Tito’s head poked out of the hedge a few feet away from me. “Here,” he said before disappearing again.

I reached the spot where Tito’s head had been but saw no opening. I stuck my hands straight into the hedge and discovered it had no interlocking branches. I pushed forward through the covering growth and found myself in a tunnel of hedge before it opened into a mown area about as wide as a small tennis court. Tito stood smiling at me, a large stone with the number VIII set in the grass at his feet.

“We found it!” I shouted at the others. “Push through the hedge. The branches aren’t interlocked.”

Mia came through next, followed by Oscar, Mom, and finally Dad.

“Brilliant,” Oscar said, looking around in surprise. “A secret garden within the maze.”

There were only two other objects besides the stone VIII marker inside the hidden garden. Near the center, a large Roman sundial sat on the ground enclosed within a circle of marble. At the far end of the garden, near the hedge, stood a large fountain with a marble statue of a woman in a long, flowing robe and two children. The woman held an urn above the children, the water trickling out of it. The trickle of water was what I’d heard when passing the hedge.

I skipped the sundial for now and headed for the statue. When I got closer, I saw the water spilled out of the woman’s urn through a spout that split the flow of water into two streams. Each of the streams fell into separate cups being held aloft by two young boys, who were identically aged and dressed. The water overflowed their cups and ran down their arms and bodies back into the pool that surrounded the statue.

“It’s beautiful,” my mother said, coming to stand beside me. Mia followed her. “Is there a significance to it?”

“Probably,” I said, although I wasn’t sure how.

I walked around the statue a few times, then headed back to the sundial, where Oscar, my dad, and Tito were studying it. The metal sundial was set in a wide, flat circle of marble. Just outside the marble base, in the grass, a ring of round stones the size of a man’s hand were equally spaced around the base.

“Do you see anything unusual?” I asked them.

“Not really. It looks like an ordinary sundial,” my dad confessed. “What do you think?”

I examined the sundial, comparing the time with my watch. “It’s much larger than the one I saw in the alcove, which reminds me we now have less than twenty minutes to solve the puzzle and get back to the veranda.”

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