Lost Cipher Read Free Page A

treasure codes onto the seat next to him. He wasn’t feeling all that lucky.
    His grandmother noticed and dropped the pamphlet into the bag with the toothpaste. “Hey now,” she said, glancing across the seat at him, “you might need that. Maybe you’ll get a chance to do some treasure hunting up there at the camp.” She started up the truck and gazed out the windshield, the smile leaving her voice. “Sure could use some right about now, couldn’t we?”
    Lucas didn’t answer. He just looked at the mountains looming ahead.
    Sure could .

CHAPTER 3
    Outside of town, the road narrowed, switchbacking its way up the west side of the Blue Ridge. Lucas caught glimpses between the trees, down to the farmland they had just crossed. The air rushing in through the truck’s open windows was still humid, but up here it was a little cooler and smelled of rotting logs and evergreen needles. Every so often the roadside cliffs glistened with tiny cascades bubbling straight from the rock, like the mountains’ cold blood seeping from veins opened by the slice of the highway.
    They passed a sign telling them they had entered a national forest, and after that the only buildings in sight were the tin-roofed farmhouses far below. Once they reached the crest of the mountains, Lucas’s grandmother asked him to read the directions to the camp aloud, and they finally spotted the tiny, moss-covered sign for Camp Kawani partly hidden by a tangle of roadside vegetation. The forgotten little marker made the camp seem even lonelier, like whoever ran it wanted it completely isolated from the outside world. When they turned onto the gravel road leading to the place he would spend the next seven nights, the knot in Lucas’s stomach tightened.
    Half a mile down the entrance road, they came out of the trees into a narrow, grassy valley surrounded by forested ridges. Lucas’s grandmother slowed the truck in front of a small cabin with a stone foundation and a hand-lettered sign tacked to the front porch that read “Camp Kawani Check-In.” Another vehicle, a pickup much newer than theirs, was stopped in the small parking area.
    Lucas forced himself out of the car and surveyed the layout of the place as he followed his grandmother toward the office. The road they were on looped around two rows of four cabins that faced each other across a grassy space. At the far end of the cabins sat a log building with high, horizontal slits for windows, and doors at either end. Behind it were several stacks of brightly colored canoes and kayaks. A circle of log benches surrounded a blackened fire pit at the center of the lawn between the cabins, and a squat stone tower with a large, brass bell on top overlooked the fire circle. Probably what they ring when a kid tries to escape , Lucas imagined.
    Beyond the buildings, a raised wooden platform perhaps ten feet high looked out over a long, blue-green lake that filled the rest of the valley floor. Though the water looked cold, a few kids were already swimming, and a couple more were doing cannonballs and jackknifes off the platform. The lifeguard, an older boy in a light blue T-shirt, watched from a chair at the top of the platform. Attached to a stout pole on his platform was one end of a long steel cable that swooped out over the lake and disappeared high in the trees on a hill at the far end.
    Lucas’s grandmother had stopped and was watching him. “Looks like fun, don’t it?” she said.
    â€œLooks like a bunch of city kids swimmin’ in a pond for the first time in their life,” Lucas grumbled.
    She ignored his sour mood and stepped up onto the porch. A wooden plaque bolted above the door was inscribed with the camp’s name and a quote from someone named John Muir. He paused to read it while his grandmother went into the office.
    I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains.
    Whatever ,