“All right,” Danny said, speaking for the first time since Matt opened the mailbox. “I think I might be able to help with this. I’m really good at spelling, and if there are multiple ways to create one word, I can get them all on film in case we need to look back. We should be able to move through the code pretty quickly that way.”

“Perfect,” Kylie said. She scooted over to make an extra space so Danny could move over and work beside her. “Let’s get to work, then.”

As much as Matt hoped that they would effortlessly build the words and figure out the message, it turned out to be easier said than done. For example, one of the hamster-print tiles showed an A—did that mean that they should consider words that started with A using letters from the snake-print pile, or did the message simply have the letter A in it somewhere? Luckily, there was only one hamster-print tile with an A, so Kylie suggested they skip trying to build on the A until there were fewer tiles to work with.

“I can’t help but notice there are two E’s and one N in the hamster-print tiles,” Becca noted as Danny tried to help Kylie build a word on an H tile and film at the same time. “Do you think it’s reasonable to assume that the E tiles are for Elephant, and the N tile is for Nacho?”

“Let’s see if the snake-print pile has what we’d need to build those words,” Kylie said, apparently relieved to have some level of direction for a solid start.

To the group’s excitement, there were indeed the tiles necessary to spell both Elephant and Nacho, which left them with way fewer tiles and a task that was far less overwhelming to tackle. After the big break, everybody felt more confident trying to build words with what was left, and before Matt knew it, they had a full list of fifteen words and zero spare tiles left.

“We’re getting closer!” Kylie said with a grin, and Becca clapped her hands together in joy.

“Now we just need to find out which order these words go in,” Frankie noted.

Everybody else started throwing out suggestions, but Matt blocked everything out and stared at the list of words, trying to work out potential answers without being influenced by the other suggestions:

THEM

NACHO

FUN

FIND

HAVE

AND

I

ELEPHANT

HAVE

SOME

TO

ENTER

AND

HOUSE

THE

“The word have appears twice,” Matt mumbled, and nobody heard him except Becca.

“Yeah?” she asked encouragingly, apparently recognizing that he was on to something.

“I have Elephant and Nacho,” he said, and Becca hushed the others so they’d listen to Matt.