The Friendship Riddle Read online

  For Matilda

  Fierce in battle, sweet at heart—

  I know you will succeed in

  whatever quest you undertake.

  Contents

  Chapter One: Precipitate

  Chapter Two: Rivals

  Chapter Three: Illuminati

  Chapter Four: Physique

  Chapter Five: Neologism

  Chapter Six: Chauvinism

  Chapter Seven: Serendipity

  Chapter Eight: Behoove

  Chapter Nine: Metamorphosis

  Chapter Ten: Mahal

  Chapter Eleven: Contrapuntal

  Chapter Twelve: Debacle

  Chapter Thirteen: Kith

  Chapter Fourteen: Amenable

  Chapter Fifteen: Synergy

  Chapter Sixteen: Chagrin

  Chapter Seventeen: Purga

  Chapter Eighteen: Knavery

  Chapter Nineteen: Mootable

  Chapter Twenty: Discipline

  Chapter Twenty-One: Flense

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Nemesis

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Freebooter

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Fidelity

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Cynosure

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Synchronous

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Graupel

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Quell

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Alchemy

  Chapter Thirty: Pandit

  Chapter Thirty-One: Planning

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Finale

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Epilogue

  The Motley Crew

  Also by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  One

  Precipitate

  The secret clue was written on an index card, folded in half, placed in an origami envelope, and then tucked into an old book about the Loch Ness Monster. The morning I discovered it in the library, it was snowing. That winter, it was always snowing. The snowdrifts were so high, they went right over the sills of our first-floor windows and made their own little peaks right there on the glass. It was like looking into an ant farm, and I squinted and pretended I could see faint tracks through the snow and that the ants were wearing anoraks while snowshoeing around.

  These are the kinds of thoughts that make my teachers write comments on my report cards like “Mind tends to wander,” “A bit in her own world,” and “Reality does little to faze Ruth.”

  The phone rang that morning and I snuggled down deeper into my covers. The phone rang again, and then, a few minutes later, there was my mom telling me she had been called in because another doctor’s flight back from some vacation had been delayed. “Barbados? Bahamas?” She shrugged. “The other call was that awful automated message about school being canceled. The person always sounds so somber, like he’s calling to tell us that a former president has died or something. Who makes that call, anyway?”

  I rolled over and tugged the quilt over my head. “I dunno,” I said. “Good night.”

  “I don’t think so, darling. Up and at ’em. You’re going to the library.”

  So we got up, and Mom made herself coffee while I made us oatmeal. We sat down together, and she had a few sips of coffee out of her #1 MOM mug (Mum has one, too), and then she said, “If you were going to make an igloo, would you build up or dig down?”

  I gave this question some thought. “Both.”

  “When Mum gets back, we should build a snow fort. As long as it doesn’t get too cold, this snow should be just right for it.”

  “That sounds like fun,” I said. And it did sound like fun. But I knew that even though in that moment Mom had every intention of making that snow fort—she was probably picturing it in her head, with windows and tunnels and everything—the chances of us building it were slim. There was always something.

  It took us half an hour to dig out in front of the garage after breakfast and to burst through the snowbank left at the end of the driveway by the plow as it cleared the road. “We’ll leave the mailbox for later,” Mom said. We’d already gotten two form letters telling us about the importance of digging three feet in either direction so the mail carrier could get her car in to deliver our bills and catalogs. Mom had crumpled them up and thrown each one in the recycle bin.

  We drove down the street and into town. The deejays on the radio had to take turns reading the list of school closures, there were so many of them. Our little town was all covered in snow. It clung to street lamps and hung off the edges of windowsills. It looked like a painting. Beautiful.

  Maine is a big state. Probably bigger than you realize. Most people just think of the ocean, but there are mountains and forests and even cities. We do live on the ocean, though, in a little town called Promise. If you have fancy friends, they have probably been to Promise. In the summer we are overrun by people from all over the world. That’s the word folks in Promise use—“overrun”—but I like seeing all the different people and the license plates from all fifty states and Canada, as well.

  I like it in the winter, too, though most of the stores close up. It’s quieter, but it’s as if everyone who lives here has been on vacation and they all come back and they’re so happy to see one another. Only they haven’t been on vacation; they’ve just been real busy working. I’m like a hawk in a tree looking down on all of it. It’s pretty from up here. The problems come when I swoop down to the ground.

  Mom turned the car onto Exchange Street and then made a quick turn onto Congress Street, driving up the hill toward the library.

  My moms are different from most adults in Promise. They don’t work in any of the touristy places, and they don’t fish. Mom is a doctor. She works in the emergency room of the hospital in Rockport. Mum can live anywhere because she works everywhere. They came here on a trip once and loved it. “So we just stayed,” they tell everyone, but it’s not really true. My moms aren’t exactly just-drop-everything-and-leave people. They had to sell the house in Connecticut, and before that, Mom had to get her job. Plus they’d visited on a romantic vacation with just the two of them, and before they could settle down for good, they had to go back and get three-year-old me.

  “If you run out of things to do in the library, I’m sure you can go up and see Charlotte,” Mom said. Hope hung on to her voice like the icicles on the side of McCallister’s Pharmacy.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  You’d think in this tiny town in Maine, I’d be the only kid with two mothers. And I am. But there’s also Charlotte Diamond, who was adopted from China by her two dads. That’s how Charlotte and I met. My two moms and her two dads formed what they called the Support Group, and Charlotte and I were thrown together. We had no choice but to be friends.

  Until we weren’t.

  It was good while it lasted. We had matching blue raincoats with whales on the insides. We liked to read. We would take out the blender that her dads used to make smoothies and mixed drinks, and we’d fill it with disgusting combinations like peanut butter and seltzer and fish sauce, and then we would see who could take even one sip (usually me). When we got to middle school, she started hanging out with the popular girls. It’s not like she ditched me or we had a fight. It’s like all this shifting and sorting out happened. Like we were dumped into a colander, and all of us small, less interesting pieces fell through and left the big, juicy berries inside. Charlotte is a berry.

  Me, I’m a lone wolf. I’m that hawk flying above it all, the quiet observer on the sidelines. And that’s the way I like it.

  The funny thing is, Charlotte was the one who was nervous about starting middle school. I promised to stick by her. Does it count as breaking a promise if the other person doesn’t want you to keep your word?

  Mom said “Hold on” as she cruised through the stop sign and turned righ
t onto Main Street. “Phew. I was afraid if I stopped, we wouldn’t get going again.”

  “We could slide right back down the hill into the ocean. Or maybe the ferry would be there and it would catch us and we could go spend the day on Swift Island, just you and me.”

  “I’m not sure the ferry is even running today. Actually, it just occurred to me—I hope the library is open,” Mom said. “If not, you’ll have to come to the hospital with me.”

  A day at the hospital is no fun. There are only so many things you can do with tongue depressors and the little cups for urine samples.

  We pulled up by a pile of snow higher than our car. “They’re running out of places to put it,” Mom remarked. “They’ll have to dump it in the ocean.”

  “They can’t,” I told her. “It’s against the law.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Because of all the chemicals and everything. They used to, but now I think they take it to the gully on the edge of town.” I’d seen the dump trucks full of snow out the school window, driving away from the center village.

  “Clever girl,” she said. “So answer me this. Why is snowy-day quiet different from regular quiet?”

  There had to be a reason, something to do with the snow muting the sound, maybe. “I’ll look it up,” I told her. “I do have all day.”

  “Ruth.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.” But I had hurt her feelings, and I didn’t know how to take it back. “I love you, Mom. See you later.”

  “Love you,” she replied.

  She waited and watched as I crossed the sidewalk toward the door. The snow was piled halfway up the plate-glass windows, taller than me. This was the seventh big storm we’d had that winter: we had two in November, before Thanksgiving even, three in December, and we’d already had one earlier that week, our first back from winter vacation. They were talking about taking days off our April vacation so we didn’t have to go to school until July.

  I pulled open the door and stomped my feet to get the snow out of my boots. A long, long time ago, the library was a Woolworth’s department store. When that went out of business, the building—which takes up most of the block—changed hands several times. I love that expression. I picture the building being picked up by giant hands and cupped gently like an egg, then spilled over to another set of waiting, warm palms. Anyway, then Renys bought it. Renys is another department store, one that exists only in Maine, which is too bad for the rest of the country. You can get honey-roasted wasabi peanuts and blueberry shampoo, sturdy socks and school supplies, all at a discount. When Renys moved into an abandoned Walmart farther up the peninsula, they sold the building to the town for a dollar. Alan, one of Charlotte’s dads, redesigned the whole building so the first two stories are the library and the top floor is a condo that Charlotte’s family lives in. When he designed it, he kept the layout of the department store, so each section of the library takes up an old section of the store.

  I found a table upstairs in the teen area (formerly women’s lingerie, according to Charlotte) and started unpacking my gear. I was thinking about how I was going to look up why it’s quieter when there’s snow—the sound of snow? sound dissipation in winter?—when I saw her: Charlotte.

  Mum said that when she was growing up in Northern Ireland, the Catholic kids went to one school and the Protestant kids to another, and you didn’t even have a choice in it. She said I was lucky because all the kids in American towns go to the same school. I wasn’t so sure.

  Charlotte had her headphones on—the big, bulky kind; hers have rhinestones—and was reading one of those books with a pink cover and a skinny girl wearing too much makeup on it. I didn’t expect her to be here. I figured she’d be curled up in her PJs upstairs, maybe redoing her toenail polish (she’s actually quite good at pedicures, adding little flowers and sparkly stars).

  I sat down at one of the computers and did a search for “quiet snow.” The first hit was from the army. They have a SNOW Research Community, with “snow” all in capitals, and the page was supposed to be about snow acoustics. But when I clicked on it, I got the FORBIDDEN message. Was the military doing secret snow research? If so, they ought to come up here to Promise. We had plenty of it.

  There were a lot of images and musings on how snowy days can make you relax—clearly written by people who don’t live with feet of it to shovel. Then there were some of those sites where someone posts a question and others answer, and sometimes it’s good, but often you’re dealing with a bunch of ding-dongs with too much time on their hands. I couldn’t find anything substantial, so I went to ask Ms. Pepper for help, but there was a sign on the youth services desk that said to go downstairs for assistance. So I did, and found Eliot, the reference librarian who was also Charlotte’s other dad, at the circulation desk.

  “Ruth!” he said, looking pleased. “How would you like to earn free books from the book swap?”

  Eliot thought he had my number, but I’d seen those book-swap books. People clean out their basements and attics and bring their old, beat-up books to the library like they’re doing this big, honking good deed, but the library doesn’t want their old books, either, so they sell them for a quarter each or a dollar for a whole bag.

  I gave him my best side-eye look, and he said, “Oh, did I say book swap? What I meant was, how would you like to earn advance copies of books that haven’t even been published yet?” He picked up a stack of paperbacks from the counter behind him. “Ms. Pepper thought you might like this one in particular.” He held up a book written by Harriet Wexler.

  Harriet Wexler is my absolute favorite author. She writes the Taryn Greenbottom books. Taryn is the daughter of a knight and an elf, although you don’t learn about her elfishness until book three; she looks human. Each book is basically a different quest. She’s a squire, allowed to train for knighthood because her father was such an amazing fighter for the king. He’s missing, though. That’s the overarching saga: Taryn trying to unravel the mystery of her father. Harriet Wexler herself is a mystery. Supposedly she lives on a tiny island in Lake Champlain that isn’t part of New York or Vermont but is its own entity all to itself. When she finishes a draft of a novel on her old typewriter, she takes a motorboat to Burlington and mails it off to her publisher. Other than that, she never leaves the island. There are no pictures of her on her books or online or anything, so no one even knows what she looks like. I think all of that is absolutely magnificent. I’ve read all her books, some of them three or four times, but I had never heard of this book, The Riddled Cottage.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Now, when I explain this job, you might think it sounds boring, but you should know I don’t trust just anyone with this task. I don’t even let the students who volunteer as pages do it.”

  “You don’t have to flatter me, Mr. Diamond. I’m in.” When I’m at the library, I’m supposed to call him Mr. Diamond.

  I didn’t ask him if he ever let Charlotte do it. Eliot and I don’t talk about Charlotte.

  He led me deep into the stacks and gave me the shelf-reading instructions: I had to read along the shelves, looking at the spine labels and making sure every book was in the right place. Like if by accident 822.92 MAL was put before 821.1 SIR, I would need to move them into the correct positions. He also gave me a cart where I could place any books that were in the completely wrong section. The cart made me feel official. I thought it might be fun to be a librarian. Still, shelf reading was about the most boring job you could think of.

  Most of the books were in order, but I did find some strange things, like a tennis ball stuck behind some books, and someone’s shopping list crumpled on a bottom shelf: milk, eggs, ladyfingers, bacon.

  I found some books wildly out of place, like a book on solar heating in the philosophy section. And, hiding in the mythology section, a book called It’s Perfectly Normal, which I actually owned, since Mom gave it to me for my eleventh birthday. It was all about the body and sex and stuff. E
liot would probably think that was funny. I had it in my hands to bring to show him when I came around the corner and almost smacked into Lucas Hosgrove. He was holding a yo-yo in his hand. “I can walk the dog, you know.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Lucas had been showing everyone his yo-yo tricks for the last three weeks.

  As he was preparing himself, I remembered what book I was holding. I clutched it to my chest, but it was so big that I couldn’t hide the cover. So I tried to put it behind my back.

  “Are you even watching?” he asked.

  “I am.”

  “You’re not.”

  He was right. I wasn’t. I didn’t really care about yo-yo tricks. But Lucas was one of those kids you’re supposed to be patient with.

  He did the trick again, the yo-yo swinging out in front of him, then curling back. Walking the dog was a strange name for it. Sure, when it rolls out, the yo-yo looks like a dog on a leash, but when you tug back on a leash, it’s not like the dog glides back to you as if on roller skates. He might stop and look back with his tongue lolling out. If you were lucky.

  “Wonderful,” I told him.

  “I know,” he agreed, and then he left without saying good-bye.

  I dropped the book on Ms. Pepper’s desk, but after that I decided to just do what Eliot said and leave the misshelved books on the cart.

  It was in the second row that I found the note, not too long after I put the solar heating book on the cart to be reshelved. I was supposed to read only the Dewey decimal numbers on the spine, but I couldn’t stop myself from reading the titles. Most of them were bland and didn’t even tell you what the book was about. But I found one called The True Story of the Loch Ness Expedition by Mervin R. Shuttlecock. I knew, of course, that the Loch Ness myth had been debunked. The man who took the picture admitted that he had faked it. Still, it sounded like an interesting story even though it had the ugliest cover: brown, with the dust jacket torn beneath the plastic protective coating. I slid it off the shelf and flipped it open.

  The note was in a tiny envelope no bigger than a trading card. It was made out of origami paper that was black with tiny gold flowers. Inside, an index card was folded in half. One half was blank, but the other half had a seal drawn on it in red pencil. It was made to look like it had been pressed into wax, and the artist had used a heavy hand with the pencil. The center of the seal was a bird with a thin, sharp beak and a bright eye. I unfolded the card. A border was drawn around the card, a vine of green leaves and red thorns. Printed in green ink in small, even letters were the words: