The Treasure of Le Monde!

A flashlight beam catches something odd in the boards above the stairs at Whit's End, and Connie Kendall's curiosity is enough to send John Whittaker after a crowbar. Behind the boards is an attic no one has opened in years, packed with clutter and musty tarps. Robyn Jacobs trips, grabs a tarp to catch herself, and pulls the cover off a hand-carved antique pipe organ. Mr. Whittaker explains that the tower they are standing in was once the steeple of the town church, which burned down long ago; when the rec center was built, everyone liked the tower so much that they kept it. How the organ got up here, he cannot say.

Robyn sits down to play, but one key refuses to sound. Middle C has been stuffed with an old gray rag, and the rag has writing on it - a rhyme signed by a fortune hunter named Rufus Cowley, pointing the way to the treasure of Le Monde and ending with a line that makes no sense at all: start in the center and play a deaf cabbage.

Whit takes the cloth to his friend Aldus Webster, a history professor at Campbell County Community College. The treasure is real, the professor says. It is named for a French nobleman, Henri, whose family sailed for Canada before the French Revolution with much of their wealth. Everyone but Henri died of plague on the crossing. Counting his survival as a miracle, Henri became a missionary, and legend says he buried part of his fortune near every mission he founded. Odyssey was his last. He was also a prankster, and he hid his fortune behind a chain of clues and devices rather than simply burying it. Town records show that Cowley and a partner, Zachariah Ames, quarreled over the treasure, that Ames lost the fight, and that the law cornered Cowley in the church steeple - which is exactly where the poem has been waiting ever since.

That night Robyn cannot sleep. The clue turns over and over in her head, and so does something less pleasant: a hunger for money, a whatever-it-takes feeling she has never had before. It frightens her enough that she prays for it to be taken away, then turns her mind to her recital piece instead. Humming Fur Elise, note by note, she hears it. The letters in deaf cabbage are not words. They are notes on the musical scale.

At six in the morning she drags Connie up to the attic, and Professor Webster is already there. He has worked out the same answer, and he remembers the rest of the line: start in the center, on the middle of the organ's three keyboards. Robyn plays, and a wall swings open on two secret panels with an antique telescope fixed between them, aimed at a wooded hill and the shadowed outline of a cave. Then the professor takes a rope, ties the girls up, and leaves for the treasure alone.

Mr. Whittaker finds them hours later. He also finds what they missed - Henri's diary, tucked in a slot beside the telescope, with a sketch of the cave, an X, and circles marking traps the professor knows nothing about. In the cave they find him hanging upside down in one of those traps, above a small box. They cut him down and give him water, and he tells them plainly that he is not sorry and still wants the treasure. He grabs the box, forces it open the wrong way, and a hidden device sprays his face bright green. Inside is a note: the treasure belongs to the green one with the most greed, who has worked hardest for it and needs it most. Whit hands the box over. Wrapped in cloth is a Bible. The professor is stunned, but Whit tells him it truly is the greatest treasure of all.

Afterward the girls decide not to press charges - a green face, they figure, is punishment enough. Whit notices that the hidden room in the basement and the hidden room in the attic were both built out of greed, and he decides to leave them exactly as they are. Those who don't learn from history, he says, are doomed to repeat it, and a reminder at the top of the stairs and another at the bottom may be just what everyone needs.