THE U-HAUL putted up a hill, leaving downtown San Francisco behind. The sidewalk sprouted trees; the bars on windows were replaced with flower boxes. Her dad turned down a street so steep Emily was amazed everything didn’t just lean over and careen downhill through intersection after intersection into a crashing mess at the bottom.
The moving van slowed to a stop in front of a building Emily recognized from the rental website. The new house was taller than it was wide, as if it held its breath to squeeze between the neighboring homes.
“Definitely need the emergency brake for this street,” her dad said, shoving the brake pedal down with his foot. “You ready?”
Emily glanced at the clock. One minute to go until Mr. Griswold’s announcement. Her dad tapped his temple, his shorthand for I can read your mind.
“I’ll leave the radio on. I know you don’t want to miss anything,” he said.
He swung open his door with a creak and jumped to the pavement, joining the rest of their family on the sidewalk. Emily’s mom dug through her purse, the hem of her patchwork sundress chasing itself around her ankles in the breeze. Matthew shuffled in a circle, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he took in their new surroundings. His off-center Mohawk could make you do a double take, thinking he was tilting his head when he really wasn’t. Her brother couldn’t care less that they were moving again. He never cared. Matthew attracted friends like a rainbow attracts leprechauns. And it never bothered him to leave them behind, either. He saw it as building a fan base for his future as World-Famous Rock Star.
The mention of “Griswold” drew Emily’s attention back to the radio. The DJ was saying, “We’ve got a Foghead calling in from the event, and they’re saying so far Griswold is a no-show.”
“A no-show?” Emily asked the radio.
“You there, caller?” the DJ asked.
A woman’s voice said, “Yeah, I’m here at the library, but we haven’t seen a glimpse of him. People are getting antsy—this guy near me is ranting about what a waste of time this is. But I don’t know. I’m feeling worried myself. Garrison Griswold doesn’t seem like a flake, ya know?”
And suddenly Emily knew with certainty why Mr. Griswold hadn’t shown up. It was part of the new game! He was faking his disappearance, and the challenge would be to find him, similar to the online murder mystery he’d planned two Halloweens ago. How brilliant!
Her mom rapped on the passenger door.
“Moving boxes are calling your name,” her muffled voice came through the glass.
A salty and crisp breeze was blowing when Emily stepped out of the van, carrying with it a faint chorus of brays and barks. She wondered if they might be the Pier 39 sea lions she’d read about. From her vantage point on this steep hill, she could look down across the city and see a slice of the bay beyond the cityscape. Not that she could make out sea lions from this distance—the lone sailboat she could see wasn’t any bigger than her fingernail, so a sea lion would be like the size of a freckle.
As she helped her family unload the U-Haul, ideas tumbled around Emily’s head of how Mr. Griswold’s disappearance could be launched into a game. Maybe there was something to find at the library where he was supposed to make the announcement, or maybe there was a message hidden on the Book Scavenger website.
A third-floor window slid open with a squawk. While their new building looked like a regular, if superskinny, three-story house, Emily knew from the rental website that every floor was a separate apartment. An Asian woman older than her parents leaned out the open window.
“You’re blocking the driveway,” the woman shouted.
“Hello!” Emily’s dad took off his baseball cap to wipe sweat off his brow and waved it. “Ms. Lee, isn’t it? We’re the Cranes—your new tenants? Just unloading our things, then we’ll return the U-Haul and it’ll be out of the way.”
“Move that truck or I’ll call the police,” their landlady said, and slammed the window shut.
“Mental note: Do not mess with her driveway,” Matthew said. He straddled the ground with one foot against the garage door and the other nearly in the gutter. “Can’t really call this a driveway, though, can you?”
“Not even a parkway,” Emily said.
Matthew sat cross-legged on the ground. “Sitway might work.”
Emily smiled. Sometimes she forgot how funny her brother could be, when she wasn’t the butt of his jokes.
The house had three front doors opening onto the porch, one for each apartment. While her mom worked the key in theirs, Emily noticed the door to the right was wide open. A private staircase stretched up and out of view to Ms. Lee’s floor. Partway up the staircase sat a boy, about Emily’s age, who she assumed must be Ms. Lee’s grandson. He carefully wrote in a Puzzle Power magazine.
Emily’s mom pushed their front door open, revealing their own staircase. While the rest of her family went inside, Emily hung back. The boy had shiny black hair that poked up at the back of his head as if he’d slept on it funny. He looked at Emily.
“Moving in?” he asked.
Emily startled a little and blushed. Had she been staring at him long?
She raised the plastic bin filled with clothes. “I’m delivering a pizza.”
The boy blinked at her twice. She’d been going for funny, but maybe that just sounded snotty. She turned to her own doorway, but not before seeing the corner of the boy’s mouth curl up in a smile.
Upstairs, Emily’s dad dropped his moving box in the front room. He spread his arms wide and rotated in a circle. “Does this feel like Home Sweet Home or what?”
“It feels like a sparsely furnished apartment,” Emily said, dumping her bin next to his.
“Dibs on this room,” Matthew called from down the hallway.
“Hey, no fair!” Emily ran past Matthew’s claimed room to see the leftover bedroom. It was narrow, like their building. A closet door cut off one corner, and Emily was surprised to see the inside was a triangle instead of the expected square. She’d never had a triangular closet before. There was also a window that stared at the building next door. Emily slid the window up and reached an arm out. Her fingertips almost brushed the neighboring house.
The window directly above hers slid open. Emily snapped back inside, fearing Ms. Lee would pop out and yell at her about touching the neighbor’s building. Instead, she heard a repetitive squeaking.
She’d been so focused on the next-door house that Emily hadn’t noticed the rope strung alongside her window. The rope wound around a pulley attached to the outside of the building and ran up to another pulley fixed beside the window directly above hers. A rusted tin sand pail was being lowered, and once it reached her, the window upstairs shut.
Bewildered, Emily tilted the bucket to see what was inside. She removed a scrap of paper that had a three-by-three grid drawn on it with the message Fly into flamingo theater, enter empty nest.
Emily reread the message. It made no sense. She leaned out the window and peered up, but there was no one to see.
The boy on the stairs must have sent this. But what in the world was a flamingo theater, and how was she expected to fly there? And what about this grid? Tic-tac-toe had nine squares, but then why not mark an X to start the game?
Emily pulled the pencil from her ponytail and sat on the floor to study the paper further. The sentence didn’t strike her as being a cipher since it was made up of actual words, not a garbled mix of letters. Emily played around with rearranging the letters, thinking maybe it was an anagram.
Her mom leaned in her doorway. “You’ll have plenty of time for sleuthing later, Em.”
“This isn’t for Book Scavenger,” Emily muttered. But sometimes taking a break helped her see a puzzle in a new way, so she tucked her pencil back into her hair and went downstairs.
The boy sat in the same place as before, absorbed in Puzzle Power. He gave no indication that he’d just delivered a puzzle via sand pail, but now he wore a bulky purple scarf. Odd, since it was warm enough for Emily to wear a tank top.
At the moving van, Emily dawdled, debating if she should ask the boy about the bucket and the note. But what would she say? Did you send this to me? Duh. Who else would it be from? Ms. Lee? What am I supposed to do with it? If she said that, then she might as well just say I give up, and Emily wasn’t one to give up.
“What are you doing?” Matthew said from behind her.
Emily blushed, realizing she’d been making gestures while she imagined her conversation. She grabbed the closest thing to her in the truck bed—her suitcase filled with books.
“Looking for this,” she said, and lugged it to the ground.
“Oh-kaaay.”
The suitcase was so packed with books Emily had to drag it up to the front porch one step at a time.
“Can you go any slower?” Matthew asked.
“This is heavy.” Emily grunted. She looked inside their doorway at the endlessly long flight of stairs. “If you’re in such a rush, go around me,” she said.
Matthew sidestepped her and clomped by with his skateboard and backpack. Emily sat on the edge of her suitcase to catch her breath. She peeked in Ms. Lee’s door. The boy now wore swim goggles along with his scarf. Emily snorted in surprise and then clamped a hand over her mouth. He continued to make marks in his magazine and acted oblivious to her being there.
It seemed like an hour passed dragging her suitcase up the stairs, during which all three of her family members passed her going up or down and none offered any help. Unless you counted her mother saying, “I told you not to pack all your books in one bag, Em.”
She debated the puzzle as she climbed, sorting through her mental file cabinet of puzzles solved for Book Scavenger. The grid had to be the key. Why include it? Logic puzzles used grids, but she didn’t see how that scrap of paper added up to being a logic puzzle.
Emily rolled the suitcase into a corner of her room and pulled out the paper and her pencil once again. When she tried reading it backward, it was gibberish. What if she took the first letter of each word …
“‘Fifteen,’” she read aloud.
The first letter of each word spelled out fifteen. That couldn’t be a coincidence. But fifteen what? Was that the solution, and if so, what did that mean? And that still didn’t explain the grid.
“A magic square!” Emily threw her pencil triumphantly in the air.
In a magic square, a grid was filled with a consecutive set of numbers so every row, column, and diagonal added up to the same number. With a three-by-three grid and the numbers one to nine, the solution was always fifteen. She had learned about magic squares when she hunted Shakespeare’s Secret in Colorado. The clue was a partially finished magic square. The numbers used to solve the square ended up being the combination for a lock on a hidden box that contained Shakespeare’s Secret.
When Emily finished solving the boy’s magic square it looked like this:
She dropped the note back in the bucket and pulled the rope to raise it up to the boy’s room. Then she ran downstairs and jumped on the landing. This time the boy had added reindeer antlers to his ensemble. Emily giggled.
“Halloween already?” her dad murmured as he passed by on his way inside.
Ms. Lee’s voice rang down the stairs. “James!” she said. “Come help me, please.” Without so much as a glance Emily’s way, James jumped to his feet and ran upstairs, the bells on his reindeer antlers jingling with every step.
“Check your bucket,” Emily called after him, hoping he’d heard.