Page 85 of No Escape

Winston cradled the plane and carefully carried it to the scale table. I climbed down from the ladder and angled it under the lamp so I could get a better look.

“I think I see something.” I carefully reached my hand into the cockpit, twisted my hand, and slowly pulled out a small round weight. This weight was dark blue and had the number six on it. Taped to the top was a small, folded note.

“Yes!” Alessa exclaimed. “Another weight. Way to go, Gio.”

“Don’t give me the credit. This is a total team effort.” I carefully extracted the note and handed the weight to Stefan. He and Winston began trying to balance the scale with the weights we’d already collected.

“Read the note,” Vittoria urged me, so I gingerly unfolded it. Like the others, the clue was in both English and Italian, but since there were non-Italian speakers in our group, I read aloud in English.

“My seas are dry, / My mountains rise no more. / My forests are green, but treeless. / My cities are many, / But of people, I have none.”

“Sounds like an apocalypse,” Alessa mused. “Dry seas, no people. The end of the world, an endless stretch of desert, or a nuclear winter, maybe.”

“Perhaps it refers to the end of time,” Father Armando offered. “In a biblical sense.”

“But the forest in the riddle is green, not burned,” Winston said, looking up from the scale. “That doesn’t sound like an apocalypse to me.”

“Perhaps it refers to the moon,” Stefan mused. “It has a sea with no water.”

“But the moon doesn’t have cities or green forests,” Vittoria countered. “So that doesn’t make sense, either.”

“Clarissa?” I asked. “Have any thoughts?”

Everyone moved aside so Clarissa could look at it. She maneuvered the paper beneath the lamp to see it better. After a moment, she looked up. “I think the riddle is referring to a map.”

“A map?” I said, stunned.

Stefan threw his hands up in astonishment. “How. Do. You. Do. That? It’s crazy amazing.”

Clarissa bestowed Stefan with a dazzling smile, one that practically lit up the entire room. Romeo had told me that Lexi’s mother had been a beauty queen or something when she was younger and, no kidding, that woman could still turn heads. Apparently, she also had intellect by the bucket load. Impressive.

“I told you I like crossword puzzles, riddles, logic, and word games,” she said lightly, as if she hadn’t just solved a complicated riddle in less than a minute. “I do one in the newspaper every morning, even when my favorite paper moved online. It’s my thing, as is said these days.”

“Well, I’m highly appreciative of your thing, Clarissa,” Stefan declared, bowing and causing us all to laugh.

Since Clarissa had mentioned a map, I quickly moved to inspect the only map I saw in the room—the gigantic world map hanging on the right-side wall. If the riddle was pointing us to a map, there was no bigger one in the room than this one. It was mounted in a thick wooden frame and was marked as being from the 1600s. Its depiction of the Americas, Oceania, and eastern Asia was wildly out of proportion. Greenland and Antarctica were completely missing, and there were only a few representations of cities and an occasional name in roughly the right geographic location. Rivers were prominently displayed, but mountain ranges were not.

Unlike modern maps, this one lacked a compass that oriented the map to the cardinal directions. Instead, whoever had mounted the map had placed a compass on the frame adjacent to the map to avoid damaging what was clearly a valuable historical item.

“What are we looking for?” Alessa asked, joining me at the map.

“I have no idea, but hopefully we’ll know when we see it. Got any ideas?”

“Not a single one,” she murmured.

“Father Armando, how much time do we have left?” I asked.

The priest checked the old-fashioned clock on the wall. “About an hour. I think we’re making good progress. We’ve already collected three weights and several clues.”

“Although, unfortunately, the weights we’ve found are not enough to balance the scale,” Winston replied. He’d been trying to balance the weights we’d already found, with no success.

Stefan joined Alessa and me at the map, and the three of us stared at it for a while longer. Without knowing what we were looking for, it was impossible to find anything. We decided to regroup to see what options we had.

“In terms of clues, we have one pointing us to the map, but we’re not sure what we’re looking for,” I said. “Just the same, Clarissa, Alessa, and I will keep looking at the map and see if anything jumps out at us. Stefan, head back to the card catalog and look for books that have to do with maps. Vittoria, Winston, and Father Armando, check the bookshelves and tables for any maps lying around or books that might have mapsinthem. We have to figure out why the map is our clue.”

“Wait,” Stefan suddenly said. “There was a dedicated section in the card catalog labeled ‘Maps.’” He rushed back to the catalog and began thumbing through it. “Yes, it’s here. But that’s weird. From what I can tell, there are several hundred cards for maps. But where are all of these maps?”

I looked around but only saw the giant map on the wall. “Severalhundredmaps?”

---