Book Scavenger Read online

  “We’re good,” James said, looking to Emily for affirmation. “Emily’s going to show me the Book Scavenger website.”

  “Oh, Emily! I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m so sorry. I’m James’s mom. I’d shake a hand but…” She waved her flour-coated hands. “How are you liking San Francisco?”

  “It’s nice.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the roar of a stove fan that had been switched on in the kitchen. Something sputtered as it dropped in hot oil. From inside the kitchen they heard James’s grandmother shout something over the oil and fan.

  James’s mom held her palms up and shrugged, like she was saying, “What can you do?” and ducked back into the kitchen.

  It was a little overwhelming how different James’s apartment felt from Emily’s, which was nearly identical in layout but nothing else. The Cranes’ rentals were always furnished with the basics, and that was it. Stark and bland. James’s apartment was layered with objects and smells and noises. There were rugs and couches and decorative pillows. Tables with fabric draped over them, and then frames and trinkets on top of the fabric. Real plants that you had to take care of. The walls were painted colors, not rental white, and covered with art, photographs, and a collection of paper fans. Some things looked brand-new, like the flat-screen TV, and some things looked like they belonged in a museum. James had said his family had been living in this building for generations, and you could feel it.

  James’s room was no different from the rest of the house. Filled to the brim. Blue walls covered with superhero and comic book posters, a solar system slowly revolved from the ceiling, a stuffed boa constrictor stretched across the foot of his bed. Multiple bookshelves with not just books but collections. Neat and orderly LEGO models, toy monsters, a tower of board games, sand dollars. Emily and Matthew were limited to one suitcase of “nonessentials” and one suitcase of books. Emily couldn’t even calculate how many suitcases it would take for all of James’s things.

  James pushed back a curtain concealing a closet filled with a desk and computers.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Emily said.

  “I never kid about computers.” James patted each one on top like obedient puppies. “One computer for schoolwork and regular stuff, one for video games, and the third—I built this one.”

  “You built a computer?”

  “It’s not really a big deal,” James said with a shrug. “So how do we see if that Gold-Bug book is part of the Book Scavenger game?”

  They went to the Book Scavenger website, and Emily clicked on “Embarcadero BART station.” There were no books listed under Hidden. She did a search for The Gold-Bug, but nothing turned up in the results.

  “Maybe somebody really did throw it away and missed the trash can,” James said.

  “Who would throw this away?” Emily asked. The book was entirely too special-looking: a hardback bound in linen cloth the color of a pomegranate, a gold beetle embossed on the front with flecks that sparkled when you tilted the book. It opened stiffly, as if she was the first to do so. Nobody would dump a book like this.

  Emily flipped to the copyright page. The only thing on it was a small drawing of a black bird in front of a bridge and ocean waves, and a short string of numbers. The drawing gave her an itchy-brain feeling, like she’d dreamed about finding this book or had seen that symbol before.

  Maybe someone hid it so recently he or she hadn’t had time to register it online, or maybe he or she even forgot. She clicked on the forum and posted a message.

  She typed: “I found a copy of THE GOLD-BUG by Edgar Allan Poe in a San Francisco BART station. Did anyone hide it and forget to register it? Please, pretty please, say yes because I need the points.” She didn’t really need the points, but she was only fifteen points away from advancing from Miss Marple level to Auguste Dupin, and she’d been counting on getting those two points by finding the Tom Sawyer book today.

  After posting her message to the forum, Emily gave James a tour of the Book Scavenger site, updating her profile information so it listed San Francisco as her city and Booker Middle School for “school/work.”

  “What about that card you found?” James said. “At the Ferry Building? What did you call that guy? A … poacher? Can we find out anything about him?”

  Emily pulled the card from her backpack and typed “Babbage” into the user search. She clicked on the profile and was surprised to see that Babbage ranked Sherlock Holmes level, the highest possible level.

  “That rat! He didn’t even need those points. Selfish poacher,” Emily muttered.

  “Points don’t matter when you’re at the top level?” James asked.

  “Well, you can still use them at the Book Scavenger and Bayside Press stores. And some people are just competitive and want to see how high they can get their point total.”

  It would take her a long while to get to Sherlock Holmes level, but once Emily did, she’d probably be one of those competitive people.

  “Has Babbage declared any books?” James asked. “Maybe we could beat him to one of the books he’s hunting.”

  Emily clicked on Babbage’s profile to look at his hidden books but was stopped by another discovery.

  “Booker Middle School!” James read. “He goes to our school?”

  “Or she,” Emily said. Knowing Babbage was a middle schooler just like them made her all the more irritated that he or she had poached Tom Sawyer.

  “Can’t we see their picture?”

  “There isn’t one uploaded.” Babbage used a generic avatar, just like Emily.

  She scanned Babbage’s book listings. The user hadn’t declared any titles, but he or she had hidden several recently. When you hid a book and uploaded the clue, you selected a detective category to give other users an idea of how tricky it might be to find your hidden book. Babbage had rated all of his or her clues at Sherlock level, so they were almost definitely beyond Emily’s cipher-cracking capabilities.

  The computer dinged, and an instant-message box popped up.

  RAVEN: Can I be of service?

  “Who asks if they can be of service?” James said. “Is Raven a butler or something?”

  Emily shrugged. “Beats me.”

  SURLY WOMBAT: Service with what?

  RAVEN: You inquired about THE GOLD-BUG.

  “Oh!” Emily straightened. “That was fast. Raven knows about the book! See? I knew it was a Book Scavenger book.”

  SURLY WOMBAT: Did you hide it in the BART station?

  RAVEN: I cannot reveal the locations.

  “The location’s been revealed, you weirdo,” Emily said. “How else would I know about it?”

  SURLY WOMBAT: I already know the location. I found THE GOLD-BUG in the BART station. I’m trying to get credit for it.

  RAVEN: THE GOLD-BUG is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1843. Poe won a short story contest and the prize was publication in a local paper. It was a popular story in its day and brought attention to cryptograms and secret writing.

  “What’s with the history lesson?” James asked.

  Emily sighed. “I don’t think Raven actually hid this book. She’s probably one of those know-it-alls who likes to flaunt every fact in her head. Yippee for you, you know a lot about Edgar Allan Poe.” Emily closed the instant-message box with a sharp click of the mouse.

  “Let’s see if there’s anything new about Mr. Griswold in the hospital,” Emily said.

  In the forums, there weren’t any news updates, but Emily did see a thread under the “Garrison Griswold” category titled “What if…” A user from South Carolina had posted: Don’t want to be a downer, but I just had a sad thought. What happens to Book Scavenger if Mr. G doesn’t make it?

  Emily breathed in sharply. She had been worried about Mr. Griswold and what it meant that he was in critical care, but it never crossed her mind that something happening to him could mean something happening to Book Scavenger, too. She skimmed the posted reactions, finding an ass
ortment of replies. Most people were positive about the future of both Mr. Griswold and Book Scavenger. But one user’s reply might as well have been boldfaced the way it jumped out: A friend of a friend works at Bayside Press, and let’s just say it’s been love, not $, keeping Book Scavenger up and running. And that was before all this went down with Big G. I want to be bright and cheery about what the future holds, but I’m thinking we should get our book-hunting kicks in now while we still can. Hope I’m wrong.

  A world without Book Scavenger? Six years ago she didn’t know any different, but now it was such a huge part of her life. Without Book Scavenger, Emily wouldn’t be able to follow a book’s journey, see who found it and where it traveled to next, read the adventure logs that other sleuths posted, trade reviews after they read the book.

  Reading would be lonely without Book Scavenger. Moving again would be unbearable without Book Scavenger.

  “Well, it looks like nothing’s changed with Mr. Griswold,” James said, breaking up her thoughts. “We talked about making up a secret language. Want to do that now?”

  Emily blinked at James a few times, like she couldn’t quite get her eyes to focus. “Right,” she finally said. “Looks like nothing’s changed.” Emily glanced at the forum message once more before closing the browser window.

  CHAPTER

  9

  THAT NIGHT IN BED, Emily distracted herself from worrying about Mr. Griswold and Book Scavenger by reading the new book she’d found. Thanks to the odd exchange with Raven earlier that day, she knew The Gold-Bug was an old story of Edgar Allan Poe’s. She thought that was weird at first, an old story in a clearly brand-new book, but her dad reminded her that classics get republished all the time, often with a new cover to “make them more accessible to modern readers,” as he put it.

  Emily dipped her nose in The Gold-Bug and breathed deeply. It had a new-book smell with the faintest hint of lemons. The pages turned crisply as she went back to the beginning of the story to start over. The language was old-fashioned, and Emily noticed a spelling mistake right off the bat and then another a few sentences later, so she was having trouble getting into the story.

  She’d flipped ahead and read enough snippets to know it was about a secret message and a treasure hunt. That sounded good, so she stuck with it, but the mistakes bothered her. Using one of her dad’s purple editing pencils, she corrected the misspellings like he did, marking through the incorrect letter and writing the correct one above. Some people thought it was strange or even destructive to write in books, but it was a habit Emily had picked up when she was seven and used to play “editor” while her dad worked. Back then she mostly wrote nonsense or drew pictures of cats, but now her notes made up a reading diary of sorts.

  Emily sighed with frustration as she came across what was probably the twentieth typo.

  From the ceiling she heard a thud, then three fast thuds, followed by another thud. That was the signal she and James had agreed on when they made up their secret language earlier that day. It meant a bucket message was coming. Emily crossed her room and slid open her window.

  For their secret language, they had decided on a substitution cipher. James knew from keyboarding class that the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” used every letter in the alphabet, so they made that their cipher key. To end up with twenty-six letters to match the alphabet, they skipped any that were repeated. Their secret code looked like this:

  Regular Alphabet:

  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

  Cipher Key:

  THEQUICKBROWNFXJMPSVLAZYDG

  S was still S, but they decided that was okay. If they could memorize their new alphabet, they’d be able to read each other’s messages without using an answer key for reference.

  The bucket lowered beside Emily, and she removed James’s note. It said, ZKTV TPU DXL QXBFC? Gibberish to anyone else, but Emily knew what to do. She tugged her pencil free, and soon she’d translated his message: What are you doing?

  Emily wrote her reply:

  PUTQBFC CH. IXLFQ 20 VDJXS. DXL?

  (Reading GB. Found 20 typos. You?)

  She used the handle of the broom she’d found in the kitchen to repeat the knock on the ceiling before sending the note up. James’s reply came a few minutes later:

  KXNUZXPO. ETF B SUU CH?

  (Homework. Can I see GB?)

  Emily placed the book in the bucket. While she waited for James to send it back, she thought about how weird it was for a book to look so perfect on the outside, but have so many mistakes on the inside. Whoever made it must not have hired someone like her dad to fix the errors. James knocked, and the bucket lowered back to her window.

  DXL ZPBVU BF HXXOS? PUHUW!

  WXXO ZKTV B IXLFQ—KTKT.

  (You write in books? Rebel! Look what I found—haha.)

  Emily opened the book and saw that James had circled consecutive letter corrections in order to spell out the words fort, wild, and home. Leave it to James to turn a bunch of boring typos into a crazy word search game. She sent him a note back:

  DXL TFQ DXLP JLGGWUS. ☺

  (You and your puzzles. ☺)

  * * *

  Sunday morning, Emily woke to the sound of someone bowling outside her room. She groggily shifted under her covers. Wait—did she just hear someone bowling? She threw off her sheet and cracked her door just in time to see Matthew careening toward her on his skateboard.

  “Breakfast!” he hollered as he coasted by, beaning her on the forehead with a plastic-wrapped muffin. He skidded to a stop in front of his own room. Emily picked up the blueberry muffin from the floor.

  “You’re such an idiot,” she snapped.

  “Tough break for you, then,” Matthew said with a shrug. “Same gene pool.”

  Emily shuffled to the kitchen. It was a narrow room with a small table squeezed in at one end.

  “Where’s Mom?” she asked her dad, who sat at the table surrounded by sections of newspapers.

  “Out taking pictures for the blog.”

  “Already?” They’d been in San Francisco less than two days.

  “The blog won’t create content for itself, I suppose,” her dad murmured.

  Emily searched for a juice glass among the various moving boxes and bags that still cluttered the counter and floor, lost in thought about The Gold-Bug. She’d made her way through the whole story last night. With every typo she found, she crossed out the incorrect letter and wrote the correct one above. On the last page her handwritten corrections spelled out the word belief. Even though she had teased James about his knack for spotting a puzzle anywhere, it kind of spooked her, as if the book itself were trying to talk to her. But that would be crazy.

  “Hey, Dad? When you’re copyediting, have you ever noticed the typos spelling out a word?” She found a juice glass and joined him at the table.

  “Hmm?” Her dad unfolded the section he was reading and then refolded it in quarters so he could read a different part of the page.

  Emily poured herself some juice. “You know how you cross out the incorrect letter and write the correct one above it? Have those corrected letters ever spelled out words?”

  Not looking up he said, “They’re already part of a word.”

  “No. What if the typos themselves were part of a second word, too—made up of only the corrected letters that you wrote. That’s never happened?”

  “You mean the corrections spell out a word by chance?” Her dad looked at her, baffled. Then he gave a soft grunt, like he was amused by this idea. “That would be quite a feat. Unless you’re talking about two-letter words like be, or maybe the, I don’t think it could happen.” He gave it some more thought then shook his head firmly. “No, it would be impossible to do accidentally.”

  Emily was about to tell him it wasn’t impossible and in fact had happened many times over in the book she was reading when her dad said, “Thought you’d be interested in this.” He riffled through the stacks of paper and pulled out a folded-up
section. “A profile on Garrison Griswold today, and a little about Book Scavenger.”

  “Oh! Let me see!” Emily opened and closed her hand like a little kid wanting a toy.

  Her dad stood from the table and handed the paper to Emily with a smile. “I love that you’re so passionate about books and publishing. Speaking of, it’s back to work for me.”

  “It’s Sunday,” Emily said.

  “I need to make up for the time I took driving us out here so I can meet my deadline. No rest for the weary. But don’t worry, we’ll have a family adventure this afternoon.”

  “You do know adventure means something unusual and exciting, right?” Emily asked her dad. He crinkled his nose and tilted his head in response, looking bemused. “If sightseeing and exploring new places is our family norm, then maybe adventure isn’t the right word choice.”

  Her dad chuckled. “Interesting theory,” he said and left the kitchen.

  Emily unfolded the newspaper. A photo of Garrison Griswold accompanied the article. He stood in front of the Bayside Press building in the same burgundy-and-silver-blue outfit James had described him wearing at the book carnival: top hat, suit, and walking stick all in Bayside Press colors. He was a very tall man—from the photo it looked like he’d have to duck to go through the front entrance if he had on his hat. He wore frameless glasses, had floppy silver hair, and a salt-and-pepper mustache that was like a miniature duster broom balanced under his nose.

  Emily skimmed the article:

  Griswold moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1952 at age twelve. At the age of eighteen, propelled by his admiration for the Beat Generation of writers, he moved out of his parents’ house and into the city itself. Inspired by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s endeavors with the City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, Griswold began publishing an alternative weekly paper called the Bayside Weekly, which eventually developed into one of the most prominent publishing companies in San Francisco.