Book Scavenger (12 page)

A man strode toward the cluster of students, keys jangling in his hand. The crowd parted as he boomed, “Let's go, people. We've got dead men to discuss.”

Their teacher, Mr. Quisling, planted himself at the front of the room, legs apart, arms crossed. Muscles bulged from beneath the short sleeves of his red T-shirt. His silvery-gray hair was cropped close to his skull, and icy-blue eyes watched each student enter and take a seat. He held up a hand like a traffic cop, stopping Emily.

“New face,” he barked.

Emily didn't know what to say to that, so she just stood there.

“Emily Crane?”

“Yes,” she mumbled.

“Grab a textbook from the bookshelf. I hope you've been learning about the Roman Empire; otherwise you will have a lot of catching up to do.”

Emily pulled a textbook from the shelf Mr. Quisling had indicated and slid into the seat James had saved for her.

“So, Emily Crane,” Mr. Quisling said. “Where are you from?”

A simple question, but it always threw her. She wasn't
from
anywhere. She never knew if she should say where she was born or the last place she lived. If she said something vague like “all over,” a teacher like Mr. Quisling might interpret that as attitude. The rest of her teachers had just welcomed her to the school and left it at that.

“Um…”

There were snickers behind her. Emily looked back to see the mushroom-cap girl with her mouth covered and taunting in her eyes. So much for thinking she'd imagined her negative attention earlier.

“I'm not grading you on your response, Ms. Crane,” Mr. Quisling said.

“I moved here from New Mexico,” Emily finally replied as the tardy bell rang.

Mr. Quisling clapped his hands twice to get everyone's attention.

“Excellent. A-plus for that. Just kidding, no grade.” Mr. Quisling rubbed his hands together. “Let's get to work. Open your books to chapter eight.”

Emily's pen was poised over her open binder, ready to take notes. She copied the words Mr. Quisling wrote on the whiteboard, but her mind wandered back to Mr. Griswold's game.
Fort wild home rat …

“Psst.”

The Gold-Bug
perched on the edge of James's desk with an origami frog peeking from the pages. Making sure Mr. Quisling still faced the board, James held the book out to Emily.

She grabbed it and slid out the frog-shaped note. Placing the note in her lap, she unfolded each section as Mr. Quisling spoke so he wouldn't hear the rustling. The note was a garbled mixture of letters, but Emily recognized it immediately as their secret code.

When Mr. Quisling looked down to read aloud from his textbook, Emily eased the note from under the desk. At the same moment, something hit the ground with a loud
boom
.

Mr. Quisling's head snapped up. Emily tucked the note inside
The Gold-Bug.

“Is there a problem?” Mr. Quisling said sharply. “Maddie?” Maddie, it turned out, was the name of the mushroom-cap girl.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Quisling,” Maddie said. “I accidentally knocked my book off my desk.”

Emily did her best to discreetly slide
The Gold-Bug
inside her binder as Mr. Quisling walked down her aisle. He picked up Maddie's textbook and handed it back. Emily's heart thundered so loud she was sure he'd hear it.

Instead of returning to the front of the room, Mr. Quisling hovered over Emily's desk. With his index finger he flipped open her binder and revealed
The Gold-Bug.

“I don't recognize this,” Mr. Quisling said. “You're not doing homework for another class on my time, are you, Ms. Crane?”

Emily jerked her head back and forth so emphatically her pencil flew out of her ponytail and clattered to the floor. Mr. Quisling picked up
The Gold-Bug
, flipped through it, and pulled out the unfolded note. She couldn't bring herself to peek at James. Mr. Quisling studied the paper a bit before saying, “Interesting form of note-taking you have. Is this how they did it in your previous school?”

He returned
The Gold-Bug
to her desktop with no additional attention. Emily would have felt relief about that except that he carried James's note with him as he strode back to the front of the class.

“So you're an Edgar Allan Poe fan and you take encrypted notes.”

Someone returned her pencil to her desktop, but Emily was too mortified to move or say thanks. Mr. Quisling gestured to his lecture outline about the Roman Empire and said, “Then surely you know what Edgar Allan Poe and Julius Caesar have in common?”

She had no idea other than they were both dead and had been for a long time.

“Anyone?” Mr. Quisling asked the class.

A chair squeaked and someone coughed, but other than that the classroom was silent.

“Who knows what a cipher is?” Mr. Quisling asked. He sounded genuinely interested, not like he was merely torturing a student. He turned to the whiteboard and wrote
cipher.

“A cipher,” he underlined the word, “is when you substitute individual letters with other letters, numbers, or symbols.”

“Like a code,” someone said.

“A code is similar: It's a way to conceal a message. But a code can be more expansive, with word or phrase substitutions rather than individual letters.”

Some of the students looked uncomfortable, like they might be embarrassed for Emily; others were writing in their notebooks, possibly copying Mr. Quisling's board work.

“Will we be tested on this?” asked a boy slumped in his desk in the far row next to the wall.

Mr. Quisling blinked with lizard-like slowness. “You can consider anything we discuss in this class possible fodder for an exam, José.”

And then, to Emily's great horror, Mr. Quisling began copying James's note onto the whiteboard.

 

CHAPTER

14

“
THIS IS WHAT
Edgar Allan Poe and Julius Caesar had in common. They were both fans of the monoalphabetic substitution cipher.”

Emily desperately hoped the bell would ring or someone would pull the fire alarm as she watched Mr. Quisling transcribe the note. She couldn't even bring herself to look at James.

“Julius Caesar developed one of the earliest substitution ciphers,” Mr. Quisling said. “Today we call it the Caesar Shift. Edgar Allan Poe was not only a famous writer but also a cipher enthusiast. So enthusiastic, in fact, he organized a cipher challenge when he was the editor of a literary magazine. He claimed he could solve any cipher submitted.”

Despite herself, Emily found this interesting. It made sense, really, since his story “The Gold-Bug
”
included ciphers. She resumed cringing in horror once Mr. Quisling finished copying James's note:

NTDHU VKU OUD BS IXPV.

B ETF VKBFO XI VKPUU.

Mr. Quisling tapped the whiteboard. “What we have here is called a ciphertext. When decoding a secret message like this, letter frequency analysis is a good place to start.”

Starting on the far left of the whiteboard, Mr. Quisling wrote out the standard alphabet. He was almost jogging as he scribbled his stubby capital letters. He's enjoying this, Emily thought. He is, he's enjoying humiliating her! James intently studied the pencil he rolled back and forth under his fingertips.

“Ciphers play an interesting role in the history of our world. Battles have been won and lost because of them. Assassinations have been diverted because coded plots were intercepted and deciphered, or conversely, assassinations have been successful. The twists and turns history has taken have often relied on secret messages and whether those messages were able to remain secrets.”

José raised his hand. “Are you sure we should be doing this? Breaking this code?”

Emily gave José a small smile of gratitude, but his interjection didn't deter Mr. Quisling.

“Your syllabus plainly states that passing notes or doing any work other than class work is done at your own risk.” Mr. Quisling waved to the board behind him. “This is what you risk.”

“If Ms. Crane were plotting an assassination, let's see how we'd fare in diverting the course of history.”

Using the alphabet he'd written on the board, Mr. Quisling drew a hash mark under a letter for each time it appeared in James's message.

“The three most common letters in the English language are
e
,
t
, and
a
. By looking at our frequency chart we see that
u
is used five times in this message,
v
four times, and
k
and
b
three times. It's highly likely at least one of these letters represents
e
,
t
, or
a
. But which is which?”

This was the same tactic the character had used to solve the secret message in Poe's story.

“
Let's look at our three-letter words:
vku
,
oud
,
and
etf
.” Mr. Quisling stood back and rubbed his chin. He circled the
vk
in
vku.

“The
th
combination found in
the
is commonly found at the beginning of other words. In this message, you see
vk
is also used in
vkbfo
and
vkpuu.
This might suggest that
v
equals
t
and
k
equals
h
,
making
vku
equal
the.
Let's go with that and see what happens.”

Mr. Quisling filled in letters of the message like a game of Hangman. Students began calling out guesses for the words. Before Emily knew it, Mr. Quisling and her social studies class had cracked James's message:

MAYBE THE KEY IS FORT.

I CAN THINK OF THREE.

“Assassination diverted!” Mr. Quisling cried.

Emily's face burned so furiously she thought her eyes might act like magnifying glasses in the sun and set her binder paper on fire. At least James hadn't mentioned Mr. Griswold or his game in his note.

A student called out, “It doesn't make sense!”

Another said, “Maybe it's supposed to read
fart
,”
and laughter filled the room. Mr. Quisling clapped his hands and shouted “Enough!” The laughter sputtered until a boy stage-whispered, “The three farts of Christmas past, present, and future.”

James joined in the renewed titters, but the tips of his ears looked suddenly sunburned.

Mr. Quisling paced the aisles for so long the laughter faded into suppressed giggles, then uneasy silence and shifting in seats. Emily ran her finger around the diamond carved onto her desktop, avoiding eye contact and hoping no more humiliation was in store.

Mr. Quisling smacked the desk of a girl, who yelped in surprise.

“I propose a challenge!” Mr. Quisling proclaimed. “A cipher challenge, in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. Here's how it will work: You may submit substitution ciphers to the class. One cipher per student per week. You can turn in your first ones tomorrow, which is Wednesday, if you wish. After this week, Monday will be the day to submit ciphers. The class will have the week to attempt to break the submitted ciphers. Any ciphers left standing by the end of the week will earn you a free homework pass to use on any assignment this semester. You may earn a maximum of three homework passes.”

Chatter and excitement permeated the classroom.

“Don't lose your heads, people,” Mr. Quisling bellowed over the din. “Be prepared to explain your cipher for the class if it goes unbroken, in order to prove it's validly constructed.”

The bell rang, and above the scraping chairs and zipping backpacks, Mr. Quisling shouted, “Bring enough copies for the whole class.”

As people filed out of the room, Mr. Quisling tapped papers into an even pile on his desk. Without looking up, he said, “Starting off on a bad foot, Emily Crane. Do better tomorrow.”

Emily nodded obediently, even though Mr. Quisling wasn't looking at her.

“You aren't mad at me, are you?” she asked James in the hallway.

“Mad at
you
?”
James said. “You should be mad at me. It was stupid to pass the note in the first place. At least this cipher challenge sounds cool.”

“Don't get too excited.” Maddie stepped away from the lockers like she'd been waiting for them. “Your cute little code was broken like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I doubt you'll win any homework passes.”

“And you will?” James asked.

Maddie smirked. “How about a side bet? Whoever earns the most homework passes or gets to three first wins.”

James rolled his eyes. “It's always about winning with you, isn't it? It's only worth doing if there's a ribbon in it.”

For the briefest moment Maddie winced, but with a shake of her motionless hair, she said, “Sounds like someone who's afraid of losing.”

“
I'm
not afraid of losing. Are
you
afraid of losing, Steve?” James tilted his head to the side as if he were listening to his cowlick's reply.

“What's in it for the winner?” Emily interjected.

Maddie's calculating smile took on a slightly evil cast. “Maybe it's not about what we win, but what the other has to lose.”

“What does
that
mean?” Emily asked.

Maddie moved two fingers like alligator jaws across James's hair. “If you lose, you have to shave off that stupid tuft of hair you treat like an imaginary friend. And just that—I want a bald spot in its place.”

Emily sucked in a breath.
Not Steve!
she thought. She'd grown attached to the spiky guy. But James didn't look worried.