At this point in the mystery, the Skynet website hadn’t activated, and the girls hadn’t solved the book cipher.  On May 1, two of the girls then received this riddle, which would come in handy later.  It’s a common one, and most people figure it out in seconds.  This stuff was mostly filler, as I just wanted to add little things in until the May 15th date.

May 2015
What does man love more than life,
Fear more than death or mortal strife,
What the poor have, the rich require,
and what contented men desire,
What the miser spends and the spendthrift saves,
And all men carry to their graves?

It was at this point that I started adding the dancing men, which just stand for “sh”.  Of course, they derive from a classic Sherlock Holmes story, the Mystery of the Dancing Men.

I would also soon subtly switch from sh to s.h. and drop the shhh image, though I don’t think anyone noticed.  The point was that I was hoping the kids would clue into Sherlock Holmes.  In one letter I mention “the irregulars” and in another I refer to Wiggins (who was the only named kid in the Irregulars).

One of the girls received this cue via email (have you seen this?) – I was hoping they would recognize the painting, which had been sitting in the girl’s living room for weeks now.

And this also showed up in one mailbox:

I bought this online.  Purportedly a toy replica of a Civil War Code Wheel (Jefferson disk) or something like the M94 used by the US Army.  Either way, the girls were not at all certain how it would be used (the date of the newspaper classified ad still hadn’t arrived).

The girls, much like the boys, all received letters and a few objects on April 24th.  But, first, a month before the mystery began, I planted this picture frame at one girl’s house.  The art is from Elise Plessis (eliseplessis.com), who painted card art for a few board games that I own.  This one is called Porte Verte.

Two of the girls also received a crossword puzzle, ripped in half, to force them to work together to solve it.

Crossword puzzle file

I got this idea from the history of Bletchley Park, where during WW2, they sometimes used crosswords in the paper to screen promising candidates. Hidden behind the picture frame was a scrap of paper with the following:

(167.24.3)(57.3.6)(13.1.4)  
(184.29.5)(140.4.3)  
(199.24.6)(76.12.3)

The girls were cued about Porte Verte over email.  I had hoped that a google search, which will show the art image, would be enough, but a couple of weeks later I needed to be a little more direct because this needed to be solved by a certain date.

In case anyone wants to work through these clues, the solution is hidden here:

Show/hide

Although used often historically, I got the idea for this last code from a made-for-tv movie I watched in 1979 (on a rainy Sunday, if I remember correctly) —  The French Atlantic Affair. I remember that Telly Savalas was in it, a ship was hijacked, and a teenager had a hidden CB radio that he would use to communicate with someone on shore using this secret code technique.
One of the girls received this QR code on a scrap of paper:

This, of course, introduces Skynet into the story.  The website (still up) originally showed a countdown to May 14, 2015, 4:45pm. Our own local Judgement Day. Conveniently timed for after school so that the kids could get home and to a computer in time.  During the mystery, it was a long three-week wait for the countdown to finish.  It’s now set to sometime in 2017 to show the countdown effect.  The original website, when the countdown reached zero, redirected to this site:
www.simon4.ca/sky/greetings.html
And we shift from Skynet to a different pop culture reference.  Moving through the website eventually ends at another dead-end, requiring a -not yet known- password.
And, finally, one of the girls received the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, which provided a few clues to the end of the mystery (a date and locations to visit).  Of course, the puzzle was incomplete (the most important pieces weren’t found for a few more weeks).