I Told You, Eli Oxley

Chapter Eleven

I typed in the message and was directed to another screen with another message and riddle (what's with all the puzzles, right?). Here's what it said:

"In a street there are five houses, painted five different colors. In each house lives a person of a different nationality. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, eat a different brand of candy and keep a different pet. The question you must solve is: Who owns the fish?

Necessary Clues:

The Brit lives in a red house. The Swede keeps dogs as pets. The Dane drinks tea. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee. The person eating Baby Ruth rears birds. The owner of the Yellow house eats Snickers. The man living in the center house drinks milk. The Norwegian man lives in the first house. The man who eats Twix lives next to the one who keeps cats. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who eats Snickers. The man who eats Jolly Ranchers drinks beer. The German eats Hershey's Kisses. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house. The Twix eater lives next door to the man who drinks water."

After this message, more directions:

"Each person from the riddle is associated with a real address. The answer to the puzzle is our address. The other four are misdirections. But don't think you can just methodically visit each address until you find us. From the moment you entered the site, we were notified and set a timer for you. You have only 90 minutes to solve the puzzle and get to the right address."

I looked at the top left corner of the screen and there was, indeed, a timer that had already reached 87 minutes.

"Only attempt to solve this problem and find us if you are serious about joining our group. Good luck."

I scrolled further down and found the nationalities of the five people and the addresses associated with each. I knew what it said about it not being enough time to go to each address, but I, of course, was stubborn and looked each of the addresses up on my phone anyway. They were each at least thirty minutes away from each other, and the nearest address from me was about forty minutes away. I would have to solve the puzzle.

But I began questioning whether I even wanted to solve the puzzle. I'm so wishy-washy at times, aren't I? I mean, I could have gone into a strip club and maybe even have done the dirty deed with Kara, both a part of my childhood fantasies, but I chickened out. So here I was again, scared and unsure. Did I even want to be a part of a hacking group? What if the group went beyond just hacking security codes? What if they were black hat? I definitely didn't want to be caught up in something like that, and I knew my dad would kill me if he found out that I was involved in some low-level cyber terrorist organization. Then I began to think about my dad and his secret cache of money. Maybe they wouldn't be a bad group. I should at least check them out.