E. –D minus 49 days = May 4

F. –E plus 5 tomorrows and a next week = E plus 12 days = May 16

He went over his math again to make sure he’d done it right, and was just about to put the calendar away, quite satisfied with himself, when he realized he’d missed the easiest and most important part of the clue. The beginning date.

You idiot, he thought.

Whoever M.G. was, he or she would have no way of knowing when people received the cryptic letters, much less when they would test out the first clue to figure out the
all-important date. Tick reread one of the lines from the first letter:

Beginning today (the fifteenth of November), I am sending out a sequence of special messages . . .

November the fifteenth. Even before officially starting the messages, M.G. had provided the mystery’s first hint: the start date needed to solve Clue Number One.

Tick quickly went through the calendar again, calculating three times what the date should be based on the new starting date, erasing and rewriting. Finally, confident that he’d solved it, his paper showed a different result:

May 6

At first, he worried that the results were only ten days apart when the beginning dates had been off by eleven, but after looking at the calendar three times, he determined it had to do with June only having thirty days.

May sixth. The all-important date. Just over five months from now.

Tick wrote the date in big letters on the bottom of the first clue, then ripped out the one-page calendar and stapled it to the back of the cardstock. He examined the second clue for awhile, which really did nothing but refer him to the first letter he’d received as a code or something to figure out the “magic words.” After an hour of staring at the typed message, his brain exhausted, he gave up. He folded everything up together and stuck the stack in his desk drawer.

For the rest of the evening, Tick couldn’t quit thinking about the first clue. According to the stranger known as M.G., something very important was to happen on May sixth of the next year.

But what?

~

Much later that night, after playing Scrabble with his mom and Lisa (Tick’s best word: galaxy, 34 points on a double-word score), eating two-thirds of a bag of Doritos while watching SportsCenter with his dad (swearing on his life he’d never eat another chip—a promise he knew wouldn’t last past tomorrow), analyzing the clues for a while (still no luck with the magic words), then reading for an hour in bed (the latest seven-inch-thick fantasy novel he’d checked out from the library), Tick finally went to sleep.