The group fell into a contemplative silence for the next stretch, listening to the waves slap the side of the boat. Ms. Linden pointed ahead to a small mound of land that rounded out of the water, like a lumpy turtle shell.
“Gull Island, straight ahead,” she said. “I can get us fairly close, but then you’ll need to take the dinghy to the beach. I don’t recommend more than three in the dinghy. I’ll stay on the boat. It gets too busy around these parts for me to leave it unattended.”
Emily’s parents and Matthew volunteered to stay with Ms. Linden, as Mr. Quisling, Emily, and James had been the three working on the unbreakable code all along. Matthew stretched out along a bench with his hands behind his head and the sun beaming down on his face and declared, “This is what I’m talking about.”
* * *
The dinghy was a small inflatable boat that barely fit Emily, James, Mr. Quisling, and the metal detector and two different-sized shovels he brought along.
Once the water was shallow enough, they dragged the dinghy onto the narrow sliver of pebble-filled beach. Birdcall chatter drowned out the sounds of the bay. Ms. Linden hadn’t been kidding when she said the island had become a refuge for birds. White gulls waddled around the beach; another gray bird swooped overhead.
The island had a gentle rise that was easy to hike to the flattened top. The trickiest part for Emily was not placing her hand on a bird-poop-splattered rock as they climbed. At the top of the rise, they could see all the way across the island. It was sparsely covered with scrub brush, the occasional boulder, and a handful of trees. Because of the flat terrain and small size of the island, they could see all the way across it. It would probably take ten minutes to cross from one side to the other.
“Do any of these boulders look like a duck to you?” Mr. Quisling asked, and they began walking haphazardly around the island, scrutinizing rocks as if they were studying sculptures.
“This one?” James pointed to a rock that was not much bigger than a football. Emily tilted her head, realizing that one person’s duck was another person’s bunny. This might be as difficult as spotting the same picture in the clouds, but at least the rocks weren’t changing shape.
They wandered and analyzed rocks for what felt like a long time. The sky was lightening into a beautiful shade of pink, which Emily knew meant they were running out of time for tonight’s adventure.
“What about this one?” Mr. Quisling called.
As Emily walked closer, she could see it: The rock looked like a plain version of a duck resting on the water with its neck tucked into its body. There was even a lip of rock that extended kind of like a beak.
“I think this might be it!” Emily said, excited.
“This direction is east,” Mr. Quisling said.
Emily and James ran in the direction of his pointing finger calling out with each tree they passed, “One … two … three!”
Tree number three was more of a stump than a tree. It hadn’t been chopped down, but looked like it had been split by a storm or lightning a long time ago. There was a hollow area at its base that was almost solidly white, it was so completely covered with bird poop.
“Gross!” Emily said.
Mr. Quisling swung his handheld metal detector in front of the tree. When he arced it up the side of the tree, it beeped. The three of them froze and looked at each other. “Let’s not get too excited yet,” Mr. Quisling cautioned. “Could be a false alarm.” But the beeping continued consistently whenever he combed over the trunk.
“It almost seems like there’s something inside,” James said. They studied the trunk hollow that had layers and layers of bird poop caked over the top. “It’s like a fortress made out of bird poop.” James grimaced. “I call ‘not it.’”
If Mr. Quisling was grossed out, he didn’t show it. He began to gently scrape at the white crustiness with the tip of a trowel. Gradually it chipped and peeled away until a dark opening was revealed. Emily bent close trying to see inside. She wished she’d brought Matthew’s cell phone with them so they could shine the light in.
Mr. Quisling stuck the trowel in, this time swinging it around to get a feel for what was in the hollow. The trowel connected to something with a dull clank.
That didn’t sound like bird poop.
That didn’t sound like tree innards.
“That sounded like metal,” James said.
Mr. Quisling reached a hand in the dark hole—an action alone that had Emily feeling antsy on his behalf. Even though the opening had been sealed with bird poop, what if this was still a nest for a snake or another animal? Maybe the occupant had a different entrance than the one they were barging through.
But Mr. Quisling didn’t yelp, and nothing seemed to attack him. Slowly, he unearthed a large, rusty tin can.
“Oh, man,” James said.
“I really hope that’s what I think it is,” Emily said.
Mr. Quisling pried open the top. He reached in and pulled out a black bowl. It was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand and simply designed.
Emily knew it was probably unrealistic to expect a treasure chest filled with gleaming gold coins, but the bowl was quite a disappointment.
“That’s it?” James asked. “Is that the miner’s treasure from the unbreakable code?”
Mr. Quisling removed a paper from the tin. He unfolded it to find a letter with Chinese characters on one side and primitively written English on the other. “It’s difficult to make out the handwriting, but it looks like this says Wong Ming-Chung—this is probably a notice of ownership.”
“You know what doesn’t make sense?” James asked. “If this is ceramic, then why did the metal detector go off?”
“It’s the tin,” Mr. Quisling said. “It’s known to be a false-positive for finding gold.”
“Can I see the bowl?” Emily asked.
It was a dull black, like a chalkboard. Emily rubbed her thumb along the uneven side and was surprised to see some of the black came off. A dull brown peeked through. Emily rubbed more. More of the black coloring came off.
“This is like soot,” Emily said. “Look, if you rub it off, the pot looks different underneath.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Quisling said. He took the bowl and began rubbing it vigorously with the corner of his shirt. The shirt quickly became blackened. A patch of gold gleamed through the surrounding soot.
“We found the gold,” Emily said, not quite believing what she was seeing.
James whooped. He threw his head back and hollered to the sky, “We found the gold!”
CHAPTER
46
BACK ON THE BOAT, Emily and James were like excited frogs hopping all over the place as they told how they had uncovered the golden bowl from the hollow tree. Ms. Linden laughed. “Settle down, settle down! You’re rocking the boat! The last thing you want to do now is capsize us and lose the treasure to the bottom of the bay.”
“The first thing we’re going to have to do,” Mr. Quisling announced, “is reach out to the owner of this island. By property rights, this bowl belongs to him.”
Emily and James the hopping frogs landed splat.
“It belongs to him?” James repeated.
“Even though we did all the work to find it?” Emily added.
“It could, but that will depend on a lot of different things. It’s entirely possible he might reward you for making the find. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Emily blinked back tears. She tried not to show how upset she was, but her mom noticed right away. “What is it, Em?”
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. But then words came bursting out of her, directed to her dad. “I know what you wanted to talk about this morning. San Francisco is too expensive, and we need to move again. This was my plan to fix that.” She jabbed a finger at the bowl. She blinked repeatedly, desperate not to cry in front of everyone.
“Oh, Em,” her dad said. His face paled. “That’s not what I wanted to tell you and Matthew.”
“It�
��s not?”
Ms. Linden had gotten the boat moving back toward San Francisco. Emily and her dad shouted at each other over the wind. Matthew leaned forward to hear what their dad was going to say.
“What I wanted to tell you is that I was offered a job at Bayside Press. But before I accept, I wanted to get your okay. I know Mr. Griswold means a lot to you, and with you two being on his teen advisory committee, well, I thought me working there might be similar to if I became a teacher at your school or something. I know you might not want your dad hanging around a place that’s personal to you.”
“Are you serious?” Emily leaped forward and hugged her dad. “That would be great if you worked at Bayside Press! Are you going to help Mr. Griswold with his games?”
Her dad laughed. “No, I’ll be working on the publishing side of things. You know, the actual business part of the company? I’m going to be a production editor for their humanities and social sciences textbooks.”
“That sounds really boring!” Matthew shouted.
Her dad laughed again. “I suppose it does. I’m excited, though. It’s funny—for years I thought I never wanted to set foot in a nine-to-five office job again. Freelancing was the life for me. But now I’m really looking forward to the stability.”
“And staying in San Francisco,” Emily added.
“Yes,” her dad agreed. “And staying in San Francisco.”
* * *
“It’s almost on!” Emily’s dad called down the hall.
Emily sat next to her dad on their couch, a pillow hugged to her chest. A week had passed since their outing to Gull Island, and any minute now her face was going to be on the TV screen, talking with the reporter about the unbreakable code and found treasure.
“Coming!” Emily’s mom hurried from the back of the apartment, bangles chiming as she ran. Matthew plopped next to Emily on the couch.
“It’s starting,” Emily said, ducking her face behind the pillow so only her eyes were visible.
Her dad smiled and patted her leg. “It’s going to be fine, Emily. You did great!”
The news report began with a brief overview of the history of the unbreakable code. “There’s Ms. Linden!” Emily pointed. The footage showed Ms. Linden opening the manila folder to reveal the miner’s original code and map.
The news report shifted to footage of the reporter standing on Gull Island next to the tree trunk where they had found the treasure. Wind whipped her hair as she said, “Thanks to the cleverness of two middle school students and their social studies teacher, this centuries-old mystery has been solved and treasure uncovered in this very spot.”
Now the TV showed Emily, James, and Mr. Quisling sitting in his classroom, where they had been interviewed by the reporter.
“Did you imagine you would actually find treasure?” the reporter asked Emily and James.
James replied, “I imagined it the way I imagine flying in a rocket ship or fighting zombies. You know—I imagined it, but not in a really-thought-it-would-happen way.”
“And when you uncovered the treasure, what was that like, Emily?” the reporter asked.
“It was exciting at first, because we found something—”
James interjected, “Actually, it was disgusting before anything else, because of all the bird poop.”
Emily laughed. “That’s true. And then when we found the bowl, I was disappointed. It didn’t look like gold at all, so I thought maybe it was just old junk. And then it was exciting again when we realized it was gold after all.”
“And, Mr. Quisling,” the reporter asked, “how do you feel as their teacher?”
“Incredibly proud. We’ve solved a historical mystery, and it wouldn’t have happened without the hard work and dedication of these two students.”
Over footage of the found bowl, the reporter’s voice stated, “What was the breakthrough discovery made by these clever kids? A Chinese symbol for hope, painted in a citric wash on the paper. The acidity turns brown when it is heated, making it an invisible ink commonly found in many households. Discovering that the map incorporated both Chinese and English eventually led to the children solving the mystery.”
The TV screen now showed a woman from the Chinese Historical Society speaking with the reporter.
“It wasn’t common for the Chinese in Gold Rush era San Francisco to know both English and Cantonese, but it also wasn’t unheard of,” the historian said. “We know of Chinese immigrants like Ah Quin, who maintained a diary in English in an effort to practice the language. The miner who created the unbreakable code was undoubtedly educated, likely a merchant who interacted with both English-speaking populations and Cantonese.
“The letter is dated 1853, and at that time there was a lot of antagonism toward the Chinese. They were the only group required to pay a special tax for mining. There was no legal protection if they refused, so they could be robbed or beaten or worse, without any legal recourse or protection from an entity like the police. Because of this hostile environment, Chinese miners sometimes melted their gold and molded it into an everyday object like a bowl, and then covered it with soot to conceal the value. For reasons we will probably never know, this miner took the extra step of hiding his gold to be retrieved later.”
The news report ended, and Emily’s dad hugged her sideways. “That was wonderful!”
“You’re a regular Indiana Jones,” Matthew said.
The doorbell rang. “That’s James,” Emily said. “It’s time to go to Hollister’s.”
* * *
The replaced front window of Hollister’s bookstore greeted Emily, James, and Matthew like a warm smile. The store hadn’t reopened yet—Hollister said there was a long road ahead until that happened. But the structural damage had been repaired, and today he was having a painting party.
Empty bookcases huddled in the middle of the room, waiting to be painted. Every inch of floor was covered with canvas tarp. A long card table had been set up. Mr. Quisling had come to the painting party and was laying out paintbrushes, rollers, and drip pans at one end while Ms. Linden arranged an assortment of snacks and drinks at the other. Mr. Griswold ran blue tape around the new window and door trim. Jack draped the front counter in plastic.
Mr. Griswold’s dogs were there, too. Angel had curled up on a mound of tarps, and Claus was sniffing every inch of the store.
“Dogs at a painting party. Leave it to Gary.” Hollister shook his head. “You know they’re going to get paint on their fur, don’t you?” he said.
Mr. Griswold waved a hand. “They’ll be fine! They’re due for the groomers anyway.”
James set down the plastic bag he’d been carrying and began unpacking the food his mother and grandmother had insisted he bring along: steamed banana leaves that held sticky rice and chicken, and fried spring rolls.
Emily and James had invited the dance committee, and they soon trickled in. Vivian was at a loss for what to do without her clipboard in tow, so she rearranged the painting supplies Mr. Quisling had set out. Kevin and Devin made a beeline for the dogs. Claus eagerly played a game of catch with them and a balled-up towel. Maddie and Nisha laughed when they realized they had both brought similar-looking dishes. Maddie’s were empanadas with shredded beef and cheese, and Nisha’s were samosas with curry chicken and peas.
Charlie wasn’t at the painting party. Hollister had fired him. While Charlie hadn’t started the fire as Emily had suspected, he did lie about feeding a parking meter, and it turned out that wasn’t all he had lied about. Hollister had hired him because Charlie claimed to be proficient in computer coding and web development, but in actuality, he had only recently begun to teach himself HTML. The reason he left the store on the day of the fire was because he didn’t know how to fix something on Hollister’s website, and he needed to check a how-to manual he’d left in his car.
“He was only learning HTML? That’s so basic! And he said he was an expert?” James said, astonished that someone could lie so boldly. “Did he even know
JavaScript?”
“It seems Charlie was a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none.” Hollister sighed. “Even without the lies, I would have let him go. Leaving my store unattended with only a minor inside by herself is not a responsible decision by any stretch of the imagination.”
Even though Charlie hadn’t been a good employee for Hollister, Emily felt a twinge of guilt for accusing him of being an arsonist to the police. If they hadn’t figured out the real story with Mr. Sloan, her words could have caused an innocent person a lot of trouble.
Hollister looked around his empty store. “This little shop is ready for a new chapter. I want it to be a cheery one. Orange walls, white bookcases—I think it will look nice.”
“It’s going to look fantastic,” Jack said.
“Like being inside a Creamsicle,” Matthew said, and everyone laughed.
“Yes,” Mr. Griswold said. “And who doesn’t want to browse for books inside a Creamsicle? Every bibliophile’s dream, I imagine.”
Emily eyed a sunny orange test patch of paint on the wall. “I like the color you chose, Hollister. Maybe I’ll paint my bedroom this color, too.”
“That reminds me.” James flipped open the top of the cooler they’d brought to reveal piles of It’s-Its. “We pooled together a little of our treasure money to splurge on these for the painting party.”
“It’s-Its!” Hollister clapped his hands gleefully. “I haven’t had one of these for years. Do you have mint?” He rummaged through the plastic-wrapped ice cream sandwiches. “Oh, yes you do!” He triumphantly raised his treat and did a little dance, which got Claus excited.
“Claus,” Mr. Griswold said sternly. When the dog trotted to his side, he leaned close to his ear and stage-whispered, “Don’t worry. I’ll share some of mine with you and Angel.”
After everyone selected their ice-cream flavor, Mr. Quisling asked Emily and James, “So you treated us to It’s-Its. What other plans do you have for your reward money?”
When they had returned from Gull Island, Mr. Quisling had followed the protocol of turning over the found bowl to police. Since they had found the gold on private property, the owner of Gull Island had to be notified before anything else could happen. It turned out he was so taken with the story and moved by the historical significance, he donated the bowl to the Chinese Historical Society and gifted Emily and James each with a ten-thousand-dollar finder’s fee. Since her parents weren’t worried about money with her dad’s new job, they had insisted she keep her share. James’s dad had refused the money when James offered, and instead promised to cut back on his business trips. So she and James had come up with an alternative plan that they were excited to announce.
The Unbreakable Code Page 22