Out on a Limb Read Online Free PDF Page B

of letter from the stream.
    “What? Where?”
    “In here,” Tilley stuck her finger inside a hollow knothole in one of the huge oak branches that cut through the six corners of our treehouse. “Right here, in this little cave in the branch.”
    I took the blue paper from her hand and unfolded it.
     
    From the Desk of
    Lydia Florence Augustine McGrady
    Grand Oak Manor
    Number 9 Bellemonde Drive
     
    ID ID NOTEVERTHIN KAPA IROFSCIS SORSCO ULDDO
    SOMU CHHARM. IHAVETOLE AVETH ISBLO ODYHO USE. ABADDESTINYAWA ITS MEHERE.
    ALI FEISSOE ASI LYL OST.
    LETUSESCA PE. LETUSELO PE.
    I SOB ELME ETME:THETRE EHO US EATTEN.

    X
     
    “It’s on Great-great-aunt Lydia’s stationery,” I told Tilley. She was just out of kindergarten and couldn’t read cursive yet. As she looked at the block letters though, she moved her lips to sound out the words.
    “What does Great-great-aunt Lydia say?” Tilley asked, giving up.
    “I don’t know. It’s in code.”
    “Let’s uncode it.”
    “Decode it. Yeah.I’ll do that while you pick the cherries.”
    Pen and paper in hand, I headed across the meadow and climbed one of the gnarled cherry trees. Settling onto a branch, I stared at Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter. My best clue for cracking the code was the final letter,‘X’, where the signature would normally be. That had to be an ‘L’, for Lydia. So if ‘X’ was code for ‘L’, that meant the code alphabet was twelve letters ahead of the real alphabet. I wrote out the two alphabets.
     
    A=M B=N C=O
    D=P E=Q F=R
    G=S H=T I=U
    J=V K=W L=X
    M=Y N=Z O=A
    P=B Q=C R=D
    S=E T=F U=G
    V=H W=I X=J
    Y=K Z=L
     
    Then I started decoding. WR WR BC HS JSFHVWB was what I got for the first five words. It made no sense.
    Tilley climbed down to my branch, dangling cherries from her fingers. “What does it say?” she asked. Cherries dangled from her ears too.“
    This is harder than I thought,” I said. “I’ll figure it out later.”
    “Okay,” Tilley said. “I bet I can spit cherry pits farther than you.”
    “We’ll see about that.” I curled my tongue into a blowgun and spat my cherry pit. It shot a respectable distance over the meadow. Tilley spat her cherry pit. It went a really long way. She had a natural advantage at spitting because of her missing front teeth.
    “Good one,” I said.
    “That code letter is on the same blue paper as the ripped-up letter you found in the stream,” Tilley observed.
    “Yeah,” I said. “The exact same blue.”
    “And Great-great-aunt Lydia’s name is at the top of the code letter, right?”
    “Yeah. It’s her stationery.”
    “And that means Great-great-aunt Lydia wrote both letters, right?” Tilley spat another long-distance cherry pit.
    “Right.”
    “How come she rips stuff up, and writes stuff in code? How come she doesn’t want us to read what she writes?”
    I ate a triplet of cherries while I considered. Then I spat the three pits one after another, like semi-automatic gunfire. “Maybe she’s testing us. Maybe she has a secret that she doesn’t want to tell unless we prove ourselves worthy. Maybe she wants to find out if we’re smart enough to share her special knowledge.”
    “What kind of special knowledge?”
    “That’s what we’ve got to figure out,” I said.
    “So Great-great-aunt Lydia’s not like other grownups, right?”
    “Right. She’s eccentric.”
    “What’s eccentric mean?”
    “Eccentric? Eccentric means weird,” I said. “Weird in a good way.”

     

NOTEBOOK: #6
    NAME: Rosamund McGrady
    SUBJECT: The Pleasure of her Company
     

    Great-great-aunt Lydia’s letter was harder to decode than I’d expected. Every night at bedtime I’d pull the curtain shut around my bunk and read it with my headlamp. I experimented. I wrote out the normal alphabet with possible code alphabets beside it. I tried a code alphabet starting with ‘B’. I tried one starting with ‘C’. I tried one starting with every possible letter. None of it was right.