Book Scavenger Read online

  There was a Jack Kerouac quote their dad loved to repeat when the family deliberated weekend plans. Emily said it out loud, “‘What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?’”

  “Exactly,” Matthew said and inserted his earbuds.

  If they’d stayed in New Mexico or Colorado or Connecticut or any of the other states, she never would have met James or ridden a cable car or found Mr. Griswold’s book. Even though they’d only just moved to California and she and James weren’t talking, she wouldn’t trade these last few weeks away. Matthew was right—you missed out on stuff either way. Or you gained stuff, depending on your perspective.

  CHAPTER

  30

  EMILY AND MATTHEW stood on the sheltered porch of 1155 Leavenworth. It was a corner building with a white-arched entry framed with black lanterns. The first story was beige brick, and the second and third stories were yellow, with the fire escapes painted to match.

  “Do we go in?” Matthew asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Emily said. “All the clue said was, where he finished writing this book. His actual apartment belongs to someone else now, I’m sure, so I doubt we’re supposed to knock on their door and ask if we can look around.”

  “Unless they’re the ones who hid this book on Book Scavenger.”

  “Uh, yeah.” Even though her brother had been making a nice effort since yesterday afternoon, she still hadn’t confided in him about Mr. Griswold’s game. Doing that would make it feel too much like she was replacing James, and she didn’t want that. If she could have it her way, James would be here with them, too.

  Matthew tried the front door, but it was locked. There was a call box to ring individual apartments to ask someone to unlock the door for you.

  “He wouldn’t have hidden it inside,” Emily murmured, turning on the front stoop to survey the area. “Let’s walk around the building.”

  Because the buildings were plunked right next to each other, they couldn’t actually walk around the building. But they walked back and forth multiple times along the Leavenworth side and the Sacramento side, studying every nook and cranny for a spot where you could hide a book. There were windows just above the sidewalk at foot level, and more at head level, too. But Emily couldn’t see any way they might conceal a book. There were no planter boxes or benches tucked next to the building, and the entry alcove was tidy and clear of anything booklike. Emily studied a fire escape ladder.

  “Should I climb it?” Matthew asked.

  “You can’t reach up there.” The bottom of the fire escape stopped at least a couple of feet above the front entry arch.

  “Sure I can.” Matthew proceeded to jump repeatedly, not even coming close to reaching the fire escape, but he kept jumping nonetheless.

  Emily turned and looked at the two trees in front of the building. Something caught her eye perched high amid the leaves. A large black bird peered down at them.

  “Oh, spooky! Matthew, look—that bird is staring at us.”

  Matthew stopped hopping and looked up at the tree. They had a staring contest with the bird for a minute before Matthew said, “He sure is still. Do birds sleep with their eyes open? Hey, Bird!”

  “Matthew!” Emily laughed, which only encouraged her brother.

  “Yeah you, Bird! I’m talking to you!”

  Still no reaction from the bird.

  “That is really weird,” Emily said.

  “What kind of bird are you anyway, Bird?” Matthew hollered. “Are you a crow? Or maybe a—”

  “Raven!” Emily realized. “That’s it! That’s the book I’m hunting!”

  “You’re a book, Bird?” Matthew hollered. “That’s not confusing at all!”

  “You wanted to climb something.” Emily indicated the tree with a flourish. “May I interest you in this climbing tree?”

  The trunk of the tree split in four directions, each branch thicker than both of Emily’s legs put together. Her brother leaped into the palm of the branches and picked and pulled his way up to the fake raven. After he climbed back down and jumped to the sidewalk, he handed the bird to Emily. It was a wooden box designed to look like a raven. Emily popped off the front, revealing a compartment just big enough to hold a paperback book, which is where The Maltese Falcon sat.

  “This is so cool!” Emily exclaimed. She put the lid back on the raven and turned the box around to inspect it.

  “Now that’s a scavenger who went all out. Must be Mr. Money Bags to be able to give away a box like that.”

  Emily gave the raven an affectionate pat. “Must be.”

  On the bus ride home, Emily flipped through The Maltese Falcon. It looked like an average paperback. Nothing written in it. Nothing hidden in it. It had all the publisher and ISBN and copyright info where it normally should be, so this was an actual published version, not a handcrafted one like Mr. Griswold’s edition of The Gold-Bug.

  Emily flipped back to the inside cover where a Book Scavenger tracking label had been placed. She had flipped past it the first time, assuming it had the registration number listed as was typical. But now she saw it did not. Instead of a tracking number there were six symbols:

  Emily pulled her notebook out of her backpack and the pencil from her ponytail and copied the symbols down. She began playing around with different possibilities for how to solve the puzzle—she rearranged their order; she drew them combined with one another like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. There were only six symbols, so was it a six-letter word? Or did each symbol represent a word, making it a six-word sentence? At one point she felt her brother studying her work. She looked over and he pulled out an earbud.

  “Just so you know, I don’t think your book scavenging is stupid.”

  Emily rolled her eyes.

  “I don’t!” Matthew insisted. “Not any more stupid than you think my Flush videos are. It was fun when we used to go book scavenging. Today was fun, too. I just like other stuff more now, so when I have a choice, I’m going to choose the other stuff.”

  “I don’t expect you to choose Book Scavenger or doing anything with me,” Emily said quietly. “But you don’t have to be so mean about it.”

  James’s words came back to Emily from their fight. She’d said Mr. Quisling’s challenge was silly, and he’d shot back by calling Mr. Griswold’s game the same and then asked her how that made her feel. Her brother talking about prioritizing his own interests over hers wasn’t that different from her prioritizing Mr. Griswold’s game over the cipher challenge. It made her feel sick to think she might have been dismissing James, a new friend she wanted to impress, the same way she’d felt her brother had been dismissing her.

  “Matthew?” Her brother was about to put his earbuds back in, but he waited. “I don’t think Flush is stupid, either.”

  “You better not.” Matthew mock punched her arm. “They’re not just great musicians, they’re my buds.”

  “Oh, trust me. I know.”

  CHAPTER

  31

  AFTER EMILY and Matthew returned home, she spent over an hour trying to decode the odd little symbols on the flyer with no luck. The message was so short, using frequency analysis didn’t amount to much help. Only the symbol was repeated, but that could still be any letter. Even if she tried replacing it with a commonly used letter, she had no way of knowing if it was the right one, and it was incredibly difficult to fill in the other symbols in a way that made an actual word. Like if she used E for the duplicate symbol:

  ___ ___E___E___

  Themed?

  Pieced?

  Those were both words, but how would she know which one was the right word, if either one was at all? Or if she used T:

  ___ ___T___T___

  Rotate?

  Entote?

  Was that even a word?

  Astute?

  Or A:

  ___ ___A___A___

  Cravat?

  She had to look that one up to make sure it was an actual word.

  Graval? Weasal?


  Those were almost words, but they weren’t spelled right.

  She wadded up her paper and threw it across the room, where it bounced off the reindeer antlers that were now sitting next to the raven box.

  “Yeah, I’d rather be working with him on this, too,” she snapped at the antlers.

  How had she ever enjoyed being a solo book hunter before? It was so … quiet and laughless working alone.

  James’s floorboards had creaked earlier, so she knew he was home, but there was no way she’d ask for his help now. She had tried getting a hint from Raven on Book Scavenger, but there was no response. (Which was especially annoying because Raven’s “online” light was green, so she was obviously ignoring her.) The only other cipher expert she could think of besides James was Mr. Quisling, and there was no way she would ask for his help, either. Interesting form of note-taking, Ms. Crane. He would probably dismiss her with some admonishment to study more and play less.

  “Oh!” A bolt of inspiration struck. Emily dug through her backpack, gently laying her notebook and The Gold-Bug aside, then tossed out various scraps of paper until she found the bent calling card of that poacher who stole her book at the Ferry Building weeks ago.

  Babbage. That was the name. She remembered Booker had been listed on the profile, too, so they were schoolmates. Not that that meant much, since it was such a big school. She probably had a stronger familiarity with the window cat she passed on her way there than she did with 99 percent of the kids at Booker. She would send Babbage a message and ask if he or she wanted to meet up at school to talk ciphers. Maybe she should even mention this new puzzle. Puzzle people usually couldn’t resist at least looking at a new one, if not attempting to solve it. Fingers crossed Babbage would reply to her message.

  * * *

  On Wednesday at school she did her best to avoid James. She didn’t need him anyway—she’d quickly formed a new clique with the seagulls who hovered near her at lunchtime. She flicked a piece of bread to a seagull she’d begun to call Bob, because of the way he moved his head up and down while he watched her eat.

  “Tomorrow’s Halloween, Bob,” she said.

  Bob twisted his head sideways and stabbed his beak at the piece of bread.

  “Do the kids normally dress up here, Bob?”

  Bob nodded.

  “I don’t know if you’re trustworthy, Bob. I get the feeling you’d say anything for more food.” She tossed another bit of crust his way.

  There had been no word from Babbage the day before, so when she got home she went straight for the computer to check her messages again. Her mom was updating their 50 Homes in 50 States blog with photos from the Golden Gate Park concert. Emily leaned over her shoulder.

  “Can I check my messages real quick?” she asked.

  “No, but you can check them quickly,” her mom replied. “I love this one.” The image she was resizing was shot through a crowd to focus on Emily perched on the fountain with her hands pressed flat next to her thighs. Her head was turned toward the de Young Museum, so all you saw was her long ponytail. Orange lights glowed in the trees. The crowd was blurry and colorful around her—someone’s tutu and butterfly wings, a person with a unicorn head, Benjamin Franklin, and a group of people with neon-colored wigs. It was like looking down a bizarro rabbit hole to a hoodie-and-jeans-wearing Alice.

  Her mom saved her work and stood up, patting Emily’s cheek. “All yours,” she said.

  Emily logged into Book Scavenger, and a new-message notification greeted her. Babbage had replied! The message read: I would be willing to meet with you tomorrow morning before school. I have first period in Room 40. We can talk there.

  Hearing back from Babbage gave her a lift, so she decided to try her luck again with Raven, who was, of course, online. She was beginning to suspect Raven must be an adult who worked at a computer all day, because she always seemed to be there.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Hi, Raven. I found another clue.

  RAVEN: I can’t help you with that.

  Emily sighed. Raven was such a stickler with the whole “ask in the form of a question” rule.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Do you have a hint for solving the cipher in The Maltese Falcon?

  RAVEN: Charlie, Sally, Lucy.

  “What kind of hint is that?” Emily muttered. Beggars can’t be choosers, though. She did individual searches for Book Scavenger players named Charlie, Sally, and Lucy, but there were hundreds of results. She’d have to think on this hint a bit more.

  That night, in anticipation of meeting Babbage, she double-checked her bag for school, making sure she didn’t forget The Maltese Falcon. She’d taken to always carrying The Gold-Bug and the Poe collection of stories with her, too, but because her backpack was so bulky she almost removed them. The two Poe books were the smallest ones and barely added to the bulk, so she left them in. Anyway, what if she and Babbage really hit it off talking about ciphers? She might want to tell him or her about Griswold’s game, or at least show the original hidden message and how it worked. You just never knew, so it was better to be prepared.

  Emily also squared away an idea for a Halloween costume, if you could call it a costume. She wanted something low-key so she could walk that line of not standing out in an embarrassing way if nobody actually dressed up, but also not looking like a stick in the mud if everyone did. She used plain white labels and cut out dots and dashes for Morse code and then stuck them on a black shirt like this:

  For the first time since she and James stopped talking, she was kind of excited for school tomorrow.

  * * *

  Thursday morning, Halloween, Emily got to school extra early. The hallways were nearly empty. Two teachers Emily didn’t know stopped talking as she walked by. One dressed in a striped red shirt, matching knit hat, and round black glasses raised his hand in greeting, and the woman dressed as a mad scientist added, “Morning!”

  Emily rounded a corner, passing the papier-mâché witch hats decorated by sixth graders that lined the windows of the library. She studied every student in the halls, wondering if one might be Babbage. A boy wearing a panda hat and a Giants jersey, two girls with cat-ear headbands and their faces painted with whiskers.

  Room 40 was where she and James had social studies with Mr. Quisling, so she shouldn’t have been surprised when she stepped inside to see him there, grading papers, but she was.

  “Oh!” Emily stepped backward. “I’m supposed to meet a student here.”

  Mr. Quisling set down his pen. He hadn’t dressed up for the holiday. “Surly Wombat?”

  For a moment she thought he was asking if that was the student she was meeting. Finally, she understood he was asking if she was Surly Wombat.

  “You … you’re Babbage?”

  She knew adults played Book Scavenger, but she didn’t think that meant teachers.

  “At your service.” His eyes flicked down to her T-shirt then back up. He cracked a smile. “Boo to you, too,” he said.

  Emily’s face warmed. “I wasn’t sure if kids dressed up for Halloween or not…”

  Mr. Quisling nodded. “Clever. Subtle. I like it. So, you have a question about a cipher?” His eyes narrowed. “This isn’t one of the submissions for class, is it?”

  “No, no, no,” Emily said. “It’s not for school. It’s just … something I was working on in my free time.”

  This seemed to satisfy Mr. Quisling. “Let’s take a look.”

  Emily set her backpack on his desk and unzipped it to pull out her notebook. Before she laid a hand inside, Mr. Quisling cleared his throat.

  “That isn’t the book I think it is, I hope.”

  Oh why didn’t she think before opening her backpack? The Gold-Bug sat prominently on top of her notebook. She’d completely forgotten she’d told Mr. Quisling she’d hidden it through Book Scavenger and would try to retrieve it. As casually as possible, she shifted the book deeper into her backpack while she removed her notebook.

  “I’ve already seen it. There’s no use
trying to hide it,” Mr. Quisling said. “It will be much worse if you lie to me. You can trust me on that.”

  Reluctantly Emily said, “It … it is that Poe book. I am giving it back. Soon.”

  Mr. Quisling’s mouth formed a thin, tight line. He wiggled his jaw as if he were grinding something between his teeth. His next words came out very slowly.

  “You did hear me say someone’s job was on the line for that book? A man could be fired if he doesn’t have it.”

  “Yes,” Emily said. She couldn’t meet Mr. Quisling’s gaze. From the moment she’d met Mr. Quisling, she’d been on his bad side. He must have a very different idea of the kind of person she actually was.

  “Let me get this straight. You would rather a man lose his job so you can keep a book?”

  With every word Mr. Quisling said, Emily shrank an inch.

  “I wasn’t going to keep—”

  Mr. Quisling held up a hand to stop her and then turned it palm up.

  “Give me the book.”

  She had to make him understand. “Mr. Quisling, it’s not what you think.” Before Mr. Quisling cut her off, she rushed on. “It’s Mr. Griswold’s next game. And I can prove it.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  MR. QUISLING dropped his hand to his desk and didn’t say anything. Emily wasn’t sure if that meant he was surprised or not. Mr. Quisling’s expressions were like a closet of pressed gray suits. All pulled together, all professional, all respectable. But it was hard to tell from day to day if the gray suit he wore was the same or different from the one he wore before.

  She flipped open The Gold-Bug to the Bayside Press symbol that had a raven in place of the seagull.

  “That was my first clue,” she said. “And then I found a secret message in the story. Mr. Griswold made this book with typos intentionally left inside. If you find the typos and list all the correct letters in one line, it spells the first sentence of another Edgar Allan Poe story.”