The Genius Files #4 (13 page)

“Are you okay?” Dr. McDonald asked, checking to see if there was any blood on his son in places where blood wasn't supposed to be.

“Yeah, I think so,” Coke said, still dazed. Then he turned to his sister. “You saved my life.”

“It was just instinct,” she said. “I saw something falling. I didn't know what it was.”

A few people came over to see what was going on. After all, it wasn't every day that a cow fell out of the fake Eiffel Tower. Some teenage girls took cell phone pictures of the cow and walked away giggling. A man wearing a cowboy hat and blue jeans walked over. He knelt down and put his hand on the cow.

“It's dead,” he said.

“That's so sad,” said Mrs. McDonald.

“It would have been a lot sadder if our kids were under it,” Dr. McDonald told her.

“It's cold as an ice pop,” said the guy in the cowboy hat, who appeared to know a thing or two about cows. “I reckon this bossy was dead before it hit the ground.”

“Why would somebody drop a dead cow on my son's head?” Mrs. McDonald demanded. “For that matter, how did they get a dead cow up there in the first place?”

“Why is the sky blue?” the guy replied. “Why is sugar sweet? Stuff happens.”

“Wait a minute,” Dr. McDonald said, clearly annoyed. “There are scientific reasons why the sky is blue or sugar is sweet. There's no logical explanation for why a cow should fall on our son's head.”

“Never said it was logical,” drawled the guy in the cowboy hat. He stood up and walked away.

Just for the record, this was not the first time a large object had fallen—or been dropped—on the McDonald twins. Back in North Carolina, Pep was standing under a building that looked like a giant chest of drawers when a
real
chest of drawers fell out of it and nearly killed her. At South of the Border in South Carolina, Coke was standing under the giant Pedro statue when a bag full of plastic Pedro statues almost landed on him.

And now, a cow.

“Whoever did this is going to
pay
!” Coke said, his fists clenched.

He was sweating and his heart was racing, as you would imagine your heart might race if you had nearly
been flattened by a dead cow dropped from sixty-five feet. Pep put her arm around him protectively.

“I'm sure it was just an accident,” she said, shooting a look at her brother.

“Maybe we should take you to a doctor,” Dr. McDonald told Coke.

“I'm fine. Let's just get out of here.”

“Well, I want to file a formal complaint,” said Mrs. McDonald. “Somebody should be notified that cows are falling on people. You could get killed out here. This place is dangerous.”

While their parents went to look for a place to lodge their complaint, Pep walked her brother back to the car to rest and recuperate.

“Do you think that was intentional?” Pep asked.

“No, a dead cow
accidentally
fell out of that tower on my head,” Coke snapped.

“You know what I mean. Did somebody drop it on purpose?”

“You can bet on it,” Coke said, looking up again at the tower. “And he's gonna
pay
.”

“Or she.”

To get her mind off what had just happened, Pep opened her notepad and looked at the cipher that had been stumping her all morning:

P-C-F-T-H-B-L-R-N-Y-S-T-N

She stared at the message, manipulating the letters in her mind. And then, after a few minutes, Pep picked up a pencil. Her brain saw something it hadn't seen before. Maybe the adrenaline had something to do with it.

“I just noticed something,” she told Coke. “There are no vowels.”

“So?”

“Well, if there are no vowels, it's obvious,” Pep told her brother. “All we need to do is put in the vowels.”

“But how do we know where to put them?” Coke asked.

“The
TH
helps,” Pep told him. “There's probably an
E
after that.”

“How do you know?”

“Look at it,” Pep said. “There aren't many words that have
THB
in them. And
THE
is a really common word. And if that word is
THE
, the next word is
BL
-something-
RNY
. What vowel would fit in there?

“Only an
A
,” Coke said. “
BLARNY
, or
BLARNEY
. The Blarney.”

“The Blarney Stone!” Pep shouted. “
STN
must be
STONE
after you put the vowels in!”

“Then what would
PCF
mean?” Coke asked.

They both stared at the letters for a long time. . . .

PCF THE BLARNEY STONE

“Piece of!” Pep suddenly blurted out. “A piece of the Blarney Stone!”

“Wow, you are
good
.”

“What's a blarney stone, anyway?” Pep asked.

“It's a big rock at the top of a castle in Blarney, Ireland,” Coke explained, recalling a book he'd once read during detention. “They call it ‘the Stone of Eloquence,' and the legend goes that if you kiss it, you'll never be lost for words.”

“I don't get it,” Pep said. “We're not going to Ireland. It doesn't make any sense.”

Oh, it made sense. It just didn't make sense
yet
.

I
f you recall from the first Genius Files book, Coke and Pep received a bunch of mysterious messages that appeared to have no common connection. But actually those messages led them to their climactic confrontation with Dr. Warsaw at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin.

In the second book, it also seemed as though the ciphers had nothing in common, but in the end they all referred to items inside the National Museum of American History, where the twins encountered the deranged teenager Archie Clone.

Once again, in the
third
book, the ciphers seemed to be completely incomprehensible, until the twins finally realized that they all had something to do with Graceland, Elvis Presley's mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. That's where Evil Elvis/Aunt Judy was waiting to ambush them.

But what could these two
new
messages possibly mean? Pep turned to a blank page in her notepad and wrote them out in her neat handwriting:

1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO

2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE

Dr. and Mrs. McDonald came back from the Lamar County Chamber of Commerce, where they had lodged a formal complaint about the dangerous conditions at the fake Eiffel Tower.

“What did you say?” Pep asked.

“I told them a dead cow fell out of the Eiffel Tower and almost landed on my son,” said Dr. McDonald.

“And what did
they
say?” asked Pep.

“They just laughed,” said Mrs. McDonald. “They thought it was funny.”

It was, in an odd sort of way. After the family had gotten over the initial shock of what had happened, they were even able to joke about it.

“Hey, what has four legs and goes ‘moo—thud'?” asked Pep.

“What?”

“A cow falling on Coke's head.”

Back in the car, the McDonalds were heading south and west. It would be almost two hours to Dallas, mainly along I-30. They stopped for lunch at a little diner in Greenville, but the parents spent most of the time arguing over what they were going to do for the rest of the day.

“It says here that the first 7-Eleven opened in Dallas in 1927,” said Mrs. McDonald. “But the Slurpee wasn't invented until fifty years later.”

“Please don't tell me they have a Slurpee museum in Dallas,” Dr. McDonald said, groaning. “I will have lost all faith in humanity.”

“They don't, but at the Baylor University Medical Center, they have bronze-coated replicas of the hands of famous people like Louis Armstrong, Winston Churchill, Joe DiMaggio, and Walt Disney,” Mrs. McDonald said. “That could be pretty interesting to see, don't you think?”

“Those could be
anybody's
hands in bronze,” scoffed Dr. McDonald. “I don't need to see that.”

“Hey, the world's largest patio chair is in Dallas!” Mrs. McDonald said more excitedly. “It's in front of a furniture store.”

“I'm not driving to Dallas to look at a
chair
,” Dr. McDonald said, “and that's final.”

Listening to the two of them go at it was like watching two great tennis players whack a ball back and forth.

Coke and Pep's parents hardly ever fought back home, but they seemed to bicker a lot in the car. Maybe it had something to do with being so close together in a confined space, and having to make important decisions quickly.

In any case, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald finally hit on something they both wanted to see in Dallas—the Sixth Floor Museum.

“What's that?” asked Pep.

“The Sixth Floor Museum chronicles the assassination and legacy of John F. Kennedy,” said her all-knowing brother.

You're probably aware that President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas on November 22, 1963—a tragedy that shook the nation to its core. People who were alive that day remember exactly where they were when they heard the news that the president had been shot.

When they reached Dallas, Dr. McDonald drove up Elm Street on the western edge of the historic district downtown and parked the car behind an early 20th-century warehouse that used to be known as the
Texas School Book Depository. Shots rang out from the sixth floor of the building on that day in 1963. Today, the sixth and seventh floors are a museum jammed with exhibits about the assassination, and about Kennedy himself. Photography was not permitted in the museum, but Mrs. McDonald took notes for
Amazing but True
.

What the twins found most interesting was the window where the sniper's nest and rifle were found after the assassination. They could look out and see Dealey Plaza, where the president's motorcade passed. As Coke and Pep peered out that window, a guard informed them that there's an X painted on the street at the exact spot where the president was hit.

“I can't see the
X
,” Coke said.

“That's because that tree is in the way,” the guard told him.

“Well, if the tree is in the way, how could Lee Harvey Oswald
possibly
have shot the president from this window?” asked Coke, quite proud of himself for personally debunking the notion that Oswald was the lone gunman.

“The tree was a lot shorter in 1963,” the guard informed him.

“Oh.”

The museum was fascinating, but there was a lot
to absorb, and to the twins 1963 might as well have been ancient history. After an hour or so, they were ready to leave.

“I want to see
everything
,” Dr. McDonald said. “This was one of the most important events in American history.”

“Can we go outside and look at the
X
on the street?” asked Coke.

“Well, okay,” their mother agreed reluctantly. “Meet us back at the car in an hour.”

Coke and Pep took the stairs down and walked around the front of the building to Dealey Plaza. They weren't the only ones. A half-dozen tourists were milling around the area with cameras and guidebooks. Invariably, they would look up to the sixth floor of the book depository building, and then down to the street.

“There it is,” Coke said, pointing to the white X painted in the center lane.
“
That's
the exact spot where Kennedy was hit.”

The twins walked over to the curb. Cars zipped down the street, many of them driving right over the X mark.

“Think about it,” Pep said quietly. “If those bullets had missed by an inch, history would have been different. Kennedy would probably have been reelected and been president through 1968. Maybe he would have ended the war in Vietnam. Watergate would have never happened. Maybe—”

“You don't know any of that,” Coke replied. “Nobody can know what would have happened if Kennedy had lived.”

The traffic eased up. Coke looked up and down Elm Street. There were no cars.

“I want to stand on it,” he said.

“It's just an
X
,” said Pep.

“I know. I want to stand on the exact spot.”

“It's a busy street,” his sister warned. “You could get run over by a car.”

“Who are you, Mom?” Coke asked. “Relax. Don't worry about it.”

Elm is a one-way street, but Coke looked both ways just to be sure. Satisfied that there were no cars coming, he dashed out into the middle of the road.

“Be careful!” Pep yelled.

“I'm always careful!” Coke yelled back. “Look, I'm standing on it! This is the exact spot where the president was hit.”