The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone by Tony Abbott

“It says ‘gnomon’?”
    “I told him he did it wrong,” Darrell said.
    “Is it a real thing?” asked Lily.
    “Absolutely. The gnomon is what you call the blade of a sundial. It’s what casts the shadow that points to the time—”
    “Sundial?” Becca practically exploded. “Are you kidding me? There was a sundial at the cemetery! Didn’t you all see it? At that old tomb near the service. It had vines all over it and there was a sundial in front—Lily, you must have gotten it on your video.”
    Lily sent the video from her phone to her tablet. When it came up on the screen, she froze the image of the tomb.
    The crumbling sundial stood leaning in front of the old mausoleum, and because of its sunken angle, its blade pointed directly into it. Over the heavy-looking iron doors on the face of the tomb was its occupant’s name, carved in elaborate old Gothic letters. Several of the letters were in shadow, and some had worn away. It took them a long moment to decipher the carving, until Lily enlarged the image and they all realized at once.
    K . . . u . . . p . . .
    The name on the tomb was Kupfermann.
    Wade blew out a cold breath. “The house of Kupfermann is his wife’s tomb. Is that it? He wants us to go back there? He wants us to follow the way the blade of the sundial is pointing? Why? What’s in there?”
    All eyes turned to Dr. Kaplan. He stared at the translated message, then stood up. He walked across the room, walked partway back, then turned again.
    “Dad?” Darrell said.
    His stepfather flicked his finger up as if to say, “Hush!” and closed his eyes. A full minute went by before he released a long, slow breath. Then he sat and flipped over several pages in his notebook, searching. He stopped. “My German isn’t as good as yours, Becca. I know Mann means ‘man.’ What does Kupfer mean?”
    Becca stared blankly at him. “Um . . .”
    “Copper,” said Lily. When everyone turned to her, she said, “What? There’s a translation site.”
    “Copper man?” Darrell said. “Is that more code?”
    Looking from the star chart to Wade’s decoded message to the lights of cars zipping past outside the restaurant, Roald flipped three more pages in the notebook, stopped, stood up, and began rocking on his feet.
    “Kupfermann. Copper Man. That was the joke of Frieda’s name.”
    Wade could practically hear the gears meshing one after the other until his father finally spoke. He said one word.
    “Copernicus.”
    Darrell frowned. “Uh . . .”
    “It’s where the Greek quote comes from,” Roald said, looking at a page in his notebook. “Heinrich wanted us to remember it because the quote also appears at the beginning of On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres , the treatise by Nicolaus Copernicus that describes how the earth moves around the sun.
    “In the first message, Uncle Henry says ‘the Magister’s Legacy.’ Copernicus’s students called him Magister. Heinrich is saying that Copernicus’s legacy—whatever it is—needs protecting. I have no idea what it could be, but the gnomon of the sundial at his wife’s tomb is pointing toward it—”
    The bell rang over the doorway, and two stone-faced men entered. They didn’t look like students. They wore dark suits and had obvious bulges near their armpits. They sat down on the other side of the doorway with a clear view of the darkening street.
    One of the men started pawing his cell phone while the other glanced at a menu.
    Or pretended to.

Chapter Sixteen
    D arrell’s heart thumped like a Fender bass laying down a funk riff. If they were right, Heinrich Vogel had been murdered by the goons from the cemetery. By natural extension, if the two guys at the other table had managed to tail them from Vogel’s apartment, they must be killers too.
    He knew all too well from movies how things went from here.
    The men would follow them into the street. They’d corner them in a filthy alleyway. They’d wait until no one was