Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library

by Chris Grabenstein

“Yes!” said Haley, pulling off her shoe so she could show everybody her clue card.

  “Bandits! I found this in the three hundreds room.”

  “That’s the room clue we’re waiting for,” said Kyle.

  “Because the Dewey decimal number for True Crime books always starts with the number three,” said Miguel. “When we find that book, it’ll tell us how and where the ‘bandits crawled in in 1968.’ ”

  “Listen to this, you guys,” said Akimi. She read a placard in the display case: “ ‘This plaid fedora from 1968 was worn by bank robber Leopold Loblolly, one of the notorious Dandy Bandits.’ ”

  “Loblolly!” Miguel shouted.

  “The smell-a-vision clue,” said Kyle. “That’s why everything kept smelling like pine trees.”

  “Loblolly was one of the pine trees in the answer Mr. Lemoncello gave you guys!” said Haley.

  “Whoop-whoop-whoop,” said Mr. Lemoncello as, banana shoes squeaking, he stepped into the room. “Well done, Miss Daley … and Miss Hughes.”

  “See?” said Akimi. “I was right the first time we came in here. I said ‘dandy’ and everybody else said, ‘Noooo, candy. Willy Wonka …’ ”

  “Yes, it’s all coming back to me,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Nineteen sixty-eight. I was pondering an idea for a game at the old public library.”

  “And,” said Kyle, “you were so totally focused, you didn’t hear the police sirens screaming past the library as they raced to the Gold Leaf Bank.…”

  “The blackbird was from Alexandriaville,” said Sierra. “The police siren wail was from that day.”

  Miguel finished that thought: “When the Dandy Bandits tried to crawl into the bank!”

  “My goodness,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “How could you kids know all that?”

  “From the game clues,” said Kyle, “and from the story Dr. Zinchenko told us on Friday night when somebody asked her why a library building needed a bank vault door.”

  “She was already feeding us clues!” said Akimi.

  “The time is now ELEVEN a.m.,” announced the ceiling lady. “This game will end in ONE hour.”

  “Come on,” said Kyle, heading for the door. “It’s the eleventh hour. We need to go check out the Wonder Dome again.”

  They raced to the balcony.

  “There it is!” said Sierra.

  “364 point 1092!” shouted Miguel.

  “Whoo-hoo!” cried Akimi. “We’re gonna win!”

  On the first floor, Charles was at long last video chatting with his uncle, James Willoughby III, the librarian of Congress, who had finally shown up for the Ask an Expert call.

  “Sorry for the delay, Charles.”

  “That’s okay, Uncle Jimmy,” Charles said, straining to smile and not scream.

  “The time is now ELEVEN a.m.,” announced the annoyingly placid lady in the ceiling. “This game will end in ONE hour.”

  Charles had to hustle.

  “Sir, I know you’re a very important, very busy man, so I just have one quick question: If I were a book on true crimes in the state of Ohio, where would you shelve me?”

  “Library of Congress classification?”

  “No, sir. Dewey decimal.”

  “Ah. Easy. 364 point 1. What comes after the one will depend, of course, on how many books a library …”

  Charles didn’t stick around to hear the rest of his uncle’s answer.

  He took off running for the closest spiral staircase up to the second floor. As he ascended the steps, two at a time, he saw Kyle Keeley and his entire entourage running down a staircase from the third floor.

  Charles reached the second-floor balcony first.

  He darted around the bend, past the door to the 500s room, the 400s.

  Keeley and his crew were coming from the opposite direction, but Charles reached the door to the 300s room before them.

  He swiped his library card, yanked on the handle, and dashed into the room.

  He scanned the shelves and headed to his right.

  He heard Keeley enter the room.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Charles saw Keeley go left.

  Charles dashed up an aisle between bookcases. He read the number at the end of each row of shelves.

  310.

  320.

  330.

  One of those robots with the book baskets came rumbling across his path, but Charles was able to dodge it.

  340.

  350.

  Keeley’s footsteps pounded up the passageway on the other side of the shelving units to his left.

  In the middle of the 300s room, they entered an open space with a judge’s bench and witness box.

  Charles was getting closer to the True Crime section.

  But so was Kyle.

  Charles saw Keeley read something off his palm.

  He had the whole call number!

  It was time to change tactics.

  Charles hung back and let Keeley take the lead.

  Kyle rushed toward a bookcase.

  Charles sprinted after him.

  “Got it!” Kyle shouted as he reached for a book on the shelf.

  But before he could completely pull it out, Charles grabbed hold of the book, too.

  They both yanked it off the shelf.

  Kyle had the spine; Charles had hold of the top.

  They tugged it back and forth.

  While they wrestled with the book, Keeley’s teammates caught up to them.

  “Careful, Kyle,” cried Sierra Russell. “Don’t hurt the book.”

  Charles grinned. Keeley, the sentimental sap, was listening to the silly, bookish girl and easing up on his grip.

  Giving Charles his chance.

  He body-checked Keeley. Slammed into him with his shoulder. Sent him flying, the book tumbling. Charles snatched it off the floor.

  He had the book. He quickly flipped through the table of contents. Saw chapter 11 was about a robbery at the Gold Leaf Bank in Alexandriaville.

  He knew he’d won the game.

  Charles used his free hand to slap an “L” on his forehead.

  “Loser,” he sneered at Keeley.

  A tiger roared, a whistle blew, and Mr. Lemoncello entered the room, accompanied by Clarence, Clement, and what looked like a rare Bengal tiger.

  “Mr. Chiltington?”

  Charles smiled. He knew Mr. Lemoncello was about to congratulate him for defying the odds and winning the game. He had single-handedly defeated Kyle Keeley’s entire team! “Yes, sir, Mr. Lemoncello?”

  “Do you remember Dr. Zinchenko’s number one rule?”

  “You bet, sir. No food or drink except in the Book Nook Café.”

  “No,” said Mr. Lemoncello, touching the tip of his nose and making a buzzer noise. “Dr. Z? Tell him what he should’ve said.”

  Dr. Zinchenko’s voice purred out of the ceiling speakers. “Be gentle. With each other and, most especially, the library’s books and exhibits.”

  “I know,” said Charles. “That’s why I had to stop Kyle Keeley. He was ready to rip the cover off this poor book. Heck, sir, everybody at school knows that Kyle Keeley is a maniac. He’ll do anything to win a game.”

  Mr. Lemoncello turned to Keeley.

  “Is that true, Kyle? Would you actually destroy property if it stood between you and your prize?”

  “W-well, sir …”

  Keeley was stammering. The fool didn’t know how to lie.

  Charles quickly opened the book to chapter 11 and slipped in his library card to bookmark the location.

  “You should ask Keeley about the window he broke, sir.”

  Mr. Lemoncello turned to face Charles again.

  “The window?”

  “Yes, sir. The whole school heard about it. See, Kyle Keeley and his two brothers were playing some sort of wild scavenger hunt game and …”

  Mr. Lemoncello pointed at the book. “That’s clever. You use your library card as a bookmark?”

  “Yes, sir, I sure do,” said Charles, tu
rning on the charm. “Of course, I can’t take full credit for such a clever idea. On Friday night, I saw Sierra Russell doing it and …”

  “You told Andrew Peckleman to ‘borrow’ her card.”

  Charles blinked. Several times. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You broke Dr. Zinchenko’s number one rule. You were not gentle with your teammate Andrew. In fact, you bullied him into stealing Miss Russell’s library card, which you knew she always used as a bookmark.”

  “No, sir. I did not.”

  “Yes, Charles. You did.” Mr. Lemoncello touched his right ear. “In fact, Dr. Zinchenko has spent the past few hours combing through security tapes, and guess what she just found?”

  Charles heard his own voice ringing out of the ceiling speakers:

  “Have you noticed what Sierra Russell uses for a bookmark?”

  “No.”

  “That was Andrew,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “This is you again.”

  “Her library card, which, of course, doubles as a key card for Meeting Room B. Find a way to borrow it.”

  “You told Andrew to steal Sierra’s library card.”

  “How could you record that?” said Charles. “I was whispering!”

  “And I have very good microphones. You’re done, Charles. Dr. Zinchenko? Tell our departing guest what he has just won.”

  “Absolutely nothing,” said the voice of the Russian librarian. “But please, Mr. L, tell Charles the correct answer to the final pictogram.”

  “Ah, yes!” Mr. Lemoncello reached into his back pocket, pulled out a four-by-four card, and showed it to Charles.

  Charles stood there fuming.

  “Anyone care to help Charles out?”

  “Hmmm,” said Kyle. “Is it ‘six eat’?”

  “You are very close,” said Mr. Lemoncello.

  There was a pause and then Haley laughed. “Did it come after the football player?”

  “Yeah,” said Charles. “So?”

  “Andrew was right all along,” said Haley. “The football player clue wasn’t ‘past,’ it was ‘nineteen.’ ”

  Mr. Lemoncello shifted into his game show voice. “So, Haley Daley, would you care to solve the puzzle?”

  “Sure: ‘You can walk out the way bandits crawled in in nineteen six ate.’ ”

  “I don’t get it,” said Charles.

  “Nineteen, six-ate,” said Akimi. “You know: 1968.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “The year From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler won the Newbery Medal for excellence in children’s literature. Another clue you completely missed, Charles.”

  “Wow,” said Miguel. “And I thought Chiltingtons never lose.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Clarence? Clement? Kindly escort young Mr. Chiltington from the building.”

  “Buh-bye,” said Akimi. “There goes this game’s biggest loser.”

  “Open it!” Akimi said to Kyle. “We only have like forty minutes to figure out how Loblolly and the Dandy Bandits crawled into the bank back in 1968!”

  Kyle flipped through True Crime Ohio to the place where Charles had slipped in his bookmark.

  “Well?” said Miguel.

  “ ‘Chapter Eleven. The Dandy Bandits Burrow into a Bank Vault.’ ”

  “Even though thou should not steal,” said Akimi.

  “And I’ll bet they crawled in, right?” said Haley.

  “ ‘The clever thieves,’ ” Kyle read from the book, “ ‘took up residence in an abandoned dress factory next door to the Gold Leaf Bank and spent weeks tunneling from its basement into the bank vault.’ ”

  “Which,” said Miguel, “according to those old blueprints I found, was down where the book-sorting machine is now.”

  “That explains the first clue,” said Kyle. “The book title was Get to Know Your Local Library. Dr. Zinchenko meant we needed to get to know this library. This also explains why she wanted us to read those Sherlock Holmes stories.”

  “ ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,’ ” said Sierra. “The story about robbers tunneling into a bank from the building next door.”

  Kyle nodded. “Dr. Zinchenko told me she had just reread it. I’ll bet that’s where she got the idea for this whole game.”

  “Hey, Charles should’ve stuck with crawling through sewers like he did in that video game,” joked Miguel. “He might’ve found the Dandy Bandits’ tunnel before we did.”

  “Come on, you guys,” said Haley. “We need to be back in the basement.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “I just have to see how this story ends!”

  Clutching the True Crime book against his chest, Kyle led the way down to the Stacks.

  “Why are you bringing that book?” asked Akimi.

  “We’ll put it on that conveyor belt thing,” Kyle explained. “Whatever basket the scanner sends it to, I’m guessing that’s where we’ll find our ‘black square.’ ”

  “Our shortcut out of the library!”

  “Exactly.”

  As the team trooped down the steps to the basement, Mr. Lemoncello turned to Kyle and said, “So, Mr. Keeley, did you have fun this weekend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Congratulations, Miss Hughes, it seems you have already won.”

  Akimi sort of blushed.

  “What do you mean?” asked Kyle.

  “In her essay, your extremely good friend wrote, and I quote: ‘I want to see the new library so I can tell my friend Kyle Keeley how cool it is.’ ”

  “You wrote your essay about me?”

  “Maybe,” mumbled Akimi.

  “Wow,” said Kyle. “No one’s ever done that before.”

  “Well, no one’s ever going to do it again if you blow our chance at winning this thing. So can we please stop yakking and find our way out of here?”

  “Works for me.”

  “Warning,” said the calm voice in the ceiling speakers. “This game will terminate in THIRTY minutes.”

  Everybody moved a little faster.

  Fortunately, when the group reached the basement, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves didn’t start sliding into another maze formation.

  “The automatic book sorter is straight up this path, near the far wall,” said Kyle.

  They made it to the conveyor belt.

  “From what I remember from the old blueprints,” said Miguel, “the vault was right here, in the same spot as this machine.”

  “Okay, you guys,” said Kyle. “Whatever robo-basket this book ends up in is probably sitting right on top of the entrance to the tunnel.”

  “Here goes everything.” Kyle placed True Crime Ohio into the array of crisscrossing beams.

  Nothing happened.

  “What’s going on?” cried Miguel. “Why isn’t it working?”

  “Maybe this book isn’t heavy enough.” Kyle pushed down on the cover of the book a bit.

  Still nothing.

  They stared, dumbfounded, at the book sitting on the immobile belt.

  “It wouldn’t stop moving yesterday,” muttered Haley.

  “That’s it!” cried Akimi. She hurried to the wall and flipped the emergency shutoff switch back to the “on” position.

  Several red laser scanners sprang to life under the book drop slot.

  The belt started moving. Slowly.

  The single book worked its way down the line like a candy bar on a wrapping machine. When it reached the third robo-basket from the end, a set of rollers popped up and shunted the book off to the side into the waiting wire basket.

  The conveyor belt stopped rolling. The robo-cart rolled away.

  Nothing else happened.

  “That’s it?”

  “Warning,” said the calm voice. “This game will terminate in TWENTY minutes.”

  “It didn’t work,” said Haley.

  “We’re toast,” added Akimi.

  “Wait,” said Kyle, pointing to a square tile on the f
loor where the robo-basket had been. It was glowing, like one of the touch-screen computers in the desks upstairs. “It says ‘Howdy. Dü you like fun games? Get Reddy.’ ”

  “Excellent!” Akimi giggled. Then she and Kyle cracked up, remembering the box tops from their first puzzle in the Board Room on Saturday morning.

  “Now it says we’re going to get an anagram,” said Kyle.

  “My favorite kind of cookies,” said Mr. Lemoncello.

  “Okay, everybody,” said Kyle. “Gather round. Get ready.”

  Kyle, Akimi, Sierra, Miguel, and Haley knelt on the floor in a circle around the square. Mr. Lemoncello hovered behind them.

  “Here we go,” said Kyle as game instructions scrolled across the screen.

  GIVE ME SIXTEEN WORDS MADE FROM

  THESE SIXTEEN LETTERS

  IN SIXTY SECONDS OR LESS.

  A sixty-second clock popped up at the bottom of the screen. And then a four-by-four Boggle jumble of letters:

  “Luigi L. Lemoncello,” mumbled Kyle.

  The sixty-second clock started ticking down.

  Sierra shouted out, “Lemon!” and a ding sounded from the speaker above. The five teammates started shouting out words:

  “Cello!”

  “Eon!”

  “Elm!”

  “Lion!”

  “Mole!”

  “Leg!”

  “Oil!”

  “Thirty seconds left,” said Mr. Lemoncello.

  “One!”

  “Cell!”

  “Cone!”

  “Lone!”

  “Glen!”

  “Lime!”

  “Eh, mole.”

  “We already said that.”

  “Melon.”

  “That’s fifteen,” said the voice in the ceiling.

  “Um …”

  “Ten seconds left.”

  “Anybody?”

  “Five.”

  “Four.”

  “Colonel!” shouted Haley.

  The computer screen flashed “Congratulations!” and “Winners!”

  Somewhere, a game show audience cheered, fireworks rockets whistled through the air, and several geese honked out a “Hooray!”

  “Please stand back,” said the soothing voice in the ceiling.

  Kyle and his teammates did as they were told.

  “Warning,” the voice continued. “This game will terminate in FIFTEEN minutes.”