Us and Uncle Fraud by Lois Lowry Read Free Book Online Page A

and said petulantly, "There aren't any clues. And he spelled 'treasure' wrong, too."
    "Wait," I said, and snatched the paper back. "There's something written on the bottom." The writing was tiny, and I squinted at it, but it was meaningless.
    I pronounced the unintelligible words phonetically. "
Ya tebya lyublyu
."
    "Same to you," Marcus muttered. "Let me see it."
    But when he read it aloud, it sounded the same. "
Ya tebya lyublyu.
"
    "Let's try it backwards," I suggested. I took a pencil from the kitchen drawer and printed the words carefully in reverse. But it still meant nothing.
Uylbuyl ay bet ay.
"You'll buy—" I started, but it made no sense after that.
    Father looked up and chuckled. "You'll buy some worthless stock in a nonexistent oil well," he said. "That's what Claude tried to sell
me,
this time."
    "Matt," Mother said, with a sigh, "you don't know for certain. It might actually have been worth something."
    Father grinned. "I know he's your only brother, Hallie," he said, "but he's a con artist of the first order." He picked up the paper again.
    But Marcus and I were barely listening to him. We were poring over the note, trying to decipher the words. It was obviously a code; and just as obviously, it related some hint to the whereabouts of the jeweled eggs.
    "Is it French?" I asked Mother.
    But she shook her head. "No."
    "Swedish, maybe?"
    "I don't know," she said. "But it doesn't sound like it. It doesn't sound like any language I've ever heard."
    Stephie wandered into the room, her basket filled to the top with eggs, some of them cracked. "I'm hungry," she announced.
    "I'll fix some breakfast for everyone," Mother said.
    The front door opened and Tom came in, hanging his jacket in the hall on his way to the kitchen.
    "Look!" said Stephanie to Tom. "Look at all my eggs!"
    "Nice," he said to her, admiringly, and she smiled with satisfaction. Tom picked up the front section of the newspaper.
    "Some picture on page one," he said to Father, who nodded, pleased, and turned back to the first page so that they could admire the photograph together.
    "
Ya tebya lyublyu
," I murmured to Marcus.
    "
Ya tebya lyublyu
," Marcus murmured back solemnly. Somewhere in our house was a hidden treasure; and somewhere, in the secret words, my brother and I held the key to it.

7
    We searched. How we searched, Marcus and I! We started in my room, Easter morning, since it had been where Claude slept and would have been the obvious place to hide something.
    There was no sign that Claude had been there at all. His suitcase was gone; the little box was gone; and he had even removed the blue sheets from my bed and put them into the laundry hamper in the bathroom.
    "Think, Louise," Marcus commanded. "It's your room. Where would you hide something?"
    I shrugged. "I always hide stuff under the bed," I said. "But we looked there. Or under my clothes, in the bureau, but we looked there."
    "And we looked in the closet," Marcus said. "Even in all the shoes."
    "
Ya tebya lyublyu
," I repeated. "That first part sounds like 'the table.' Do you think it could mean 'the table' in some other language?"
    "Maybe." We glanced around my room, but there were only two tables. The one beside my bed had only the small drawer where Claude had kept the Life Savers. We had looked in there. The other table, under a window, was where I did my homework. There were no hiding places in it.
    I sighed. "It's not in this room," I said. "And it wouldn't be in the other bedrooms, because he hid it while everyone was asleep last night."
    Marcus tested his ragged tooth with the tip of his tongue. "This house is full of tables," he pointed out. "Up in the attic and down in the basement and out in the shed—he could have gone there."
    We looked through the window to the large, decrepit shed at the end of our driveway. Years ago, at the turn of the century, Mother said, a family probably had housed their cow or chickens there. They had stored wood there to heat the house in