Jimmy's Clue.
"So Yves is dead, Kimmy is dead, and we only have what Emily Rhett told Jimmy." Langly hit his computer keyboard in frustration. "Where are we going to go with this? Yves was the only thing that we could get a lead off of."
"Aha!" said Jimmy. "Remember how you guys always said that we'd be better off without her? It's not true! You miss Yves, don't you." He smiled smugly.
Frohike rolled his eyes. "Jimmy, Langly does not speak for all of us. I'll admit, she does give us good leads even if she does take advantage of us. She likes money more than other people. She needs to learn that money isn't the key to life."
"There we go with money again," said Byers. "I told you, money makes the world go around. But does this particular case have anything to do with money?"
"Possibly," Langly said. "After all, if there wasn't money involved, would Yves even bother getting herself involved. So we're talking a large sum of money here."
"Great," said Byers. "All that we really know is that Kimmy was killed because he helped someone. Some people," he corrected himself. "Yves hired Kimmy to hack into an email account. Maybe it was to get a bank number or something."
"Or where to find buried treasure!" Jimmy's eyes lit up. "That's exactly it. The email had an address and it told Yves exactly where the treasure was buried."
"It's a possibility," Langly said. "Surprisingly, it does sound plausible. Some criminals are pretty stupid, you know." He started banging on his computer again.
"Langly, computers aren't all that cheap, you know!" Byers tried to stop Langly in case he had done some permanent damage to the machine. Sometimes Langly did things rather impulsively.
"Hey, look at this," Frohike pointed to the monitor. "You just brought something up."
"It looks like an instant message or something," said Byers. "It has an email address. Macbeth@netmark.com."
"Maybe that's the hacked address," Jimmy suggested.
Frohike looked at Jimmy. "Jimmy," he said, "sometimes I wonder. How can you not understand the simplest things and yet you think up ideas like buried treasure?"
"Just lucky, I guess." Jimmy smiled.
"Hmmm. Well, I'll start hacking into Macbeth." Langly pushed a few more keyboard keys. "What's with all of these Shakespeare names, anyway?"
"Some kind of code, a society?" Byers suggested.
"Maybe. But I'll hack into it and see if we can find any information. It's probably all gone. I don't think these people are that stupid," said Langly, hacking away. "We really need to get a higher connection."
"We can't afford one," said Frohike. "We need to sell more papers. By the way, whatever happened to last week's 'Lone Gunmen,' anyway?"
"I don't think we actually picked it up from the publisher," Langly said, still hacking.
"We really ought to make this a monthly publication," mumbled Byres.
"Done," Langly said with satisfaction. It was always nice to finish a hack so quickly. "It looks like most everything's been deleted, but there's one message here." He opened the message.
"'They write a newspaper,'" Frohike read off of the screen. "They're talking about us!"
"Us?" asked Jimmy. "But what did we do?"
"We fought the good fight, we uncover the truth and warn the American people!" said Langly. "They're worried about us. They can't stop us! We're finally getting known!"
"Alright," said Frohike, taking charge. "What we need to do now is find out anything we can about Yves. We need to know what she wanted in that email account. Langly, you and Jimmy go down to Kimmy's house and see if you can find anything about the hack. We'll meet up later."
"Right," said Langly. "C'mon, Jimmy, let's go."
"Do you even know where Kimmy lives?" asked Jimmy in the Gunmen mobile later.
"I think so," said Langly. "We can always get Frohike to look up the address if we have to. But here we are," he said, pulling the beat up van into a small driveway. "Let's do some digging." They walked up the driveway to the front door. "Kimmy always had a spare key somewhere," he said. "It's here in the bushes somewhere."
Jimmy watched with interest as Langly dove facedown into a rather prickly bush. "It's in here—ouch—somewhere," he yelled from within the bush. "I found it!" he said triumphantly, after a few minutes.
Kimmy's house was well decorated. He had quite a few expensive pieces of furniture lying around. "He must have made a lot of money," Jimmy observed.
"Hacking's a pretty well paying job. You just have to be good at it," said Langly as he sat down at Kimmy's computer. "Frankly, I'm surprised that this place isn't crawling with policemen."
"Maybe they're looking for Yves," suggested Jimmy.
"According to them, Yves doesn't exist," Langly pointed out. "She never has, never will. She has so many different anagrams for her name that no one's really so sure who she is—or was."
"Do you think that Yves Adele Harlow was her real name?"
"Most likely not. I'm guessing that she's just borrowing it. Useful set of letters, though. I bet she could make a million names. If she already hasn't." Langly continued accessing files. "Most of everything's been wiped out, but I think I can restore some of it. Even though Kimmy was a hacking genius he was pretty careless about where he left his files. But someone else probably deleted them."
Jimmy had wandered into the kitchen by now. Sometimes it was so hard keeping up with the Gunmen. He was really happy to be part of the team. They were admirable, he thought. They were so dedicated to finding the truth and telling everyone about it. If only he could do the same.
It was so difficult, sometimes, to notice the details. He just had to keep his eyes open. Details were everything sometimes. Jimmy scouted around in the kitchen, looking for anything strange or unusual. Everything appeared to be ordinary.
He walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. He sat down on one of the chairs, trying to think clearly. Then he noticed something very odd. There was a tiny little slit in the leather down the side, near the back. He was actually very surprised that he even noticed it. He slipped two fingers into the slit, trying to find what was in there, if anything. But there would be something in the slit. At least, there always was in the movies.
Jimmy pulled out little box. It appeared to be a mint tin. He opened the mint tin slowly and carefully, as if something would suddenly pop out. There was a folded up piece of paper. It read:
When I first met St. Yves
I knew she had something up her sleeve.
Clocks don't only tell time
Underneath a large pine.
"I have absolutely no idea," said Frohike as they all crowded around to see the note. "It looks like some kind of riddle."
"Riddle? How are we supposed to figure out a riddle?" asked Jimmy. He wasn't very good at this kind of logic.
"Well, it says something about St. Yves. Is that the Yves we know?" Langly puzzled aloud.
"There's a St. Yves street over in the next town," said Byers, trying to be helpful.
"Let's go."