“What uh-oh?” I asked. “I hate uh-oh.”
“I might have made a mistake when I lost my place in the van. I think I might have put the man’s-best-friend spell on him.”
Ammon was on his knees licking up the salt. He moved to the work island and lifted his leg.
“Bad dog!” I said. “No!”
He put his leg down and looked up at me.
“Do something!” I said to Glo. “Change him back.”
“That could be a problem,” Glo said, “since I seem to have made a combination of two spells. But here’s the good news. I didn’t have any powdered newt snot, so the spell is most likely temporary.”
Diesel walked into the kitchen, set the map on the counter, and went to the refrigerator. “How’s it going?”
“Not so good,” I said. “Ammon thinks he’s a dog.”
“Not my bad,” Diesel said, grabbing a meat pie. “And I’m not walking him.”
“So this is the map,” Josh said, staring down at it. “Hard to believe it will lead to such riches.”
Diesel ate the meat pie cold like a sandwich and washed it down with a beer. He removed the map from the frame and placed the map back on the countertop. I thought Josh was right. The map didn’t look like anything that would lead us to a treasure. It was a round piece of old parchment. On one side was the inscription “Denarius clavis ad chartum est.” There was also a rudimentary sketch of a collection of islands below the inscription. One of the islands had an X drawn onto it. The other side of the map was filled from top to bottom with seemingly random letters. A series of concentric circles drawn on the round map were the only things that seemed to separate one group of letters from another. It looked like an archery target.
“This isn’t a slam dunk,” Glo said. “The treasure could be buried anywhere on those islands. We could dig holes for a thousand years and never find anything.”
Diesel turned the map over to the side with the letters. He put the coin on the parchment. Nothing magical happened. Josh tried to rub the letters with the coin, as if it was a scratch-off lottery ticket. Nothing happened.
“How did you get the seven pieces of coin to stick together?” I asked Diesel.
“Superglue.”
“Maybe it’s like a Ouija board,” Glo said. “Maybe we just need to put the coin on the map, and we all put our hands on it, and the coin will move around while we chant.”
“It’s some kind of a puzzle,” I said. “I’m sure we have to figure out how to use these concentric circles.”
I put the coin in the center circle…the bull’s-eye. It was a perfect fit.
“Omigosh,” Glo said. “There’s a letter peeking out through one of the little holes in the coin.”
I rotated the coin and there were more alphabet letters.
“The coin has to be perfectly rotated to have letters appear in the holes,” I said. “Right now we have an ‘E’ and an ‘O.’?”
“We need the missing piece of the coin,” Diesel said. “Without that piece it’s impossible to know if the coin is oriented correctly, if we’re missing letters, or even if we have the correct letters.”
“What about the outer rings?” Josh asked. “They all have letters in them, too.”
Diesel put the coin on top of the outermost ring. The width of the coin was exactly the width of the “doughnut ring,” the space between the outside ring and the next one. In fact, each of the concentric rings, though they formed smaller and smaller doughnuts, had the same exact width of approximately one and a half inches, the same width as the diameter of the coin.
“Try to rotate the coin in the outer ring and see if you can find letters in the holes,” Diesel said to me.
I chose a random place within the doughnut ring and put the coin inside it. I rotated the coin slightly until letters were visible through the holes. I used that as my starting point and rolled the coin, like the wheel of a bicycle rolling down the road, so that it stayed inside the confines of the doughnut ring. It looked like a planet revolving around the sun. As the coin moved through its orbit, additional letters were revealed through the holes. I rolled the coin around all of the rings, and Diesel wrote down all of the letters.
“This makes no sense,” Diesel said, looking at what he’d written. “We need the last piece of the coin from Wulf. We can’t decipher the map without it.”
Ammon was on his feet, looking around. He spied Cat, gave a woof, and chased Cat into the living room. Cat planted his feet, hissed, and swatted at Ammon, slashing a four-inch rip in Ammon’s pants leg. Ammon yelped and jumped away from Cat.
I pointed at the couch. “Sit!” I said to Ammon.
Ammon got on the couch, scrunched around a little, and curled up.
“We have to do something with him,” I said to Diesel. “He can’t stay here. Either we turn him over to Rutherford, or else we take him to the animal shelter.”
Crash! Ammon fell off the couch.