Book Scavenger (22 page)

Matthew jumped up. “All right, let's go. I mapped out the address: 1155 Leavenworth, right?” He held up his phone for Emily to confirm.

“You remembered,” Emily said.

Matthew tugged her ponytail as he passed by and headed down the stairs. “Of course, Phlegmily,” he said.

“Lead the way, Barf-ew,” she replied, but she was smiling as she followed her brother out their front door.

On the bus ride to Leavenworth Street, Emily wondered what James was doing. Probably studying in his room or hunched over his cipher books or logic puzzles with Steve defying gravity, like a diving board of hair sticking off his head. As if he'd been reading her mind, Matthew pulled out his earbuds and asked, “So what happened with James? Why didn't he do this with you?”

Emily shrugged. They passed a lady unloading grocery bags from the trunk of a car parked on the sidewalk.

Matthew was silent a moment longer then said, “He'll get over it, whatever it is. Don't worry.”

“Easy for you to say,” Emily said, still looking out the window. “You make a zillion friends every time we move. It's why you love moving so much.”

Matthew snorted. “I don't love moving. If you asked me a few years ago, I would have rather bleached my hair and burned off my eyebrows again.”

Giggles bubbled up at the memory, and Emily pressed her fingers to her lips to stifle them. She remembered her brother tearing out of a bathroom with a towel over his face shrieking, “It burns! It burns!” It wasn't funny at the time, but it was a
little
funny now that everything had worked out okay. Emily couldn't imagine there'd been a time he'd rather go through
that
again than move.

“Go ahead, laugh at my expense,” Matthew said, but he was smirking, too. “This is how our life is. It can be cool in a lot of ways, you have to admit.” Matthew waved a hand as if their bus, with the lone man gripping an oxygen tank and the Sharpie-scribbled seats, was what constituted his “cool.” “But I used to hate moving.”

“You really hated it?”

“Before we moved from Connecticut. Remember?”

Emily remembered Connecticut, but she didn't remember Matthew being upset about moving.

“I had just started a band with Ollie and his brother. I didn't want to leave and start over somewhere new again. I even ran away, I was so mad.”

“You ran away?”

“Not the real kind. But I went to Ollie's house and told his mom I had permission to sleep over when I didn't. Mom and Dad figured it out.”

“Were they mad?”

“No. But you were.”

“Me?” As hard as she tried, she had no memory of any of this.

“You loved moving back then. Remember you made us do the family map?”

Of course she remembered that. The family map had hung in every kitchen since they'd made it.
The Cranes Conquer America
was written at the top in Emily's eight-year-old scrawl, back when she was into putting smiley faces inside her
e
's,
a
's, and
o
's. Metallic stars dotted the cities where they'd lived.

“You got it in your head we could have an elk for a pet when we moved to Colorado.”

“I was going to name him Monty,” Emily said. She'd spent a lot of time drawing pictures of her and Monty and the adventures they'd have in Colorado.

“I think I'd gotten Mom and Dad seriously reconsidering moving, and you thought I was ruining the fun. That's when Mom and Dad let me get a phone to keep in touch with my friends. And it turned out Colorado was a cool place to live, although you never got your pet elk, so you might not agree. What I finally figured out with all our moving is you miss out on stuff whether you stay or go. So I decided to just go with it. Embrace how we live.”

There was a Jack Kerouac quote their dad loved to repeat when the family deliberated weekend plans. Emily said it out loud, “‘What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?'”

“Exactly,” Matthew said and inserted his earbuds.

If they'd stayed in New Mexico or Colorado or Connecticut or any of the other states, she never would have met James or ridden a cable car or found Mr. Griswold's book. Even though they'd only just moved to California and she and James weren't talking, she wouldn't trade these last few weeks away. Matthew was right—you missed out on stuff either way. Or you gained stuff, depending on your perspective.

 

CHAPTER

30

EMILY AND MATTHEW
stood on the sheltered porch of 1155 Leavenworth. It was a corner building with a white-arched entry framed with black lanterns. The first story was beige brick, and the second and third stories were yellow, with the fire escapes painted to match.

“Do we go in?” Matthew asked.

“I'm not sure,” Emily said. “All the clue said was,
where he finished writing this book
. His actual apartment belongs to someone else now, I'm sure, so I doubt we're supposed to knock on their door and ask if we can look around.”

“Unless they're the ones who hid this book on Book Scavenger.”

“Uh, yeah.” Even though her brother had been making a nice effort since yesterday afternoon, she still hadn't confided in him about Mr. Griswold's game. Doing that would make it feel too much like she was replacing James, and she didn't want that. If she could have it her way, James would be here with them, too.

Matthew tried the front door, but it was locked. There was a call box to ring individual apartments to ask someone to unlock the door for you.

“He wouldn't have hidden it inside,” Emily murmured, turning on the front stoop to survey the area. “Let's walk around the building.”

Because the buildings were plunked right next to each other, they couldn't actually walk
around
the building. But they walked back and forth multiple times along the Leavenworth side and the Sacramento side, studying every nook and cranny for a spot where you could hide a book. There were windows just above the sidewalk at foot level, and more at head level, too. But Emily couldn't see any way they might conceal a book. There were no planter boxes or benches tucked next to the building, and the entry alcove was tidy and clear of anything booklike. Emily studied a fire escape ladder.

“Should I climb it?” Matthew asked.

“You can't reach up there.” The bottom of the fire escape stopped at least a couple of feet above the front entry arch.

“Sure I can.” Matthew proceeded to jump repeatedly, not even coming close to reaching the fire escape, but he kept jumping nonetheless.

Emily turned and looked at the two trees in front of the building. Something caught her eye perched high amid the leaves. A large black bird peered down at them.

“Oh, spooky! Matthew, look—that bird is staring at us.”

Matthew stopped hopping and looked up at the tree. They had a staring contest with the bird for a minute before Matthew said, “He sure is still. Do birds sleep with their eyes open? Hey, Bird!”

“Matthew!” Emily laughed, which only encouraged her brother.

“Yeah you, Bird! I'm talking to you!”

Still no reaction from the bird.

“That is really weird,” Emily said.

“What kind of bird are you anyway, Bird?” Matthew hollered. “Are you a crow? Or maybe a—”

“Raven!” Emily realized. “That's it! That's the book I'm hunting!”

“You're a book, Bird?” Matthew hollered. “That's not confusing at all!”

“You wanted to climb something.” Emily indicated the tree with a flourish. “May I interest you in this climbing tree?”

The trunk of the tree split in four directions, each branch thicker than both of Emily's legs put together. Her brother leaped into the palm of the branches and picked and pulled his way up to the fake raven. After he climbed back down and jumped to the sidewalk, he handed the bird to Emily. It was a wooden box designed to look like a raven. Emily popped off the front, revealing a compartment just big enough to hold a paperback book, which is where
The Maltese Falcon
sat.

“This is so cool!” Emily exclaimed. She put the lid back on the raven and turned the box around to inspect it.

“Now that's a scavenger who went all out. Must be Mr. Money Bags to be able to give away a box like that.”

Emily gave the raven an affectionate pat. “Must be.”

On the bus ride home, Emily flipped through
The Maltese Falcon
. It looked like an average paperback. Nothing written in it. Nothing hidden in it. It had all the publisher and ISBN and copyright info where it normally should be, so this was an actual published version, not a handcrafted one like Mr. Griswold's edition of
The
Gold-Bug
.

Emily flipped back to the inside cover where a Book Scavenger tracking label had been placed. She had flipped past it the first time, assuming it had the registration number listed as was typical. But now she saw it did not. Instead of a tracking number there were six symbols:

Emily pulled her notebook out of her backpack and the pencil from her ponytail and copied the symbols down. She began playing around with different possibilities for how to solve the puzzle—she rearranged their order; she drew them combined with one another like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. There were only six symbols, so was it a six-letter word? Or did each symbol represent a word, making it a six-word sentence? At one point she felt her brother studying her work. She looked over and he pulled out an earbud.

“Just so you know, I don't think your book scavenging is stupid.”

Emily rolled her eyes.

“I don't!” Matthew insisted. “Not any more stupid than you think my Flush videos are. It was fun when we used to go book scavenging. Today was fun, too. I just like other stuff more now, so when I have a choice, I'm going to choose the other stuff.”

“I don't expect you to choose Book Scavenger or doing anything with me,” Emily said quietly. “But you don't have to be so mean about it.”

James's words came back to Emily from their fight. She'd said Mr. Quisling's challenge was silly, and he'd shot back by calling Mr. Griswold's game the same and then asked her how that made her feel. Her brother talking about prioritizing his own interests over hers wasn't that different from her prioritizing Mr. Griswold's game over the cipher challenge. It made her feel sick to think she might have been dismissing James, a new friend she wanted to impress, the same way she'd felt her brother had been dismissing her.

“Matthew?” Her brother was about to put his earbuds back in, but he waited. “I don't think Flush is stupid, either.”

“You better not.” Matthew mock punched her arm. “They're not just great musicians, they're my buds.”

“Oh, trust me. I know.”

 

CHAPTER

31

AFTER EMILY
and Matthew returned home, she spent over an hour trying to decode the odd little symbols on the flyer with no luck. The message was so short, using frequency analysis didn't amount to much help. Only the
symbol was repeated, but that could still be any letter. Even if she tried replacing it with a commonly used letter, she had no way of knowing if it was the right one, and it was incredibly difficult to fill in the other symbols in a way that made an actual word. Like if she used
E
for the duplicate symbol: