Page 90 of Spades

“It’s February.” Maddox smirks. “The only birds that have stuck around are the penguins in the zoo.”

“And their wings don’t take to sky…” I rub at my forehead. “Wings… Wings… Landings…” I jerk my head up. “A plane!”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Maddox says. “Maybe we’re looking for a green area near an airport.”

“There are two major airports in Chicago. Midway and O’Hare.” I pull up my Maps app and look up Midway International Airport first, scanning the area. “Midway has a few small parks surrounding it, but nothing that I would qualify as ‘unkempt.’ It’s in the middle of a bunch of buildings for the most part.”

“What about O’Hare?”

“Already on it.” I clear the search cache and type inO’Hare International Airporton the same app. “O’Hare is out near Des Plaines.” I look through the surrounding area on the map, and…

“Oh my God.”

“What is it?”

“There’s a huge strip of undeveloped land just east of O’Hare.” I scroll down the satellite image of it, reading the names overlaying the greenery. “Algonquin Woods, Iroquois Woods, Monument Park, Catherine Chevalier Woods, Schiller Woods.” I cast my gaze to the floor of my living room. “It’s huge, Maddox. Even if thisisthe place we’re looking for, there are any number of areas where evidence could be hidden.”

“But it’s a place nearcascading wet banks.”

“Which could refer to an actual bank, or a riverbank.” I scroll again. “The Des Plaines river cuts through the green space. But again, the bank could be anywhere along the river.”

He scratches his chin. “But I’m still stuck on the wordcascading. That word usually only ever refers to a waterfall.”

“And then there’shenge,” I say. “That’s certainly an odd choice of word. That makes me think of Stonehenge back in the UK.”

“Which would imply a manmade series of stones.”

I frown. “But it has to also beunkempt.”

“Yes, but the second line says that it’snearthe henge.” He points at the phone number at the top of the note. “We’re supposed to call whoever gave me this note once we get there, and then I bet we’ll receive further instructions. They can’t lay it all out in this first note, otherwise it would be damning if they were caught handing it off to me. Maybe we’re supposed to start at the manmade section—the henge—and then go from there.”

“But we still don’t know where the bloody hell this henge could be.”

Maddox peers over my shoulder at my phone. “Of all those locations you read as you scrolled just now, which one was closest to the airport? Where would you be able to see the planes taking off and landing?”

I zoom in. “Looks like Monument Park and the Chevalier Woods are the closest to the airport proper.”

He presses his lips together. “Monument Park was the only thing you listed that wasn’t labeled as ‘Woods.’ Google it and see what comes up.”

The image that comes up nearly makes me drop my phone.

Cascading waterfalls, just as the second line of the riddle suggested, pouring over a wall of large rocks. In the background are some evergreen trees, and in front of the waterfall is a large metal sign bearing the wordsVillage of Rosemont.

“Rosemont,” I say. I look up at Maddox again. “What was Rouge’s last name again?”

His eyebrows nearly fly off his head as the thought hits him. “Montrose. A reversal of the syllables.”

“Its fate”—I point to the last line of the riddle—“mirrored clearly.”

He exhales sharply. “Holy shit. We cracked it.”

“So it would seem.” I look closer at the note. It looks like something was written under the note but then erased. “Can you make out what this was supposed to say? It could be something more.”

Maddox grabs the note from me and squints at it. “I didn’t even notice it. Looks like someone wrote three letters but then thought better of it.”

I take the note from him. “This one is a C, and I think the second one is an A. And this could be a capital T. Cat?”

He rubs his chin. “Maybe there’s a statue of a cat at Monument Park or something. Maybe that hint would have given it away too easily, so the writer decided to not include it.”

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