Previously on Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand: Crime is happening at Beech Hill Museum! And here we thought we might spend this internship doing actual work. Henrik had amnesia for like five minutes, but he’s sitting up and talking about glyphs and Mayan history now, so I guess he’s all right.
Most importantly: we found a mysterious Zip Disk! No, the mystery is not why this person didn’t just invest in a floppy. Anyway, the disk contains most of the information we need to move forward, so clearly, there is no time to waste. Onward!
Not the actual password.
So the last of our assignments was to break into Joanna’s office and find the provenance documents for the Pacal carving, which we then handed over to shady, shady Alejandro del Rio. I want to make a joke about government officials here, but I can’t think of one. Having done that, we now have some downtime, which we’re going to use to figure out the password to the zip disk we found in Henrik’s drawer. When we last met up with Henrik, he handed us a page of his notes, which had a glyph and the word “stone” on it. The glyph, incidentally, is the same one that appears on the disk’s password screen. So the password to the zip disk is “stone”, and knowing that, we can unlock its 100 megabytes’ worth of secrets. Sadly(?), there is no evidence of a torrid affair between him and Joanna, or anything like that. Instead, we have a ton of information re: the monolith and the jade carvings, of which Pacal is only one of six. The six carvings represent the four points of the world, as well as a “king” and a “fool.” That seems a little random, but okay. The gist of it all is that the carvings actually combine to create a lock that will open the monolith, in case anyone wanted to take a look at a 1500 year old corpse. Henrik makes a note that he has to find them soon, because someone else is after them. Spooky! By the way, I think at this point it’s safe to say that Henrik isn’t the villain. Unless this is some kind of elaborate Gossip Girl setup where he pretends like he’s not the culprit even when he’s by himself.
Anyway, Henrik has conveniently categorized and color-coded his notes, with the ones in pink being important. I’ll go by category, for the sake of organization:
- Whisperer: Henrik thinks that there must be a way to escape the tomb, which is weird, since Pacal seemed pretty into the Whisperer dying in there. Maybe he had a change of heart.
- North: this was the key lost in the Chaco Canyon heist. Despite (admittedly circumstantial) evidence to the contrary, Henrik doesn’t seem to be the culprit behind that.
- South: seems to be the key owned by Prudence Rutherford. Also stolen. Doesn’t she live in Kansas? I want to know how the culprit is running all over the country like this.
- East: Henrik suspects this carving might have ended up in Cuba — Pacal was scattering the keys all over the Mayan world, to make sure no one would ever discover the Whisperer (ever!), even though he installed an escape mechanism into her tomb. Pacal was weird. Anyway, Henrik thinks that the East key description matches up with a jade carving found by a dude called Bishop Landa. Hey, Beech Hill has a “Diego Landa” jade carving on its incoming mail list! Gosh, they sound like they might be the same carving.
- West: privately owned by a “shoe polish tycoon” by the name of Henry Daddle. Henrik has his phone number, so we can call him later.
- Fool: “Radio for delivery.” Um, okay. Elsewhere in Henrik’s notes, we can see that we can contact someone on the HAM radio station 2050, and use the Nahuatl word for “snake” as the password, presumably to get our sticky paws on this carving.
- King (Pacal): Stolen by Henrik himself. He says that he needs to send “a loud and clear” message to the culprit to let them know that Henrik is onto them, so I guess that’s the reasoning behind the scarlet hand. Not sure why the original culprit was leaving the scarlet hand, though.
So that was Henrik’s notes! We should go back to the museum and see if we can figure out what happened to the Landa carving, get in touch with the CCCC, and maybe needle Joanna some more, just because we can.
Unfortunately, Joanna isn’t here to needle, because she’s been suspended from the museum by the Board of Directors. Way harsh, Franklin Rose. She asks us to call him and plead her case, one of which we were going to do anyway. I guess we can help Joanna out, shady as she is. We’re nice that way.
Franklin Rose tells us that Joanna’s been in trouble for a while now, and the Pacal theft is just the last straw. Franklin is suspicious of her: even if she didn’t do it herself, how did she let this theft happen? “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. That’s Shakespeare.” Okay, Frank. And then, amazingly, he says that the Board has decided the best thing to do in the circumstances is to put Nancy in charge of the museum. Right? The 18-year-old who was barely qualified for her internship position definitely can run the museum in the lead up to its biggest exhibition. I guess the Board of Directors are all too busy brushing up on their junior year English homework to find someone else, or do it themselves, or just temporarily close the museum. I hope the villain gets away and Franklin Rose is forced to face his terrible life decisions.
Anyway, we cut a deal with him: if we get the carving back, Franklin will reinstate Joanna. He agrees, and we hang up. I feel like I’ve gotten dumber after talking to him.
In Joanna’s office, she’s left a note asking us to hold down the fort until she gets out. Again with the putting ridiculous amounts of responsibility on the intern, but at least she doesn’t seem to think that Nancy’s going to be running the museum. While we’re in there, we notice that there’s a plaque listing all the organizations that have donated to Beech Hill, and the Topeka Commission of the Arts is on the list. That’s where Prudence Rutherford works, right? Maybe Franklin Rose knows how to contact her.
We have some more calls to make (Chaco Canyon and Henry Daddle), but weirdly, we get an error tone every time we pick up the phone in the lab. Well, the museum is essentially dead for now, so let’s just go back to the hotel. We haven’t called Bess and George in a while, right? Let’s do that.
Bess and George, amazingly, are still playing cards. You will recall that they were doing that the last time we called, which was three days ago. Anyway, Nancy tells them about the theft, and we can also run down the suspect list. Bess asks if Alejandro is cute, because she does that in every game, and Nancy admits he’s “a little bit handsome.” Oooh. Anyway. We talk a little bit about the significance of the scarlet hand, and Bess and George suggest it’s just a way for the thief to leave his mark — “It’s not just any old villain that gets a book deal these days,” says Bess. Indeed. Since our conversations with Nancy’s friends are always a little behind, we can’t talk to them about any current events. So that’s all for them.
The number for the Chaco Canyon Cultural Center was on Henrik’s desk, if I didn’t mention it earlier. The director, Sheila, is pretty helpful, although like everyone else in the game, she doesn’t know what the scarlet hand means. “‘Don’t walk?’ ‘Don’t go there?’ ‘Talk to the hand,’ as my fifteen-year-old would say?” Heh. (She also says that while it looked like blood, the police analysis confirmed that the handprint was made with mercuric sulfide. See? The New Mexico police took the handprint as evidence. They’re not frighteningly incompetent like the DC ones.) Anyway, she confirms that a jade carving was stolen from the museum, and weirdly, the glyph was considered untranslatable until Henrik came along. The museum sent their print of the glyph off to the insurance company, but Sheila will ask around and see if there’s another way we can get a replica of the carving. We have to call them back later.
Now for Henry Daddle. He doesn’t have the carving; he gave it to his daughter, Penelope. We have to call her on her own line (sigh). So we do, and it turns out that Penelope Daddle is Poppy Dada. Remember her? It was a while ago, it’s alright. She’s the artist behind that weird painting in Taylor’s office. She’s thrilled to find out that Nancy’s a detective, and wants to know if she wears a “sassy tweed hat.” Nah, Nancy’s more mom jeans and ugly horse shirts. We tell her we’re working on a case, and Poppy says, “That’s hot.” Oh, dear. But she’s happy to help, and tells us that she used the jade carving in one of her art pieces. Nancy is all appalled by this, and Poppy tells her not to be such a “prude.” ‘Kay. Anyway, she coincidentally sold the piece to Taylor, and it’s probably still in his office, so we can just swing by and get it from him. But we have to put something in its place, so Poppy’s artwork can continue to live and grow, or whatever. So of course we’ll have to do that, even though I have no idea how Poppy will know if we’ve done it, being all the way in Texas. I’m not above lying to teenagers, but Nancy is, apparently.
Taylor continues to look creepy, so not much has changed there. We mention that it must have been difficult getting the Pacal carving for Beech Hill, and he assures us that it was entirely on the up and up — but oh, to be back in his glory days, before “Mexico lost its sense of humor.” Oh. Taylor is one of those people. We cut Taylor off his inappropriate ranting by asking to try a Oaxacan cookie, which we then swap with the jade carving on Poppy’s painting. So we have our first carving! Cool beans.
Back at Nancy’s hotel, we call Sheila at Chaco Canyon, and she says they can send the original packaging of the carving — it was packed super tight, so the glyph’s shape should be imprinted in the box. That’s the second carving.
You can track down the carvings in pretty much any order; I decided to go use the HAM radio at this point. As predicted, a vacuum tube blows the second we try to turn it on. I’m sure Henrik would go mental, as promised, if he weren’t already having a case of amnesia. Anyway, since Joanna’s gone and we have her key, we can just take a tube out of the radio in one of the exhibits. Time to go chat up some smugglers!
Henrik’s notes said to go to station 2050, but all we get there is a message repeating “8, 3, 2, 7, 1” over and over. Henrik’s notes had instructions for figuring the numbers out, and I am too lazy to run through them; suffice to say, the real channel is 2731. Once we’re on that frequency, someone will tell us to send our message. So using Morse code, we send “coatl” to start the conversation, and then “leche” to indicate that we’re ready for the package to be sent. The person on the other end says they’ll send it as soon as possible. “Cambio y fuera.”
(The Spanish in this game has a tendency to be misspelled. It’s “atención,” not “attencion,” and “lo más” is two words, not one.)
The package shows up the next day. I’m glad the smugglers are willing to splurge on overnight shipping. We now have the third jade carving, and the cube-thing that all the carvings are set into to form the key. Excellent.
Back at the hospital, Henrik finally, finally remembers where the Pacal is. He says he hid it at the bottom of the temple exhibit at Beech Hill, which of course can only be accessed by completing all the puzzles in the exhibit. One of the questions is impossible to answer — it’s what Pacal was afraid of, which nobody knows, but Sonny Joon was afraid of the coatimundi, and he’s the one who set up the quiz. What’s more, Henrik also remembers why he stole the carving. I mean, we already know from looking at his notes, but we can let him tell us anyway. We shouldn’t rain on Henrik’s parade, after all. He’s had a rough week.
I already did the first level of quizzes, so we can go down to the second. We use Sonny’s info to log in and…oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s a maze game. Ha. Hahahaha. If you press M you get a little overhead view of the maze in the dialogue box, at least, so it’s not too hard to get through. There’s also a ball game, which isn’t too hard, and another quiz, the answers to which are:
- The name of one of Shield Jaguar’s wives is Lady Xoc.
- The cycle of life and death is represented by Bicephalic.
- A decorative woven blouse was called a huipil.
- A cahal is a nobleman, but you have to write it “Noble Man” for some reason.
- The name of a Maya matchmaker is atanzahab. Somewhat sneakily, this wasn’t in the museum — it’s on Henrik’s zip disk, which I know everyone playing this game read with utmost attention and concentration, and didn’t at all skim because Henrik is so freaking boring.
We can now proceed to level three, and now that I’m thinking about it, this whole swiping-a-key-card method probably is going to cause some bottlenecking when the exhibit actually opens and there’s more than one person trying to move through the rooms. They didn’t plan this very well. But whatever. Down on level three, there are again three puzzles: one about the Mayan calendar, another glyph-to-English matching game, and another quiz.
The calendar has to be set to 12 Kaban, which looks like this:
And the glyph-to-English match up is the same deal as the first level, only a bit longer. I’m getting bored writing about these stupid puzzles, so I’ll skip over it. The answer to the final quiz question is “coatimundi,” as Henrik told us.
The tomb of Pacal opens, and then we get to reach into the skull’s mouth and retrieve the Pacal carving. Yeah, that’s not creepy at all. And as a reward for completing the temple challenge, we also get a glowstick! That’s nice. More importantly, we can go tell Franklin Rose to get Joanna her job back, and we’re three for six re: the carvings.
The error tone is gone from the lab phone, so we can start using it again. I have no idea what was going on there.
Now, I’m pretty sure talking to Franklin Rose kills brain cells, so I wouldn’t call him without a reason. In this case, we have two purposes: one, to get Joanna her job back (which he does), and two, to get the phone number of Prudence Rutherford. Franklin does indeed know it — he and Prudence used to hang out together, once upon a time. He gives us the number and tells us that he’ll call ahead and let her know who we are. And that’s it for Franklin Rose, whose dumb ass I’m pretty sure we don’t have to speak to again.
We need to kill some time before we can call Prudence/before Joanna gets back, so let’s see how Bess and George’s card game is going.
As it turns out, Bess and George have abandoned their card game to hang out with the Hardy Boys! I have such a love-hate relationship with the Hardy Boys. I love my idea of the books, where Frank and Joe actually solve cases without having improbable martial arts skills, and it’s not a giant sausagefest, and also they don’t cheat on their girlfriends all the time, but alas, that is not the reality. I don’t understand how Ned is such a huge part of Nancy’s canon, but when it comes to Callie and Iola, everyone in the Drew/Hardyverse is like, “Girlfriends? What girlfriends?” I feel like there’s a kind of feminist lens through which you could look at Nancy having a fixed boyfriend who is pretty involved in her cases and has a developed personality, while the Hardy Boys essentially have “girlfriends” that fade in and out of canon (they’re girlfriends in one series, “just friends” in another, and don’t even appear in some), don’t do anything, and who the boys barely acknowledge.
But I’m getting off track. Anyway, Bess says the Hardys are as “cute as ever” — did anyone else watch Call the Midwife? I remember when Jimmy showed up and I shrieked, “Oh my God, he looks like a fucking Hardy Boy.” But whatever. The Hardy Boys and Nancy banter a bit about their cases, and then Frank says that they’re taking off soon, but if she needs help, she can call them on their car phone. God in heaven. That’s about it for this call, so we hang up, and the Hardy Boys’ number is added to the list in the dialogue box. Somewhere, Ned Nickerson is seething and vowing vengeance.
(Note: I did call them on their car phone, but they don’t really offer anything useful by way of hints or conversation, so I just cut that out. Who cares about the Hardy Boys, anyway?)
We still need a little more time before we call Prudence, so let’s say hi to Joanna.
Joanna thanks us for clearing her name and says, “Honestly, what kind of moron would I be to try to ruin my own exhibit?” Yeah, Franklin. But we already knew he was dumb. Joanna immediately puts us to work, as we don’t have much time before the exhibit opens (when is it opening, anyway? I feel like this game might’ve worked better on a day-by-day timeline, like The Final Scene) — there’s a package with a security device on it in the storeroom, and Joanna gives us the code and sends us off to open it. I’m not sure why she couldn’t just do this herself, but okay.
The code is 0677, and the package just happens to be #1113, the Diego Landa carving! Wow, that’s convenient. Four for six!
I think that killed a sufficient amount of time. Let’s call Prudence Rutherford. When she picks up, she tells us that Franklin Rose told her all about us, and she’ll do everything she can to help us catch those “rapscallions.” “To think how they violated the sanctity of my domicile! Good heavens!” Uh, alright. She tells us about the necklace — she inherited the carving, which is a family heirloom. The glyph is untranslatable, but someone told her that it has something to do with the direction “South.” So this is the south carving, obviously. And when she woke up to find the necklace gone, someone had left a red handprint on her wall. But she doesn’t know what the handprint means, either.
The point of it all is that the insurance company sent Prudence a replica, which she absolutely refuses to wear out in public, because it’s heinous or whatever. She agrees to send it to Nancy.
The next day, we have not one, but two packages for us waiting in the packing area! Life is exciting.
The first is from Prudence, who is all offended that her insurance company would dare put fake rubies on her replica necklace, and asks us to offer them to the “Maya god of refuse, if there is one.” I find it hard to care about Prudence’s rich person problems. Anyway, we now have the south carving. Five for six! And there’s also a package from the Chaco Canyon Cultural Center, which has the foam core from their carving. When we pick it up, Nancy will muse that we could probably make a mold from this. Yes, yes we could.
The lab conveniently has a machine to make castings from molds, so we just close up the foam core and stick the drill in, and tada, we have a plaster replica of the original carving. Six for six! I feel like Pacal would be ashamed to know his super-secret, spread-all-over-the-Mayan-world jade carving puzzle was so easily defeated by packing supplies and a plaster machine.
Now it’s time to actually assemble the key, and once we have that, the end of the game will start. But since there’s not much in the way of minigames or anything, we can just go ahead. Unless you want to harass Henrik about his memory one last time, or something. The key is a six-sided cube, and luckily (conveniently), the cube frame is just hanging around, ready for us to stick the carvings in. The Pacal carving goes on top, and then the placement of the rest can be guessed from their shapes.
“Now I have the key!” Nancy chirps. Indeed. Still, that’s not all we need to get into the monolith (of course it isn’t). When we first checked out the monolith, like 6,000 words ago, Nancy noted that one side was damaged. That’s because it was a calendar puzzle, and the stones have been removed and placed in one of the exhibits. So naturally, our next move is to steal from the display cases. What do you mean, we’re supposed to be getting the exhibition ready to open to the public?
We unlock the case and pull out the calendar stones — Nancy will say, “Wow! They’re heavy!” like, yes, Nancy, they’re gigantic rock formations, what did you expect? She’ll continually make grunting noises all the way out to the garden, and you have to move fast, otherwise she’ll drop the stones and crush herself. Oh, that Nancy, she’s so wacky.
Out in the garden, we place the calendar stones in the side of the monolith, and have to set them to the date of Pacal’s ascension, which is “6 Lamat.” Once we do that, a little cube-shaped area in the side of the monolith will open, and we can stick the key in there with the correct carving facing inwards — basically, the south carving goes in the south side, north in the north, etc etc etc. Each correctly inserted carving will open up another side of the monolith until finally, all the carvings have been put in.
Say hi to the Whisperer’s moldy 1500 year old corpse! Gosh, what should we do with this discovery? Get Joanna? Call Franklin? Nah, man. Instead, let’s just crawl into the tomb and chill with the Whisperer’s shrunken decayed body for a while. Hey, what’s this? Remember how Henrik said the Whisperer had provided an account of life under Pacal’s rule? Yup, that’s the piece of paper in front of her. We reach out to grab it, which is kind of weird, because it’s not like we’ll be able to understand any of it, but whatever. It turns out not to matter, though, because the paper is blank. Wait, what?
Before we can puzzle this out, though, the villain of the game pops up behind us and says, “Who’s your friend, Nancy?” and then pushes us into the Whisperer’s lap, so we get a nice close-up of her nasal cavity.
“Boo!” says Taylor Sinclair, for he is indeed our villain. Are you really surprised, though? Dude is creepy. He snarks that the Whisperer seems to have forgotten to moisturize. “Oh, well. I guess we can’t all age gracefully.” With that mustache, though? Nancy says, “I’m sure she would say the same about you!”, which…I’m not really sure how that’s supposed to insult him, but whatever. Nancy’s under a lot of pressure right now.
So we can ask him why, why he’s doing such a dastardly thing, and he tells us that the book contains the only known personal account of Mayan life in the entire world, and he’s going to make millions on the black market. We tell him that the tomb belongs to Mexico, because I guess we’re on Alejandro’s side about this whole issue, and Taylor applies the second-grade logic of “Finders keepers” to the situation. Besides, nobody even knows that there’s anything in the tomb (besides Henrik? Is Henrik going to come save us?) — won’t they be surprised when they open it up to find a 1500 year old scribe and a 21st century detective?
Yup. Taylor locks us in the tomb with the Whisperer’s mummified cadaver. Presumably he assumes that Nancy’s going to be forgotten inside like the Whisperer, except this is the year 2001 and missing persons units have been invented. Taylor’s not the smartest villain, especially when you remember that the tomb is equipped with the Maya version of an internal trunk release. Let’s get out of here before Nancy runs out of air and can never solve a case or make out with Frank Hardy again.
So we use the glowstick we got from the temple exhibit to find our way around in the tomb. The correct move is to open the Whisperer’s mouth (ew), pull out a bar type-thing, that we can insert in the left eye of an owl carving a little bit above our heads. Then we turn around, look down, and find the real Whisperer’s writings — which are cool and all, but more important to our immediate survival is another bar type-thing, this time with a flowery-looking-thing on the end. We stick this in the right eye of the carving directly across from the Whisperer, and the tomb opens. Ha! Joke’s on you, Taylor, we barely suffocated in there.
Joanna, Henrik, and Alejandro greet us with…blank verse? Alejandro says, “Behold! Our heroine emerges from the tomb, like a mermaid from the sea!” (What?) Henrik adds, “Meanwhile, the foolish villain stews in the sour soup of his own miscalculation.” (What?) Joanna finishes it up with, “From deep in the recesses of time, a wise royal scribe whispers her thanks.” (WHAT?) Were they just chilling outside the tomb this whole time, composing their ode? Man, if you guys knew we were in there, why didn’t you try to get us out, huh?
(Also, Alejandro’s accent has gotten weirdly French since the last time we saw him. He sounds like Henri from Liberty’s Kids.)
Finally, we get a cutscene of Taylor realizing the book is blank. “Confound you, Nancy Drew!” he shrieks, shaking his fist at the ceiling. Indeed.
And thus, the game ends. Henrik intends to translate the Whisperer’s writings, which Nancy is sure will be a “tremendous” addition to our knowledge of the Maya. She’s such a dork. Taylor Sinclair — who apparently goes by the codename “Big Bunny”; I have no idea what to make of that — is going to prison. Weirdly, the newspaper article says that it’s for trying to steal from the museum, not for attempting to murder an 18-year-old girl. Further proof that the DC police suck, I guess. And the Pacal provenance documents turned out to be faked after all, and the carving is going back to Mexico. Alejandro is thrilled about this, and Joanna has apparently learned her lesson about dealing with guys with tiny mustaches. No word on whether or not Alejandro and Joanna subsequently started up a torrid affair, but I choose to believe that’s what happened.
THE END.
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