More Than Magic by Donna June Cooper Page A

have little toys and things. And someone hides them in different places. And you can hide them too!”
    “Like buried treasure?”
    “Nope. Never buried. That’s a rule. Hidden’s all right, but not buried. And you have to ask permission and you can’t do it some places, like national forests and stuff. The Woodsman—” Jamie grew solemn for a moment. “I mean Dr. Grace only has one listed geocache on the mountain, in a place folks can get to without disturbing the guests.” Jamie leaned forward to confide. “Right near to the sign out front, although not a lot of folks find it. Anyway, so you record your visit on the log in the cache and online too.”
    “And you leave the cache there?”
    “For the next cacher to find. You explore all kinda interesting stuff, right in your own town! I betcha you’d enjoy doing it in the big city.”
    “So how do you and Dr. Grace do it up here, if she only has the one?”
    “Well, he started it—The Woodsman I mean—but Dr. Grace is really the best. We do waymarks mostly, but we do real caches sometimes. Waymarks are just places all over the mountain. There’s no cache, just plants for my science project.”
    “Your project?”
    “I am tracking the spread of invasive species on the mountain, then removing the invader and preventing further spread. “I send my results in to the NISC!” Jamie pronounced the letters carefully.
    There was a long pause and Nick made the appropriate questioning noise.
    “The National Invasive Species Council! That’s the US Government!”
    “Very impressive.”
    “Mostly kudzu,” Jamie said with a dismissive hand gesture. “But sometimes we get garlic mustard.”
    “And you said something about puzzles?” Nick asked carefully, not wanting to appear too eager. “Is that a part of your project?”
    “Well, puzzles are the way we give each other the coordinates to find the caches or the waymarks, whichever. Anyway, she put my birthday present in one! That was fun.”
    “So you don’t enter them online then?”
    “Nope. It’s even more fun the way we do it. She gives me a puzzle to solve which gets me the first cache. Then in it is a puzzle to get me to the next one. And we use text messages on our cell phones for the waymarks. She even got me my own cell phone.” The obviously precious phone was carefully pulled out for display.
    Nick nodded. He couldn’t find it in himself to say anything out loud. He was pretty sure of what was coming next and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.
    “Her puzzles are always questions about the mountain, about plants and stuff, animals, things like that. Mine are better. Mine are cipher puzzles!”
    Nick felt his stomach clench and his headache settle into a steady ache.
    “I’m real good at math. I’m gonna be a cryptologist when I grow up. That’s what Dr. Grace tells me anyways. And I’m gonna solve the Beale and the Sweet Sixteen ciphers and—” There was a shake of the blonde head. “You’re not some government spy or something are ya?”
    Nick cleared his throat. “Why?”  
    “’Cause Dr. Grace told me if they knew how good I was with ciphers, they’d probably whisk me off to decode all kinds of secret stuff.” Jamie leaned in conspiratorially. “And I don’t like the sound of Washington much. Well, except for the NISC folks.”
    “Understandable. So, we’ll say you’re not good with ciphers then.”
    “Exactly.” A crease appeared between Jamie’s eyebrows. “But I fool Dr. Grace every time. She always has to ask for the key.”
    “And she’s pretty smart herself.”
    “Boy do I know! Would you like to try to solve some of ’em?” Jamie stood up. “I bet she’s in her lab. I’ll go ask her if it’s okay.”
    Before Nick could move, the high-energy bundle that was apparently the key to his whole case disappeared.
    Dammit, dammit, dammit. Of all the luck. It seemed his instincts were just fine, thank you very much. And he had landed dead center on