Edison's Gold Page 10

  “Ya think so, genius?” said Noodle as the three of them stepped inside the tunnel’s all-encompassing blackness. Even their flashlights provided only weak patches of illumination in the dark.

  Whoosh! Tom and Noodle turned at the sound of Colby’s inhaler, followed by the sound of her sneakers squeaking against the rusted railroad tracks as she followed them in.

  “What happened to Colby the daredevil from the other day?” asked Noodle.

  “Hey, two days ago, you wouldn’t have even been able to get me on the Metro-North.”

  Their flashlights darted like dragonflies, sweeping and lighting different sections of a damp, crumbling wall, momentarily illuminating graffiti and leaky pipes that crisscrossed paths along the ceiling.

  “It smells like feet and mushrooms in here,” said Noodle.

  “No, it smells like vinegar and cat farts,” corrected Colby.

  “No. Actually it smells like old tin—”

  “Guys, enough!” Tom barked. “We need to concentrate right now.”

  “Sor-ry, grumpy old man,” said Noodle as Colby suppressed a chuckle.

  Together, they walked along in silence; the echoing drip-drop of water splashing onto the tracks provided a haunting background noise.

  Tom hadn’t meant to snap, but finding Edison’s treasure—or lost invention or whatever it was—had consumed him to the point where it was impossible to joke around.

  “Hey, guys.” Noodle’s hushed voice broke the silence. “What are you gonna tell everyone at school when they ask what you did over spring break?”

  “Probably easier to lie and just say I watched DVDs with Nana.”

  Tom smiled ruefully. “I don’t think this is what Phelps had in mind when he told me to reflect on my future.”

  Their laughter bounced along the concrete walls, the sound reverberating into spooky, ghoulish noises. Maybe he hadn’t completely lost his sense of humor after all.

  “Woo-hoot!” Noodle spun around. “Listen to that. We sound like a gallery of ghosts trying to—ooomph!” The flashlight flew from his hand and clattered to the tracks as Noodle went down with a thud.

  “Noodle! Are you hurt?” Colby spun on her sneaker to find him lying flat, wincing in pain as he struggled for breath.

  “Uh, I think I broke my coccyx,” he moaned. “What is a coccyx, anyway?”

  Tom dropped to his knees, beaming his light onto Noodle’s back at the point where he clutched at it with both hands.

  Next to Noodle’s shoe, something white peeked up at a right angle from beneath the gravel.

  “You’re a genius.” Tom began to scoop away some of the rocks from around the white stone. “I think you tripped on something good.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about me dying over here. As long as I tripped on something good.”

  Ignoring him, Tom pulled a shovel from the duffel bag and started to dig furiously through the rocks. In a few quick turns, he had exposed the rest of another white mile marker, with MI 9 chipped into the stone.

  “Just like the other two,” said Colby softly.

  Tom wiped his brow. “Grab a shovel and get digging.”

  Noodle hopped up, his coccyx miraculously repaired, and soon he and Tom were winging clumps of dirt and rock over their shoulders.

  After several fruitless minutes had passed, however, Noodle’s spirits and strength began to flag.

  “We got nothing but a big ole pile of gritty rubble on one side, and a big ole hole on the other,” said Noodle, passing his shovel to Colby. “Thanks for the exercise in futility, T.E. the First.”

  “Could we have messed up the Morse code or something?” Colby began to dig alongside Tom. “Maybe I got the cipher equation wrong.”

  “Seems unlikely,” said Noodle. “Since you’re the first kid ever to have a hundred and four average in Mr. Farrell’s math class.”

  “Guess I have to agree with your logic on that one.”

  Tom’s shovel flew faster, his digging growing desperate.

  No, no, no, he thought with every mound of overturned earth. No, they hadn’t got the code wrong. The clue had to be here somewhere. They’d come too far—

  “Uh-oh!” Noodle’s exclamation broke Tom’s thoughts. “This might put a damper on our plans!” They followed his finger toward the growing circle of light that was slowly moving its way down the tunnel toward them.

  “Yikes,” breathed Colby. “I thought you said no trains could come in when the light’s red.”

  But Tom had no time to think about what had gone wrong because at that same moment his shovel clanked against a hard object.

  “Wait—I got something!”

  What you got is thirty seconds!” Noodle shouted. “That train sees us, but it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon.”

  The train’s whistle sounded through the darkness, its brakes shrieking as a warning light flashed several times at the kids.

  Tom dropped to a crouch. “It’s some kind of container.” His hands pawed at the dirt. The battered and rusty tin box peeking out was roughly the size of a toaster oven, and it wasn’t coming loose very easily.

  “Tom! We’re not waiting for you!” yelled Colby. “If we don’t start running, we’ll be flattened!”

  Noodle was pulling at Tom’s jacket. “We’ll come back for it.”

  “It’s almost loose! I’m so close.” He yanked with every ounce of strength, losing balance and falling backward as it finally dislodged.

  Tucking the metal box under his arm like a fullback, he took off after the others down the center of the railroad tracks. The shrill whistle and howling brakes continued ringing through Tom’s ears, but he kept his eyes focused on the tunnel’s opening, now only fifty feet away.

  “Aaagh!” Tom felt his leg buckle as he fell to the ground, and the metal box flew from his hands. Although he couldn’t see anything, he could feel his shoelace stuck on one of the track’s wooden cross ties. He heard Colby’s voice in the distance as he freed himself.

  “Tom, hurry!”

  Behind him, the train roared like a diesel-fueled beast. With no time to recover the box, and no alternate escape, he flattened himself on the tracks and offered up a quick prayer.

  The train bore down, gears grinding, its tons of steel inches from his head. The sound was a deafening explosion. Nerves raw, heart pounding like a jackhammer, Tom squeezed his eyes shut as the interminable train whined and rattled above his body for what felt like an eternity.

  And then, silence. The noise had stopped.

  Tom peeked up to see one of the car’s lower axles above his head. With shaking hands, he crawled toward the edge of the tracks.

  “Please tell me you’re all right!”

  His ears were still numb and ringing, so it took him a second to make out Colby’s voice, and then the faint outline of her face as she appeared in front of him, crouched alongside one of the train’s still wheels.

  “Thank God you’re still three-dimensional,” she said when she saw him.

  Noodle and Colby each held out a hand and pulled Tom out from under the train and onto his feet.

  Too shocked to speak, he leaned against his friends as they all flattened their bodies sideways to give themselves enough room to exit the tunnel.

  Once out, their eyes quickly adjusted to the weak moonlight. Where the one entrance to the tunnel had been all industrial buildings, the other end offered a landscape that was thick with overgrown trees and weeds.

  The front of the train was a couple hundred yards away, which made it impossible to see in the night.

  “I bet there’s a conductor on his way toward us right now,” said Noodle. “With loads of questions.”

  “Wait, we almost forgot the box,” Tom croaked, and was about to turn around and head back into the tunnel when—

  “You kids lost or something?” The words, spoken in a heavy Brooklyn accent, fell like an anvil on the moment.

  They froze. A heavyset shadow stepped out of the trees and di
rectly in between the kids and an escape route. “Thought you lost me in Brooklyn, didn’t you?”

  And as his face came into the moonlight, they could see exactly who this man was.

  “Pet store guy,” whispered Noodle. “Go!”

  They ran, fresh energy surging through Tom’s veins. But he’d made it only a few yards before he heard a commotion and looked back to see the worst: the pet store guy had Colby by the leg.

  “I didn’t do anything!” she hollered.

  Tom and Noodle dove into a heavy cluster of bushes and slid in the dirt.

  “What do we do?” Noodle’s eyes were sheer panic.

  Tom’s mind was awhirl. “Let me go back for her. But the metal box is still in the tunnel—”

  “Yeah! Under a freaking train!”

  “You have to go grab it and hide it someplace safe.”

  “No way I’m leaving you two! The conductor’ll probably be here any second.”

  “Noodle, whoever that guy is, he doesn’t want Colb. He wants the clue!”

  “But we should all stick together—”

  “That box might be exactly what we need to trade for Colby! As long as you don’t get seen by anybody.”

  There was no point arguing. Tom was already on his feet, running back toward the fat man, who was now grappling Colby tight against his waist.

  “I’ll stay with her, Noodle!” Tom called over his shoulder. “Promise!”

  Let’s go. Keep it moving, you two.”

  The fat man in the cheap suit shoved Tom and Colby up a long flight of stairs. He was huffing loudly behind them. With each exhale, Tom almost gagged from the instant coffee-and-nicotine stench.

  The two of them had spent the last hour and a half in a window-blacked van, only to arrive at some enormous Manhattan brownstone that on the inside resembled a hunting lodge from another century. Mounted elk and bear heads peered down from the corridor walls, and several of the rooms they’d passed through were hung with old oil paintings of grim, ringleted ladies and equally somber ruffle-collared gentlemen.

  The fat man had herded them through a few of these more public rooms, then up a back staircase and down a narrow hallway, which finally led to a planked oak door that was on its own private landing and seemed to be secured off from the rest of the house.

  The fat man gave three loud knocks on the door.

  “Send them in, Nicky,” came an icy voice from the other side.

  The fat man turned the knob and prodded Tom and Colby into an immaculate state-of-the-art office, which looked like the bridge of a spaceship. Multiple wall-mounted monitors scrolled international stock tickers and news programs, and every piece of pristine furniture was designed in chrome and leather.

  From behind his metal-and-glass desk, a wiry man gazed at Tom with a face devoid of any expression. From his slicked, silver hair to his starched white pajamas and black silk robe, he was well groomed to the point of obsession.

  As Tom took another step into the room, he noticed several sheets of paper with the Alset Energy letterhead stacked near the edge of the silver-haired man’s desk.

  What does all this have to do with dad’s old company? he wondered.

  “Well, if it isn’t the heir to the great Edison legacy,” said the man. There was something disdainful about the way he’d enunciated Tom’s last name. As if he’d meant it to be a punch line. But Tom was used to people saying his name like that.

  “Who are you?” Tom asked.

  “Someone who’s been keeping close tabs on your family.” The man rose from behind his desk in slippered feet and crossed the room to a small bar trolley, where he snapped open two old-fashioned glass Coke bottles and handed them to Tom and Colby. “I think it’s fate that you and I are meeting now, Tom. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the boy who broke into my museum exhibit also happened to be the son of one of the lowly engineers I’d just laid off.”

  Tom’s knees nearly collapsed from under him. He’d never even seen a photo of Curt Keller, yet the man was the reason so much had gone wrong in his life.

  “What do you want from my family?” he asked. But as Keller turned, reaching for his remote to change the channel on his flat-screen, the answer became clear. Arranged neatly on the table behind his desk were all the clues they’d found so far: the wax record, the movie film, the Firestone photo. All on obvious display.

  “There’s nothing to fear from us, kids. I’m just taking a few necessary precautions.” Keller allowed himself a tight-lipped, joyless smile. “We only intend to hold you here until Grandpa Edison’s formula is safely in my hands.”

  Tom tried not to let the shock appear on his face. What else did this guy know?

  “Now is there anything more you’d like to tell me?” asked Keller. “Something else you’ve found?”

  “We didn’t find anything,” said Tom, trying to keep his voice from rising. “Our search was a dead end.”

  Keller leaned in close. Unlike fat Nicky’s breath, his smelled like mentholated cough drops, and his bloodshot eyes seemed to look both past and through Tom.

  “I can read people better than a polygraph machine,” he hissed, “and you’re not exactly someone I’d call a practiced liar.”

  Tom went silent, hoping Keller wasn’t close enough to hear his heart beating like crazy.

  “Really, though, I should be thanking you kids.” Keller returned to his desk, where he picked up the wax record, spinning it in the edges of his hands. “As you know, my company’s had a rough few years, with alternative energy sources cutting into my profits.” Keller now turned his attention to the Firestone photo, inspecting it casually. “But what’s a couple million when you’ve got the formula to make gold, right?”

  This time his laugh was genuine, and it took every ounce of restraint for Tom not to lunge over and snatch the clues right out of his bony hands.

  “My great-great-grandfather hid his secret specifically to keep it from people like you.”

  At that, Keller’s face tightened, defensive as a closed fist. “Don’t get started with me, son. The brilliant Thomas Edison also ruined a great many lives.”

  “What did he ever do to you?” asked Tom. He could feel Colby’s hand on his sleeve.

  “Tom, pick your fights. Trust me, this isn’t one of them,” she whispered. He could see something was troubling her.

  Keller regarded the two of them coolly. The calmness in his blue eyes made him seem that much more terrifying.

  “No, no. I’m happy to tell you.” Keller smiled. “The story’s quite simple, actually. Your great-great-grandpa destroyed the career of the modern era’s greatest inventor, then robbed him of the credit he deserved.”

  “That’s a lie.” Tom knew his double-great-grandfather’s life better than any of his history teachers, and if there was a bitter feud he’d ever had with a rival scientist, Tom certainly would’ve read something about it.

  “I will do whatever it takes to restore my great-grandfather’s name and bring the formula back into my family. Where it’s always belonged.” Keller tipped back in his chair as he made a dismissive sweep of his hand. “I’m afraid our visiting hour is over,” he said with a glance toward Nicky, who’d been glowering in the corner of the office the entire time. “Please show our guests to their luxury suite.”

  Keller swiveled his body back to his desktop computer as Nicky grabbed each of the kids by an elbow, then unceremoniously marched them toward the door and out of the office.

  There was nothing luxurious about the luxury suite. Tom and Colby saw that right away as Nicky escorted them down two flights of stairs, then locked them into the dark, dingy room, somewhere deep within the mansion’s basement. A clunky armoire and a rusty, cracked metal cot with a bare mattress were its only furnishings.

  Once the fat man was out of earshot, Tom started to pace the room nervously, tapping the walls and listening for hollow points.

  “Tom, what are we gonna do?” Panic crept into Colby’s voice as she
dropped down onto the cot, which caused it to collapse on the floor with a crash.

  “You okay?” Tom turned from checking the armoire’s drawers and ran to her side.

  “Yeah. The mattress softened the fall.”

  “I’ll get us out of here, Colb,” said Tom, then went back to checking the room for any grates or drains. “It looks like they’ve got us in some kind of old servants’ quarters.”

  “My nana’s gonna be up in two hours.” Colby slumped forward and stared down at the cracked cement floor. Just thinking about her poor, worried-sick nana calling the police made her nauseous. “If she’s not already.”

  It didn’t take much longer for Tom to realize that the only way out of this room was through the door. Which was bolted shut.

  After a moment, he sidled up next to Colby on the mattress.

  “Maybe Keller will let us go,” he said weakly.

  “I don’t think so.” Colby was shaking her head slowly. “I couldn’t help noticing that the word Alset? Is just Tesla spelled backward. Like Nikola Tesla.”

  Tom cocked his head. “That can’t be a coincidence, right? I mean, he kept talking about restoring his great-grandfather’s reputation.”

  At the sound of Tesla’s name, Tom did recall reading something once about a professional rivalry between the two inventors, but there was obviously something more personal to it.

  Colby snuck a quick hit off her inhaler. Even though it hadn’t worked for years, she needed some kind of security blanket right now. “So maybe Edison and this Tesla dude had a falling-out over the formula, and now Keller wants it back in his family.”

  “And if Keller is Tesla’s great-grandson,” said Tom, “it must’ve made it that much sweeter for the old jerk to fire my dad.”

  “And one more reason he’s not letting us go anytime soon.”

  Tom dropped his face into his hands and tried to rub the stinging sleep out of his eyes as the full reality of their hopeless situation came crashing down.

  “Everything’s gonna be fine,” he said, though it was more to comfort himself than anything.