Gold: Chapter 3
Auralie read the first clue that appeared on her screen:
Zo ni sehctiw gniviil fo rebmun eht yb dedivid (draziw a sulp noinapmoc sih dna eh) fo toor erauqs eht sulp eno dah worceracs eht fi
Already the day faded into background noise as the impulse to solve overtook her. She sounded it out. It wasn’t in a language that she recognized, not that she could recognize many.
Her eyes zeroed in on the first letters. If the theme of the puzzle was a reference to the famous novel by L. Frank Baum, then Zo was simply Oz spelled backward. She quickly typed out the letters in reverse:
If the scarecrow had one plus the square root of (he and his companion plus a wizard) divided by the number of living witches in Oz.
All right, a math problem. And, if this was a math problem, then the parenthesis were not arbitrary. Auralie remembered from basic math PEMDAS, in which parenthesis were meant to be solved first. So “he and his companions” totaled four, plus “a wizard” would make five.
The next step in sequence would favor division, so divided by the number of living witches in Oz would be two.
Therefore,
1+(Square root of 5)
------
2
Something about this particular equation seemed vaguely familiar, but Auralie couldn’t quite place it. It was easy enough to calculate on her phone the answer: 1.61803399
Auralie smiled to herself. The golden ratio. Her math team had competed to memorize as many digits as possible, along with its more famous cousin, Pi.
But what was she supposed to do with the number? That was all the hint the app had given.
Her eyes read over the title of the game.
Follow the yellow brick road.
Auralie pulled out her phone and typed in maps. She smiled softly to herself. It would be a bit of a hike from downtown Dallas, but she could take the bus for this. She headed toward an industrial part of the city, passed Dallas Executive Airport, and almost to the Dallas Police Academy. She hopped off the bus stop and walked a little bit to 1618 Gold Road.
She looked around and saw nothing, until her eyes landed on a shadow in some bushes. She pulled it out. It was one of those briefcases with a series of digits that functioned as a lock. There were four entries, so she tried 1618, rounding out the famous irrational number.
It didn’t open.
Auralie toyed with the digits for a moment, thinking back over the first clue.
Oh, of course.
She fiddled with the digits, then tried 8161.
The briefcase opened. It was stuffed with straw and an ax. A note also accompanied the weapon.
Tungsten Hydrogen muinatit Erbium oxygen carbon potassium Lanthanium potassium einsteinium tungsten indium francium yttrium platinum
The WITCH is made out of Tungsten, Iodine, Technetium, and hydrogen.
Auralie seriously doubted that a magical creature would be made out of some combination of radioactive transition metal, so it wouldn’t be literal. The all-caps gave her pause.
In this case, it was literal. Of a sense. The H stood for hydrogen. W was Tungsten, I was Iodine on the periodic table, and TC was technetium. So, working backwards, the clue read
WHTIEROCKLAKESWINFRYPT
When she flipped muinatit around to titanium, the entire clue read
WHITEROCKLAKESWINFRYPT
It was easy enough to decipher
White Rock Lake Winfry Pt, which meant Winfry Point, where there was a multipurpose building. White Rock Lake was a beautiful green oasis in the industrial jungle that was Dallas. Hundreds of people biked, ran, and walked the paths along the shoreline, and in good weather, sailboats raced across the surface. Auralie ignored that whoever had developed this clue had misspelled “Winfrey,” but perhaps they were from out of state.
In any case, Auralie hopped once again on a bus to go to Winfrey Point at the lake. Once she arrived, she found a box inside the building. Using the ax, she smashed it apart and found a piece of paper with coordinates on them and a small object that looked like a flashlight but when illuminated, it glowed purple.
When Auralie arrived at the coordinates, it was at a series of apartment buildings with fire escapes. One of the local high schools sat across an adjacent street. Someone had painted a mural of a lion leaping to devour a stallion, the infamous rival of the Preston Hollow Lions.
Auralie took the flashlight that had been in the previous briefcase. She clicked it on then swept the light over the wall in front of her. The mural was of a lion from the local high school basketball team. Over its face read the words,
To find the emerald city
You must take a leap of faith
And fly like a monkey.
Auralie waved the light over the rest of the wall, looking for more text. That was it? That was all she had?
To take a leap of faith…
She glanced up at the fire escape.
No way.
She hated heights. Hated them so badly that she would do anything to avoid them. As a kid, she had gotten stuck in a tree. She had climbed, trying to prove to her brothers that she could, and when she looked down, she froze. She had no idea how to get back down. What seemed easy going up was suddenly terrifying. The branches seemed so small. Unstable. She was trapped for hours before the fire department finally rescued her and her father yelled at her for embarrassing the family.
But the pull of this particular bonkers puzzle was strong.
She placed one foot on the bottom stair. “Hard part’s over,” she whispered.
She climbed, clutched the rusty rail. When she got to the roof, she assessed the scene. Typical roof. Someone had laundry hanging on a string, a few broken pottery jars, trash. It was only when she saw the next roof over that she understood what she had to do.
Someone had a lovely rooftop garden, complete with lavender, marigolds, and the unmistakable poppy flower. The final payout would be over there, under the poppies. She just had to get there.
Which meant leaping across the roof.
Already, Auralie felt dizzy. She hated even standing still. The clearance between the roofs wasn’t large, maybe about three feet, but it was enough to send her adrenal glands into overtime.
She couldn’t do it.
She had to do it.
If she took it at a run, then she would be perfectly fine. It wasn’t like she had to be Tom fucking Cruise.
She shook her hands out, jumped from foot to foot. She had to know where this led. She had to figure it out. Finding out a mystery was one of the most powerful drives she knew. It would eat at her at night, claw at her, drive her crazy. It was like an itch she could never fully scratch, a mosquito bite that only grew bigger with each passing moment that she didn’t know what the answer was. This curiosity, this insatiable need to know had gotten her into trouble more than a few times in her life. It was what pulled her toward whatever Gavin had been doing—
Enough. Not the time to think about Gavin.
She focused on the poppy flowers. Where you looked, there you went.
She ran. She leapt.
For a sickening moment, she thought she wouldn’t make it, until her feet landed, and the impact jarred her knees. She kept running for a moment, catching her breath. Then, with a churning stomach and shaking fingers, she walked to the poppy flowers. Dug up the first one, then the next. They were nestled in planters. On the third one, her fingers hit something hard. Metallic.
She pulled out a coffee can and carefully pried open the lid. It was rusted from being buried for so long, and bits of amber flaked off. When she opened the cannister, her heart dropped.
It couldn’t be real.
Inside lay a necklace. The gold chain links glinted in the moonlight, and the emerald was the size of a small egg.
She looked around, suddenly aware that she held a necklace that some A-list actress might wear to the Met Gala, alone, at night, in the dark. She placed it in a small pouch in her purse and gripped it tightly to her.
A weight, much heavier than the emerald, but the same shape, lifted in her chest. Tomorrow morning, she would take this to an appraiser and exchange it for cash. She could pay her rent, bills, and be OK for another couple of weeks—shit, maybe a few months— while she found work. It would be OK. Everything was going to be OK.
She took out her phone and ordered a ride. She had just enough to cover it, and tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter. The necklace seemed to pulse, burning a hole in her mind. She didn’t know who had left it or why, but she didn’t care.
The ride seemed to last forever, and after a few attempts at small talk, the driver fell quiet. For the first time all day, Auralie breathed deeply, letting the highway lights wash over her as the tires ate up the miles.
When the driver pulled away, she took out her apartment key. Only the crickets were out. She lived on the second floor, the landing dark. Her landlord hadn’t bothered to replace the broken lightbulb, so it took her a second to see the shadowy figure standing at her door.
Holding a gun.
To be continued…
Psst…hey y’all, it’s Ariel. If you liked this chapter and want to show your appreciation, please chip in here.