Book Scavenger Read online

  Their teacher looked up at the clock and capped his dry-erase marker. “So it is. I assume you have one, Mr. Lee?”

  “I do,” James said, and flipped to the back of his binder. At the same moment, Maddie stood up.

  “I have one, too.” She walked her stack of papers to the front of the class and handed them to Mr. Quisling. She resumed her seat behind James, who was pulling pencils, crumpled papers, and textbooks from his backpack and piling them onto his desk.

  “It was right here,” he muttered.

  “Excellent, Maddie.” Mr. Quisling held the page forward for the class to see. The sheet of paper had a short paragraph at the top.

  Something slithered in Emily’s belly, as if a snake were winding its way around her stomach. All she could picture was their stuff, abandoned at the library table while they’d been at the computer bank discovering Mr. Griswold’s next clue. Leaning across the aisle she whispered to James, “That isn’t…”

  “This looks interesting,” Mr. Quisling said. “Your average paragraph about ninja monkeys—or is it?”

  James looked up. “Hey, that’s my cipher!”

  “No, it’s not.” Maddie hit the perfect note of disbelief and outrage. “That’s mine. I just turned it in.”

  James twisted in his seat to argue with her. “I spent all weekend working on that.”

  Maddie’s eyebrows bunched together in a frustrated glare. “Funny, because I spent all weekend working on that, too.”

  If Emily hadn’t just sat next to James at lunch and listened to him break down his new cipher and explain how it worked, she might be swayed by Maddie’s performance.

  Mr. Quisling turned the cipher around to study it. “Maddie’s name is typed on this,” he commented.

  “Well, maybe she retyped it after she stole it from me.”

  “I didn’t steal anything!”

  “Enough!” Mr. Quisling said as the bell rang. The rest of the students shifted in their seats, packing up their backpacks.

  “Mr. Quisling!” Emily raised her voice over the sliding desks and chatter that filled the hallway outside their room. “That’s James’s cipher. He showed it to me at lunch.”

  Maddie blinked her eyes rapidly, like she was fighting back tears. “Of course she is going to back him up.”

  “I said enough! It’s clear something is amiss here, but there’s no time to get to the bottom of this. You know how I feel about cheating.” Mr. Quisling ripped the paper in two. He picked up the stack of copies Maddie had turned in and dumped them and the torn pieces into his recycling bin. “That cipher is invalid.” He pointed a finger between James and Maddie. “For this week only, I will allow you to submit a different cipher. But if there is even the slightest suggestion that one of you has cheated, you’ll be disqualified from the challenge completely.”

  Emily warily watched James shove his belongings back into his backpack. He didn’t talk as they left Room 40. They walked silently past slamming lockers and laughing students.

  “How did Maddie type her name on your paper, anyway?” Emily finally asked.

  James shrugged. “It was a short paragraph. It wouldn’t have taken her long to retype it and make copies.”

  “But why?” Emily said, incredulous.

  “Maddie doesn’t like to lose,” James said glumly.

  “But she had to know she couldn’t win a homework pass with your cipher.”

  “She didn’t want to win a homework pass. She wanted to make sure I didn’t, and she wanted to rub it in at the same time,” James muttered.

  “So she’s threatened by you,” Emily said, trying to shine a light on a bright side. “And she should be. You could still use your bacon-and-eggs cipher. Just submit a different encrypted message tomorrow.”

  She had hoped for a smile with the “bacon-and-eggs,” but James didn’t look up from the linoleum.

  “Maddie stole the cipher key, too. Once you know how a cipher works, it’s easy to break.” He stopped abruptly in a hallway intersection. With his hands shoved in his hoodie pocket and eyes still on the floor, he muttered, “I forgot I have to do something,” before turning away and getting swallowed by the crowd.

  CHAPTER

  25

  “A WHOLE WEEK of sitting here and nothing,” Barry said.

  This was the second Monday afternoon in a row that he and Clyde sat in his beat-up El Camino parked across from Booker Middle School along with the cars of parents. He had thought it would be a simple thing to spot those kids again, but the more days they sat there staring, the more all these kids started to look the same. There were so many that poured out of the doors of this school, and there were different exits on all sides of the building, too.

  “This is never going to work,” Barry said.

  “We’ll find them,” Clyde said.

  Clyde dug his hands into his sweatshirt pocket, making Barry flinch. A shrieking chaotic mass of boys and girls ran down the sidewalk, jumped off the stairs, clustered in groups. Maybe if he could get them to line up and stand still for a minute, but they might as well be identical for as much as he could tell them apart.

  “You’re a high-strung kind of guy, aren’t you?” Clyde said.

  Barry bit at a cuticle. “Is this your idea of fun? ’Cause it’s sure not mine—”

  “Purple backpack,” Clyde said and pointed.

  Barry followed the direction of his finger without much enthusiasm. They’d seen purple backpacks before. And the longer they looked for these kids the more he wondered if maybe the backpack had been black or green.

  The girl with the backpack was waiting for something, and that was when Barry spotted the boy crouched down, tying his shoe. That poky bit of hair standing up on his head—he’d watched that thing bob around when he’d been running behind it.

  “What do you think?” Barry asked.

  Clyde had the look of a cat narrowing in on his prey.

  “Bingo,” he said.

  “Bingo,” Barry agreed.

  CHAPTER

  26

  JAMES WASN’T his usual chatty self on their walk home from school. Emily knew the cipher challenge would be a touchy subject after Maddie had ruined all his hard work, so she tried to distract him by talking about Mr. Griswold’s latest clue.

  “So, you don’t know anything about Dashiell Hammett?” she asked. “You haven’t heard of a park named after him, or anything like that?”

  James was intent on watching a row of black birds huddled on a wire overhead and didn’t answer.

  Emily continued talking. “Every clue has led us to another book or story, so I’m thinking this one will too. Or here’s another idea: Maybe there’s an animal theme with the scavenger hunt—gold bug, black cat, Maltese falcon.”

  James gave a short huff and stopped walking. “You know—” he started to say, but then something across the street distracted him. “Do you know them?”

  “Know who?”

  Emily scanned the people moving in and out of the stores and restaurants, the cars parked at the meters, the bus shuttling down the street.

  “That car,” James said. “Those men look like they’re staring at us.”

  A long tan car idled up the block. The glare off the windshield made it difficult to see well, but the two torsos angled their way were clear enough.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for someone in the dry cleaners,” Emily said, but she was glad the car was on the opposite side of the street.

  The car rolled out of its spot.

  “Never mind. They’re leaving,” James said.

  They fell back in step, but Emily couldn’t shake that feeling of being watched. When she looked behind once again, she saw the car arc in a U-turn at the intersection. Those men were turning around and headed in their direction.

  “James,” Emily said. “They’re coming back.”

  “What the—” James looked baffled for only a moment before the expression dissolved into seriousness. “Okay, let’s go this way.”r />
  James turned and headed toward Booker—and the approaching car.

  “What are you doing? I don’t think we should talk to them. I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “We’re not going to talk to them,” James said, marching forward. “They’ll have to pass us and turn around again if they want to follow.”

  He was right; the street was lined on either side with cars parked at meters. The men couldn’t even double-park their car without stopping traffic.

  “Hey, we want to talk to you!” the man in the passenger seat called out the window as they rolled by.

  Emily and James quickened their pace.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” the man added.

  “Oh, well, now I really trust them,” Emily muttered.

  “Come on, I know how we can lose them.”

  People looked up from café tables as they raced by. A dog in the doorway of a clothing boutique yipped.

  “This way!”

  At the next corner, James ran across the street and up a hill inclined so steeply they couldn’t see beyond the first block.

  “Are you sure about this? I can’t run very fast uphill.”

  “Trust me.” James panted. “We have enough of a head start. Keep running, it won’t take us long to get there.”

  Emily wondered where “there” was. Backpack straps gripped and head bowed, she bent forward and charged. She leaned over so far that her backpack was almost parallel to the ground. She felt like a turtle, and she was probably moving as fast as a turtle would run. The backs of her legs throbbed. Her bangs were matted with sweat. She kept her focus on the ground and tried not to think about how far she had to go, or who might be catching up behind her. Her breath came out in gasps. She was afraid she might collapse, but then she looked up and realized they’d reached the top of the hill. A few more steps and the ground was level again. She wanted to lean against the closest building, under the shade of a tree, and catch her breath, but when she looked down the hill, the tan car rounded the corner.

  “C’mon.” James wheezed. Thankfully he turned down the street they’d intersected, which was level. Their feet pounded the shadows of trees. Leaves crunched underfoot.

  “We’re almost there,” James shouted.

  Ahead, a line of cars slowly inched forward—a traffic jam. James reached the corner where the cars were all turning, and he stopped to wait for Emily to catch up.

  “We can take the stairs.”

  “What sta—”

  The road curved sharply downhill in a zigzag path, like the track of a sidewinder snake. At the bottom of the block it resumed a straight path that could be followed all the way across the city to the bay and Coit Tower on the other side.

  “Welcome to Lombard, crookedest street in America.” James panted. “Sorry we don’t have time to take a picture.”

  They took small, fast steps down the hill until they reached the stairs, doing their best to dodge tourists and pedestrians.

  A car honked behind them, followed by others like a cacophony of quarreling geese. Emily and James were more than halfway down the stairs when they stopped to look back. Over the hedge and hydrangeas that separated the road from the stairs, they could see the tan car had joined the parade inching down the street. The passenger-side door had been thrown open and one of the men was running toward the stairway. The driver was out of the car, too, slamming his hands on the hood and shouting.

  And that was when Emily realized who the men were.

  CHAPTER

  27

  EMILY CLUTCHED the railing. James yelled, “Go, go, go!” but she was transfixed. The charging man bumped into a camera set on a tripod. The camera owner—a burly man twice the size and height of the one chasing Emily and James—steadied his tripod with one hand and grabbed the pursuer with his other. The men argued.

  James pounded back up the stairs and shook her arm. “Let’s go!”

  She spun around, feet moving as fast as possible. At the bottom they turned sharply, almost colliding with a woman painting at an easel, and kept running until they found themselves on a quiet residential street. Distant horns honked—reassuring bleats that the men were still being held back.

  “What happened to you back there? Did you get zapped with a freeze ray?”

  Emily’s heart hammered in her chest. “Didn’t you recognize them? Those men?”

  “You did?”

  “They’re from the BART station. The security guards who chased us a few weeks ago.”

  “That’s impossible. There’s got to be more important stuff that happens in that BART station than tracking down kids who stick a bumper sticker on something. Finding Mr. Griswold’s mugger, for starters.”

  James was right; it didn’t make sense. But Emily was sure those were the BART station men. But how could they have found them? She replayed that Saturday afternoon: She found Mr. Griswold’s book, her brother put the Flush bumper sticker on the ticket machine, the men shouted across the station for him to stop—

  “Oh no,” Emily said in a small voice.

  “What?” James eyed her warily.

  “They found my Book Scavenger card. With my username on it. I put it next to the trash can when I found Mr. Griswold’s book. Remember? They probably went to the Book Scavenger website, looked up ‘Surly Wombat,’ and saw our school listed on my profile information. Do you think they followed us from Booker?”

  “They found your card where you found Mr. Griswold’s book?” James repeated.

  A car sputtered through the intersection ahead, causing them both to jump, but it was only a cab. James grabbed her arm and marched down a block to a screen of trees and overgrown bushes that concealed a small park squeezed between two buildings. Emily prickled with wonder at how well James knew his home turf. She would have walked right past and never guessed a swing set, toddler’s slide, and teepee play structure were hiding behind the wall of foliage. James crouched in front of the teepee entrance and went inside on his hands and knees.

  “Since when is plastering a bumper sticker on something that serious of a crime?” Emily said. Leaf shadows and sunlight dappled the backs of her hands as she crawled after James into the teepee. “Why would they go to so much trouble?”

  “Hello?” James play-knocked her skull then shrugged his backpack to the ground. “Don’t you get it? Why do you think they looked by the trash can?”

  “Because they saw me put my card there.”

  “Because they saw you remove the book from there. They want The Gold-Bug, Emily.” James worked the zipper of his backpack up and down until finally he said, “I think we should get rid of it.” James looked serious and, actually, a little scared.

  “We can’t be certain those men were after the book,” Emily said.

  James spoke to his backpack instead of her. “I know you want to finish the game, but this feels too risky for a game we’re not even sure was completed.”

  Emily sighed. Not this again. “It was completed, James. I’m positive. The Black Cat clue led somewhere—don’t you see? If Mr. Griswold hadn’t finished his game that would have been a dead end.”

  James didn’t look up from his backpack, so Emily tried a different tactic. “If those men used my Book Scavenger account to track us to Booker, then that’s all they know about us. That we go to Booker. They don’t have my real name or an address or anything. And I’ll post to the forums that I don’t have the book anymore. We’ll walk home different ways, leave from a different school exit. They won’t find us again.” She was speaking faster and faster in her effort to persuade James not to give up.

  “It’s not just those men, Emily. There was that guest user on Book Scavenger who asked about the book. Then we found out Mr. Remora needs it. Now this. It’s like the universe is telling us the book isn’t ours.”

  “But it’s not theirs!” Emily jabbed her thumb in the direction they’d come from. “If those men want the book that badly, then whatever Mr. Griswold’s scavenger hunt
leads to must be valuable. He wouldn’t want those men to have it.”

  “Why don’t you give the book back to Mr. Remora?” James asked. “It belongs to him, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

  James’s suggestion was like a slap. “It doesn’t belong to him.”

  “If he said he needed it for his job…”

  “It’s Mr. Griswold’s book, and Mr. Griswold’s game. He didn’t create The Gold-Bug so it could sit on a shelf and be ignored. Mr. Griswold would want us to play his game.”

  “Would you stop saying that?” James’s eyes pinched with hurt. “Just admit you want to play his game. That’s all you’ve cared about since we found that stupid book. I’ve helped you with his puzzles, and you keep saying you’re going to help me with Mr. Quisling’s challenge, but you haven’t.”

  Emily’s anger at the suggestion of giving away The Gold-Bug melted into embarrassed horror when she realized that James was right. She hadn’t helped him with the cipher challenge at all. The teepee filled with the twitters of a bird and distant traffic.

  “But you didn’t need my help.” Her voice sounded so far away. “You broke Maddie’s cipher last week, and what you came up with today was amazing—”

  “And it got ruined in two seconds. Do you know how long it took me to come up with that Baconian idea? All that time wasted. Just because stupid Maddie stole it when we left our stuff to go to the computer.”

  The unspoken part of his sentence was “to look up the ISBN number.” Mr. Griswold’s game again.

  James went on, “It might have been a cool cipher idea, but I still didn’t win a homework pass, which means I still might lose my bet with Maddie. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if I needed your help or not. I wanted your help. And you offered it.”

  “It’s just a silly bet.”

  “Well, then I say The Gold-Bug is just a silly game. Does that make it matter any less to you?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s not a game anymore, Emily.”

  It wasn’t a game to her anymore, either. Those men were scary, but something valuable was at stake. Something that mattered to Mr. Griswold. And that made her determined to get to it first.