Caching In Read online

  Caching In

  * * *

  Kristin Butcher

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2013 Kristin Butcher

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Butcher, Kristin

  Caching in [electronic resource] / Kristin Butcher.

  (Orca currents)

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0234-6 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0235-3 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca currents (Online)

  PS8553.U6972C33 2013 jC813’.54 C2012-907472-1

  First published in the United States, 2013

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012952953

  Summary: Eric and his best friend, Chris, find themselves on a high-stakes geocaching treasure hunt.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by the BC Arts Council during the writing of this book.

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  Author photo by Steve Loughead

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B PO BOX 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  16 15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1

  For Diane Swanson, with thanks

  for introducing me to geocaching.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chris and I duck behind a tree and hope the group of people up ahead hasn’t seen us.

  “Dearly beloved,” we hear. “We are gathered here today, in the presence of these witnesses, to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony. Marriage is a commitment not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently and solemnly. It is—”

  “Jeez, man! Are you kidding me?” Chris peers around the tree. He’s not exactly whispering. “It’s a wedding!”

  I haul him back. “Shut up. Somebody will hear you.”

  “It’s a freakin’ wedding!” Chris exclaims again, without turning down the volume.

  “I can see that,” I say.

  “But this is a cemetery! Who gets married in a cemetery?”

  “Them, obviously.”

  “But why? Tell me why, Eric. It’s a cemetery!”

  “How the heck should I know?” I growl through gritted teeth. “Why don’t you yell a little louder and ask them?”

  Finally, he gets the message. But Chris is not what you’d call patient. After a few minutes, he flops against the tree and grumbles, “I didn’t sign up to spend the afternoon at a freakin’ wedding.”

  I pull my GPS from my pocket and check the screen. “Well, we don’t have a lot of choice. According to the coordinates, the cache is on the other side of those people, so we wait for them to finish their wedding, or we come back later.” Then I add, “And hope nobody gets there before us.”

  It’s that last bit that convinces Chris to stay. If someone were to beat us to that cache, it would eat him alive.

  Chris and I started geocaching about a year ago after I read an article about it. It was something different to do, and all we needed was a GPS. So we went to the website and joined up. The longitude and latitude coordinates for the hidden caches were right there. All we had to do was load them into our GPS and go where they took us.

  Geocaching is kind of like hunting for treasure. Not that the stuff in the caches is all that great. Usually they are filled with plastic toys and other junk like that, but it doesn’t matter. We have a good time just hunting for them and reading the logbook to see who’s been there before us. Sometimes we take whatever is inside and replace it with something else, but mostly we just add our names to the log and put the cache back where we found it.

  The better we get at geocaching, though, the bigger the challenge we want. Lately, we’ve started focusing on caches with puzzles and clues and lots of twists. And ones that nobody else has discovered yet. Being the first names in a cache’s logbook is important—especially to Chris.

  I glance sideways at him. He’s totally zoned into his phone. I don’t know if he’s texting someone or playing a game, but he’s quiet. That’s all I care about.

  Though I don’t say so, I feel dumb hiding behind a tree in a cemetery. It’s not the sort of place fifteen-year-old guys hang out on a Saturday afternoon—unless they’re planning to rob a grave or something. I think about what to do if someone sees us. Beat it out of there, I guess. The geocaching rules are pretty clear about making sure nobody spots you opening a cache.

  At last we hear applause. Chris and I peer around the tree in time to see the bride and groom kiss.

  Then the wedding guests start hugging the bride and thumping the groom on the back. Cameras are clicking all over the place as people take turns getting their pictures taken with the newlyweds. Everyone is smiling so hard, you’d think they were in a toothpaste commercial.

  The bride and groom pose by one of the headstones, and then the bride crouches down and sets her bouquet on the grass in front of it. She’s crying. One of the guests passes her a tissue. She dabs at her eyes and smiles. The groom helps her up. She buries her head in his shoulder.

  A few minutes later, the whole wedding group starts moving away down the path.

  “It’s about time,” Chris mutters as he stuffs his phone into his jeans. “I thought they were never gonna leave.”

  He starts to step away from the tree, but I yank him back.

  “Not yet.”

  We wait until all the people have gotten into their cars and the last one has driven away.

  “Okay.” I take one last look around to make sure the coast is clear. “Let’s go.”

  The GPS leads us right to the spot where the wedding was.

  “This is it,” I tell Chris. “Now we find the cache.”

  We start looking around. The area is mostly grass and graves, though there are a couple of trees and a flower bed too.

  Chris starts tromping through the flowers, using his foot to search between the plants.

  “Take it easy!” I tell him. “We don’t want to wreck the place. Besides, the cache has to be in plain sight.”

  “Whatever,” he mumbles, but he stops kicking the flowers. After a while he says, “Hey, Eric. Are you sure this is the spot? I don’t see a freakin’ thing that looks like a cache.”

  I check the GPS again. “This is it, man.”

  He frowns. “Maybe you copied the coordinates down wrong.”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t.”

  But I begin to doubt myself. I was excited when I saw the new cache listing on the website this morning. I called Chris right away. In my rush to get searching, I could have screwed up the numbers.

  “So where is it?” Chris demands.

  I do another sc
an of the area. Headstone, headstone, headstone, bouquet. I walk over to the bouquet. I don’t know why. It couldn’t possibly be the cache. But there is nowhere else to look.

  I kneel down for a closer look. It’s just a bunch of flowers and ribbons. That’s all. Wait a second. Something is stuffed in the middle of the flowers. It’s yellow and white, like the flowers, so it’s a wonder I even noticed it. I pull it out.

  It’s a small cardboard box—the kind medicine comes in, but it’s been painted. And there’s printing on one side. CACHE.

  “I got it!” I holler, though Chris is now standing right beside me.

  “Open it up,” he says.

  “It doesn’t feel like there’s anything inside.”

  “Quit talkin’ and open the stupid thing!” Like I said before, Chris is not real patient.

  I open the flap and tip the box. Out slides an egg.

  Chris scowls. “That’s it? That’s all that’s in there?” He grabs the box from me, shakes it and looks inside. “So where’s the log? There’s supposed to be a log. How can we prove we’re the first ones to find the cache if there’s no log?”

  “Sign our names on the box and write down the date and time,” I suggest.

  He fishes a pen from his pocket, but I can tell he’s ticked off. Chris believes in playing by the rules. And the rules say there’s supposed to be a log. When he’s finished, he puts out his hand for the egg. I don’t give it to him. Instead, I shake it and hold it up to my eye.

  “It’s been hollowed out,” I say. “See the hole?”

  “So what? Just put it back in the cache, and let’s get out of here.”

  “There’s something inside.”

  Suddenly, Chris is interested. “What?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it is, it went in through that little hole.” I shake the egg again. “There’s no way it’s coming back out though.”

  Chris sticks out his hand. “Let me see that. I can get it out.”

  I pass him the egg.

  He brings his eye to the hole. “Yup. There’s something in there, all right.”

  “How are you going to get it out?”

  “Easy,” he says. Then he smacks the egg against the headstone.

  Chapter Two

  A scrap of paper flutters to the ground. Chris makes a dive for it, but I scoop it up first.

  “What is it?” He lunges for the paper again, but I hold it out of his reach.

  “Hang on.” I frown and squint at the tiny writing. “It’s an obituary.”

  “That figures!” he hoots.

  Even though I should be used to Chris’s eruptions—we’ve been friends since kindergarten—I jump. Being in a graveyard is starting to creep me out.

  “It makes perfect sense, right?” he adds sarcastically. “I mean, what with us being in a cemetery and all.” Then he shakes his head. “This geocache keeps getting weirder and weirder. So whose obituary is it?” He spreads his arms to take in the nearby graves. “One of the locals?”

  I peer at the headstone in front of me—the one with the bouquet. “Actually, yeah,” I say. “It’s this guy right here. Richard Carlisle.”

  Chris looks at the headstone and then over my shoulder at the obituary. “Richard Carlisle? That’s the dead guy’s name?”

  “Yeah. You know him?”

  I expect a wisecrack in reply, but to my surprise Chris says, “I’m not sure.”

  My jaw drops open. “Are you serious? You know this guy?”

  “Not personally, but I definitely know the name.”

  “From where?”

  He scowls. “I can’t remember.” Then he points to the scrap of paper. “Read the obituary. Maybe it says something that will trigger my memory.”

  I start to read.

  CARLISLE, RICHARD CAMERON

  Forty-eight-year-old Richard Carlisle lost his battle with cancer on March 26 at 3:00 pm in the north wing of the Royal Jubilee Hospital. His loving daughter, Jane, was by his side.

  Richard was born and raised in West Vancouver. After earning a degree in commerce at UBC, he took over the family business, moving the main office to Victoria.

  Always up for a new adventure, Richard’s favorite saying was “1, 2, 3—go!” His biggest challenge and greatest success was his company. At the time of his death, it was valued at over $19 million.

  He was predeceased by his wife and parents and will be greatly missed by all who knew him. No service by request. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Tree of Life, 31 Richmond Road.

  “So?” I say when I’m finished. “Do you remember how you know this guy?”

  Chris’s mouth hardens into a tight line, and he shakes his head.

  “Maybe you heard his name on television or read it in the paper,” I suggest.

  “The obituary says he was rich, so he’s probably been in the news.”

  He shakes his head again. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  “Too bad there isn’t a picture. That might help you remember.”

  Chris holds out his hand for the obituary.

  “What?” I snicker. “You think reading it yourself is going to make a difference?”

  He doesn’t even let on that he heard me. He just waggles his fingers for the obituary. I sigh and hand it over.

  After a couple of minutes, he says, “What are the dates on the headstone?”

  I look at the marker. “January 15, 1960, to March 4, 2012.”

  Chris frowns. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it says here that Carlisle was forty-eight when he died.”

  “So?”

  He looks up from the obituary. “Do the math. If he was born in 1960 and he died in 2012, that would make him fifty-two, not forty-eight.”

  I shrug. “Maybe the person who wrote the obituary isn’t very good at subtraction, or the guy who engraved the headstone got the birthdate wrong.”

  “The year he was born and the day he died? The obituary says Carlisle died on the twenty-sixth, and the headstone says the fourth. Another screwup? More bad math?” Chris looks back at the scrap of paper.

  “So what are you saying?”

  He rolls his eyes like he’s explaining something to a two-year-old. “This is supposed to be a challenging cache, right?”

  I nod.

  “Well, if you ask me, so far it’s been a bust. We followed the coordinates and found the cache. So where’s the challenge in that? Unless—” he pauses for so long that I’m ready to stick my hand down his throat for the rest of the sentence “—the obituary is a clue to another cache.”

  I scramble to my feet and read the notice again. If there’s a clue in there, I sure don’t see it.

  “So what’s the clue?” I demand.

  Chris’s face relaxes, and his eyes start to glitter. He looks like a cat that just ate every fish in the aquarium. He knows I’m dying of curiosity, and he’s obviously getting a charge out of torturing me.

  I punch him in the arm. “Get on with it, Einstein!”

  He laughs, but at least he starts to explain. “I think the longitude and latitude coordinates for the next cache are hidden in the obituary. That’s why Carlisle’s age is wrong. Forty-eight is the first part of every latitude coordinate around Victoria. And that’s why the date of death is wrong too. It needs to be the twenty-sixth because that’s part of a coordinate.

  “Here.” He whips his pen and a crumpled paper from his pocket and pushes them at me. “Let’s read the obituary again. As we pick out the coordinates, you write them down.”

  So we do. Once we know what we’re looking for, it’s easy.

  “What have we got?” Chris asks when we’re finished.

  “Forty-eight degrees 26 minutes 3 seconds North, and 123 degrees 19 minutes 31 seconds West.”

  “All right!” Chris grins and gives me a high five. “Plug those bad boys into the GPS and let’s get going.” He starts jogging down the path toward our bikes.
>
  “Wait,” I holler at him. “We have to put this cache back.”

  He does a quick turnaround. “Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot.”

  “And, since we broke the egg, we have to stick something of our own into the cache too.”

  Chris lowers his head and squints at me. “That means we can take the obituary, right?”

  “Yeah, but if we do, nobody else can get the next clue.”

  Chris grins. “I know.”

  I shake my head. “Where’s the fun in that? We already have the lead, and you can take a picture of the obituary with your phone in case we need to look at it again.”

  A scowl replaces the grin. “You know, Eric, you can be a real downer sometimes.”

  “You’re the one who wanted a challenge,” I remind him.

  He doesn’t say anything. How can he? I’m right.

  “So,” I continue, “what are we going to stash in the cache? Your pen?”

  “Forget it!” He snatches it from my hand and shoves it into his pocket. “Put something of yours in the cache.”

  “Why? You’re the one who broke the egg. Besides”—I start picking through my pockets—“the only thing I have is this ticket to last night’s school dance.”

  “Perfect,” Chris says, plucking the black-and-green strip from my fingers. “It’s worth way more than that hollowed-out egg.” He checks the stamp on the back. “At least, it was before you used it.” Then his face lights up. “Maybe it’ll confuse the next guys who find the cache. They won’t know if the clue is the ticket or the obituary. They might end up at our school!” He finds the idea so funny that he chuckles the whole time he’s stuffing the cache back inside the bouquet.

  Chapter Three

  Plugging longitude and latitude into the GPS is pretty much the same as punching in an address. A map appears on the screen, and the guy inside the GPS—we call our dude Merlin—gives us directions to our destination. He doesn’t always pick the shortest route. If you’re riding a bike, this can mean a lot of pedaling. It would be way better if he told us where we were supposed to go—say, the Inner Harbor or Beacon Hill Park. Even if he told us which part of town we were headed for, it would help. But he doesn’t. We never know until we get there.