The Unbreakable Code

by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman

  CHAPTER

  37

  THE PHOENIX panted under the awning of a corner market at the bottom of Telegraph Hill, his back pressed against the brick wall. Rain pelted the street. He looked down at his sopping wet shoes.

  Being chased by children brought back a memory of running through muddy cornfields when he was a kid. The words fire freak floated out of the past, circling him now. Even though it was pouring, he could have sworn he smelled hot straw and dirt. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to push it all away. He couldn’t stand this bruising weight of being overlooked, judged as inferior or, worse, incompetent. Struggling to gain control of his ragged breathing, he closed his eyes and imagined each inhale like air from a bicycle pump, inflating him to his fullest height.

  His breathing calmed. The plan was to right old wrongs, and he was going to see it through. He couldn’t let kids get to him, divert him from his intended course. He would end this tomorrow.

  The Phoenix stepped into the rain and raised an arm to hail a cab.

  CHAPTER

  38

  EMILY AND JAMES rode the bus home, quiet and drenched. Emily racked her memory for details that would identify Coolbrith. He hadn’t seemed especially tall or short or heavy or thin. There’d been nothing distinctive about him at all.

  “It has to be Charlie,” Emily said. “That man looked about his size. And you should have seen Charlie’s face when he talked about Mr. Quisling before the fire at Hollister’s. He can’t stand him.”

  James’s plastic poncho crinkled as he adjusted in his seat. “But Charlie doesn’t seem to like much of anything. And there are lots of guys who are about Charlie’s size and who own black windbreakers. That guy at Coit Tower could have been anyone.”

  “But, James, Charlie lied about where he was during Hollister’s fire. Why else would he do that if he wasn’t trying to hide something?”

  “Charlie’s shady, that’s for sure, but you can’t go around accusing someone of being an arsonist because they have a bad attitude or told a lie. We need to tell Mr. Quisling what we know and let him take care of it. They’re both going to be at the dance tomorrow. We can talk to Mr. Quisling then.”

  “Okay,” Emily agreed. She knew it was the right thing to do, even though she still felt uneasy about talking to their teacher. “Tomorrow night we’ll find Mr. Quisling, and we’ll say we need to tell him something,” Emily declared, trying to make herself feel more confident about the proposition.

  “Yes,” James agreed.

  “We’ll say we came across his Book Scavenger quest … but leave out the part about spying on him.”

  James nodded encouragingly.

  “And we’ll say we noticed he had found an awful lot of Tom Sawyers…”

  “Sure…” James said.

  “I guess we should leave out the part about planting a copy for him to find, to see what he would do?”

  “And the part about e-mailing his old girlfriend because we thought she was Coolbrith,” James added.

  Emily sighed. Every action had seemed small and innocent on its own, just part of a game, but now all those small things had rolled into a giant snowball, and she didn’t know where to begin with explaining everything.

  “The important thing is that we find a way to tell him that Coolbrith isn’t who he thinks,” Emily said.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to come clean, but Charlie—or whoever was responsible for Hollister’s fire—had to be stopped.

  * * *

  At home, Emily changed into dry clothes and plopped onto her bed with her laptop. She opened a web browser and typed fire Coit Tower in the search field. The only results told the history of Coit Tower and how it was a memorial to a woman named Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a wealthy patron of the city’s firefighters.

  There were no reports of a fire happening that day. Emily took a deep breath and exhaled. The rain must have extinguished Coolbrith’s fire before it could become newsworthy. So many questions raced through Emily’s mind. Who was Coolbrith? Why was he setting fires? Why was he trying to link their teacher to the locations of these fires? What did Mr. Quisling know about Coolbrith?

  Emily typed in the Book Scavenger URL and searched for Coolbrith and Babbage’s quest thread so she could see their latest exchange about the found Tom Sawyer, but when she logged into the forum, the conversation thread wasn’t there. She typed Babbage and Coolbrith into the search bar again: no results. She went to the Quest directory and scanned the list of different quests launched by Book Scavenger players, but Coolbrith’s “For Old Times’ Sake” thread wasn’t there.

  It had been deleted.

  Only an admin or the quest originator could delete a thread. Emily knew she and James hadn’t deleted it. She couldn’t imagine why Jack or Mr. Griswold would.

  Coolbrith must have deleted his own thread. What did that mean? Without the back-and-forth between Coolbrith and Babbage, there was nothing left to show that Mr. Quisling had been participating in a quest. All that remained was the chain of books hidden and found by the two users—accounts that were both registered in their teacher’s name. Maybe chasing Coolbrith had been enough to make him stop whatever it was he was doing with the quest and the fires. Or maybe he was trying to distance himself from them so the only person who would look responsible would be Mr. Quisling. Emily’s stomach twisted with guilt. James was right—they should have talked to their teacher long ago.

  Her Book Scavenger notebook lay next to her on her bed. She flipped through it, stopping on the page where James had written out the unbreakable code solution. In the beginning that’s what Emily had thought Mr. Quisling’s quest was all about, but now she wasn’t sure.

  “Third tree east of duck rock,” Emily read out loud.

  She didn’t understand how that led to buried gold, but maybe, if she and James were standing on Gull Island, it would make more sense. Not that it would be easy for them to get to Gull Island. What they needed was someone with a boat.

  And then Emily realized that they did, in fact, have a friend with a boat.

  She dug through her backpack and found Ms. Linden’s business card, then ran to the phone to dial her number. After hearing Ms. Linden’s voice tell her to leave a message, she said, “Hi, this is Emily, um, Crane. Me and my friend James are the ones who are interested in the unbreakable code and we…” Emily paused. Announcing you’d broken a historical code was really the sort of news you should deliver in person. “We, um, want to ask you some questions about your boat. If you don’t mind.”

  Emily left her phone number and hung up, feeling uncertain about having reached out to the librarian in the first place.

  * * *

  Saturday afternoon found Emily preparing for the school dance. At least that’s what she was doing if “preparing” meant pacing her room while deliberating how to confess to Mr. Quisling that she’d spied on him and discovered an arsonist was impersonating him online, and simultaneously feeling anxious about the presidential relay race she had spearheaded, which could make her the laughingstock of the school if everyone thought it was ridiculous.

  Her footsteps fell in rhythm with the beat of the Flush song permeating the wall between her room and Matthew’s. Impulsively, she turned on her heel and went to knock on her brother’s door. He was never at a loss for words. Maybe he could coach her on what to say to Mr. Quisling.

  She knocked a second time, and his door swung open. Matthew was stretched out on his bed with his eyes closed and his hands behind his head. He clearly hadn’t heard her come into the room. She gently scratched the tip of his nose to get his attention, and bit back laughter when Matthew twitched and batted the air above his face. She did it again, tickling his nose, and this time his hand swatted hers. Matthew opened his eyes and shrieked when he saw Emily bending over him. She laughed, and the laughter felt good, cracking her anxiety into more manageable pieces.

  Matthew wasn’t amused. He picked up his pillow and thwapped her.

  “You ever he
ar of knocking?” he shouted between pillow swats.

  She held up her hands to ward off more hits from the pillow. “I did knock! Twice.” Emily laughed again. “I couldn’t resist. Sorry!”

  Matthew flopped on top of his pillow and used the remote to lower the volume of his music. “Shouldn’t you be setting up for your dance?” he asked.

  “I’m leaving with James in a minute. But I wanted to ask you something.” Emily sat on the edge of Matthew’s bed and picked at his comforter. “You always know the right thing to say to people. How do you do that?”

  “Uh-oh. Who do you need to talk to?”

  “Nobody,” Emily said reflexively. “I mean, somebody but…” She sighed. “I’ve been putting it off because it’s going to be awkward.”

  “Has it gotten less awkward the longer you put it off?” Matthew asked.

  “No, it’s gotten worse.”

  “So think of it that way. It might be awkward to say something today, but it will be more awkward if you wait until tomorrow.”

  “But how do you know what to say?”

  Matthew readjusted his pillow behind his head. “It’s not anything I plan out. Things pop into my head, and I say them. But I say stupid stuff all the time. You know that better than anyone. Go up to this person and start talking. Worrying about what to say is just another way of procrastinating.”

  There was a knock on the open door. “Hey,” James said. He wore a Pac-Man hoodie for the GameCon theme. “Your mom let me in. Ready to go?”

  “Yeah, let me grab my costume.” She’d made herself a Scrabble tile by decorating cardboard for her front and back connected by two pieces of string that hung over her shoulders.

  Matthew turned his music back up as Emily and James left his room.

  Her brother made it sound like it should be so easy, like all she had to do was open her mouth, and the right words would tumble out—or any words for that matter. She didn’t even know where to begin with Mr. Quisling. At least James would be with her.

  Emily’s laptop, sitting open on her bed, was chiming a Book Scavenger alert when she returned to her room. She slid her Scrabble tile costume over her head.

  “Did you pick the letter x because it marks the spot?” James asked.

  “That, and it’s worth eight points.” She grinned and bent down to skim the Book Scavenger notice.

  “James!” She grabbed the laptop to make sure she’d read the words correctly. “Another Tom Sawyer was hidden.”

  “Another one? By who?”

  Emily swallowed before clicking the notification box so it would show more information.

  “Coolbrith?” James asked.

  She nodded grimly. “But that’s not all.” She angled the screen so James would have a better look. “The book’s hidden at our school.”

  CHAPTER

  39

  EMILY AND JAMES hurried to their school, nearly tripping over their feet down the steep hill. After the gloomy rain the day before, the city looked freshly painted in crystal blue sunshine, but it felt fake, like they were speed walking through a movie set.

  Emily felt sick to her stomach at the thought that they might have invited an arsonist to their dance.

  “You can’t jump to conclusions,” James said, reading her mind. “We don’t know if Charlie is Coolbrith.”

  “But what if I’m right?”

  “And what if you’re wrong? Look,” James said, nearly panting with how quickly they moved. “The fires always happen after the book is found, right? Mr. Quisling isn’t going to have time to go book hunting during the dance. We’ll talk to him as soon as we see him.”

  Emily nodded, but the anxious knot in her stomach wasn’t loosened by James’s words, and it only tightened when they stepped inside the multipurpose room. It was already bustling with pre-dance activity. Mr. Sloan and Principal Montoya stood on the small stage hanging a banner that read HAPPY PRESIDENTS’ DAY! with dozens of hearts painted around the letters. Dangling from the ceiling were the cardboard hearts Emily and James had cut out. The twins, dressed as Minecraft characters with pixelated boxes on their heads, were preparing for the presidential games, which at the moment meant spinning Hula-hoops across the floor. Vivian dashed by with one hand on her head, holding down a floppy hat, and the other wagging her clipboard at the twins in a menacing get-to-work way. She wore a baggy old-fashioned dress.

  James watched her run by, tripping every so often on her long skirt, and said, “Is she supposed to be Martha Washington? Or Eleanor Roosevelt?”

  Emily spotted Charlie on the stage untangling cords and wires from the speakers, fog machine, and colored lights that were part of his DJ equipment. She nudged James, and he nodded that he saw. A teacher pinned red, white, and blue bunting along the music table for decoration. Emily studied Charlie’s movements, trying to detect some sort of suspicious behavior, but he acted uninterested in everything except setting up the DJ booth.

  “Do you see Mr. Quisling?” James asked.

  Two different chaperones passed by carrying bags of ice and flats of soda cans. Maddie balanced on a ladder while Nisha handed her strips of metallic red, white, and blue streamers to hang across the folded-up bleacher wall. Maddie appeared to be wearing a red party dress and not a costume, and Emily wasn’t sure what Nisha was dressed up as. Her shirt had pointy black shoulders with a bright pink chest plate that matched her pink boots, and her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  “No sign of him yet,” she replied.

  Charlie freed one of the speaker wires and bent down to plug it in. When he stood, he scanned the room and locked eyes on Emily. She raised a hand, haltingly, not wanting to make him suspect that she might be onto him but also not wanting to be too chummy with a potential arsonist. He nodded in return.

  Vivian appeared next to them with a trash bag in either hand. The rubber bands on her braces were red, white, and blue to match the patriotic theme of the dance. “I need you to hand out these Uncle Sam hats to the chaperones and DJ.” Vivian thrust the bags into their hands and swished away.

  “Have you seen Mr. Quisling?” Emily called after her, but she was already too far away to hear.

  “Don’t worry,” James said. “He’ll be here. We’ll talk to him. If you’re right about Charlie, he can’t do anything now anyway. He’s literally on a stage in front of everyone.”

  Emily nodded, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they needed to speak with their teacher as soon as possible.

  They split up to hand out the hats on either side of the gym. James took the stage side, and Emily the other half. She couldn’t help but be distracted watching James walk up the stairs to the DJ booth and hand a hat to Charlie.

  “Just so you know, you don’t have to worry,” someone said next to her.

  Maddie was standing there with her arms crossed, watching the stage with Emily.

  Emily looked from Maddie to the stage and back. Did she somehow know about the fires, too? Could Maddie know something Emily didn’t? Like that the arsonist had already been caught?

  “Worry about what?” Emily asked tentatively.

  “I don’t like him anymore.”

  Now Emily was really confused. Maddie didn’t like the arsonist? Charlie?

  “Like who?”

  Maddie rolled her eyes. “Right. As if you don’t know.” When Emily continued to stare, her mind trying to recollect when her classmate had ever met Charlie before, Maddie sighed and said, “James, if you’re going to make me say it.”

  “You like James?” Emily asked. Maddie was looking at her like she was struggling to solve 1 + 1, but Emily couldn’t help it. She didn’t know what compelled Maddie to confide in her right now, and it took her totally by surprise. Somebody’s crush was about the furthest thing from her mind.

  “Liked,” Maddie said. “It’s in the past. He’s all yours.”

  “All mine?” Emily’s voice squeaked.

  “What are you, a parrot?”

  “I’m so
rry, I just—I don’t like James. I mean, I do, of course. He’s my best friend. But I don’t like him, like him.”

  Maddie scowled at her. “You don’t?”

  Emily shook her head.

  “Not ever?”

  “No,” Emily said. To be honest, she wasn’t sure she’d like liked anybody yet.

  “Oh.” Maddie looked disappointed. “Well, I still don’t like him.”

  “Okay.” Emily switched the trash bag of Uncle Sam hats from one hand to the other, not exactly sure what to do with this confession. “Good to know.”

  Maddie stalked off to the registration table to help check people in. Emily continued to distribute her hats, keeping an eye out for Mr. Quisling and making sure Charlie didn’t disappear from the room. He fiddled with something on his DJ setup, and an upbeat song started to play as more kids trickled inside. The star-spotted hat James had passed out to Charlie sat on a large speaker.

  Students began to arrive. Emily recognized a few of the costumes—Mario, Luigi, and a knight chess piece. Vivian hurried up to Emily. “The fog machine and colored lights are for after the game, when the dancing starts. Does the DJ know that? He’s not going to turn them on now, is he?” Before Emily could reply, Vivian answered her own question and said, “I’ll go tell him,” then ran over to the stage.

  Emily finally spotted Mr. Quisling entering the gym from the school-side door, closest to the stage. She turned to find James so they could talk to him together, but bumped into a chair that was part of the obstacle course the twins were finishing setting up. Lines of chairs formed three aisles—one for each team—and Kevin and Devin were running crepe paper back and forth between the chairs to create a web for participants to crawl over and under.

  James was blowing up balloons for the balloon stomp, but thoughts of grabbing him to talk to their teacher flew away when a very tall and familiar silhouette appeared in the main entrance to the gym.

  “James!” Emily called to get his attention, then pointed to Mr. Griswold standing in the doorway looking very understated in jeans, a fleece, and a Giants cap. They both ran to him, meeting up in front of the publisher.