Book Scavenger Read online

  “If we were walking to school, we’d turn that way,” James said, pointing down the sloping street. Far down the road, apartment buildings framed a view of the bay with Alcatraz island smack dab in the middle.

  Emily stood still. “It’s like out of a movie,” she said.

  “What is?” James looked at the parking meters, the liquor store across the street, the bus stop in front of them.

  “The view.” Emily pointed.

  “Oh.” James absentmindedly threaded his fingers through Steve as he looked again toward the water. “Yeah, I guess so. You should see it on a sunnier day, though.”

  James turned away from the water to walk up the street. “Hollister’s bookstore is up this way.”

  James’s idea had been to hide the book in a bookstore. “Like hiding a leaf in a tree,” he said. There was one bookstore in particular that he had in mind, a place he stopped in regularly on his way home from school. “Ever since Hollister learned I like puzzle magazines, he’s kept a good stock of them.”

  As they approached, the door to the bookstore swung open with a jingle and out stepped a black man with gray-frosted dreadlocks tied loosely at the nape of his neck. The man studied the store window as if he were assessing a painting, and then went back inside. His upper body rocked like a metronome when he walked, swinging his ponytail of ropes side to side across his back.

  “That was Hollister. He owns the store,” James said. Soon they reached it and could see for themselves the display Hollister had been studying. The entire expanse of window was filled with books arranged by color and stacked atop one another like LEGOs to create the Bayside Press symbol.

  James whistled long and low.

  “How did he do this?” Emily asked.

  “This must have taken him forever,” James said.

  They pushed open the door. “Hollister, your window looks amazing!” James said.

  The bookstore owner slapped his thigh and said, “Well, hey there, James! You finish the latest Puzzle Power? I hope not, because the next issue isn’t due for another month.” Hollister nodded in Emily’s direction. “Who’s this young lady?”

  Up close she could see one eye drooped and didn’t look in quite the same direction as the other. She wondered if that lazy eye made it difficult for Hollister to read, and if so, how torturous that would be, surrounded by books all the time.

  “This is Emily. She just moved here.”

  “Hello, Emily-Who-Just-Moved-Here.”

  “Your window is really cool,” Emily said. “I never would have thought of using the colors of book spines and covers to make a picture, like art.”

  “Ah, well.” Hollister rubbed his neck. “Small token of respect for a good man. It’s the least I can do for an old friend.”

  “Old friend?” Emily repeated. She looked to James questioningly.

  He shrugged. “You’re friends with Mr. Griswold?”

  “I said old friend. It’s been at least thirty years since we’ve had a sensible conversation. Although I do have a regular customer who works for him. A rare-book collector who manages his library. So I sort of feel like I keep in touch with him that way. Or in touch with his reading interests at least, but that’s what matters most, am I right?” Hollister chuckled. For a minute he looked like he might say more, but then he dropped to one knee and sorted through the pile of books he’d gathered. A morose cloud had settled around the man’s shoulders, and Emily didn’t know him well enough to understand if that was normal or due to his dwelling on Mr. Griswold. “This window display is the least I can do right now, that’s all.”

  It occurred to her that if Hollister once knew Mr. Griswold, he might be able to help them figure out the secret message they’d discovered. But the way he acted, talking about Mr. Griswold, made her worry that maybe it was a touchy subject. And if she was honest, part of her felt protective. Right now The Gold-Bug and the words she and James found belonged to them. Sharing that might ruin the fun somehow. They should stick with their original reason for coming to Hollister’s store. She cleared her throat.

  “Could we hide a book in your store?” Emily said. “For Book Scavenger? It’s got a badge inside, so no one will mistake it for one of yours.”

  Hollister nodded. “Sure, sure. Have at it.”

  The bookshop was narrow with tall bookcases creating tunnels that twisted and turned. A ladder leaned against one bookcase to reach the topmost titles. Every nook was occupied by a chair, a teetering pile of books, or both. In the back half of the store there was a loft and a spiral staircase that led up to it. Emily and James wandered through the store, scouting for the best hiding spot.

  “It can’t be too difficult,” Emily said. “I do want someone to actually find it, since I’ll get a point when they do, and it’s no fun tracking a book that never moves.”

  “How about this?” James pointed to a bookcase raised on knobby feet that made up the arts and crafts section. James took Inkheart from Emily and slid it underneath the bookcase so the pages were visible instead of the spine. “Can I see your notebook and a pen?” he asked.

  Emily pulled her pencil from her ponytail and her notebook from her backpack and handed both to James, curious to see what he’d come up with.

  “The clue can be…”

  crafts

  wrong side out

  “I get it.” Emily grinned. “Wrong side out under crafts. That’s perfect. We can take a photo of this puzzle and upload it for our clue when we get back to our building.”

  Emily returned her notebook to her backpack and saw The Gold-Bug. She looked to the front where Hollister was. Maybe they wouldn’t tell him about the game or ask about Griswold specifically, but he still might be able to point them in the direction of some helpful information.

  “Let’s ask Hollister if he has any books by or about Edgar Allan Poe,” Emily whispered to James.

  Hollister led them to a round table decorated for Halloween with a giant paper spider, a witch’s cauldron, and cotton-strewn webs.

  “Most of my Poe is out here now. He’s popular this time of year,” Hollister said.

  Emily chewed on this as she looked over the book display. Maybe that was all Mr. Griswold’s Poe choice came down to: a popular author for Halloween season. Maybe her treasure hunt suspicion was way off—but then why not pick one of Poe’s spookier stories if Halloween was the point?

  There were various collections of Poe’s work on the table, along with other mysteries and scary stories. A stack of books in a familiar maroon color stood out to Emily. Hastily, she pulled The Gold-Bug from her backpack and stepped closer to the pile. They weren’t the same. She exhaled a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The cover color was almost an exact match, but hers had the sparkly gold-bug, whereas the one Hollister was selling had an oval portrait of Poe himself. She opened Hollister’s and flipped through it. Her book had only one story and the one on the table had close to ten.

  “That one of your schoolbooks, Emily-Who-Just-Moved-Here? Looks fancy.” Hollister’s voice made her jump. She’d gotten lost in thought comparing the two books. Instinctively, she wanted to stuff The Gold-Bug into her backpack to hide it, but Hollister had already seen it.

  “There’s no way our schoolbooks would look half that nice,” James replied to Hollister. If it made him nervous to think Hollister might catch on to Mr. Griswold’s game, James wasn’t showing it. “Our schoolbooks are so old, my science textbook says there are still nine planets. They’re so old, I found my mother’s name written in one from when she was a kid.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Hollister nodded. “So old they’re written on stone tablets? In hieroglyphics?”

  “This is just a story by Edgar Allan Poe about a gold-bug,” Emily said in her best casual, it’s-no-big-deal voice. “I’m reading it for fun. I thought it might be the same copy you have here, but it’s not.”

  Hollister whistled. “Fun indeed. Now, Poe had a twisted sense of fun, didn’t he—people being buried a
live, going crazy. You say it’s just that one story? Haven’t come across one like that before. Mind if I take a look?”

  “Sure,” Emily said, her voice squeaking ever so slightly.

  “This is very nice.” Hollister turned the first few pages like they might tear if he flipped them too fast. Emily held her breath as he opened to the copyright page where the raven version of the Bayside Press symbol was. Seeing as he’d been in the middle of constructing a gigantic tribute to the original, she thought for sure he’d spot the similarity and make the Griswold connection, but Hollister didn’t linger at all and kept turning pages. “You reading this? You like it?”

  “I finished it last night,” Emily said, relaxing a little. “It’s not the easiest story to read, the way it’s written and all. Like that first line: ‘I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand.’ Why not say ‘I met’?”

  “Seems highfalutin nowadays, doesn’t it.” Hollister closed the book and handed it back. “It was written in a different time, that’s for sure.”

  “Don’t you contract diseases, not people?” James asked.

  Emily giggled. “Maybe Mr. William Legrand is code for ‘chicken pox.’”

  “In that case, I met Mr. William Legrand when I was four.”

  “I had a shot so I’ll never have to meet him,” Emily said.

  Hollister tsked. “Poor Mr. Legrand. People going out of their way to avoid his acquaintance.” Hollister offered Emily the collection of Poe stories from the Halloween table. “On the house. A ‘welcome to San Francisco’ gift for a budding Poe enthusiast.”

  “Oh … I couldn’t,” Emily said, even though it killed her to turn down a book.

  Hollister pressed the book on top of The Gold-Bug. “I insist. The more Poe you read, the more familiar his language will be.”

  “Well, thank you.” Emily flipped through the book. The collection included “The Gold-Bug” as well as several other short stories, like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and another one called “The Black Cat.” There were poems in the collection, too, including one called “The Raven.” This poem was accompanied by an illustration of a black bird almost exactly like the one used in place of the seagull in the Bayside Press symbol. She hadn’t stopped to consider why Mr. Griswold had chosen a black bird to replace the seagull, but now she realized it must be a nod to this poem.

  “Raven.” Emily didn’t intend to say that out loud, but she did.

  “One of his most famous works,” Hollister said, before shuffling back to his window display.

  “Raven?” James lowered his voice to Emily. “Like the Book Scavenger user who messaged us with all the gold-bug info?”

  “That can’t be a coincidence,” Emily whispered back.

  James raised his eyebrows. “Someone else knows about the game.”

  “Not just knows about it,” Emily said. She was remembering the odd way Raven had greeted them—asking if they needed anything in that really formal way that made James joke about her being a butler. And then the comment about not being able to reveal where the book was hidden, even though they’d already found it. “Raven was trying to help us.”

  Emily and James left Hollister’s store with hasty good-byes and hurried back to James’s computer (as quickly as you can hurry when a hill with an incline as steep as a roller coaster separates where you are and where you have to go). The sky was overcast, but Emily was pink-faced and wiping sweat off her temples by the time they reached their building.

  As they settled in front of James’s computer, Emily fanned herself with her notebook. She logged into her Book Scavenger account and did a user search for Raven.

  “Yes! She’s online,” Emily said.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Can I ask you about THE GOLD-BUG?

  It didn’t take long before Raven’s reply popped onto the screen.

  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.

  Emily groaned. “Hello? We know. You told us that last time.” To James she asked, “Do you think I should just be straight with her? Maybe then she won’t be so weird.”

  James shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

  SURLY WOMBAT: I know about the game.

  RAVEN: I can’t help you with that.

  SURLY WOMBAT: What do you mean?

  RAVEN: I do not have the information you seek.

  Emily slapped a hand on James’s desktop. “I don’t understand this! She was so eager to help the other day.”

  SURLY WOMBAT: I thought you wanted to help us with THE GOLD-BUG?

  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.

  Emily groaned, but James straightened in his seat.

  “She’s playing a game with us,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  “No, seriously. There’s a pattern to how she replies. See how every time you mention The Gold-Bug, she gives that exact same answer? Here, let me test this out.” James took over the keyboard.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Do you like soda?

  RAVEN: I do not have the information you seek.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Plaid pants look nice on you.

  RAVEN: I can’t help you with that.

  SURLY WOMBAT: Who hid THE GOLD-BUG?

  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.

  Emily gasped. “You’re right!”

  James scrolled back through the conversation. “Look, when we ask a question she replies, ‘I don’t have the information you seek,’ like maybe if she did she would answer the question. But if we say something that’s not a question, then she’ll say, ‘I can’t help you with that.’ And asking a question with The Gold-Bug in it always gets the same reply.”

  “Here, let me try something.”

  Emily took over the keyboard and typed, Do you know what fort, wild, home, rat, open, and belief mean?

  RAVEN: Your query is incomplete.

  And before Emily and James could think of another question to ask, the chat feed updated again.

  RAVEN: That is all the assistance I can offer today.

  “That’s it?” James and Emily cried in unison.

  “I guess there’s a limit to how many questions she’ll answer,” James said.

  “Well, she did tell us something at least. She didn’t say our query was wrong, just incomplete.”

  “So maybe the words need to be in a different order?” James suggested.

  “Or,” Emily said, “maybe there are more words left to find.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  IT HAD BEEN two days since they’d seen those kids take the book, and Barry and Clyde were still hanging around the plaza across from the Ferry Building. They’d been stalking the area since Saturday, hoping the kids would come back, but no luck. Barry sat on the steps next to what had to be the ugliest fountain in all of San Francisco. It looked like a gigantic knocked-over game of Jenga sitting in a pool of water.

  “They’re not coming back,” Clyde said. Over and over he flipped the card he’d found by the trash in the BART station, every so often palming it as if he were practicing a magic trick.

  “Well, we don’t have any other leads.” Barry stabbed a stick into a crack in the concrete step.

  “This card is our lead,” Clyde said.

  Barry snorted. As much as he couldn’t wait to be done with this whack, he couldn’t walk away. He needed the extra work—it’s not like they handed out jobs on street corners—and his bookie scared him more than Clyde did.

>   “Fat lot of good that card does us. It’s got nothing on it—no address, no name, no number. Just that picture of Earth and Too Slow! This book has been found by: Surly Wombat. What does that even mean?”

  “I told you, I saw the girl put it there. After she took our book,” Clyde said.

  “It’s not our book,” Barry muttered.

  “Whatever. That’s just cement tactics.”

  “What?” Barry wanted to jab Clyde with his stick, but he wouldn’t dare. The guy was just … Three days after shooting Garrison Griswold and he still hadn’t shown any emotion. Didn’t talk about it, didn’t seem worried about it. Almost like he didn’t even remember. The way you might be if you swatted a fly, and then a couple of days later someone asked about the fly and your brain had to run a few circles to even remember that insignificant bug.

  “I said: That’s. Just. Ce. Ment. Tac. Tics.” Clyde drew out each syllable like molasses dripping off a spoon.

  “Cement tactics? That fugly fountain is cement tactics. Bad cement tactics. What the heck is cement tactics?”

  “What are you talking about?” Clyde looked at Barry like he was the one who’d lost his mind.

  “What are you talking about? You lost me with cement tactics,” Barry said.

  “It’s our book, it’s their book. It’s just words, you know?”

  “Oh,” Barry said. “You mean semantics, numbnut. Try reading more books instead of stealing them.”

  Clyde shrugged. “I prefer cement tactics. It’s poetic.”

  Barry sighed and held out his palm. “Let me see the card.”

  Clyde handed it over, and Barry studied it for the gazillionth time.

  “I’m telling you,” Clyde butted into his thoughts, “let’s look it up online.”

  “Look up what? There’s nothing useful here. You want to look up Surly Wombat? Or this picture?” The picture was a drawing of Earth and a treasure map blended together.

  Clyde shrugged. “Maybe.”