Book Scavenger Read online

  “It’s important,” Emily said.

  “No. It’s not.” Each word pushed James’s volume up and up. “I can’t believe you care more about a stupid game than being a good friend.”

  James grabbed his backpack and crawled out of the teepee. His footsteps shushed on the dirt path as he walked away.

  CHAPTER

  28

  EMILY SAT in the teepee for a good long while before she walked back to their building. James was right—she hadn’t helped him with Mr. Quisling’s challenge. But part of her was upset with him anyway. For her, playing Mr. Griswold’s game was the equivalent of making it to the championships if you played a sport. It would be nice if he could see that and understand.

  Emily stomped up the stairs to their apartment, dropped her backpack on her bedroom floor, and flopped onto her bed. The reindeer antlers James had given her on her first day of school rested on her windowsill. The photo of them with the antlers stretched over their heads was taped to the wall beside it, along with the newspaper clipping that she’d torn out about Mr. Griswold.

  “He’s going to be mad at me either way,” Emily said to Mr. Griswold’s photo across the room. She pushed herself up from her bed and found The Maltese Falcon filed in her suitcase of books. As she flipped through it, a memory nudged her. A memory of flipping through the pages of a different Maltese Falcon when she and James had visited Bayside Press. There had been a paperback in that pile of alleged games that Jack had showed them. Jack hadn’t taken the idea seriously, but what if the person who’d sent it in to Bayside Press had been right? Jack said the person had found it playing Book Scavenger and thought it was Mr. Griswold’s next game. Maybe it wasn’t his complete game, but maybe they’d found one piece. The piece Emily was currently trying to figure out.

  She ran down the hall to the front room, planning to do a search for The Maltese Falcon on Book Scavenger, but stopped short when she saw Matthew on the family computer. He was editing footage for another one of his stupid Flush fan videos.

  “Matthew,” Emily said. “I need the computer.”

  He had the hood up on his sweatshirt. When he didn’t respond, she yanked it down, revealing his earbuds plugged in. Matthew turned, yanking out an earbud.

  “What’s your problem?”

  “I need to use the computer.”

  “Sorry. I’m on it.”

  “Can’t you use your phone?”

  “Not for this.”

  “Matthew, come on. This will be quick.”

  “Wait your turn.”

  “Fine.” Emily collapsed into the nearby couch. From her vantage point, she could see Matthew putting together another stop-motion video. This new video appeared to be made up of notebook paper drawings that got crumpled and uncrumpled, over and over. And it appeared to be taking him forever to finish. Emily jumped back up.

  “I just want to check on one thing,” she said. “It will be quick.”

  “Why don’t you ask James? I’m sure he can spare one of his dozen computers for your games.” He said games as if he’d said pacifiers or tricycles.

  “He doesn’t have a dozen computers,” Emily snapped. “Anyway, this isn’t your computer. It belongs to everyone.”

  “And I’m using it right now.”

  Emily was a shaken soda ready to pop. “Why are you always so mean?” she exploded. “You used to be fun. I used to think you were cool!”

  Matthew looked at her sideways then back to the screen. “I can take a break.” Matthew saved his work. “I’m hungry anyway.” Matthew got up from the table and went back to the kitchen.

  His low-key response to her outburst only made her feel worse. Now he could add “dramatic” and “childish” to the list of reasons he didn’t want to hang out with her anymore. Emily pushed thoughts of her brother aside and logged onto Book Scavenger. She selected “San Francisco” and then did a title search for The Maltese Falcon.

  “Whoa.” She straightened in her seat. Fifty-two copies hidden in San Francisco alone. She’d never seen anywhere close to that many copies of one book hidden in a city before. But it was a big city. She did a search for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to compare against a typically popular book for hiding. Nine copies. There was definitely something going on with The Maltese Falcon.

  She went back to those search results and looked under the User column. That showed the name of who had hidden the book, and again Emily was surprised. Three copies were hidden by different people, but the other forty-nine were all hidden by the same person. And not just any Book Scavenger player: Raven.

  Emily clicked the message icon and typed “Raven” into the “To” field.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Who are you?

  RAVEN: I do not have the information you seek.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Emily said.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Are you running Mr. Griswold’s game?

  RAVEN: I do not have the information you seek.

  “Okay, fine. Be coy,” Emily muttered. She looked at the list of hidden Maltese Falcons. All of Raven’s copies were hidden the week before Emily moved to San Francisco. She already knew from the one turned in to Bayside Press that there was a message of some sort inside—something that made the person who had turned it in think it was Mr. Griswold’s game. Finding one of these copies had to be the next step. She looked at the San Francisco map on the Book Scavenger site and narrowed the choices to only show Raven’s hidden books, since the forty-nine Maltese Falcons were the only books Raven had hidden.

  Every hidden book was marked with a star on the map, and the closest star to where they lived was in an area called Nob Hill. Out of habit, she almost declared the book so she could get double points, but—thinking of Babbage poaching her books—she pulled her finger back from the mouse right before she clicked. It wasn’t like there weren’t forty-eight more options to find if she declared this one and someone got to it before her, but Emily didn’t want to run the risk of drawing someone’s attention to it. Or alerting anyone that she was interested in it, she realized, thinking about those men who must know she’s Surly Wombat.

  She opened the clue without declaring the book, and it read: Where he finished writing this.

  “Okay,” Emily muttered to herself and opened a new web browser. She did an Internet search for “Dashiell Hammett” and “Maltese Falcon.” There were almost two hundred thousand results. The top results were mostly about a movie that had been made of the book. She was about to search with different keywords when she saw a link to a map of sites referenced in The Maltese Falcon as well as places Dashiell Hammett had lived. She clicked on that. There were only two noted locations in the Nob Hill area. She hovered over one, and a bubble popped up that said, Dashiell Hammett lived at 1155 Leavenworth Street when he completed the final draft of The Maltese Falcon.

  She’d figured it out! That was where she had to go. Emily did a victory spin in the computer chair.

  She had to tell James. Sure, he was mad, but he’d be interested to know The Maltese Falcon clue led somewhere and to hear about Raven’s role in the game. He’d probably even want to go with her.

  Emily flipped to a clean sheet of notebook paper and, in their secret code, wrote, Raven hid forty-nine copies of Maltese Falcon around San Francisco. One is at 1155 Leavenworth. Next clue! She went to her room, slid open the window, dropped the paper in the sand pail, and raised the bucket. She stood on a chair and tapped their secret knock on the ceiling with the yardstick/tennis ball contraption. And then she waited. There were no footsteps above, no sliding of James’s window. Emily tried the knock again.

  Maybe he wasn’t in his room. She lowered the pail back down, grabbed the note, ran down her stairs and out the front door to their building’s landing, and pounded on the Lees’ door. After a few seconds without any noise on the other side, she pounded again and then rang the doorbell. Two locks clicked, a dead bolt slid, and the older Ms. Lee opened the door. Even though James’s grandmother was barely taller than Emily and swam in
one of James’s old Angry Birds shirts, she was still quite intimidating.

  “Is your apartment on fire?” she asked.

  “Um, no, I…”

  “Don’t knock so loud unless the apartment is on fire. I am not hard of hearing.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Emily said meekly.

  James’s grandmother gripped a wooden spoon in one hand and pursed her lips, waiting. For a moment, Emily couldn’t remember why she was there.

  “I was doing research for a … book report and found something I thought James would be interested in. Is he here?”

  “One moment,” Ms. Lee said. Up the staircase she called, “James! Emily is here.”

  Emily had expected James to appear, but instead she heard his voice reply in Chinese.

  Ms. Lee turned back to Emily, her face softened with an apologetic smile. “He’s in the middle of a school project and can’t be interrupted. Perhaps later? Or I could show him your research.”

  Ms. Lee held out her spoon-free hand.

  “That’s okay,” Emily said, backing away. She knew James was mad, but he wouldn’t even talk to her?

  She had left her own front door wide open and walked back through, closing it softly behind her. When she reached the top of her stairs, she found her brother skulking about in the hallway and guessed he might have overheard her conversation with Ms. Lee. She ignored him and was about to enter her bedroom when Matthew said, “Phlegmily. I mean Emily.”

  “What?” She didn’t bother turning around.

  “I have some free time this week. If you want someone to go book scavenging with.”

  Emily waited a beat, expecting a punch line or her brother to start laughing and take his words back. When she didn’t hear anything, she finally turned. Matthew scratched at the lines he’d shaved into his head and appeared to be studying the baseboards. He glanced up at her once, maybe to check if she was still there.

  “Okay,” Emily said. “Thanks.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  THE DAY AFTER her fight with James was the first time in the weeks since starting Booker that Emily felt lost in the big school. Not lost in the can’t-find-my-classroom sense, but in the where-do-I-fit-in sense. With every school she’d attended in the past, she’d always started with an identity that pretty much saw her through to the end, whether it was “loner girl with her nose in a book” in New Mexico and Colorado, or “Matthew’s little sister” before that. She wasn’t always wild about the identity, but it was comfortable to have one and to feel like you knew the role you were supposed to play. At Booker she’d started from day one as James’s friend. She didn’t know what role to play anymore.

  At lunch, it hadn’t seemed right to hang out in the library without James, so she went to the cafeteria, which was about as loud as a marching band practicing in a bathroom. She saw Vivian, the girl from her English and social studies classes who’d first introduced herself as their class president. But Vivian was involved in a conversation with the other girls at her table and didn’t look her way. Emily continued outside.

  Booker had an enormous blacktop where they had recess and PE and lunch. Emily found a stretch along the school building that was empty (other than some pushy seagulls) and leaned against the wall, pulling out The Maltese Falcon and her bag lunch. Hello, loner girl with her nose in a book. Haven’t seen you in a while, she thought.

  In Mr. Quisling’s class, James and Emily sat turned away from each other. Maddie took one look at them and said, “Uh-oh, things look tense for the clubhouse gang.” She slid into the seat behind James. “Did somebody reveal the secret password to a nonmember?”

  “Shut up, Maddie,” James muttered. He was methodically solving another of his logic puzzles and didn’t look up. Emily pretended to be too absorbed in doodling a maze onto the margin of her notebook to have paid any attention.

  At the start of class, James bent over his backpack and pulled out a handful of long, skinny strips of paper. “I brought a makeup cipher for yesterday,” he announced to Mr. Quisling.

  Emily ducked her head to look at Maddie and was pleased to see her gaping. She saw Emily looking at her and snapped her mouth shut. Her eyes were wide and blinking, and it occurred to Emily that Maddie might actually be nervous about losing her bet.

  “Did you?” Mr. Quisling accepted the bouquet of strips, extending one to look at the letters written on it. “Interesting, Mr. Lee.” Mr. Quisling gave an approving nod and distributed James’s cipher to the class.

  Emily looked hers over. It was unlike anything that had been turned in for the challenge so far, and unlike anything she and James had talked about cipher-wise. The strip read:

  Emily wondered why the cipher was vertical instead of horizontal. And why were there five sets of two letters, evenly spaced, and then one letter at the bottom? Was the message five different two-letter words and then one one-letter word? Were there even five different two-letter words that could be used to make up a message? She didn’t know how to start decoding this—not that she wanted to solve it or would turn in her solution if she figured it out. They might not be talking, but she still wanted James to win his bet with Maddie.

  * * *

  After school, just to be on the safe side with those men, Emily left through a different door from the main one they had walked out of yesterday. She took a different route, too, maybe to avoid running into James as much as to avoid those men if they were to come back. She didn’t actually think they would come back, because she’d done something brilliant she was rather proud of. On Book Scavenger, she listed The Gold-Bug as hidden in the “Outer Sunset.” She’d picked that neighborhood off a map because it looked about as far from their school as you could get without leaving the city. For the clue, she looked up that old language Maddie had used for the cipher challenge—Ogham—and used it to write out directions to an imaginary bench in a park. If the men were looking for The Gold-Bug as James suspected they were, and they were paying attention to what she did on Book Scavenger, then this would lead them on a bit of a wild-goose chase. She just wished James would talk to her so she could tell him they didn’t have anything to worry about now.

  When Emily walked in the front room of their apartment, she was kind of surprised to see Matthew sprawled on the couch, waiting for her. Even though he had said he’d go book hunting with her after school, she’d half-expected he would bail on her.

  Matthew jumped up. “All right, let’s go. I mapped out the address: 1155 Leavenworth, right?” He held up his phone for Emily to confirm.

  “You remembered,” Emily said.

  Matthew tugged her ponytail as he passed by and headed down the stairs. “Of course, Phlegmily,” he said.

  “Lead the way, Barf-ew,” she replied, but she was smiling as she followed her brother out their front door.

  On the bus ride to Leavenworth Street, Emily wondered what James was doing. Probably studying in his room or hunched over his cipher books or logic puzzles with Steve defying gravity, like a diving board of hair sticking off his head. As if he’d been reading her mind, Matthew pulled out his earbuds and asked, “So what happened with James? Why didn’t he do this with you?”

  Emily shrugged. They passed a lady unloading grocery bags from the trunk of a car parked on the sidewalk.

  Matthew was silent a moment longer then said, “He’ll get over it, whatever it is. Don’t worry.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Emily said, still looking out the window. “You make a zillion friends every time we move. It’s why you love moving so much.”

  Matthew snorted. “I don’t love moving. If you asked me a few years ago, I would have rather bleached my hair and burned off my eyebrows again.”

  Giggles bubbled up at the memory, and Emily pressed her fingers to her lips to stifle them. She remembered her brother tearing out of a bathroom with a towel over his face shrieking, “It burns! It burns!” It wasn’t funny at the time, but it was a little funny now that everything had worked out okay. E
mily couldn’t imagine there’d been a time he’d rather go through that again than move.

  “Go ahead, laugh at my expense,” Matthew said, but he was smirking, too. “This is how our life is. It can be cool in a lot of ways, you have to admit.” Matthew waved a hand as if their bus, with the lone man gripping an oxygen tank and the Sharpie-scribbled seats, was what constituted his “cool.” “But I used to hate moving.”

  “You really hated it?”

  “Before we moved from Connecticut. Remember?”

  Emily remembered Connecticut, but she didn’t remember Matthew being upset about moving.

  “I had just started a band with Ollie and his brother. I didn’t want to leave and start over somewhere new again. I even ran away, I was so mad.”

  “You ran away?”

  “Not the real kind. But I went to Ollie’s house and told his mom I had permission to sleep over when I didn’t. Mom and Dad figured it out.”

  “Were they mad?”

  “No. But you were.”

  “Me?” As hard as she tried, she had no memory of any of this.

  “You loved moving back then. Remember you made us do the family map?”

  Of course she remembered that. The family map had hung in every kitchen since they’d made it. The Cranes Conquer America was written at the top in Emily’s eight-year-old scrawl, back when she was into putting smiley faces inside her e’s, a’s, and o’s. Metallic stars dotted the cities where they’d lived.

  “You got it in your head we could have an elk for a pet when we moved to Colorado.”

  “I was going to name him Monty,” Emily said. She’d spent a lot of time drawing pictures of her and Monty and the adventures they’d have in Colorado.

  “I think I’d gotten Mom and Dad seriously reconsidering moving, and you thought I was ruining the fun. That’s when Mom and Dad let me get a phone to keep in touch with my friends. And it turned out Colorado was a cool place to live, although you never got your pet elk, so you might not agree. What I finally figured out with all our moving is you miss out on stuff whether you stay or go. So I decided to just go with it. Embrace how we live.”