Barking Up the Wrong Lead - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

My back room felt especially cold.  Normally the heat of the flames would help, but on that night, winter had made a brisk and brutal return to the Gallagher Academy.  I wore two sweaters and three pairs of socks, but each breath I took turned to smoke, never letting me forget how cold it really was.

The picture of Matthew Morgan hung in the center of strings and papers, held on to the wall by too much cheap tape.  There were clusters of information here and there, all from days that I had suspected a lead, but came up short.  Pictures of World War II pilots smiled at me.  Dorothy’s ruby slippers seemed to shine right through the paper they were printed on.  Everywhere I looked, there were newspaper reports from the sixties and nationwide school statistics from the eighties.

Bits and pieces of Grandpa Joe’s report hung among the chaos—torn up pieces of the packet categorizing the different leads.  “The Blackthorne Military Academy for Boys will be a facility for boys who meet exceptional standards and show specialized potential” one scrap had typed across it.  Just below the type, I saw Grandpa Joe’s handwriting, crossing out the end of the sentence and writing with nowhere else to go.

The report provided minimal details.  Grandpa Joe had found a way to say a whole lot without really saying anything.  I’m sure that whatever he had written meant something to someone somewhere, but most of it was completely lost on me.  He had made sure—as all great spies do—that if the information fell into the wrong hands that very little could be recovered from it.  It was up to me to crack his code.  It was up to me to find Mom.

My latest lead involved a line that I had read over and over, but had just realized the possible importance of.  “The facility will be located in Nokesville, Virginia, far from its ancestor.  The use of cave systems will be prohibited.”

It hadn’t seemed like much the first hundred times I read it, but with my leads dwindling, it came down to investigating the cave systems.  During my many hours of searching, I had eventually come across a news report from a local station in Maine, coving an explosion in the nearby mountains.  The incident was marked as a mining accident except for mining accidents to occur, there usually has to be, y’know, mines.  According to the state of Maine, no such mines exist or have ever existed in that area.

But it wasn’t enough. I knew that.  If I wanted anyone to take me seriously, I have to come up with a better lead than that.  Something better than the maybe-explosion that may or may not have something to do with Blackthorne—the thing that my mother only possibly told me for code-breaking reasons.  I needed something stronger.

With such little to go on, I had started turning to the adults in my life, knowing somehow that they would have answers.  They always did.

Except I had to be careful.  Whenever I talked about The Phone Call, I’d get dirty looks.  They really didn’t want me on the case.  When I asked if Aunt Bex’s team had found anything at the ruby slipper exhibit, all I got was a simple “no” from Grandma and a much sharper “don’t worry about it” from Dad.

Dad had made it perfectly clear that I wasn’t to be involved with anything about Mom’s case, which meant that any question I asked—especially those about Blackthorne—were immediately considered suspicious.  I’m serious.  One time, when we were in the middle of one of Dad’s Fieldwork lectures, I asked where the bathrooms were and he looked at me like he thought that I was running a top secret mission from stall three (which is completely ridiculous anyways because everyone knows that stall number two is the prime spot to run a mission from).  I couldn’t risk asking the questions.  It would blow the whole operation.

Lucky for me, I had some of the brightest up-and-coming minds on my side.

I had Will and Bill off trying to crack Grandpa Joe.  I told them to get any information they could without seeming suspicious.  It was a hard case though.  I mean, can you imagine trying to wrangle information out of him?  The man won’t even tell us what time his shows are on, much less reveal his classified plans for a top secret spy school.