EMILY SAT in the teepee for a good long while before she walked back to their building. James was right—she hadn’t helped him with Mr. Quisling’s challenge. But part of her was upset with him anyway. For her, playing Mr. Griswold’s game was the equivalent of making it to the championships if you played a sport. It would be nice if he could see that and understand.
Emily stomped up the stairs to their apartment, dropped her backpack on her bedroom floor, and flopped onto her bed. The reindeer antlers James had given her on her first day of school rested on her windowsill. The photo of them with the antlers stretched over their heads was taped to the wall beside it, along with the newspaper clipping that she’d torn out about Mr. Griswold.
“He’s going to be mad at me either way,” Emily said to Mr. Griswold’s photo across the room. She pushed herself up from her bed and found The Maltese Falcon filed in her suitcase of books. As she flipped through it, a memory nudged her. A memory of flipping through the pages of a different Maltese Falcon when she and James had visited Bayside Press. There had been a paperback in that pile of alleged games that Jack had showed them. Jack hadn’t taken the idea seriously, but what if the person who’d sent it in to Bayside Press had been right? Jack said the person had found it playing Book Scavenger and thought it was Mr. Griswold’s next game. Maybe it wasn’t his complete game, but maybe they’d found one piece. The piece Emily was currently trying to figure out.
She ran down the hall to the front room, planning to do a search for The Maltese Falcon on Book Scavenger, but stopped short when she saw Matthew on the family computer. He was editing footage for another one of his stupid Flush fan videos.
“Matthew,” Emily said. “I need the computer.”
He had the hood up on his sweatshirt. When he didn’t respond, she yanked it down, revealing his earbuds plugged in. Matthew turned, yanking out an earbud.
“What’s your problem?”
“I need to use the computer.”
“Sorry. I’m on it.”
“Can’t you use your phone?”
“Not for this.”
“Matthew, come on. This will be quick.”
“Wait your turn.”
“Fine.” Emily collapsed into the nearby couch. From her vantage point, she could see Matthew putting together another stop-motion video. This new video appeared to be made up of notebook paper drawings that got crumpled and uncrumpled, over and over. And it appeared to be taking him forever to finish. Emily jumped back up.
“I just want to check on one thing,” she said. “It will be quick.”
“Why don’t you ask James? I’m sure he can spare one of his dozen computers for your games.” He said games as if he’d said pacifiers or tricycles.
“He doesn’t have a dozen computers,” Emily snapped. “Anyway, this isn’t your computer. It belongs to everyone.”
“And I’m using it right now.”
Emily was a shaken soda ready to pop. “Why are you always so mean?” she exploded. “You used to be fun. I used to think you were cool!”
Matthew looked at her sideways then back to the screen. “I can take a break.” Matthew saved his work. “I’m hungry anyway.” Matthew got up from the table and went back to the kitchen.
His low-key response to her outburst only made her feel worse. Now he could add “dramatic” and “childish” to the list of reasons he didn’t want to hang out with her anymore. Emily pushed thoughts of her brother aside and logged onto Book Scavenger. She selected “San Francisco” and then did a title search for The Maltese Falcon.
“Whoa.” She straightened in her seat. Fifty-two copies hidden in San Francisco alone. She’d never seen anywhere close to that many copies of one book hidden in a city before. But it was a big city. She did a search for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to compare against a typically popular book for hiding. Nine copies. There was definitely something going on with The Maltese Falcon.
She went back to those search results and looked under the User column. That showed the name of who had hidden the book, and again Emily was surprised. Three copies were hidden by different people, but the other forty-nine were all hidden by the same person. And not just any Book Scavenger player: Raven.
Emily clicked the message icon and typed “Raven” into the “To” field.
SURLY WOMBAT: Who are you?
RAVEN: I do not have the information you seek.
“Yeah, yeah,” Emily said.
SURLY WOMBAT: Are you running Mr. Griswold’s game?
RAVEN: I do not have the information you seek.
“Okay, fine. Be coy,” Emily muttered. She looked at the list of hidden Maltese Falcons. All of Raven’s copies were hidden the week before Emily moved to San Francisco. She already knew from the one turned in to Bayside Press that there was a message of some sort inside—something that made the person who had turned it in think it was Mr. Griswold’s game. Finding one of these copies had to be the next step. She looked at the San Francisco map on the Book Scavenger site and narrowed the choices to only show Raven’s hidden books, since the forty-nine Maltese Falcons were the only books Raven had hidden.
Every hidden book was marked with a star on the map, and the closest star to where they lived was in an area called Nob Hill. Out of habit, she almost declared the book so she could get double points, but—thinking of Babbage poaching her books—she pulled her finger back from the mouse right before she clicked. It wasn’t like there weren’t forty-eight more options to find if she declared this one and someone got to it before her, but Emily didn’t want to run the risk of drawing someone’s attention to it. Or alerting anyone that she was interested in it, she realized, thinking about those men who must know she’s Surly Wombat.
She opened the clue without declaring the book, and it read: Where he finished writing this.
“Okay,” Emily muttered to herself and opened a new web browser. She did an Internet search for “Dashiell Hammett” and “Maltese Falcon.” There were almost two hundred thousand results. The top results were mostly about a movie that had been made of the book. She was about to search with different keywords when she saw a link to a map of sites referenced in The Maltese Falcon as well as places Dashiell Hammett had lived. She clicked on that. There were only two noted locations in the Nob Hill area. She hovered over one, and a bubble popped up that said, Dashiell Hammett lived at 1155 Leavenworth Street when he completed the final draft of The Maltese Falcon.
She’d figured it out! That was where she had to go. Emily did a victory spin in the computer chair.
She had to tell James. Sure, he was mad, but he’d be interested to know The Maltese Falcon clue led somewhere and to hear about Raven’s role in the game. He’d probably even want to go with her.
Emily flipped to a clean sheet of notebook paper and, in their secret code, wrote, Raven hid forty-nine copies of Maltese Falcon around San Francisco. One is at 1155 Leavenworth. Next clue! She went to her room, slid open the window, dropped the paper in the sand pail, and raised the bucket. She stood on a chair and tapped their secret knock on the ceiling with the yardstick/tennis ball contraption. And then she waited. There were no footsteps above, no sliding of James’s window. Emily tried the knock again.
Maybe he wasn’t in his room. She lowered the pail back down, grabbed the note, ran down her stairs and out the front door to their building’s landing, and pounded on the Lees’ door. After a few seconds without any noise on the other side, she pounded again and then rang the doorbell. Two locks clicked, a dead bolt slid, and the older Ms. Lee opened the door. Even though James’s grandmother was barely taller than Emily and swam in one of James’s old Angry Birds shirts, she was still quite intimidating.
“Is your apartment on fire?” she asked.
“Um, no, I…”
“Don’t knock so loud unless the apartment is on fire. I am not hard of hearing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Emily said meekly.
James’s grandmother gripped a wooden spoon in one hand and pursed her lips, waiting. For a moment, Emily couldn’t remember why she was there.
“I was doing research for a … book report and found something I thought James would be interested in. Is he here?”
“One moment,” Ms. Lee said. Up the staircase she called, “James! Emily is here.”
Emily had expected James to appear, but instead she heard his voice reply in Chinese.
Ms. Lee turned back to Emily, her face softened with an apologetic smile. “He’s in the middle of a school project and can’t be interrupted. Perhaps later? Or I could show him your research.”
Ms. Lee held out her spoon-free hand.
“That’s okay,” Emily said, backing away. She knew James was mad, but he wouldn’t even talk to her?
She had left her own front door wide open and walked back through, closing it softly behind her. When she reached the top of her stairs, she found her brother skulking about in the hallway and guessed he might have overheard her conversation with Ms. Lee. She ignored him and was about to enter her bedroom when Matthew said, “Phlegmily. I mean Emily.”
“What?” She didn’t bother turning around.
“I have some free time this week. If you want someone to go book scavenging with.”
Emily waited a beat, expecting a punch line or her brother to start laughing and take his words back. When she didn’t hear anything, she finally turned. Matthew scratched at the lines he’d shaved into his head and appeared to be studying the baseboards. He glanced up at her once, maybe to check if she was still there.
“Okay,” Emily said. “Thanks.”