Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman Page B

the future of both Mr. Griswold and Book Scavenger. But one user’s reply might as well have been boldfaced the way it jumped out: A friend of a friend works at Bayside Press, and let’s just say it’s been love, not $, keeping Book Scavenger up and running. And that was before all this went down with Big G. I want to be bright and cheery about what the future holds, but I’m thinking we should get our book-hunting kicks in now while we still can. Hope I’m wrong.
    A world without Book Scavenger? Six years ago she didn’t know any different, but now it was such a huge part of her life. Without Book Scavenger, Emily wouldn’t be able to follow a book’s journey, see who found it and where it traveled to next, read the adventure logs that other sleuths posted, trade reviews after they read the book.
    Reading would be lonely without Book Scavenger. Moving again would be unbearable without Book Scavenger.
    â€œWell, it looks like nothing’s changed with Mr. Griswold,” James said, breaking up her thoughts. “We talked about making up a secret language. Want to do that now?”
    Emily blinked at James a few times, like she couldn’t quite get her eyes to focus. “Right,” she finally said. “Looks like nothing’s changed.” Emily glanced at the forum message once more before closing the browser window.

 
    CHAPTER
    9
    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
    Â 
    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