The Investigators, Inc. The Northern Mystery. Chapter 5. Land of Green.

Back at the hotel the manager somehow came up with 2 extra rooms for the rest of the team. I guess now that Brenda is gone he can relax. She seemed to spread fear over several people in this town. I am glad she is out of the way, at least for a while, until she figures out we made some changes to her particular letter and sent her off to Norway just to get her out of the way.

Now we should have a few days of quiet as we try to translate this coded message into something understandable. And then get out of here before Brenda gets back. We want to stay ahead of her if we can. And somehow I do not think this message is going to keep us running around the area here, that would be too simple. We must have to travel a bit.

I just hope we do not need to travel a lot. After all of us looking at this coded message all day we were not any further ahead than when we started. I basically let the others work on this, decoding things was never my strong point. Even when I was a kid, my friends and I would make up coded messages to give each other and then try to figure them out without help. I lost out all the time on those until one friend told me how to do it. But this is much more complicated.

After dinner we were all back in our room once more looking at this message. I decided to look at it too this time, just for some fun. I looked at it, then a bit more… “Hmm, this reminds me of the coded messages my friends and I wrote when I was a kid,” I said laughing, “this first line says, ‘in a land that is green there is a cave with ice in it and a big hole. In the bottom of the hole is wood, or a wood box and a clue for..um, the axe part, oh, next part maybe.’ Too simple to be correct, but it is fun.”

Galyna looked at it again, as did Sigurbjorn. “That is exactly what it says,” they both said together, “it is a cave in Greenland that we want to find!” “Well, that should be easy,” said Kat, “um, Greenland is quite large and there are probably a lot of caves around, especially if it refers to an ice cave.” I think Kat is being sarcastic, though I could be wrong.

“I think that axe could mean the port, not part,” said Sigurbjorn, “that might help us know the general area.” So everything started checking to see what port could be symbolized by an axe. There really are not a lot of ports in Greenland, so that should help. But unfortunately it did not. Eventually we concluded the axe represented more of an X, or perhaps a cross and Sigurbjorn mentioned the Hvalsey church, a well known attraction in Greenland.

It is just ruins today but dates to perhaps the 1400s or earlier. We left early the next morning flying to Greenland and then by ferry to our destination. We spent a whole day looking around but found nothing that might help us and I was beginning to think we made a big mistake coming here. “I wonder why the building has sunk like that?,” I asked, kind of talking to myself.

“It was built on the cemetery of another church before it,” said Sigurbjorn. Meow,meow.=Oh, Sugar know lots about old stuff. Meow.=Yep, she know lots about lots of stuff. Meow,meow.=Yep, that she does. The cats have started calling Sigurbjorn “Sugar” since they have so much trouble saying her name. Sigurbjorn thinks it is cute, but no one else is allowed to call her Sugar. Rock tried it. His cheek was red the rest of that day.

When Annelie found out, his other cheek was also red. I told him he looked nice with those rosy cheeks! He just said they hurt. We were allowed to camp for the night nearby and we would be picked up around noon the next day. After enduring a very cold night, we had breakfast and looked around some more. I noticed Muffin and MC scratching at an old stone marker on one of the graves and went to investigate.

It had an X on top of it, barely legible. I called Rock and Benson and asked them to move the stone. It must have weighed quite a bit as the two of them struggled a bit to move it. Underneath was a hole in the ground with a small wood box, in remarkably good condition. In the box was a leather pouch with another piece of paper, and another clue.

We just made it back in time to get picked up by the ferry and were on our way back to Nuuk, the capital city. We then flew back to Nova Scotia in Canada to rest up a bit in relative safety while we studied this next clue.

To Be Continued.

©2022 Steve McLeod.