Dumpster Diver

Eric is a free willed man. He lives life on a day-to-day basis; never thinking of the future or remembering the past. One of his hobbies, and a way to bring in cash, is dumpster diving. One day he went to one of his favorite dumpsters. It sits behind a high-class hotel. He found a lot of good stuff here before.

As he was digging through the dumpster, he came upon a little black book. It looked very well made. Maybe the cover and backing was leather, he was not sure, but it looked very up class and well put together. Written on the cover was the word Moleskine. He wondered if it was the name of the owner, or maybe the makers of this looking neat book.

He opened it up and noticed three pages where missing. There was writing on some of the remaining pages. He started to read what was inside, the handwriting looked like calligraphy. ‘Someone well-schooled wrote this’, he thought. It told a story of a rich person who was dying and wanted to do something fun. So, they made a clue book and was planning on handing it out to a select group of people to try and solve. The winner would get a big reward.

‘Well,’ he thought, ‘the person must have changed their mind and threw it away.’ He decided he would see if he could complete it just for fun. In the very back was a folded piece of paper that looked like it matched the first torn out page. So, he started off on the first clue.

It read: She stands alone in the dark, but through the lights, she sees everything.

‘Wow, this is going to be hard,’ he thought. He focused all his memory to the front of his brain, trying to remember anything even close to what the clue might be saying. Then it dawned on him…there was! A statue in a park. Minutes away from here stands a statue of a woman. At night, she stands in the dark, but about 100 yards away in front of her, is a little baseball park totally lit up at night with large spotlights. He ran there as fast as he could. When he got to where she was standing, he crawled up onto her pedestal and looked towards the ballpark. He could clearly see everything going on at the park.

‘Now where would the second clue be?’ As he scanned the area in front of the statue, he noticed that her right hand looked as if it was pointing towards a small shed just outside of the ballpark. He ran to the shed and started to look around. The shed was locked, so the clue could not be inside. He noticed a small metal box barely tucked out of site behind some bushes. He looked at closely. It appeared to be locked so he decided to turn back. He was almost turned away when he noticed that the lock was just hanging there and could easily be mistaken as locked if you did not look closely. He opened the box and there was a page that had been torn out of the book. He picked it up and compared it to the areas in the black book that had missing pages. It lined up perfectly to the second page torn out. He read this clue.

Sometimes you are high, sometimes you are low, but when you are at the top, everyone knows you are the winner.

‘Wow,’ he thought, ‘this one is even harder.’ He really stretched his brain but man, nothing was clicking. As he walked through the park, he noticed a climbing rock wall. The clue flashed back through his mind. This was a competitive climbing rock wall. People climbed it and the fastest one won. It stood behind a gate and the gate was locked. It was also closed for the season.

‘Well,’ he thought, ‘I will just climb over the gate and see what is next.’ He climbed over the gate and went up to the wall. It was a lot taller than it looked from where he originally laid eyes on it. Must have been 40 feet tall and the only way to the top was to climb it or get through the totally enclosed stairway going up the back…which was pad locked. He was afraid of heights but made himself start climbing. He almost fell a fewmo times and he had no catch-rope attached to him so it could have been bad. When he made it to the top, he pulled himself over the edge and stood up.

‘Now where could that next clue be?’ he mused. There was rope laying on the deck and climbing gear hung up on the wall. That is when he noticed a pair of climbing gloves laying on a bench. It looked like something white was sticking out of one of them. He picked it up pulled out another piece of the book with a third clue on it.

It read: If you go too fast, you will pass it. If you go too slow, you will never get there.

‘Now this one is impossible!’ he thought to himself. He looked around from his area. He had a great observation platform. He saw a staircase across the small fields just in front of the tower. It appeared to be moving down from the street above. He was not sure if it had anything to do with the clue, but he had to start somewhere.

He tied a rope off to a pillar, threw it over the side and climbed down. As he approached the stairs, he saw they were escalators. They were only moving down. He thought, ‘If I run fast enough, I could get to the top easy. Then it was as if the clue was speaking to him: move too fast and you will pass it, too slow and you will never get there. The clue had to be somewhere between the bottom and the top of the stairs. He looked and looked for well over an hour but could not see anything. He walked up the moving stairs and then rode them down about a hundred different times. It was by accident he noticed a little cloth bag stuck to the side of the stairs. He never would have seen it if he did not have to catch himself from falling during one of his fast walks up them. As he grabbed the rail to stable himself, he felt the bag and grabbed on it, pulling it loose as he moved upwards. When he reached the top, he looked inside. There was nothing but a key, but he thought he knew where this key came from. It looked just like the ones they use at the bus stations to let you lock up your stuff while you wait for your bus to leave. He knew a lot of people used those lockers to store things they did not want anyone to get ahold of.

He hopped the next city bus to the Greyhound station and went into the locker are. Sure enough the key matched the ones that were sitting in the locks of the empty lockers. He looked at the number on the key and matched it up to a locker with the same number. He put the key into the lock and popped it opened. Inside was a small suitcase, but the suitcase was locked. How was he going to open it with out breaking it? He knew he could resell it for a pretty penny. It was the kind of lock that had a series of letters in a straight line instead of numbers. He just did not know what he was going to do. He decided to thumb through the little black book, ‘Maybe the combination is somewhere in it.’ He counted the letters on the lock…9…and then started to look through the little black book. He was about to give up and just break the lock when he laid eyes on the name on the front of the book. He counted the letters…9.

‘What the hell, it could not hurt,’ he shrugged. He turned the lock to read Moleskine and he heard a click. He peaked inside and saw what appeared to be money. He knew he could not check it out there in public, so he went home and opened it there. When he was done counting the money, it totaled $20,000. He was so excited. There was a note that read: You Win. He could not believe his luck. All because he found a little black book with the name Moleskine on it. Now he wondered just what the name meant, but that is a whole other adventure.