Lemont Confidential Mystery Cache

The cache is not at the listed coordinates!

The most gorgeous dame I'd ever seen walked through my office door one Saturday morning. Her smile nearly blew my fedora off. All she needed was a saxophone tune cued on her arrival and she could've been Bette Davis. She turned to me. "Sweetie, where did you put our wedding pictures?" she asked. "Oh, and put something decent on. We're going to be late to the museum."

My smile vanished like a penny stock in the late 20's. The museum. I've met a lot of dames in my business, and she was the only one who could get away with marching me into one of those. Before I could come up with a wisecrack involving the Eighth Amendment, she continued. "Oh, come on. You need to get away from that silly paper. Besides, maybe you'll learn something." With a less than reassuring grin, she left.

I had been staring at "that silly paper" for months. Regular work had been hard to come by ever since the Hinks murder last year. Oh, there was still a need for private investigators in this old town, but nobody wanted to hire one who was now best known for getting his high-profile client killed by ferreting out the wrong kidnapper. The police eventually caught the right guy, but the trial and subsequent publicity killed my career. Reputation is important in a small town. You can't end up with a bad name and expect to make a living. So it was back to cold cases for me.

The torn, yellowed note on my desk was a case so cold it could have floated down the Des Plaines River all the way from Greenland, with penguins riding on top. "Sweetie! Penguins don't live in Greenland!" echoed from the bedroom. I decided to stop narrating aloud. The old note was found in a cigar box in the attic of the late Gregory P. Schaum, amongst the miscellaneous possessions his family had to sort through after his passing. This was in 1977. It had been six years since his granddaughter brought the mysterious message to me. The family had never been able to decipher the note's meaning. Neither had I. The initial work was easy. Schaum grew up in Lemont and worked as a policeman until his forties, when he quit the local force amid a spate of graft allegations that ended the constabulary careers of three lawmen. The other two were his partner, an Off. P.M. McCleese, and Maj. R. Herring, who had been in charge of the departmental budget. Nobody ever figured out exactly what happened, but the motivation was clear enough. Money was hard to come by in those days. When a big WPA project came into his department, the temptation to skim must have been hard to resist. The work got done and folks got canned, and nothing else ever came of it... until this note turned up in an attic. Something was fishy here, and it wasn't just Major Herring. What did the cryptic note mean? What exactly was Schaum hiding?

For the forty-eighth time this morning, I read the note. Something had been moved out by "St. J." It was easy to figure out where that was, considering that establishment has been around a lot longer than Schaum. ("Since 1650, honey! Are you getting ready to go?") But the meaning of the scribbled code underneath was hard to figure. In some way it must work from someone's name, or maybe a set of names, to something that would have reminded Schaum where to look for whatever it was he moved out into the woods. I had tried working with "Gregory P. Schaum" over and over again, as well as with the names of the other two officers. Nothing sensible had emerged. Some notes didn't seem to make any sense. "Digits?" Names don't have digits. And what did the abbreviations such as "chis." and "O. S. Ch." stand for? There was a reference to "Bromb. dairy", but no such establishment was listed in the phone book. Working at this note felt like trying to pick a lock with a paper clip. I've never been much good at picking locks. It's usually a lot easier to beguile my way into a key.

A meaningful "I'm waiting..." came from the vicinity of the front porch. Drat. I wasn't going to escape my fate. Rushing into the bedroom, I threw on some pants and a button-down shirt that I hadn't bothered to wash for several wearings. Detergent is overrated. Sometimes in my job it helps to blend in with the crowd. I finished fumbling with the buttons and hustled through the front door in as debonair a manner as I could manage. One glance from her stopped me like coattails caught under the wheels of a gadabout. "That shirt's disgusting. And your pants are on backwards." I looked down. It was perfectly true. What would I do without her?

One change of wardrobe later, we were in the car, headed downtown. A sign at the edge of town advertised Lemont's friendliness to family living. It's a typical small town that way. A lot of families go back decades, mostly in the same line of work. If the quarries or aluminum plant were still open, half the town would still be working there, just like granddad did. We cruised in air conditioned comfort past a mural depicting people laboring in the hot sun. I hung a left and parked outside an old church. The white paint on its steeple was peeling like a post-Labor Day sunburn. "This is it!" said my wife, excited to have finally exacted my compliance with her archival outings. "I can't wait," I muttered under my breath. I followed her through the doorway into the steepled stone building.

Two lovely ladies sat in an office to the left of the door. "Can I help you?" asked one.

"This is the Historical Society, right?" replied my wife.

"Yes, yes!" came the answer. The woman stood up and bustled out, intent upon giving us a tour. My wife poked me and gestured at a wooden box. Oh yes. One dollar entry fee. I peeled two singles from the meager stash in my wallet and fed them through the slot. At least this would be inexpensive agony. The woman looked at me oddly. "Hey, aren't you that private inve-"

My wife coughed sharply and stepped in front of me. "Does the tour start this way?" she inquired pointedly.

We were led past a half-dozen rows of curved wooden pews to the nave. Our guide began to relate, in that rehearsed tone of voice common to all museum guides, the history of the building. Assembled from bits of limestone quarried just down the street, it had stood since before the Civil War, and was one of the oldest surviving buildings in town... my mind began to wander. My wife was in rapt attention - to her, this lovely lady might as well have been the muse Clio - but I could only stare at the stained glass windows. There was a sudden silence and I realized my wife had just asked me something. "Er, um, yes... why are there names on those windows?" I asked weakly, completely unaware of what was expected of me at the instant.

I got a glare from my wife and a canned answer from our guide, but I didn't pay much attention to either. I was feeling the tickle.

Every investigator, whether private or gainfully employed, knows about the tickle. When a case has been bubbling in the deep recesses of your mind like cheese on a stuffed pizza and finally the taste of pepperoni suffuses the onions, you feel the tickle. A connection is made. You know it's important, but you haven't quite figured out the whats or whys. I stared at the window a moment longer. "Nm. dated s.g. wind." Had I stumbled upon something used by Schaum? My mind raced as I numbly followed the two women toward a set of stairs I hadn't noticed at first. My wife stopped to ask about a photo hung on the wall. It was of a streetcar running through Lemont, past a stone building. I was still trying to piece together the windows. What if Schaum's code involved things he'd grown up with, things that would trigger his memory but would be fairly impenetrable to other people? Local landmarks such as this old stone church? People he knew? The mark of a good code is that it can be easily read by the right people - in this case, probably just by himself - but can't be understood by anyone else. It was as good a hypothesis as any I'd had, but I still didn't know what these names were. I stared pensively at the streetcar as my wife continued down the stairs. The building behind it caught my eye. Stone. Around before Schaum's time. "Chis....?" I stumbled after my wife and emerged in a quaint little basement museum. The sudden realization that everything I needed was in front of me hit like a Singletary tackle. I moved around the museum frenetically, taking everything in. My wife stared at me, mouth agape. "I've never seen him like this!" she exclaimed to our guide, delighted at my newfound interest in history. Eye doc. Dairy. Flyer. Hotel bath. All elements of the small-town Lemont of Officer G.P. Schaum's childhood and early adulthood. It was all starting to coagulate. Now all I needed was... "chiseled?" Of course! The key! Schaum would have used something around at the time, something semi-permanent, something close at hand. I caught my wife's eye. She and our guide were both still staring. "Um... I've gotta go. Here are the car keys, sweetie. I'll meet you at home." I vaulted up the stairs before she could protest.

I almost ran to the building, nearly getting run over by a speeding 1932 Buick along the way. The driver's hair looked like a cross between J.Y. Young's and a skunk pelt. This town has a thing with vintage cars. I can't explain the hair. Breathless, I found the building and searched its surface. There was a metal plaque. Dug out. No, this one was put up in 2003. I kept looking until I found my quarry. I stared at it. My head pounded with excitement. I barely knew what to do next. I patted down my pockets in search of the old, yellowed note, but it was sitting at home. I'd have to try to summon the details from memory. My wife had the car keys, and it would take too long to walk home and back. Mumbling and ignoring the looks of passers-by, I began to piece things together, line by line. This had the smell of paycheck all over it. If watermarks smelled like roses, I would have been swarmed by hungry bees. Schaum's grandkids would love to finally get some results out of poor disgraced me.

"Sir, what are you doing?" came a commanding voice nearby. It sounded displeased. I turned. It was a cop.

I spat out an answer. "I'm just interested in our local history." It wasn't entirely a lie, although my wife would have laughed at the thought.

"Aren't you that private investigator..." began the officer suspiciously.

"Yeah. That's me. I have to be up on history in my line of work." Any more irony and I'd spontaneously smelt.

There was a long pause. "I think maybe you should go some place else and stop disturbing these fine people," said the officer with a wave of his hand at a mostly empty sidewalk. His voice sounded more nervous, less authoritarian.

What? How could this possibly be illegal? I tried to craft an unimpeachable way to say this. "What? How could this possibly be illegal?" I asked, mentally kicking myself.

"You're disturbing order. Now move along and leave this building alone, and don't come back or I'll have to arrest you for violating ordinance 15-5 of the municipal code. That's 'disorderly conduct'." The commanding tone was back in his voice. One hand rested meaningfully upon the butt of his pistol. I looked at the nameplate pinned to his uniform. It read "MCCLEESE".

I turned and walked away. Some things aren't worth risking for a potential paycheck.

You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.