Book Scavenger Read online

  “That’s Hawaii, doofus,” Emily muttered.

  “Our parents both do freelance work, so they can work from anywhere,” Matthew said. “They’re total dorks about this moving stuff.”

  Emily waited for James to double over in laughter or compare her family to a traveling circus, but all he did was shrug and say, “That sounds cool. My dad travels a lot, too.”

  “You don’t think it’s weird?” Emily couldn’t help asking.

  “Not any weirder than having your dad live out of hotels on business trips while you’re at home with a mom and grandma who are obsessed with their catering company. Our couch is usually covered in sheets of soup dumplings.”

  “How often do you see your dad?” Emily asked.

  “A couple of times a month, maybe. It varies.” James looked away, up the hill they’d traveled down.

  Emily couldn’t imagine her parents traveling without her and Matthew, let alone by themselves. They liked to say they were the Swiss Family Robinson minus the shipwreck, or the Partridge Family minus the music.

  They got off the cable car, and James led Emily and Matthew through a nearly deserted outdoor mall, then a palm-tree-lined plaza. The Ferry Building sat across a busy street, perched on the edge of the bay. It was a simple but stately building. Long, two stories high, and crowned with a giant clock tower at its center. White tented booths for a farmers’ market lined the sidewalk in front and wrapped around the corner.

  They had made it halfway across the plaza when Matthew stopped in front of a man setting up a half circle of buckets, some overturned with a pot on top, some buckets right-side up with an upside-down, empty water jug tucked inside. The man pulled drumsticks from his vest pocket and gave a practice rat-a-tat run before readjusting some buckets.

  “Matthew, come on,” Emily said. “We’re almost to the Ferry Building.”

  Matthew refused to leave, so Emily and James agreed to meet him by the bucket man after they found their book. They crossed the busy street and followed the white tents around the side of the building to the pier, where a maze of additional tents stretched ahead of them.

  They wove through the crowds, and Emily felt a trill of anticipation. This was her favorite part of book hunting. The puzzles and riddles were fun, and she devoured the books, but the actual seeking was what brought her back to this game again and again. She could check out books from the library or she could buy puzzle books from the grocery store if that was all she was interested in. But combining those things with a hunt was like living a real-life board game, with a book as the prize.

  “What do we do now?” James asked once they stood in front of the third bench down the pier. Gray-green water lapped softly on the other side of the railing.

  “We look for the book. It should be hidden somewhere around here. We’re looking for Tom Sawyer.”

  Emily crouched next to the bench on her hands and knees, her ponytail dipping to the ground. There was a small piece of paper taped to the underside of the bench.

  “No!” She slapped the ground in frustration.

  “What’s wrong?” James asked.

  Emily pulled the calling card loose and stood up. It had the Book Scavenger logo on the front, and the back said:

  “This Babbage guy poached our book, that rat,” Emily said. “He knew I was hunting it, and so he got to it first.” And her double points, too, while he was at it, she thought glumly.

  “Who’s Babbage?”

  “I don’t actually know him. It’s a username for another Book Scavenger player. He could be anyone. Babbage could even be a she.”

  Emily dug a card from her small backpack pocket. “See? This is my card. You leave them when you hide or find a book, so people know you were there.”

  Her card was nearly identical to the one they’d found, but instead of Babbage it said Surly Wombat.

  “‘Surly Wombat’? How’d you come up with that?”

  “It’s an old joke with my brother. When we were living in Connecticut, we were hunting The Golly-whopper Games and the clue told us to go down this path through a bunch of trees. I don’t know why, but the path creeped me out, and I didn’t want to go. Matthew said, ‘Don’t be a surly wombat,’ and went tromping down the path. It was such a random name to call me that it cracked me up. I mean, they’re these cute, pudgy animals, and picturing one with an attitude, all surly…” Emily smiled at the memory. “So that got me over my nerves, and I followed him down the path to find the book. Later that day, I logged onto Book Scavenger but had to leave the computer for some reason, and Matthew changed my username to Surly Wombat. My first username was something generic, like booknut123. I never changed it back.”

  “Surly Wombat. I like it.” James compared her Surly Wombat card and the Babbage card for a second more before handing them back to her. “How did this Babbage person know you were hunting Tom Sawyer?”

  “I declared it before I downloaded the clue. Doing it that way, you get double points if you find the book. But declaring a book means it’s flagged on the website, so every other Book Scavenger user knows it’s worth twice the points if they find it first. But it’s only been a couple of days since I declared it, and there are a bunch of flagged books, so I thought there was no way someone else would solve the cipher and get to it first. I guess I thought wrong.”

  They made their way back to Matthew, stopping a couple of times for James to pick up some produce and other items from the farmers’ market for his mom and grandmother. They had to pry Matthew from the crowd watching the bucket man rat-a-tat around his makeshift drum set, and then they headed back to the cable car stop by a different route than the way they’d come. They walked in between the same gray corridor of office buildings Emily’s family had driven through the day before. It was a ghost town on the weekend, with only a few cars and the occasional passersby. A colorful bouquet of flowers abandoned on the sidewalk stopped Emily in her tracks. There was another one just ahead, and then another. A staggered trail of bouquets, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, led to an iron railing surrounding an underground staircase.

  “What’s with the flowers?” Matthew asked.

  A torn yellow streamer tied to one of the iron bars wafted up in the breeze, waving the word caution. Emily gasped, realizing the yellow tape was a remnant from the perimeter that had barricaded the underground stairway the day before.

  “This is the BART station,” she said in a hushed voice, as if they were standing outside a cemetery and not a public transit stop. “We drove by this yesterday. All the emergency vehicles were here.” This was where Garrison Griswold had been mugged. Even though the sun beat down on them, Emily felt a chill.

  CHAPTER

  7

  IF IT WEREN’T for the pile of mementos honoring Mr. Griswold, a person might pass this corner and never guess something horrible had happened there. A poster board leaned against the railing. It read: GET WELL SOON, MR. GRISWOLD! YOUR CITY NEEDS YOU! Flowers, candles, stuffed animals, and cards were in the pile, but more than any other item, there were books. Lots of books as if all the people in the city had brought their favorites just for Mr. Griswold.

  “I feel like we should leave something,” Emily said.

  James looked in the nylon bag that held his grandmother’s vegetables. He pulled out a bundle of leafy greens.

  “Bok choy?”

  Emily dropped to one knee and opened her backpack. She tore a piece of paper from her notebook and folded it into a makeshift card. She and James crouched on the sidewalk to write a note and sign it. James also signed Steve with three little lines coming up from the second e like a cowlick. Emily held the card up to Matthew.

  “What?”

  “You should sign it, too.”

  “I don’t even know the guy.”

  “Sign it, Matthew.”

  With a grumble, Matthew held out his hand for a marker. When Emily took the card back, she read what Matthew wrote: My sister is bummed about what happened to you, so she�
�s making me sign this. Get well soon, Mr. Candyman!

  “Matthew! You can’t write that. And I’ve told you before—the Willy Wonka nickname has nothing to do with candy. He makes books.”

  “Fine, I’ll fix it.” He took the card back, crossed out Mr. Candyman, and wrote in Old Book Dude.

  “That’s even worse!” Emily snatched the paper from Matthew and crumpled it in her hands.

  “So where did it happen, anyway?” Matthew asked. “Do you think he was standing right here?”

  Emily shivered. “Creepy! I don’t want to think about that.”

  “I think it was down in the station,” James said.

  “I’m going to check it out.” Matthew was halfway down the stairs before Emily or James could say another word.

  “Matthew, get back here!” Emily yelled after him.

  “It’s not closed or anything,” Matthew shouted from below. “This would be a sweet spot for a music video.”

  Emily and James clambered down the stairs after him. The air grew warmer and more stale with every step until they were underground, standing next to Matthew, who panned the area with the video on his smartphone. The station was an expansive, slick-walled cave with flickering overhead lighting. Slow, faraway notes from a clarinet player Emily couldn’t see made her think the station must stretch pretty far back from where they stood. Bright advertisement posters for Beach Blanket Babylon, Teatro ZinZanni, and other San Francisco businesses were framed and hanging along the walls and on columns. Fingerprint-smudged glass walls and electronic gates separated them from the escalators and stairs that went down to the level where the trains came and went.

  A woman walked down the stairs behind them and straight through the fare gate, like she did this all the time. Up ahead, a group entered from a farther entrance and turned to walk away from them to the opposite end of the station. Did these people even realize where they were or know what violent thing had happened here just one day before? Thanks to her brother’s earlier question, Emily couldn’t stop wondering where Mr. Griswold had been when he was mugged. Was he arriving on a train or downstairs waiting for one? She didn’t want to be thinking like that, which of course made it all the more difficult to stop.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Emily said. As she turned to leave, she lobbed the crumpled ball of her ruined card at a trash can, but it came up a few feet short. When she bent down to pick up her litter, she spotted the maroon edge of a book jammed between the can and the wall.

  “No way!” she said. She pried the book loose from its spot and held it up. “A hidden book!”

  “Is that for Book Scavenger?” James asked.

  “The Gold-Bug,” Emily read the title. It would totally make up for Babbage poaching her book if this was, in fact, for Book Scavenger. She flipped the cover open. “There’s no tracking label on the inside. You’re assigned a unique tracking number when you register a book with Book Scavenger,” she explained to James. “You print the number on a label and put it inside the book. But sometimes people forget, or they don’t care about tracking the book so they don’t print the label and put it inside. But this must have been hidden, right? Why would someone throw this away? It looks brand new.”

  She considered the book again. The gold beetle embossed on the front glittered at her.

  “I’ll leave my card, just in case.”

  She crouched by the trash can, but before she could place her card, James nudged her.

  “Um, your brother…”

  Emily looked up to see Matthew applying a bumper sticker for Flush to the face of the ticket machine.

  “Matthew! What are you doing? You actually carry those around in your pocket?”

  “A devoted Swirly carries Flush paraphernalia at all times. That’s rule number one. Rule number two is Flush adornment makes the world a better place. Besides, sticker slapping never hurt anyone.”

  “Do you not see the sign?”

  Directly above him was a sign that read: NO VANDALISM. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  Matthew waved a hand dismissively. “That’s like a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign for Chihuahua owners. Nobody’s even here—this place is practically empty.”

  “Practically is not the same as totally,” James said, shifting from foot to foot as he eyed two men who had come into view on the far side of the station.

  “Cut it out, seriously,” Emily said. She hastily slid her calling card behind the trash can, adjusting it so it could be seen by someone looking for it but not spotted as trash. She stood and nodded toward the approaching men. “Those guys are watching us.”

  One was short and squat, the other tall and thin as a lamppost. The men were uncomfortably focused on them. If there was any doubt about that, it was squashed when the short man punched his friend on the arm and stabbed a finger in their direction.

  The tall one cupped a hand around his mouth and shouted: “Hey, you kids! Stop!”

  “Matthew, you idiot!” Emily said.

  “Undercover security! Run!” Matthew shouted.

  They flew to the staircase, Emily still clutching her new book. James pushed past Matthew when they hit the sidewalk.

  “Follow Steve!” James shouted. His spiky tuft bobbed wildly as they ran.

  James headed back in the direction of the Ferry Building. They hurdled flowers and stuffed animals, pounding down the brick-laid sidewalk until they reached a wall of people lining up to board a bus.

  “Excuse us!” James shouted as they dove through the line. James turned a corner by the bucket man, who was still beating his makeshift drums in a frenzy. They ran toward the empty outdoor mall, the splattering of an immense concrete fountain urging them on. Emily looked over her shoulder. The men were still behind them, rounding past the bucket man.

  “Keep running!” she shouted to James and Matthew.

  James turned past a bakery and entered the mall. Glass-fronted stores passed by in a blur, then James turned sharply and hustled upstairs. There was nothing but the sound of their feet pounding until, finally, they slowed to a stop outside the public restrooms.

  “I think we lost them,” Matthew said between gasps.

  “Quiet!” James held a finger to his lips.

  Emily, James, and Matthew hugged the wall next to the restrooms to stay out of view of anyone on the lower level until footsteps thundered beneath them and then faded. A man swore, which echoed in the empty shopping center. Another voice said, “I told you they circled back to the park. Come on!”

  Emily counted to one hundred in her head and then, when she was certain the men were gone, turned to her brother, her face hot from running and growing hotter with anger.

  “Matthew!” She thwacked him with the maroon book still gripped in her hand. “I can’t believe you!”

  “Jeez, chill out.” Matthew wiped sweat from his forehead with a corner of his T-shirt. “Who would have thought security guards would get so worked up over a stupid bumper sticker?”

  CHAPTER

  8

  EMILY WANTED to look up The Gold-Bug on the Book Scavenger website, and because there was almost always someone on the Cranes’ computer and James had his own, they left Matthew at the front porch and went up to James’s apartment. With every step up James’s staircase, the smells of spices and roasting meat grew stronger. It had been a long time since Emily had been in a friend’s house. She thought of James’s grandmother and her scolding tone, and she started to feel anxious that she would do or say the wrong thing. She followed James’s lead when they reached his entry landing, sliding off her shoes like him and adding them to the row that lined the wall.

  Voices speaking Chinese came from the front room, and when Emily peered in, she saw they were from a flat-screen TV perched on a cabinet. An elderly Chinese woman, dwarfed by the floral armchair she sat in, was fixated on the screen. Every so often she’d flap her hands and say something too quiet for Emily to hear over the TV noise, like she was carrying on a one-sided conversation.

 
“Hi, Tai Po.” James crossed the room and gave the woman a sideways hug. “My great-grandmother,” he explained to Emily. “She lives over on Pacific with my auntie, but Saturdays she usually comes here because my cousins have weekend tournaments and stuff. You know how that is.”

  James tossed those sentences out so casually, totally unaware of how such simple statements could make Emily’s head spin. First of all, what tournaments? She assumed he meant some kind of sport or maybe chess, but no, she didn’t know how those could be. Moving so often, organized sports and school clubs weren’t really something she did. Her free-time activities were sightseeing with her parents, reading, puzzles, and Book Scavenger.

  And then there were all the people James mentioned in one sentence—a great-grandmother, auntie, cousins—all right here, nearby? Like he saw them all the time? Emily saw her grandmother who lived in Vermont maybe once a year, and the rest of her grandparents had passed away. She had an uncle who was in Europe, at least she thought that was where he was. He and her dad weren’t super close. And her mom had a sister she talked often with on the phone, but it had been years since they saw her.

  There was a clatter from the kitchen at the other end of the apartment. Emily turned to look down the hall and saw another woman pop her head out of the doorway. “You’re back!” she said.

  “Hey, Mom.” James walked down the hallway to hand over the two bags he’d brought back from the farmers’ market.

  “Did you guys eat? The kitchen’s a disaster zone, so don’t come too close, but I can get you something. We’re in the middle of prep work for that anniversary dinner we’re catering tonight.” James’s mom had long, glossy black hair and wore hoop earrings that rocked like swings when she talked.