Cheesie Mack Is Not a Genius or Anything (3 page)

Gloucester (people here say
GLAH-stah
 … weird, huh?) is the oldest fishing port in America. It was founded in 1623, only three years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, which is also in Massachusetts somewhere. I have never seen Plymouth Rock, but rocks last almost forever, so I guess it’s still there.

Georgie and I live less than a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, in a neighborhood of big, old houses. Not old like Pilgrims, but Granpa says our house is older than he is, and I know he is way more than seventy. (He
does not celebrate his birthday, and I don’t even know when it is. He won’t tell.)

Our houses are three blocks apart if you use the streets, but Georgie and I only go that way if we’re on our bikes. There’s a scrawny little stream in a scrawny little gully that separates our backyards, and it is so narrow that last year Georgie launched a balloon filled with chocolate pudding all the way from his bedroom window over the trees and the gully into my backyard, where my sister was playing with her friends.

I told you he has terrific ideas!

Of course I was in Georgie’s bedroom at the time, but on purpose here’s what I
did not
do:

1. I did not fill the balloon with pudding.
   
2. I did not touch Georgie’s huge slingshot.
   
3. I did not help pull back the rubber part.
   

I did not do any of these things so that if Mom or someone asked, I would not have to lie. I did help aim it, kind of. When the pudding bomb landed and splashed chocolate on you-know-who, the girls screamed like the universe was exploding—and even though we got yelled at, it was cool.

I trotted through the gully on the path that Georgie and I made, then up the other side and through the won’t-close-gate into his backyard. Once inside his back door—I never have to knock—I yelled for him. He yelled back from the basement.

I walked down the stairs. They creaked and squeaked like in horror movies. (I’m not trying to scare you—it’s just one of the details I remember.)

His house, like mine, is really old. The basement and stairs are made out of wood, and the floor is mostly dirt except for the concrete part where Mr. Sinkoff keeps his tools.

I could see a shadow moving on the basement floor, so I knew Georgie was directly beneath me, under the stairs. When I reached the bottom, Georgie stepped out and grabbed me, talking real fast.

“I found something big! Really big!”

There were cobwebs in his hair. He had one hand behind his back.

I have known Georgie my whole life. We have always been best friends … except for the time in third grade when he called me Dumbo Ears. (This
is really the last time I am going to mention my ears!)

Georgie has reddish-brown hair, greenish-brown eyes, braces, and really cool glasses with bright red rims. He is already eleven and is almost twice my size. He is good at games where being big is an advantage, like basketball and football. My best sports are soccer and baseball because I am wicked fast and very excellent at catching flies.

I have brown hair, brown eyes, and a whitish scar on my thumb where a fishhook stabbed me when I was on a lake with my dad. I was eight and fooling around. Don’t ask.

Georgie and I go to the same school, have always had the same teacher, and in the summer, always go to camp in Maine.

“I was down here looking for black widow spiders,” Georgie continued. “I figured if I caught one in a jar, we could use it to scare your sister. But this”—Georgie brought his arm around and held up a yellowed envelope with one corner ripped off—“was
completely hidden between those two boards.” He pointed under the stairs, but I took my eyes off the envelope for only a second. “It’s addressed to my house, but the name is”—he squinted at the envelope—“G. J. Prott.”

“Probably there was somebody named G. J. Prott who lived here before you guys,” I said.

Georgie nodded. “Look what was in the envelope!”

He held out a piece of paper folded up small, then opened it. Inside were a silvery metal heart on a silvery metal chain and one penny.

“A penny? Not exactly treasure, Georgie.”

“Yeah, but this necklace is probably real silver. And what if there’s more hidden stuff? Like gold and diamonds.”

I picked up the necklace and held it high between us. The lightbulb on the basement rafters was not very bright, but the heart sparkled as it spun slowly.

“I bet a hypnotist could use this to hypnotize people,” I said.

Georgie didn’t say anything. Maybe I’d sort of hypnotized him.

I placed the heart necklace back on the paper in Georgie’s hand and examined the coin. The back looked a lot different from any other penny I’d ever seen, but the front had the same face on it: Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth president.

(Glenn Philips, the smartest kid in my class, can name all the presidents
and
all the vice presidents. In order!)

I looked at the date on the coin. “This penny was made in 1909.”

That snapped Georgie out of his trance. He grabbed the penny and peered at it closely. “That means it’s over a hundred years old.”

One of us said, “Whoa.”

I don’t remember who.

Georgie set the penny down on the paper next to the heart necklace and handed it all to me. He held the envelope up so that we both could look at it.

The postmark—that’s the inky stuff in the circle that tells when and where the letter was mailed—was kind of smeary. We could read “Calif.” and “Mar 11 9:43 AM 195,” but the last number of the year and whatever city in California were unreadable. The stamp was blue-green, with
Wildlife Conservation
across the top,
3¢ United States Postage 3¢
on the bottom, and in the middle, a big fish jumping from a stream next to the tiny words
King Salmon
.

“I’ve got it!” Georgie said suddenly. “Someone didn’t want anyone to know where this letter came from, so they ripped off the corner where the return address was and smeared up the postmark on purpose.” He pointed at the unfolded paper in my hand. “And there’s something real suspicious about putting plain white paper in an envelope.”

I shrugged. “Maybe whoever sent it just wanted to keep the stuff inside from flopping around. And maybe the envelope got ripped and smudged by accident.”

“Nah,” Georgie said. “We are on to something big. That coin. It’s probably worth millions.”

I didn’t think it could be worth that much, but I
looked at it closely. “I don’t think I’ve held anything that was over a hundred years old before.”

“Maybe this,” Georgie said, jabbing at the paper in my hand, “has invisible ink on it.”

I held it up to the light. “It looks like plain, ordinary paper to me.”

“Look, if it had a secret map on it, you wouldn’t be able to see it. And maybe, since you can’t see it, that proves it’s there.” Even though we were alone, Georgie lowered his voice like he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “If we could read it, we’d know where the rest of the treasure is buried.” He touched the postmark. “Probably in California.”

I took the envelope from Georgie and pointed at the stamp. “Probably in the bottom of a stream with a bunch of king salmon jumping all around,” I teased.

Georgie tried to get me into a headlock, but I squirgled out of his grip and jumped away. (There is actually no such word as “squirgled,” but since what I actually did was to squirm and wiggle … Well, you get it.)

“I don’t know about any buried treasure,” I said,
“but let’s get on your computer and see what we can find about this old penny.”

We trotted upstairs to his bedroom and turned on his computer. While it booted up, Georgie dug around in his closet for an old magician’s set that he said had a potion that would make invisible ink turn visible.

I did a web search for “United States coins” and found a site that listed every United States coin ever made. Did you know that we used to have three-cent coins?

Then I searched for “Lincoln penny value” and discovered that it’s a Lincoln
cent
, not
penny
. The word “cent” means that there are one hundred of them in every dollar and is almost the same as the word “century” (one hundred years, duh!). I don’t know where the word “penny” comes from—and neither does anyone else. I looked it up. But there are pennies in England, and I’m guessing that there are one hundred of them to the pound or euro or whatever the people in England use for money. I wonder if every country uses money that breaks into one hundred smaller pieces. If you know of a country
that doesn’t, please go to my website. I’m making a list.

Georgie had opened his magic set and was struggling to unscrew the potion bottle when I saw that there was a little letter
S
under the 1909 next to Abraham Lincoln’s chest.

Georgie grunted as he got the top off the potion bottle. “Rats, it’s all dried up.”

“Hey, Georgie,” I said after reading more of the web page. “It says here that this little
S
means that this penny was made in San Francisco.”

Georgie leaned over, took a quick look at the coin, and nodded a couple of times. “California. See? I told you so.” He put on his magician’s hat and bow tie and began waving his wand around, trying to make some fake flowers appear and disappear.