The Maze of Bones (The 39 Clues #1)(12)

Then she glanced down the aisle. At the end of the shelf, curled up on a box on a small table, was an old friend.

"Saladin!" she cried.

The cat opened his green eyes and said,

"Mrrp?" without much surprise, like he was asking, Oh, it's you? Did you bring me my red snapper?

Amy and Dan ran to him. Saladin had the most beautiful fur Amy had ever seen -- silver with spots, like a miniature snow leopard. Well ... not so miniature, actually, since he was pretty enormous, with huge paws and a long striped tail.

"Saladin, what are you doing down here?" Amy stroked his back. The cat closed his eyes and purred. Amy knew he was just a cat, but she was so happy to see him she could've cried. It was like part of Grace was still alive.

"Hey, Saladin," Dan said. "What's that you're sitting on, dude?"

"Mrrp," Saladin complained as Dan lifted him up. Underneath was a polished mahogany box with the gold initials GC engraved on the lid.

Amy's heart skipped a beat. "It's Grace's jewelry box!"

Amy opened it up, and there was Grace's personal jewelry, which Amy had loved since she was little. Grace used to let her play with these -- a pearl bracelet, a diamond ring, a pair of emerald earrings. Amy hadn't realized until much later that the stuff was real -- worth thousands of dollars.

She blinked the tears out of her eyes. Now that she'd found Saladin and the jewelry box, she felt like she really was standing in Grace's most secret place. She missed her grandmother so much it hurt. Then she pulled a very familiar piece of jewelry out of the box....

"Dear me," Alistair said. "That's her favorite necklace, isn't it?"

He was right. Amy had never seen her grandmother without this necklace -- twelve intricately carved squares of jade with a green dragon medallion in the center. Grace had called it her good-luck charm.

Amy touched the dragon in the center. She wondered why Grace hadn't been buried with this necklace. It didn't seem right.

"Hey!" Dan called. "Look at this!"

Amy found him around the corner, holding Saladin and staring at a giant wall map covered in pushpins. The pins were in five different colors: red, blue, yellow, green, and white. Every major city in the world seemed to have at least one. Some areas were stuck with only red pins, some with green or blue, some with several colors.

"She's been doing voodoo on the world!" Dan said.

"No, dummy," Amy said. "Those must be markers. They tell where something is."

"Like what?"

Amy shook her head. She found the map creepy. "Maybe something about the Cahills?" She glanced at Alistair.

He frowned. "I don't know, my dear. Most curious." But he wouldn't meet her eyes, and Amy got the feeling he was hiding something.

"Look at Europe," Dan said. "And the East Coast."

Those areas were heavily pinned in all five colors. Amy could hardly see the cities underneath. If these pins represented the Cahills, then it looked like they'd started somewhere in Europe and spread across the world, heavily colonizing North America.

Then she thought:

Europe. Colonies. North America. The name Richard S-- started nagging at her mind again, trying to scratch its way out. A name from the eighteenth century, someone who had written resolutions ...

Suddenly, she turned and raced down the row of shelves.

"Hey!" Dan cried, as Saladin wriggled out of his arms. "Amy, where are you going?"

"The Fs!" she yelled.

"What for - failure?"

She got to the Fs and found it immediately: a tiny book, so tattered it was falling apart. The cover was decorated with a red-and-white woodblock print of Colonial farmers. The title was faded, but she could still make out: Poor Richard's Almanack, For the Year 1739, by Richard Saunders.

"Of course!" Uncle Alistair said. "Very good, my dear. Very good, indeed!"

Despite herself, Amy felt flush with pride.

"Wait a second," Dan said. "If this was written by Richard Saunders, what's it doing under F?"

"Richard Saunders was a pseudonym," Uncle Alistair explained.

Dan knit his eyebrows. "A fake foot?"

Amy wanted to strangle him, but Alistair said patiently, "No, my dear boy. You're thinking of a pseudopod. A pseudonym is a fake name, a nom de plume, a disguise for the author. This book was written by a very famous person."

"Benjamin Franklin," Amy said. "I did a report on him last year."

She opened the book. The text was printed in block letters without much punctuation, so it was hard to read, but there were charts, illustrations, columns of numbers. "This is the most famous thing Franklin ever published. Poor Richard was a character Franklin created. He had lots of pseudonyms like that. When he wrote, he would pretend he was different people."

"So we're related to a guy with multiple personalities," Dan said. "That's great. Aren't almanacs for sports?"

"Not this kind," Amy said. "This has facts for farmers. It's like a yearbook with useful tips and articles. Franklin put all his famous quotations in there, like 'Early to bed, early to rise.'"

"Uh-huh."

"And 'A rolling stone gathers no moss.'"