The Alcatraz Escape

by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman

  “Greetings, scavengers!” Mr. Griswold welcomed the contestants.

  His words charged through the crowd, and everyone erupted into cheers and applause. Emily joined in, feeling so happy to be part of this sea of strangers. It was a mix of young, old, and in between, a range of skin tones and fashion styles. You wouldn’t have guessed they had anything in common unless you noticed the Book Scavenger emblem on shirts and hats and pins and one man’s tattoo on his calf.

  “I better get over there,” Hollister said. “Good luck tonight, kids!”

  After Hollister left, James said, “Let’s go join Nisha and Maddie.”

  Emily and Matthew hugged their parents once more; then they and James wove through the crowd, their backpacks bumping against people, until they stood next to their friends.

  Mr. Griswold waited for everyone to assemble. Jack stood to his left, looking much more understated in jeans and a light blue fleece with the burgundy collar of a shirt underneath, and Hollister to his right.

  Jack noticed them and waved. A few contestants turned their heads to see who the man standing by Griswold was communicating with. The nudging and pointing made Emily uncomfortable, and she dropped her waving hand. It might have been her imagination, but she thought she heard whispers of “Surly Wombat” and “Emily and James.” The furtive and suspicious looks thrown her way reminded Emily that someone in this crowd had left that note in her locker. All the attention and her uncertainty about it brought Emily back to how she had felt walking through the hallways of a new school, unsure of what was in store for her.

  Mr. Griswold’s amplified voice boomed. “Congratulations on almost making it to Unlock the Rock.” There were murmurs repeating “almost,” and Mr. Griswold grinned mischievously. “I say almost because you have one challenge left before you can claim a spot on the ferry.”

  Grumbles spread through the audience.

  “That’s right,” Mr. Griswold continued. “Not all of you will be joining us on Alcatraz.”

  “What?!” James cried.

  “Well, shoot,” Nisha said softly.

  “I figured we got here too easily.” Maddie frowned at Mr. Griswold.

  It hadn’t been that easy for Emily. She mentally flicked away the seed of anxiety once again taking root.

  “We’ve got this,” Matthew said. “Let’s listen.”

  “As you may have heard from my announcement on the Book Scavenger site, a great mystery writer has offered his involvement in our game today—”

  “Errol Roy!” someone in the crowd shouted. Next to Emily, James bounced on his feet and craned his neck as if he was trying to spot the author in the crowd, even though nobody knew what he looked like.

  Griswold smiled. “Now, Errol Roy is not involved in this task.…”

  “Did you hear how he stressed this?” James whispered. “That means he is going to be involved later. Oh man, we’ve got to make it on that ferry.”

  “… but Errol Roy has long credited Dashiell Hammett, the San Francisco writer famous for classic mysteries like The Maltese Falcon, as his inspiration and writing mentor. So in the spirit of Hammett, who was a Pinkerton detective before he became a writer, we have designed a challenge for you to earn your badge, which will be your ticket onto the ferry. If your adventure ends here, you will receive a five-dollar gift card to Hollister’s new and improved bookstore, which you can bring to the grand reopening, where, perhaps, there will be signed editions of Errol Roy’s novels available to you.…”

  Mr. Griswold winked, and murmurs of interest rippled through the audience.

  “What a tease,” James muttered.

  Mr. Griswold gestured to the row of cubicles piled with giant blocks. “What you see here are twenty sets of the same puzzle. When the horn sounds, group into teams, however you see fit—although once your team begins working on the puzzle, you may not switch. Arrange your nine blocks in three rows of three to form a picture. There are six possible images, but the correct one has to do with Dashiell Hammett. When your pieces are put together correctly, come to this platform and you will receive a card with a trivia question. Your team must answer using only your brains—no gadgets. When you think you have the answer, you get one chance to type it into that.”

  Next to Mr. Griswold, Hollister held up an object that looked like a label maker with a dome-shaped light-bulb attached to it.

  “A green light signals the correct answer and means you have earned your detective badge and may board the ferry. A red light means your answer is incorrect and you won’t be continuing in the game. However, we hope to see you at Hollister’s grand-reopening party this weekend.”

  Jack held a horn canister above his head.

  “Your time starts…” Mr. Griswold scanned the crowd slowly, a twinkle in his eye. “Now!”

  At the bleating honk, everyone scrambled toward the sets of puzzles. James, being a fast sprinter, made it to the front of the crowd and kept going until he reached the very last pile of blocks. Emily wondered why he didn’t stop at one of the closer cubicles until she passed group after group arguing with one another over who was working with whom.

  “Is that Surly Wombat?” she heard as she ran past. Another voice called after her, “Want to join us, Emily?”

  She kept running and didn’t answer.

  A middle-aged woman who wore a matching windbreaker with her male partner stood in a cubicle filled mostly with teenagers. “I can’t work with children!” she cried, throwing up her hands. She called back to Mr. Griswold, “Shouldn’t the adults work together?”

  “However you see fit!” Mr. Griswold called back cheerfully.

  “We’d be happy to switch,” a familiar voice said from the next cubicle Emily passed. It was Mr. Quisling, who gave Emily a thumbs-up as she went by. His girlfriend, Miss Linden, called after her, “Good luck, Emily!”

  Once Emily and the rest of her friends had reached James, he’d already moved four of the large cubes from the pile so they could spread out all the pieces for a better look. It looked like their team would only be the five of them until a woman entered their cubicle and paced around the pile of cubes, studying them. She seemed familiar, but Emily didn’t know why. There wasn’t anything distinguishing about her—just a lady dressed for hiking in cold weather—but Emily was still hit with an overall wave of recognition. It was one of the side effects of having moved so frequently. You saw a lot of different faces in a lot of different places, and people started to seem familiar without you being able to remember why.

  “Look at these two.” Nisha pushed over one of the giant blocks until a black-and-white graphic was faceup; then she ran to another cube to do the same. “Don’t these look like they’d make part of an eye?”

  Matthew hoisted one of the cubes Nisha pointed to and set it next to the other. She was right; it did look like an eye. Emily clapped her hands. “Good job!”

  “How do we know that’s the picture we need to put together?” Maddie asked.

  It was a good point. Mr. Griswold hadn’t said what the final image should be. Focusing on the black-and-white pieces could be the wrong way to go; not to mention, three sides of each cube were in black and white, so figuring out which sides fit with which wasn’t going to be easy.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the strange woman said. “When you get a lead, follow it. If you stop to worry about all the possible outcomes, you’ll never get anywhere.”

  “Who are you?” Maddie asked.

  “I’m playing the game, just like you.” The woman smiled coolly, unfazed by Maddie’s scowling face.

  “She can work with us if she wants to,” James said. “Let’s focus on the puzzle.”

  “Here’s another black-and-white piece that looks like it’s part of an eye,” Matthew called over.

  Their group went to work tipping the blocks to study the different sides, picking them up and setting them down, twisting them in different directions.

  “Done!” someone called down the line of cubicle
s.

  Emily’s whole group froze. They had enough pieces pushed together to depict most of an eye and the letters ver sleep underneath. Because of the privacy screens, they couldn’t see which group had finished or what their final puzzle looked like, but they must have gotten it right. Jack walked to the cubicle and gave a thumbs-up, and then a bunch of teenagers and Mr. Quisling and Miss Linden ran to the platform to accept the trivia card.

  Even though they could have continued with their own puzzle, Emily and her friends couldn’t tear their eyes from the stage. Soon one of the teenage boys ran up to Hollister and typed into the label-maker-looking gadget. It lit up green, and Mr. Quisling and Miss Linden’s group erupted into a bobbing and jumping mass.

  “We have our first advancing team!” Mr. Griswold announced over the cheers. “You may proceed to the ferry!”

  James raised his hands like he was trying to preemptively calm their group. “This isn’t a race to be first. Let’s concentrate on our own puzzle.”

  While Emily’s team continued to work, two more teams advanced to the ferry, and three got red lights for incorrect answers and were handed gift cards as parting prizes. Raised voices carried over from two cubicles down. Although Emily couldn’t see their work, it was clear from what she heard that members of that group had put half the cubes together to form part of one picture, and half the cubes together to form part of a different picture, and were now arguing over which picture they should complete.

  “See?” the lady working with them said. “Distracted by possible outcomes and going nowhere.”

  Finally, Emily’s team had a complete picture:

  “Done!” Maddie called.

  Jack ran to their station to check their work. Emily held her breath, waiting to see if the puzzle they had put together was the correct one. Jack raised a thumb in the air, and Emily exhaled. Mr. Griswold waved them over and they ran—well, all of them except the woman, but she caught up shortly after Nisha accepted an envelope from Mr. Griswold.

  Nisha removed a card and read:

  This symbol and slogan were the logo for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the first of its kind, founded in 1850. Its logo of an unblinking eye and the slogan “we never sleep” gave rise to a common nickname for detectives. This term is the solution you need to move on to the next stage of the game.

  “Gumshoe?” James suggested.

  “Sleuth,” Nisha added.

  Emily tried to think what gumshoe or sleuth had to do with seeing or sleeping. Suddenly the answer occurred to her. “It’s private eye!” she hissed, excited but wanting to keep her voice low, too.

  “Bingo!” the adult woman in their group said.

  James ran to Hollister and punched in their answer. The light turned green, and Emily and her friends jumped up and down, cheering for themselves.

  “Your badges,” Mr. Griswold said, handing out silver pins shaped like shields. The front had the words BOOK SCAVENGER DETECTIVE AGENCY on it.

  James pinned his badge to his sweatshirt. “Can you believe it? We’re on our way!”

  Matthew spoke up for both himself and Emily. “Our first time to Alcatraz.”

  “Same here,” Nisha said nervously.

  As their group walked to the ferry, Emily said to the lady who’d worked with them, “You knew the answer. Would you have stopped us if we were going to guess wrong?”

  The woman smiled wryly and said, “Still dwelling on possible outcomes, are you, Emily?”

  It startled Emily to hear the woman use her name, especially given how familiar she seemed. “Do we know each other?”

  The woman raised her eyebrows and said, “You were in the paper.”

  Of course. Emily looked down, her cheeks warming.

  “I have to ask,” the woman said. “How did it feel when you looked at the unbreakable code? To handle something that had once been in Twain’s hands?”

  “Um…” Emily thought back, trying to remember that day. Honestly, she wasn’t sure if that thought had really occurred to her, but she could tell that wasn’t the answer this grown-up wanted to hear. “It was pretty cool,” she finally said. Then she added, “It’s been stored at the main library for a really long time. That’s where James and I looked at it. You could go see it, too, if you wanted.”

  “Oh, I already have.”

  An unbreakable-code groupie, Emily thought. The mostly forgotten historic cipher had received a renewed burst of attention thanks to Emily and James, and Miss Linden had told them there’d been a surge in requests to see the code at the main library after it had been talked about in the news.

  The woman gestured toward the ferry. “I’m going to go find a seat.”

  As Emily watched her walk away, she realized that while it made sense that the woman recognized Emily from the unbreakable-code coverage, that didn’t explain why Emily felt like she knew her as well.

  CHAPTER

  13

  THE GROUP of friends talked nonstop as they bounced down the awning-covered ramp to board the ferry, but Emily was distracted. It wasn’t just the oddly familiar woman—it was all the looks and whispers, the strangers who seemed to know who she was.

  A man wearing an orange life vest stood at the entrance to the ferry and checked for their silver badge pins before letting them on board. They crossed through the bottom level of the ferry in an unsteady zigzag pattern, thanks to the gentle bobbing of the docked boat. Two long rows of silver chairs rested back-to-back in the open middle, like someone was planning a game of musical chairs. There were only a few people down here, all Unlock the Rock players gabbing excitedly to one another.

  Prerecorded safety announcements followed them outside and up the staircase that led to the second-level deck. Most people sat in the outside area, sheltered by solar panels, but Emily noticed a young girl tugging her grandfather into the small, enclosed room on the far side of the level. As their group passed by on the way to another narrower, steeper staircase, Emily heard the grandfather say, “Slow down, Iris. I’m not as spry as you.”

  “Let’s hide our book by that window, Papa!”

  The girl, Iris, held a book sealed in a plastic bag with a Book Scavenger tracking number label fixed to the front. Emily smiled when she recognized her as the same person she’d seen hunting for a golden ticket at the Grace Cathedral. It hadn’t even occurred to Emily to bring a book to hide on this trip! What kind of Dupin-level book scavenger was she? Regardless, seeing Iris eager to hide a book on the ferry made Emily doubly glad she’d left the golden ticket for the girl to claim.

  Emily and her friends climbed the stairs to the top level of the ferry, where most of the contestants were gathering. In the farthest corner sat that woman from their group, with her head bent over a book.

  Once everyone was on board, the ship began to move backward past the warehouse docks. The water spread out like a slate-blue tablecloth with Alcatraz as a centerpiece. From this distance, the prison appeared to grow out of the rocky island base. Clouds gathered close, like they, too, were curious about what would be happening during Unlock the Rock.

  Nisha stood a few feet from the railing, neck outstretched, hugging her notebook to her chest. “Is it true there are sharks in the bay?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Emily said at the same time that her brother said, “Yes.”

  Nisha took another step back from the railing, like a shark was going to jump out of the water and attack them.

  “Ignore my brother,” Emily said. “He’s teasing.”

  “No, it’s true,” Matthew said mildly, adjusting the one earbud he kept in his ear.

  The ferry carved a path through choppy water. Emily found it dizzying to look down from their height to the water splashing up on the sides of the boat, so she sat on one of the hard white benches.

  “What did everyone bring?” Maddie asked.

  James had brought a GPS, a black light, his favorite book about codes and ciphers, a map of Alcatraz Island, and variously sized
cylindrical objects.

  “In case there’s a scytale,” he explained. It was his favorite way to encrypt a message. You wrapped a long strip of paper around something like a pencil, then wrote your message across, horizontally, with a different letter on each section of paper. When the strip of paper was unwound, the message would be garbled and could only be decoded by wrapping the paper once again around a cylinder of the same size as what was used to encode the message.

  Emily shook her head. “You and your scytales.”

  James nudged Nisha’s foot with his sneaker. “What about you?”

  She held up her sketchbook, which was open to a page showing the partial profile of a nearby contestant, an older teenager who looked like she could be a model with her large brown eyes, light tan skin, and curly black hair.

  “I never go anywhere without this,” Nisha said.

  Emily related to that. Her own Book Scavenger notebook was snug inside her backpack, as usual.

  “What else?” James asked.

  Nisha unzipped her backpack and tugged out a handful of knit items. “Hat, mittens, scarf, and sunscreen—”

  “Sunscreen? It’s overcast and practically dinnertime!” Maddie said.

  Nisha shrugged. “My mom makes me bring some no matter where I’m going. She is terrified someone in our family will get cancer.” She kept digging. “There’s also a first aid kit and my markers and colored pencils—”

  “I smell … spaghetti sauce or something. Did you bring food?” James reached into Nisha’s backpack and pulled out a small white object that Emily first thought was a misshapen ball.

  “Garlic?” James asked.

  Nisha adjusted her glasses and said, very matter-of-factly, “To ward off ghosts. Just in case.”

  “That only works on vampires,” Matthew said.

  Nisha plucked the garlic from James’s fingers and dropped it back in her bag. “I also have lemon juice—in case we need to write something in invisible ink—and a battery-operated heat gun in case we need to reveal it. And spare batteries and my mom’s digital kitchen scale.”