“I’m in, too,” Rayne said.
Felix didn’t like how her fingernails all had half-peeled-off purple nail polish. He didn’t like how she wasn’t looking at him.
“What?” Rayne asked him. “Don’t look at me so weird.”
Felix turned away, confused. All of a sudden, he missed Lily Goldberg. Lily Goldberg had not sent him one email or letter or anything since she’d moved away. At first, he’d missed her like crazy. Then she’d kind of faded into a happy blur. But standing here right now, seeing Rayne’s messy fingernails and listening to Great-Uncle Thorne’s big plans, the threat of the Congo getting closer every second, Felix wanted nothing more than to talk to Lily.
The others were following Great-Uncle Thorne up the stairs to The Treasure Chest and, for a crazy moment, Felix thought he might just walk away. They couldn’t do this without him, could they?
Great-Uncle Thorne paused on the stairs and swiveled his head so that he faced Felix below.
“What are you waiting for?” he bellowed.
Maybe because Felix always did what he was supposed to do, or maybe because everyone else was standing there waiting for him, he scurried to meet them.
Great-Uncle Thorne unclasped the maroon velvet rope and swept his arm to indicate they should all enter The Treasure Chest.
Once everyone had stepped across the threshold, Great-Uncle Thorne strode into the room and began to scan the cupboards and shelves.
An object caught Felix’s eye almost immediately. All of a sudden, he forgot about the Congo and Amy Pickworth. Instead, he remembered his aviation report.
At the end of the day, Miss Landers had made them write down the aviator they wanted to research and Felix chose Charles Lindbergh.
“Ah!” Miss Landers had said, flashing her dazzling smile at him. “Lucky Lindy!”
“Lucky Lindy?” Felix had said.
“That was his nickname,” Miss Landers explained.
Jim Duncan signed up for Baron von Richthofen, the World War I flying ace also known as the Red Baron. And Libby announced she would do her project on Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. Even Felix, who had trouble getting excited about the aviation unit because he was so worried about Great-Uncle Thorne’s mission, started to relax. Lucky Lindy, he thought, liking the way that sounded.
Now, right on the desk in front of him, surrounded by a seashell and a magnifying glass, was a compass. Not a regular compass, but the kind that fit into a dashboard of instruments on a plane. Maybe it belonged to Lucky Lindy, Felix thought. Hadn’t Great-Uncle Thorne said to be more deliberate about the objects they chose? When Felix reached for it, a liver-spotted hand grabbed his wrist, hard.
“No one is touching anything until we find what we are looking for!” Great-Uncle Thorne boomed.
“Um,” Maisie said, “what are we looking for?”
“How would I know?” Great-Uncle Thorne said dismissively. “When my sister and I wanted to visit King Tutankhamen, we came in here and we searched for an Egyptian object. Therefore—”
“Um,” Maisie said, “but how did you manage to get to this King Toot . . . Toot and . . .”
Great-Uncle Thorne slapped his forehead.
“Have you never heard of King Tut, you imbecile?”
“Of course,” Maisie said haughtily. “I just never knew his full name.”
“I think what Maisie was trying to say,” Hadley offered, “is how did you know that an Egyptian amulet or kartoush or whatever would get you to King . . . Tut . . . and not to, say, Cleopatra?”
Great-Uncle Thorne blinked. Then blinked again.
“I suppose we made a mistake or two,” he admitted. He chuckled softly. “Why, there was the time we ended up on the Mayflower instead of the Santa Maria. Now that was interesting.”
He looked at their blank faces and tsked.
“The Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to Massachusetts,” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “The Santa Maria was one of Columbus’s ships, along with the Ni?a and the Pinta.”
“Got it,” Rayne said, and she began to walk around the room, studying the objects that crowded every surface.
Maisie went to the other end of The Treasure Chest, scrutinizing an object carefully before deciding it wasn’t the right one.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that we aren’t looking for something African. We’re looking for something Dr. Livingstone needed to survive there.”
“Like malaria pills?” Felix asked, only half jokingly.
Hadley held up a map, brown with age and crisscrossed with faded blue lines.
“He might have needed this,” she said.
Immediately, Great-Uncle Thorne took it from her. He held it close to his eyes to better examine it.
“The confounded continent has changed so much over time,” he said, more to himself than to the children.
Everyone gathered around him, craning their necks to try to get a view of the map.