Book Scavenger Read online

  They raced up the stairs to James’s apartment and kicked off their shoes. James grabbed the cordless phone from its stand on a side table.

  “Read me the number.”

  The phone beeped with every number James punched. Before she got halfway through, Emily heard a recorded voice speak.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  James frowned. The recorded message repeated.

  “It says we’ve typed too few digits. Try again,” he said.

  Emily repeated the numbers, but once again the recording came on halfway through the call.

  “It must be because of the zero. I’ve never seen a phone number start with a zero,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s not supposed to be a phone number. Maybe it means something else. A math equation? A cipher?”

  Emily went to grab her notebook from her backpack when she saw the time on the Lees’ grandfather clock. She groaned.

  “I have to go. But we can work on this at lunch tomorrow.”

  “We were going to work on Mr. Quisling’s challenge, remember?”

  The sharpness of James’s tone made Emily feel a twinge of guilt that, no, she hadn’t remembered.

  “Of course I remember,” she fibbed. “We’ll work on them both.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  EMILY CONTINUED to puzzle over the number clue Friday and throughout the weekend. By Sunday morning, her attempts to make sense of it had amounted to nothing. And always floating around was James’s question about whether the game had actually been finished before Mr. Griswold was attacked. The Black Cat clue had led them somewhere after all, but what if this number was now a dead end?

  It didn’t help that the last time she’d checked the Book Scavenger forums, rumors were swirling that Mr. Griswold wasn’t doing well. One user, Captain-Overpants, claimed to work in Mr. Griswold’s hospital and said that Mr. Griswold was still in a coma and had been secretly moved to hospice care because he was dying. But then someone asked CaptainOverpants if he could verify his claim and he said no, and then a bunch of people started jumping on him for fanning the flames of rumors. The whole exchange was exhausting to follow. Emily clicked out of the forums and decided no news was just that—no news—and she wouldn’t let any rumors get to her before she heard something real.

  But that was easier said than done. She couldn’t shake her worry that Mr. Griswold might not recover and that she could lose not only Mr. Griswold, but Book Scavenger, too.

  That afternoon, her family was going to an outdoor concert at Golden Gate Park, which sounded like the perfect opportunity to get her mind off Mr. Griswold and his game. It also seemed an ideal time to hide a book for Book Scavenger. James’s dad was in town that weekend, so Emily would be a solo scavenger. Funny how only two weeks ago she would have preferred it that way.

  To get an idea of where she might hide a book, Emily did an online search for images of the music concourse and discovered there would be a fountain. She had once found a copy of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library hidden in an aquarium at her previous doctor’s office, and ever since she had wanted to hide one underwater. This looked like the perfect opportunity. All she needed to do was pick a book and seal it in a waterproof bag. She’d saved the Book Scavenger sack the aquarium hider had used. You could buy them through the website, and this one was printed to look like the interior of an aquarium with its teal color and pieces of coral. (Personally, Emily would have chosen the bag printed to make the book look like a treasure chest.) The aquarium camouflage in a fountain wasn’t ideal, but it would work.

  Now to decide which book to hide.

  It was always difficult to choose which of her books to give away. Her most favorites were marked up with hearts and exclamation marks and other reading notes in the margins, so she would never part with those. But she collected copies of those favorite books to give away. Rummaging through her hideable book collection, she decided on The Westing Game.

  When the Cranes left for the concert, a murky white washed the sky. There were no views of the bay on this overcast day. They walked past the street Emily’s school was on and then walked farther, stopping at a small market/deli to pick up sandwiches, and then walked farther until they finally reached where her dad had last found street parking for Sal.

  “We should have just walked to the park,” Matthew said as he climbed into the back. “We’re practically there.”

  “Only in San Francisco!” their dad replied.

  Emily sat in the middle of the van and flipped open The Westing Game. She was in the middle of rereading the bit where Turtle sneaks into the mansion on Halloween when Matthew bellowed, “Look! Looklooklooklooklook.” He pounded his index finger against the glass with every “look.”

  He’d startled Emily so much she’d almost dropped her book. She scanned the street trying to figure out what had gotten him so worked up. There was a bland brick building that looked more like a bank than anything else until she noticed the lit-up marquee that read THE FILLMORE.

  “I’ll see you in a week,” Matthew said to the building as they drove by. Matthew had found a group of friends from his school who were going to the Flush concert, so their parents had agreed to let him buy a ticket. If it were anyone else who had already befriended an entire group to go to a concert with, it might surprise Emily, but this was Matthew.

  “If we lived here, I’d work at the Fillmore,” Matthew said.

  “If we lived here, I’d ride a cable car every day,” their mom chimed in. This was one of the games they often played. Imagining life, sometimes ridiculously, lived long-term in one place.

  “If we lived here, my calves would become the size of small watermelons from walking so many hills,” her dad said.

  Emily watched gray buildings whiz by. The clinging white mist made all the wires that crisscrossed the city stand out like a cat’s cradle.

  “Your turn, Emily,” their dad said.

  “If we lived here, I’d live above a bookstore,” she said, thinking of the apartments above Hollister’s.

  “Ooh, yes,” her mom said. “If only.”

  And Emily wondered, why if only? “If only” implied “if only we could stay,” and the idea of calling San Francisco home didn’t sound so unreasonable to her.

  When they got to the music concourse, the jazz was already in full swing. Her parents hadn’t realized this was a Halloween-themed concert, and the front benches were filled with zombies, witches, and fairies. Even the stage looked dressed in costume as something out of Ancient Rome with an ornate dome carved with angels and columns flanking either side, but Emily knew from photos that that was how it always looked. Tables and pop-tents had been set up beyond the benches under frizzy trees, their leaves lit with orange lanterns. They passed the large fountain with a statue where Emily wanted to hide her book and continued to an expanse of lawn. An upbeat, bouncy number played as the Cranes wove in a single-file line around blankets and collapsible chairs and a dancing toddler dressed like a monkey. Emily’s dad put his hands on her mother’s hips and pretended to do an embarrassing conga that was mostly shrugging shoulders and the occasional kick. Emily was relieved when they found a clear space of grass to shake out their blanket.

  “Anyone hungry?” Emily’s mom sat down the bag of sandwiches.

  “I’m going to hide my book,” Emily said.

  “Why don’t you go with her, Matthew?”

  Emily pretended to be very interested in adjusting the waterproof baggie around The Westing Game. It had been a while since she and Matthew had hidden a book together. He used to be really into it, maybe even more than Emily in the beginning. They fought about it back then because he always wanted to hide books in a way that made it super hard to find them, while Emily wanted her books found so she could read about their adventures as they traveled on to new places. Matthew dug into the paper bag and pulled out a prosciutto sandwich. Without so much as a glance or apologetic smile her way, he said, “Nah. I’d rather go watch
the guitarist.”

  Emily knew her cheeks reddened. She could feel them get hot. It was stupid of her to care. She had known he wouldn’t want to join her. All she was going to do was walk the book over to the fountain and drop it in, anyway, so it’s not like she needed a partner. But if it had been a few years ago, Matthew would have found a way to make something simple like that feel like a secret spy mission.

  “Matthew, go with your sister,” their mother said. “You can get up close to the music afterward.”

  “That’s okay,” Emily said quickly. “I’m not going far, and I’ll be super quick. This one doesn’t need two people anyway.”

  Before anyone could say anything more, Emily hurried to the fountain. She’d added a small stone to the baggie to help weigh down The Westing Game so it would stay underwater. When it seemed like nobody was paying attention to her, she dropped the book. With a sploosh, it went under. That night, when she got home, she would enter the clue onto Book Scavenger. She’d thought of a good one: Where the wet things are between art and science, encrypted in her and James’s secret language to make it a little more difficult. Art and science referred to the de Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences, which were on either side of the concourse.

  She sat on the edge of the fountain for a minute. A Dorothy and a Cowardly Lion played checkers on their blanket. Three small pirates held hands, shrieking in circles until they fell down. She could see her family’s blanket from here. Her parents were dancing a clumsy, barefoot salsa on the grass. Matthew was nowhere to be seen, no doubt standing as close to the stage as he could manage. She looked down at The Westing Game, still submerged at the bottom of the fountain. She wished James could have come with her tonight. He would have liked the whole hiding-a-book-underwater thing. How odd that she could be a solo book hunter for years and enjoy it, but now it felt like something was missing to be on her own.

  CHAPTER

  24

  MONDAY MARKED the third week of Mr. Quisling’s cipher challenge. Nearly everyone had dropped out by now, having decided that doing homework would be easier than the work of creating and breaking the class ciphers. James and Maddie were both still into the challenge, but Emily figured it was more for the pride of winning their bet than for the homework passes at this point. The score was zero-zero, but at lunchtime James was confident that was about to change.

  They sat at their table in the library, and James explained the mastermind code he’d come up with over the weekend, every so often looking over to where Maddie sat.

  “I found this section about the Baconian Cipher,” James said. Emily leaned in to hear his whispered words.

  “Bacon, like bacon and eggs?”

  “Exactly. A cipher that tastes delicious on any sandwich.” James grinned. “No, Bacon was the guy who came up with it. With the Baconian Cipher, you use a combination of As and Bs to represent every letter of the alphabet. I was thinking about how computer programming is a type of cipher—it’s called coding after all—and then I came across this Baconian stuff, and it gave me the idea to combine it with binary code.”

  “Binary what now?”

  Instead of explaining, James pulled a sheet of paper from his binder and slid it over to Emily. A short paragraph typed at the top read: Beware the ninja monkey. He likes banana bread and drives a station wagon.

  “This is a normal paragraph,” she said.

  “Emily.” James tipped his head down. “You of all people should know normal-looking paragraphs can hide secret messages.”

  “Oh. Duh. Well, how does this work?”

  James pulled another sheet from his binder—the answer key, Emily presumed. Every letter of the alphabet was assigned a combination of ones and zeros:

  a=00000

  b=00001

  c=00010

  d=00011

  e=00100

  f=00101

  g=00110

  h=00111

  i/j=01000

  k=01001

  l=01010

  m=01011

  n=01100

  o=01101

  p=01110

  q=01111

  r=10000

  s=10001

  t=10010

  u/v=10011

  w=10100

  x=10101

  y=10110

  z=10111

  “These zeros and ones are called binary. For this cipher, a different group of ones and zeros represent each letter—i, j, u, and v double up because they’re not used that much and it makes it more tricky,” James explained. “So I take my secret message, which is I like soup, and convert it to binary. So I is 01000, L is 01010, and so on, until you have this.”

  James pointed to a paragraph on his answer key made entirely of 0s and 1s: 01000 01010 01000 01001 00100 10001 01101 10011 01110.

  “Then I made up sentences that used at least as many letters as there are digits in this ciphertext. Beware the ninja monkey. He likes banana bread and drives a station wagon.” All the letters that represent zeros are in italics, so if someone knows what I’ve done, they could decode this. I still think it’d be pretty hard though.”

  “This is so genius!” Emily said, a little too loudly. Maddie glared at them from across the room.

  “Sorry,” she whispered to James. But it was shout-worthy. She never in a million years would have figured out how to decode James’s paragraph.

  James dropped his pen on the cipher work and tipped his chair back. “No sorry needed. It will torture her to know she’s doomed. So what about the black cat phone number? Any progress?”

  “If you consider progress figuring out what it’s not, then yeah, I made a ton of progress. It doesn’t have the right amount of numbers to be a license plate number, and it doesn’t work as an address for a location in San Francisco. Like: 97806797226 Forty-Ninth Street? You can turn it into a math equation, like add all the numbers to find a sum, but then what do you do with that? You just end up with another meaningless number.”

  “Do you have it with you? I can take a stab at it—”

  A hand reached in between them and grasped James’s copy of The Book of Codes from the table.

  “I need to borrow this,” Maddie said. “We’re supposed to share. Library rules.”

  James hastily slid his binder over his cipher pages before clamping a hand on the book to tug it back.

  “That’s not a library book. It’s mine,” James said.

  “Oh sure, like I’m falling for that.”

  As James and Maddie tugged the book back and forth in front of Emily, the bar code waved like a black-and-white flag until it finally got her attention.

  Emily pushed up from the table and shouted, “Stop!”

  James and Maddie froze. Heads all around the room turned in their direction. The school librarian popped out from behind a bookshelf. “Is there a problem?”

  Maddie pinched her lips into a pout. She looked from Emily to James then said, “No problem,” and flounced back to her table.

  James warily watched the retreating mushroom head bob across the room. “Do you think she saw my cipher?”

  But Emily was too focused on her discovery to pay attention to anything else. She tapped the bar code on James’s book.

  “Look! Look at this!”

  Above the bar code were the letters ISBN and a string of numbers that began with 978, just like the phone number. Emily ran her finger along the numbers, counting in her head.

  “Thirteen numbers, same as the phone number on the clue,” she said.

  James flipped over his other book. Its ISBN also began with 978 and had thirteen digits. Emily’s collection of Poe works had another thirteen-digit ISBN number. Every book had a similar but unique number. The Gold-Bug had no bar code at all, but that made sense if Mr. Griswold had made it especially for his game.

  “Mr. Griswold’s clue leads to another book!” Emily said.

  They ran to the computer bank to look up the ISBN number. In the search browser, there was an option for ISBN/ISSN E
xact Match. Emily selected that and typed in the thirteen-digit number from the Black Cat flyer. Holding her breath, she clicked the red arrow and watched the computer do its thinking spiral, then slowly load a new page. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

  “No way,” Emily said.

  “That must be it!” James said. “But why did the flyer say to call Samuel? Are we supposed to do that, too, or do you think he just wrote that to make it look like a real lost-cat flyer?”

  Emily clicked on the “About the Author” link for the book. “He used ‘Samuel’ because of that.” She tapped the screen. “Dashiell Hammett’s real first name was Samuel. Maybe he thought using Dashiell would be too much of a giveaway.”

  As exciting as it was to know she’d figured out another one of Mr. Griswold’s puzzles, and must therefore be that much closer to the end, staring at the cover of The Maltese Falcon felt like starting from scratch again. Now what were they supposed to do with this clue? The satisfaction of accomplishing something could be very fleeting.

  “I feel like this book is familiar for some reason. But I don’t think I’ve heard of it until now,” James said.

  “It’s set in San Francisco. Maybe you’ve heard of it because it has to do with the city,” Emily said.

  “How did you know that?”

  “My parents gave it to me as a San Francisco–themed present before we moved here. Or maybe you saw it in my room.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” James said. The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. “Doesn’t matter anyway. What matters now is that soon we deliver Her Royal Fungus with the cipher of doom. What an awesome day, huh?”

  * * *

  By the end of Mr. Quisling’s class, Emily’s mind had drifted away from the Roman Empire and back to The Maltese Falcon clue. She wrote Dashiell Hammett in her notebook and circled it. Around the author’s name she wrote: Born here? Wrote books here? School? Because the Black Cat clue had led them to a San Francisco location, maybe this clue was meant to lead them to another spot in the city. She’d have to reread her copy of The Maltese Falcon to get more ideas.

  “Mr. Quisling?” Next to Emily, James raised his hand. “Class is almost over. Are you going to collect ciphers for the week?”