The Unbreakable Code Read online

  “The person writes like a kid,” Matthew said. “My English teacher would give that a big fat C for penmanship.”

  Emily sighed, exasperated with her brother. “It’s old, Matthew,” she said. “They wrote differently back then.”

  But what Matthew had observed was true. The printing was a little … juvenile? It looked as if someone had taken painstaking care to write each letter as neatly as they could, but just didn’t have the best handwriting.

  Emily twisted the pencil tucked in her ponytail, scrutinizing the grid. This felt a lot more serious than the puzzles she downloaded on Book Scavenger. “I don’t even know where to start with this. Do you?”

  “It is called the unbreakable code,” James reasoned. “It’s going to take us at least a day. Why don’t we copy it down so we can work on it at home?”

  Emily flipped the parchment over to look at the drawing, then flipped back to the side with the letters.

  “You could trace it,” Matthew suggested. He pointed to the windows across the room. “We could use one of those like a light box.”

  Emily tore a blank piece of paper out of her notebook. She pulled the pencil from her ponytail, and the three crossed to the window most concealed by bookcases. Not that they were doing anything criminal, but Emily didn’t want to draw attention to their actions.

  “I’ll hold the papers,” Matthew said, pressing the unbreakable code with the notebook paper on top of it against the glass. The letters were faint, but visible enough for Emily to start tracing them. When she finished, Matthew said, “You should do the back, too. You never know.” He flipped both pages so the notebook paper would be oriented the same way as the unbreakable code. Emily gently sketched the outline of the drawing.

  When they returned the file to Ms. Linden, Emily asked, “Does the unbreakable code get looked at a lot?” She wondered how many people besides Mr. Quisling might be trying to solve it right now.

  “It hasn’t been recently, I can tell you that,” Ms. Linden said. “But maybe I’ll start working on it, too.” She winked.

  * * *

  The next day was New Year’s Eve, and after frustrating themselves with trying to solve the unbreakable code ever since they’d found it in the library, Emily and James were happy to have a distraction from thinking about it.

  The Lees cooked dinner for Emily’s family, a meal James’s mom had called a hot pot, which was, not surprisingly, a literal hot pot full of ginger broth that sat in the middle of the table. The Lees were patient and laughed with Emily’s family as they used chopsticks to pick up an assortment of raw foods to drop into the boiling broth. When Emily’s dad scooted a slippery shrimp around the serving platter instead of being able to pick it up, James said, “We have forks, too. You can use one instead.”

  “No, no,” Mr. Crane insisted. “I’m usually pretty good with chopsticks. At least with sushi.”

  For a brief victorious second, he balanced the shrimp between his chopsticks, and then it shot away, landing neatly with a plink in the broth.

  “Ayyyy!” The two families erupted in cheers, and Emily’s dad grinned sheepishly, using a small ladle-shaped strainer to fish out his now-cooked shrimp.

  After dinner, Emily’s parents stayed upstairs to learn how to play mah-jongg, while Emily, her brother, and James played board games under a tent they’d made from a sheet in the Cranes’ family room. Emily couldn’t remember the last time she’d built a fort, and maybe they were too old for it now, but none of them mentioned that. It was like the three had a wordless pact not to question whether they were being immature and just enjoy the moment. It was fun to not act your age sometimes.

  “Mr. Green, in the lobby, with the candlestick.” Matthew held a tan envelope to his forehead, eyes closed, as he guessed his final answer to their third round of Clue.

  The clatter of tiles being dumped on a table overhead and a round of laughter filtered through the ceiling.

  Matthew pulled out the cards and flopped them on the board. “Yes!” He punched fists in the air and tilted back, then lost his balance, toppling into one of the chairs that supported the tent. The chair tipped over, pulling the sheet off the opposing chair so it draped onto their heads.

  “Matthew!” The sheet muffled Emily’s cry.

  “Sorry!” Matthew jumped up, tangling himself. “Sorry.” He set about reassembling the tent with James’s help.

  “Time for a new game.” Emily extricated herself from the sheet and ran to her room to sift through the pile James had brought down with him. “Yahtzee or Taboo?” she called down the hallway. Her brother and James each yelled different games in response, so she grabbed both, hesitating before she left her room to study the blobs of foggy blue, teal, and jungle green that she’d recently painted on her walls. James’s grandmother—their landlord—had given Emily permission to paint her room as long as the Cranes painted it back to white when they eventually moved out. Now that she had the freedom to have a room in any color, she didn’t know which to choose.

  Emily carried the two board games back into the family room. “You know how they say the way you spend the first day of a new year sets the tone for how your whole year goes?”

  “Who says that?” Matthew squinted skeptically.

  “Like when Mom and Dad say ‘new state, clean slate’ whenever we move? It’s the same idea,” Emily said. “What would you want your next year to be filled with?”

  “Music,” said Matthew, predictably.

  “It’s-Its,” said James.

  “It’s-Its?” Emily and Matthew replied in unison.

  “You’ve lived here for three months, and you’ve never had an It’s-It? They’re … they’re…” James sighed and stared dreamily at the corner of the room. “Imagine if a chewy oatmeal cookie and a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone had a baby.”

  “Thinking about foods mating is not very appetizing,” Matthew said.

  James shrugged. “They’re delicious. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I want my year to be filled with…” Emily began.

  “Reading,” her brother interjected.

  “Book Scavenger,” James added.

  Emily frowned. Those answers were obvious and true, but still unsatisfying. She thought about Ms. Linden with her boat, scuba diving through shipwrecks, and knowledgeable about all the unbreakable code history. Becoming a bona fide treasure hunter sounded awesome, but saying she wanted her year to be filled with treasure would be about as ridiculous as saying she wanted it to be filled with unicorns.

  “I have an idea.” James grabbed his laptop.

  “An idea for what?” Emily saw the Book Scavenger website on his screen before James angled it away.

  “I’m looking to see if there’s a book already hidden in one of my favorite places to go in the city, but it’s better as a surprise.” He typed a few more things, then said, “Yes! Someone hid a book there. Let’s go find it tomorrow. It involves music, Matthew, so you’ll like it. And if the stars align, there will be It’s-Its, too.”

  Emily hadn’t been the one to offer Book Scavenger as her pick, but she had to agree it sounded like a great way to spend the day.

  * * *

  The next morning, Emily, James, and Matthew left for the book-hunting adventure James had planned, but they had barely walked a few feet away from their building when Emily realized she’d forgotten her bus pass.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, and ran up their front steps. She left the front door ajar, and her sneakers were soft on the stairs as she jogged up.

  Her mother’s raised voice carried out from the kitchen. “They filed for bankruptcy?”

  “I know,” her dad replied. “I’m as shocked as you are.”

  “That’s one of your regular clients. This is huge, David. Why aren’t you more worried about this? We’ve been counting on those editing projects coming in.”

  Her parents’ voices were like a fishing line cast down the hallway, hooking Emily. They tugged at her as
she crossed the hallway to her room, tugged as she found her bus pass marking her place inside The Egypt Game.

  “I know, I know. Trust me, I’m as worried as you are. Probably more,” her dad said. “But we’ll figure this out. Money has been tight before and we survived. I’ll reach out to my contacts, let them know I’m in need of more work.”

  “Money has been tight before, but we weren’t living in San Francisco. Just breathing here is expensive,” Emily’s mom said.

  There was a heavy pause. Emily knew she should untangle herself from their sharp-toned words that weren’t meant for her ears and scoot back down the stairs and out the door. She knew she should do that, but she stood on the landing and listened.

  “We have the advance for the 50 States book coming,” her dad said.

  Emily’s mom scoffed. “That will cover two months, at most, and who knows when it will arrive.”

  “I know this, Elizabeth.” Her dad’s voice was brittle.

  Her mother softened. “I know you do. I’ll reach out to my design clients, too. Maybe I can rustle up more work. And we can dip into our savings while we figure this out, but that will only last us so long. We didn’t initially plan on being here more than a year.”

  Emily breathed in sharply, and the fishing line of words was cut free. She retreated down the stairs as quietly as she’d entered. Her parents were always a team, a united front. She’d heard them get in heated debates over things like whether frenemy was a valid Scrabble word, but up to now there had always been an undercurrent of playfulness. Worse than their tone was the reason for their argument. Her parents wouldn’t be fighting right now if Emily hadn’t made them promise to stay in San Francisco.

  Emily closed their front door with a soft click and joined James and her brother on the sidewalk.

  “You wanted a perfect first day of the New Year,” Matthew said, gesturing to the crisp blue sky and the distant bay water that twinkled in the gaps between buildings as they walked up the hill. “You can’t get much better than this.”

  * * *

  They rode the bus in the general direction of the Marina. Emily gnawed on her lip and stared out the window. A loop of her mother saying just breathing here is expensive played over and over in her head. Beside her, Matthew peppered James with questions about how this mystery spot related to music.

  “Is it a place that has shows or concerts?”

  James handed over a printout from the Book Scavenger website. “This is the clue for the hidden book. That’s the only hint I’ll give you.”

  23 8 5 18 5 19 20 15 14 5 19

  13 1 11 5 13 21 19 9 3

  “It’s Nancy Drew level,” James added.

  Matthew nudged Emily. “I need your help, Sherlylocks,” he said, borrowing the nickname their dad had coined because she was a puzzle lover. Emily dragged her gaze from the window and stared at the numbers. She was tempted to say what’s the point, but then she looked at Matthew—normally too cool to hang out with her these days—scrutinizing the clue like he’d be graded on it. James fidgeted in his seat like a little kid struggling to keep a secret. Her big plan had been for their first day of the New Year to represent what they hoped the future would hold. Did she want a year of sulking? No, she did not. Emily put on her game face.

  Nancy Drew was one of the easier puzzle levels for Book Scavenger, so with that as a hint, Emily guessed this would be a straightforward number substitution cipher. She pulled the pencil from her ponytail and scratched out an alphabet in her notebook, then wrote the numbers 1 through 26 underneath each letter. She quickly deciphered the clue to read:

  Where stones make music.

  Matthew repeated the clue out loud. “Is it someplace where the Rolling Stones had a concert?” he asked James.

  “Nope,” James replied.

  Matthew rested one arm on the top of the seat in front of him and drummed his fingers. “The Stone Temple Pilots?”

  “It doesn’t have to do with a band,” James said.

  Emily let them go back and forth in their guessing game, her thoughts returning to her parents’ argument. What could she do to make a difference? If she could find a way to help her parents, then she wouldn’t feel so responsible for asking them not to move, and maybe they would see how serious she was about wanting to stay in San Francisco.

  What did other nearly-thirteen-year-olds do to make money? She could babysit. She didn’t know of any families with young children, but she could find some. Her dad talked about having a paper route when he was a kid. Did those still exist? Maybe Hollister could use some extra help around his store. Yes, Hollister might be the way to go. Thinking up a plan pushed her worries to the back of her mind. This was a fixable problem. Her perfect New Year’s Day could still be salvaged.

  CHAPTER

  11

  EMILY, JAMES, and Matthew had barely walked a block from a bus stop in the Marina district when James pointed to an unremarkable corner market.

  “This is our first stop,” he said.

  “Here? This was the spectacular location you wanted to be a surprise?” Emily asked.

  “We’re getting necessary supplies,” James explained.

  She and Matthew followed him inside. They stopped at the front counter, where an older man sat on a stool, speaking loudly into a cell phone in another language. In the glass case next to the register, there were plates of baklava, spanakopita, dolmas, and a salad dotted with feta and olives and peppers, so Emily imagined the man was speaking Greek, although she really had no idea. He gave an almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgment and continued with his conversation.

  Directly in front of the cash register was a freezer chest. James slid the top open.

  “Behold: It’s-Its. The real San Francisco treat,” he said. Individually wrapped round ice cream sandwiches were stacked in piles. James plucked one from the freezer and dropped it on the counter. “Pick your flavor. I’m a vanilla guy.”

  “Cappuccino,” Matthew said. “Fancy.”

  “That’s the hardest flavor to find, too,” James said, which was all the encouragement Matthew needed to choose it.

  Emily bit her lip, wavering.

  “You really can’t go wrong,” James said, but it wasn’t indecisiveness that had her hesitating. Minutes before, she’d been sitting on the bus vowing to find a way to help her parents make money. Should she really spend two dollars on an ice cream sandwich? Two dollars wasn’t enough to pay their rent, she knew that, but she could put the money in a jar and save up.

  As if he could read her mind, James added, “My treat. My mom gave me cash before we left.”

  Emily gnawed her lip for a few seconds more before grabbing a mint sandwich. “Thanks, James,” she said as the man rang them up without missing a beat in his conversation.

  They stepped back outside, and Matthew started to tear his wrapper open, but James flung out a hand. “No, no, no! Your first It’s-It experience needs to be savored in a memorable setting. Let’s find the book. Then we dine.”

  Matthew looked longingly at his ice cream sandwich. “It’ll melt.”

  “Don’t worry,” James said, flicking his with a finger. “They’re like hockey pucks. We’ve got time.”

  They walked until the neighborhood ended at a parking lot on the edge of San Francisco, looking out at the water. The Golden Gate Bridge cables reached down from their main posts to meet in the middle like giants holding hands across the water.

  “This is where the book is hidden?” Emily asked. “A parking lot?”

  “You’ll like this spot, trust me,” James said. He led them to a miniature peninsula jutting across the water, wide enough for only a walkway. Dozens of sailboat masts bobbed in the marina on their city side, and the open bay was on the other.

  “This path doesn’t look like it goes anywhere, dude,” Matthew said. “Are you making us walk a plank?”

  “I’ll race you!” James shot forward down the empty stretch. Emily and Matthew sprinted after him, passing t
he moored sailboats and a lone fisherman standing on the rocky edge of the bay side. Emily soon realized the walkway didn’t end but turned a corner. When they rounded it, the path sloped down and revealed a lower level that had been hidden from view before.

  It was a patio on the edge of a boatless stretch of the marina. Stones and cement blocks were stacked around them in odd patterns to create curving benches and walls. Stairs led up to tiers of planter boxes, and giant concrete tubes reached out from everywhere with open ends rimmed in black. They looked like mutant worms opening their mouths for food.

  “Holy weirdness,” Matthew said.

  “What is this place?” Emily asked.

  “It’s called the Wave Organ,” James said. “Isn’t it cool?”

  It smelled like wet rocks, briny air, and something incongruent, like the lingering aroma of old French fries. The hard surfaces and dull grays were softened every so often by a scrub of green in a planted bed or a mound of purple flowers. Some of the stones were smooth with a sheen; others, bumpy and dull. There were speckled pieces, carved and ornate blocks, chunks of columns, and what looked like broken rubble. If it all hadn’t been arranged in such an intentional-looking way, Emily might have thought she was sitting in the midst of a tiny ancient building that had collapsed in an earthquake.

  “Why are some of these blocks fancy and some not?” she asked.

  “I think all the stones came from a cemetery that was demolished,” James said.

  “Cool,” Matthew said at the same time Emily said, “Eww.”

  “What does that mean anyway—wave organ?” Matthew asked.

  “Listen,” James said. He leaned an ear to one of the wormy mouths. The opening was more than half the size of his head. Emily and Matthew picked different ones and listened as well. What Emily heard sounded like water sloshing over tin cans.

  “These are the organ pipes, and when high tide comes in, the water fills them and makes sounds,” James said. “Like a water version of a wind chime.”