Book Scavenger Read online

  Clyde turned to The Gold-Bug, which she’d marked up as she compared it against Griswold’s to find all the typos. She did her best to look indifferent and bored.

  “You wrote in it!” Clyde shook the book.

  “I … I did,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t write in books.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” His partner pulled him backward by the hood of his sweatshirt. “It’s just a book.”

  The two men turned, and Emily watched until they rounded the corner and disappeared completely. She watched a few minutes more, and when the men didn’t return, she drew in a long inhale and exhaled slowly.

  Two books lost in one day. Not a good day for a book scavenger.

  * * *

  Emily stood on the landing of her building and stared at James’s door. It had been three weeks since a strange boy made her laugh and then solved her cipher when she wasn’t looking. Then—poof! A best friend where she’d never had one before. Easier than solving an Encyclopedia Brown–level clue in Book Scavenger. She wanted to tell James about those two men. And losing The Gold-Bug. And Mr. Griswold’s past as co-owner of Hollister’s bookstore. And that she’d discovered Babbage’s secret identity. She missed James. Hollister’s words—just be, just do—washed over her mind like a wave on sand. If Hollister were here, she imagined he would tell her to try knocking and see what happened. But she couldn’t risk the possibility of Ms. Lee opening the door again instead of James. Of asking to see James and having him reject her.

  She opened her own door instead and trudged up the stairs. She swung her backpack onto her bed, planning to do homework and to try to get her mind off losing what felt like everything important in the span of a few days. When she unzipped her overfull backpack, The Maltese Falcon tumbled out. After her meeting with Babbage/Mr. Quisling went downhill, she completely spaced on the fact that while she may have lost The Gold-Bug, she still had The Maltese Falcon and its clue. Maybe she hadn’t lost out on everything, after all. If she could crack that clue, maybe she could still move forward with Mr. Griswold’s game, Gold-Bug or no Gold-Bug, James or no James.

  * * *

  Bob the seagull had gotten a little too demanding about his bread, so on Friday, Emily went back to spending her lunch in the library. Being surrounded by books was comforting, even if she sat at a table by herself.

  James was there, too, at a nearby table with those twins, Kevin and Devin. Emily tried not to be obvious about it, but she glanced over at James every so often. Again she thought of Hollister and their conversation the day before. What she thought Hollister meant was that she shouldn’t be afraid to take the wrong step with a friendship. Any step was a good one as long as you were trying to be a good friend. But sitting there in the library with the low, bouncy beats of reggae music spilling from the librarian’s office and the hushed conversations broken up by the occasional rip of loud laughter, Emily felt too much potential for wrong steps, despite what Hollister thought.

  One time when Emily glanced James’s way, she caught him looking at her. He whipped his head back so fast to the card game the brothers were arguing over that Steve appeared to have momentarily laid down before bouncing back upright. Shortly after that, James put his cards down and pushed back from the table. Emily tried to look busy at work on the Maltese Falcon cipher. She was disappointed when James kept walking. He had been on his way to the bathroom.

  After that, she tried to work in earnest, and, therefore, she didn’t hear James come back.

  “Pigpen,” she heard his voice say from behind her.

  She turned. “What?”

  He’d been studying her paper over her shoulder. He pointed. “Pigpen. You’ll see it.”

  And that was it. He walked away.

  Emily studied her work again. The original cipher was written at the top of the page.

  The paper was covered in her work trying to decode it, which looked like a bunch of unfinished hangman games minus the hanging men. She’d also written down Raven’s hint: Charlie, Sally, Lucy.

  “Pigpen,” Emily whispered to herself, and she realized what James had seen. The names were all characters from the Peanuts comics: Charlie Brown, Sally, and Lucy. Pigpen was another character, but what did that have to do with the cipher itself? The solution was six letters long, and Pigpen was six letters. But that couldn’t work, because the third and fifth letters were the same according to the cipher, and in Pigpen those letters were g and e. Not the same.

  But Pigpen had to mean something. Emily went to the computer bank. All the results on the first page had to do with the cartoon character. She scrolled down and saw a heading for “Searches Related to Pigpen,” and in the list underneath that, the word code got her attention. Pigpen was the name of a cipher!

  She printed out a Pigpen key:

  Once she had a key, it took her only seconds to figure out the solution to the Maltese Falcon clue.

  SCARAB.

  CHAPTER

  34

  SCARAB.

  Scarab was the word Poe’s narrator used in The Gold-Bug. It meant beetle, like the glittering gold one on the cover. Like the inky-black one on the inside page.

  If scarab was the next clue, Emily had a sinking feeling she knew where Mr. Griswold was directing her. Back to The Gold-Bug. Back to the book that had been taken away.

  Emily pressed her forehead into her hands, her elbows anchored to the library table. This was it. She’d reached the end of the line for Mr. Griswold’s game. It was like working on a complicated jigsaw puzzle without knowing the final picture. Just as the pieces began to fall into place, and you could almost make out the image, someone came along and swiped it all onto the floor. And then vacuumed up the pieces for good measure. To choose to stop now would have been one thing. To have the power of choice taken from her made Emily feel insignificant and small.

  She raised her head and caught James studying her. They both looked away as if their eye contact burned. The bell rang and Emily started to pack up. She zipped her bag closed when James appeared next to her.

  “Did you get it? Pigpen?”

  “Oh.” Emily looked down for a second. “I did. Thanks for the hint.”

  Even if James could tell she was upset and asked her about it, she wasn’t sure she wanted to explain why. James had wanted her to stop playing the game, and Emily couldn’t bear the possibility of someone telling her that being forced to stop was for the best. All James said was, “I recognized the symbols from one of my cipher books. I was happy to help. Sometimes two eyes are better than one.”

  In a knee-jerk reply, Emily added, “No offense to the Cyclops.” They exchanged small smiles before James walked away.

  * * *

  That afternoon in social studies, Mr. Quisling asked for any final attempts to break James’s cipher. His long strip of letters was the only submission for the week. Emily held her breath, waiting to see if anyone raised his or her hand.

  The room remained silent, and Mr. Quisling said, “Mr. Lee, your cipher has survived the week. Congratulations on winning your first homework pass.”

  Emily couldn’t resist peeking behind herself to look at Maddie, who scowled at her binder and scratched a doodle in the margins of her paper.

  James punched his fists in the air and tilted his head back to shout at the ceiling, “STEVE SURVIVES!”

  The class tittered, and even Mr. Quisling looked somewhat bemused.

  “Would you—or Steve—please illuminate for the class how your cipher works?”

  James stood in front of the class and held up his vertical strip of paper with letters on it:

  “I used a type of cipher called the scytale. You take a vertical strip of paper like this, and you wrap it around a cylinder-shaped object.” James held up a pencil. He wrapped the strip around it, and all the letters lined up horizontally. “To decode my message, you have to wrap the paper around an object with the same diameter as the one the original message sender used in order for the letters to a
lign correctly. This pencil is what I used.”

  Vivian raised her hand and spoke at the same time. “Your message still doesn’t make sense. You can’t use nonsense words and expect us to figure them out—can he, Mr. Quisling?”

  Before Mr. Quisling could reply, Emily spoke up. “Those aren’t nonsense words,” she said, realizing she could read James’s message even though nobody else in the class could, and she smiled at what it said. “He used a substitution cipher to encrypt his message as a backup, in case you figured out the scytale. Right?” she asked James.

  He nodded, smiling. James held up a piece of paper that showed their secret code. “This is the cipher key I used. Decoded, my message reads Royal Fungus.”

  When James sat back down, Mr. Quisling clapped. Emily joined in without even thinking about it. She lowered her hands quickly, embarrassed by her show of enthusiasm, but James gave her a half smile and Steve a “good job” pat on his tips. Small gestures, but they made Emily feel a million times lighter.

  When the bell rang and everyone collected their things, James shuffled down the aisle and out the classroom without a glance her way. Emily didn’t realize she must have been obviously watching him until Maddie stood beside her and said, “Looks like too little too late.” She plumped up her mushroom-cap hair with one hand. Maddie was only trying to get under her skin, Emily knew that. And it worked, too, but not in the way Maddie might have been hoping for. Hearing her fear verbalized by Maddie, that her friendship with James was over for good, had the unexpected effect of making Emily realize how silly it sounded. It wasn’t too late. And oddly enough, Maddie of all people had just given Emily a brilliant idea for how to make things right.

  Back at her apartment that afternoon, Emily wrote a note for the bucket. All it said was:

  B’N SXPPD

  (I’m sorry)

  She placed the note in the sand pail. She picked up the reindeer antlers and taped a paper towel to them, arranging the items to look like a white flag waving for a truce. She stuffed the antlers in the pail, making sure the flag would be visible in James’s window once raised. When the bucket had been lifted, she secured the rope so the pail would remain there until James retrieved it.

  A while later the ceiling creaked. James’s window was opposite his door, so Emily knew he’d see the antlers and flag when he walked into his room. Whether or not he’d check it was another story.

  The creaking stopped, then resumed again, and James’s window slid open. His snorting laugh and the tinkle of a bell carried down through her open window.

  He returned a response:

  B’N SXPPD VXX

  (I’m sorry too)

  Emily sent a follow-up note:

  ETF ZU VTWO?

  (Can we talk?)

  James came over, and they spent Friday evening catching up on the week.

  “You had those men trekking all the way to the Sunset? And Babbage is Mr. Quisling?” He shook his head, disbelieving. “I stop talking to you for a few days and all sorts of stuff happens. The most exciting thing for me was dinner with my dad at Michelangelo’s.”

  “Winning a homework pass for Quisling’s challenge is nothing to yawn over. You’re one up on Maddie now. You know she’s stressing that she’ll have to make her hair look like a toadstool. Which reminds me, I have a plan I think you’ll like. I’m calling it: Operation Royal Fungus.”

  * * *

  Monday marked three days since Emily had deciphered the scarab clue. It still stung to think about The Gold-Bug squeezed onto a shelf somewhere and Mr. Griswold’s game going dormant. But it was the words of her brother, of all people, that comforted her. She’d rather have played some of Mr. Griswold’s game than none of it at all. And things had been righted with James, so she hadn’t lost everything.

  On their walk to school, they rehashed the plan for Operation Royal Fungus. It hinged on them maintaining the appearance of their fight, so they parted ways before they reached Booker.

  At lunchtime, James staked out a table next to Maddie’s in the library, his latest code work spread in front of him. When Emily approached, James made a big show of scooping his papers together.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. His anger and annoyance was so palpable, Emily forgot for a second that they were pretending. “I…” she stammered.

  Maddie nudged the girl next to her and jutted her chin in Emily’s direction, which was exactly the motivation Emily needed to surge forward with the lines she and James had practiced.

  “What are you working on?” she asked.

  James didn’t look at her.

  Emily dropped into the seat beside him, their backs to Maddie. “James, come on. Are you still mad? You’ve won a homework pass now.”

  He gathered his papers and tapped them against the table. “No thanks to you. And Maddie could make a comeback, so I haven’t won our bet yet. This new cipher makes my other one look like a preschooler’s puzzle. There’s no way I’m sharing it with you and risking it being stolen or copied.”

  “Your Baconian cipher would have been broken anyway,” Emily said as James held the stack of papers behind him, hovering over his wide-open backpack. “I mean, binary code? Doesn’t that seem kind of obvious? Especially coming from a computer geek like you.”

  “What?” James released the papers. The plan was for them to fall onto the floor instead of into the backpack, but for their scheme to be believable, neither one of them could look to make sure that was, in fact, what had happened.

  “Besides, I saw that idea in a book,” Emily continued with their script.

  “Prove it.”

  James grabbed his backpack without looking at it and followed Emily as she marched across the library and disappeared between rows of bookshelves. When they were out of sight from the tables, Emily whispered, “Did she fall for it?”

  James bent to a low shelf and slid aside books to create a tiny window. He crouched down and peered between the spines, watching for a moment before he held up a triumphant thumb.

  “I practically dropped the papers at her feet,” James said. “Of course she couldn’t resist.”

  “Well, let’s hope she uses them. And then the rest is up to Mr. Quisling. Hopefully he notices.”

  * * *

  In social studies, James made a big show of looking for another missing item when Mr. Quisling collected the cipher challenge submissions. No surprise to Emily or James, Maddie turned in “her” submission for the challenge. Mr. Quisling accepted it and looked it over. Slowly he raised his head, his eyes locked onto Maddie like lasers.

  “Is this a joke, Ms. Fernandez?”

  What Maddie didn’t realize was that the cipher wasn’t James’s. The cipher belonged to Babbage, copied word for word. It was a Sherlock Holmes–level cipher, and Emily and James didn’t have a clue how to solve it. James had included a fake solution among the pages he pretended to drop in the library. They figured either Mr. Quisling would recognize his own work or later, when it went unsolved, Maddie would have to reveal her solution, which would prove to be a nonsensical answer key once she started walking the class through it.

  Emily was so pleased that her trick had worked she almost missed Mr. Quisling’s stare shift momentarily to herself. Almost. It was enough to remind Emily of an important detail she’d overlooked. Mr. Quisling knew she knew his Book Scavenger identity as Babbage. If he recognized his own cipher from the website, then it was a logical step to connect her to it. Emily studied the carved diamond on her desk. But Mr. Quisling addressed Maddie, not Emily.

  “I know this cipher, Ms. Fernandez. And I know it’s not yours.”

  “But I—”

  “Cheating is not tolerated in this classroom, on any assignment. Furthermore, you were warned last week about the consequences of turning in a cipher other than your own creation. I’m disqualifying you from the contest.”

  James scribbled on his notebook and raised it for Emily to see DUS! or YES! in their cipher language. All they’d wanted was t
o give Maddie a taste of her own medicine. Having her disqualified was an added bonus.

  “What?” Maddie cried. “That’s not fair!”

  “Disqualified. End of discussion,” Mr. Quisling said. “You’ve wasted enough of our time.”

  In the hallway after class, Maddie stomped up to Emily and James.

  “You set me up!” she cried so loudly students stopped to stare.

  “Do you hear that?” James cupped a hand around his ear. “That’s the sound of Steve celebrating my win. Don’t worry—you’ll look great as a redhead.”

  Maddie blushed. “Your win? I didn’t lose. I was disqualified.”

  “I don’t remember that being part of the bet. Do you remember that being part of the bet, Emily?”

  “Nope.”

  “The agreement was whoever earned more homework passes or got to three first. Disqualification wasn’t mentioned,” James said. “I won one, and you have, let me count.… Oh, that’s right—none!”

  “Whatever. It’s a stupid bet. I wouldn’t have made you shave your head.”

  James snorted. “Right.”

  Maddie turned on her heel and marched away into the crowd.

  “You’ll start a toadstool trend!” James called after her. “Embrace your fate! Don’t be afraid of your own destiny!”

  “Do you think she’ll do it?” Emily asked.

  “Not a chance,” he said. “It’s okay, though. Watching her squirm was better than the toadstool hair. She probably would start a trend. Or she’d at least enjoy all the attention.”

  CHAPTER

  35

  SEA LION BRAYS carried from Pier 39 as Emily and James walked up to their building after school. The sound took Emily back to her first day in San Francisco, almost a month ago. Hearing wild barks in the middle of a city had been jarring, unexpected, but now they were soothing. It wasn’t every day that she could hear them, so she knew the noise was a gift. She knew the city well enough now that she could track a route down their hill and through the grid of streets that stretched below to the general location of Pier 39.