THAT NIGHT IN BED, Emily distracted herself from worrying about Mr. Griswold and Book Scavenger by reading the new book she’d found. Thanks to the odd exchange with Raven earlier that day, she knew The Gold-Bug was an old story of Edgar Allan Poe’s. She thought that was weird at first, an old story in a clearly brand-new book, but her dad reminded her that classics get republished all the time, often with a new cover to “make them more accessible to modern readers,” as he put it.
Emily dipped her nose in The Gold-Bug and breathed deeply. It had a new-book smell with the faintest hint of lemons. The pages turned crisply as she went back to the beginning of the story to start over. The language was old-fashioned, and Emily noticed a spelling mistake right off the bat and then another a few sentences later, so she was having trouble getting into the story.
She’d flipped ahead and read enough snippets to know it was about a secret message and a treasure hunt. That sounded good, so she stuck with it, but the mistakes bothered her. Using one of her dad’s purple editing pencils, she corrected the misspellings like he did, marking through the incorrect letter and writing the correct one above. Some people thought it was strange or even destructive to write in books, but it was a habit Emily had picked up when she was seven and used to play “editor” while her dad worked. Back then she mostly wrote nonsense or drew pictures of cats, but now her notes made up a reading diary of sorts.
Emily sighed with frustration as she came across what was probably the twentieth typo.
From the ceiling she heard a thud, then three fast thuds, followed by another thud. That was the signal she and James had agreed on when they made up their secret language earlier that day. It meant a bucket message was coming. Emily crossed her room and slid open her window.
For their secret language, they had decided on a substitution cipher. James knew from keyboarding class that the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” used every letter in the alphabet, so they made that their cipher key. To end up with twenty-six letters to match the alphabet, they skipped any that were repeated. Their secret code looked like this:
Regular Alphabet:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Cipher Key:
THEQUICKBROWNFXJMPSVLAZYDG
S was still S, but they decided that was okay. If they could memorize their new alphabet, they’d be able to read each other’s messages without using an answer key for reference.
The bucket lowered beside Emily, and she removed James’s note. It said, ZKTV TPU DXL QXBFC? Gibberish to anyone else, but Emily knew what to do. She tugged her pencil free, and soon she’d translated his message: What are you doing?
Emily wrote her reply:
PUTQBFC CH. IXLFQ 20 VDJXS. DXL?
(Reading GB. Found 20 typos. You?)
She used the handle of the broom she’d found in the kitchen to repeat the knock on the ceiling before sending the note up. James’s reply came a few minutes later:
KXNUZXPO. ETF B SUU CH?
(Homework. Can I see GB?)
Emily placed the book in the bucket. While she waited for James to send it back, she thought about how weird it was for a book to look so perfect on the outside, but have so many mistakes on the inside. Whoever made it must not have hired someone like her dad to fix the errors. James knocked, and the bucket lowered back to her window.
DXL ZPBVU BF HXXOS? PUHUW!
WXXO ZKTV B IXLFQ—KTKT.
(You write in books? Rebel! Look what I found—haha.)
Emily opened the book and saw that James had circled consecutive letter corrections in order to spell out the words fort, wild, and home. Leave it to James to turn a bunch of boring typos into a crazy word search game. She sent him a note back:
DXL TFQ DXLP JLGGWUS. ☺
(You and your puzzles. ☺)
* * *
Sunday morning, Emily woke to the sound of someone bowling outside her room. She groggily shifted under her covers. Wait—did she just hear someone bowling? She threw off her sheet and cracked her door just in time to see Matthew careening toward her on his skateboard.
“Breakfast!” he hollered as he coasted by, beaning her on the forehead with a plastic-wrapped muffin. He skidded to a stop in front of his own room. Emily picked up the blueberry muffin from the floor.
“You’re such an idiot,” she snapped.
“Tough break for you, then,” Matthew said with a shrug. “Same gene pool.”
Emily shuffled to the kitchen. It was a narrow room with a small table squeezed in at one end.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked her dad, who sat at the table surrounded by sections of newspapers.
“Out taking pictures for the blog.”
“Already?” They’d been in San Francisco less than two days.
“The blog won’t create content for itself, I suppose,” her dad murmured.
Emily searched for a juice glass among the various moving boxes and bags that still cluttered the counter and floor, lost in thought about The Gold-Bug. She’d made her way through the whole story last night. With every typo she found, she crossed out the incorrect letter and wrote the correct one above. On the last page her handwritten corrections spelled out the word belief. Even though she had teased James about his knack for spotting a puzzle anywhere, it kind of spooked her, as if the book itself were trying to talk to her. But that would be crazy.
“Hey, Dad? When you’re copyediting, have you ever noticed the typos spelling out a word?” She found a juice glass and joined him at the table.
“Hmm?” Her dad unfolded the section he was reading and then refolded it in quarters so he could read a different part of the page.
Emily poured herself some juice. “You know how you cross out the incorrect letter and write the correct one above it? Have those corrected letters ever spelled out words?”
Not looking up he said, “They’re already part of a word.”
“No. What if the typos themselves were part of a second word, too—made up of only the corrected letters that you wrote. That’s never happened?”
“You mean the corrections spell out a word by chance?” Her dad looked at her, baffled. Then he gave a soft grunt, like he was amused by this idea. “That would be quite a feat. Unless you’re talking about two-letter words like be, or maybe the, I don’t think it could happen.” He gave it some more thought then shook his head firmly. “No, it would be impossible to do accidentally.”
Emily was about to tell him it wasn’t impossible and in fact had happened many times over in the book she was reading when her dad said, “Thought you’d be interested in this.” He riffled through the stacks of paper and pulled out a folded-up section. “A profile on Garrison Griswold today, and a little about Book Scavenger.”
“Oh! Let me see!” Emily opened and closed her hand like a little kid wanting a toy.
Her dad stood from the table and handed the paper to Emily with a smile. “I love that you’re so passionate about books and publishing. Speaking of, it’s back to work for me.”
“It’s Sunday,” Emily said.
“I need to make up for the time I took driving us out here so I can meet my deadline. No rest for the weary. But don’t worry, we’ll have a family adventure this afternoon.”
“You do know adventure means something unusual and exciting, right?” Emily asked her dad. He crinkled his nose and tilted his head in response, looking bemused. “If sightseeing and exploring new places is our family norm, then maybe adventure isn’t the right word choice.”
Her dad chuckled. “Interesting theory,” he said and left the kitchen.
Emily unfolded the newspaper. A photo of Garrison Griswold accompanied the article. He stood in front of the Bayside Press building in the same burgundy-and-silver-blue outfit James had described him wearing at the book carnival: top hat, suit, and walking stick all in Bayside Press colors. He was a very tall man—from the photo it looked like he’d have to duck to go through the front entrance if he had on his hat. He wore frameless glasses, had floppy silver hair, and a salt-and-pepper mustache that was like a miniature duster broom balanced under his nose.
Emily skimmed the article:
Griswold moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1952 at age twelve. At the age of eighteen, propelled by his admiration for the Beat Generation of writers, he moved out of his parents’ house and into the city itself. Inspired by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s endeavors with the City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, Griswold began publishing an alternative weekly paper called the Bayside Weekly, which eventually developed into one of the most prominent publishing companies in San Francisco.
Also known for his spirit of fun, Griswold has been affectionately nicknamed the Willy Wonka of book publishing. In 2004 he launched a book trading game called Book Scavenger that has grown in popularity, amassing over 500,000 users in sixteen participating countries, with an average of 100,000 books to be found on any given day. In addition to Book Scavenger, he’s hosted several smaller-scale games around the city and occasionally in farther-off locations.
Mr. Griswold had also moved to the Bay Area when he was twelve? Emily hadn’t known that. She wanted to cut out Griswold’s profile and photo, but she couldn’t find any scissors. After rummaging through bags and boxes, and yanking open kitchen cabinets and drawers, she sighed to the ceiling separating her apartment from James’s. She bet the Lees had a specific location for scissors. All normal kids who didn’t live like gypsies probably did. She bent the paper over the corner of their laminate countertop to rip it, but accidentally tore off the corner of Griswold’s photo.
She was about to flick the small piece into the trash bag hooked over a cabinet door but stopped when she saw the Bayside Press logo on the building. She’d ripped right through it—the circular crest with a seagull soaring over water in front of a bridge. The logo wasn’t new to her, but now it was like seeing it for the first time.
Emily raced down the hallway to find her dad settling in front of the family computer.
“Dad,” she said, her voice breathless as if her run had been a mile long. “About my typo question—could someone do it intentionally? Publish a book with the typos in it on purpose?”
Her dad readjusted his glasses as he considered her question.
“They could,” he said slowly, “although I don’t know why they would. Publishers pay me to keep typos out of books. Why would they want to leave them in?”
Why would someone want to leave them in? Emily left her dad perplexed by her sudden interest in the editorial process and raced back to her room. She picked up The Gold-Bug from the top of her stack of books, the word belief echoing in her head as she flipped to the copyright page.
The emblem on the copyright page was nearly identical to the Bayside Press logo, but instead of a seagull there was a black bird.
“No way,” Emily whispered. This was Mr. Griswold’s book. It had to be. He must have hidden it in the BART station before he was mugged. And there was only one reason Emily could think of that Mr. Griswold would purposely hide a book and not enter it on Book Scavenger.
To start a game.