June Sparrow and the Million-Dollar Penny

by Rebecca Chace

  “Moses will keep it safe,” Joe shouted. “We’d better go to the library like we said.”

  June started to protest, then stopped herself. First of all, it was very difficult to have a conversation while riding on a tractor, and it was awfully fun to ride. Second of all, Joe was right. Moses knew even better than Joe how important the Penny Book was to her, and the shop wasn’t exactly busy. He would certainly notice if Bob came by and left it in the drop box. She could check the box again after they pretended to do whatever they were supposed to do at the library. Besides, she was curious; June Sparrow really loved libraries.

  As the tractor progressed slowly down Main Street, June had another chance to check out the town. The two girls were still sitting in front of the coffee shop in their lawn chairs next to the rack of clothes. June tapped on Joe’s shoulder. “Pull over!”

  “Huh?”

  “Pull over!”

  He slowed the tractor down and pulled up to the curb. There weren’t many cars parked on Main Street, so there was plenty of room.

  “We’re supposed to go straight to the library,” Joe said, turning around on the seat. June slid down to the sidewalk with Indigo.

  “This will only take a second,” she said. “I want to shop!”

  June walked over to the girls, who suddenly seemed very interested in the magazines on their laps—until they saw Indigo peeking his head out of June’s arms.

  “Oh, he is so cute!” one of the girls said. “What is he?”

  June smiled and held Indigo out to show them.

  “He’s a pig?” the other girl said. “A tiny pig!”

  “A miniature pig,” June said proudly. “You want to hold him?”

  “Will he let us?” asked the first girl.

  “Of course!” June handed off a warm and wriggling Indigo Bunting.

  Indigo loved meeting new people, and he licked the girl right on the tip of her nose as she held him in her arms.

  “My name is June,” June said, grateful to Indigo for breaking the ice.

  “You’re new, right? I’m Keisha and this is my sister, Aliyah,” said the girl holding Indigo.

  “We’re twins, but not identical,” Aliyah said. “Seems obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how many people ask us that. Hi, Joe.” June turned to see that Joe had just walked up.

  “How’s it going?” Joe’s face had gone beet red.

  “Can you believe how cute he is?” Luckily, Aliyah was talking about Indigo, not Joe. “My turn,” she said, and Keisha reluctantly handed him over. Aliyah promptly sat down with Indigo on her lap and started making high-pitched cooing noises, which Indigo responded to graciously, though June knew he didn’t like it when people spoke baby talk to him just because he was little.

  June started to flip through the clothing racks. There were lots of matching little-girl dresses that looked like they might have come from the sisters’ own closets.

  “Everything is fifty cents to five dollars,” Keisha said.

  “Or best offer,” Aliyah said, looking up from Indigo, whose curly tail was going a mile a minute, despite the baby talk.

  “You do best offer,” Keisha said, rolling her eyes at her sister. “I try to stick to the price since we donate it all to charity.” She smiled at Joe. “Your mom bought some great stuff last Saturday. Maybe you want to get her something?”

  “We have to be at the library,” Joe mumbled, looking anywhere but at her. “School report.”

  June started to protest, but then she remembered that Aunt Bridget seemed to have eyes in the back of her head. She wished that she could buy something, just to be friendly, but then she remembered that she still had to work off the Dalmatian sweater she was wearing. She couldn’t afford to go into the coffee shop either, she realized. It was easy to forget that life without cash in her pockets was very, very different.

  “Thanks anyway,” June said, after a beat.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Aliyah, handing back Indigo. “He’s the cutest little pig I ever saw.”

  “Thank you,” said June. “And good luck with the sidewalk sale.” The girls waved and Indigo waved back with one of his little trotters, which sent them into paroxysms of giggles.

  “They’re nice,” June said as she clambered up next to Joe on the tractor.

  “Yep.” Joe was still blushing, though the red had faded a tiny bit. He looked over his shoulder and paused. “You might as well know it—I don’t really have a lot of friends at school. I don’t like sports, and all the boys play sports. Plus we moved here after my dad left, so . . .” Joe’s voice trailed off and he looked away.

  “I don’t have a dad either,” June said, wishing she could think of something more encouraging to say. “Or a mom. It’s just me and Indigo, which is fine by me, but nobody here seems to understand pigs as pets. I’ll bet I’ve got the weirdest family in town.”

  Joe brightened a bit and turned back to take the wheel. “I don’t think you’re weird,” he said. “And pigs as pets are fine by me.”

  Joe turned the ignition and they started off again down Main Street, the tractor’s engine breaking the quiet of the afternoon. There were three pickup trucks parked in front of the hardware store, and one of them had a horse trailer attached. A long brown tail peeked out, swishing back and forth. The woman who had been sweeping the sidewalk earlier was leaning in the driver’s-side window, chatting with the driver. She looked up and waved as Joe drove by, and he lifted a couple of fingers off the wheel and nodded in acknowledgment. June thought it was kind of sweet the way people waved to each other in Red Bank, and she wished that she could run her hands down that beautiful horse tail, but she didn’t dare ask Joe to stop for a second time.

  They passed a closed-up video store and a beauty parlor June hadn’t noticed before: Goldie’s Goldilocks. There were two women staring out the window at them with big curlers in their hair—maybe one of them was Goldie. They must have a sense of humor, thought June, to name the shop Goldie’s Goldilocks, and she did the queen wave from the back of the tractor with her fingers cupped together. She had seen the queen of England do this on television. Both women pulled back from the window, and June giggled. “I think I might already be causing trouble in town,” she yelled to Joe.

  “This town could use a little trouble,” he shouted back.

  They reached the end of Main Street, and Joe pulled the tractor into the parking lot of a low building with a painted wooden sign out front:

  RED BANK LENDING LIBRARY.

  OPEN MONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, AND SATURDAYS 11–5

  That’s not very many hours, June thought, but she decided not to say anything. She didn’t want to keep stumbling around like a city kid. The tractor gave a final shudder as Joe parked it and turned off the ignition.

  “How do you like my ride?” he asked.

  “We don’t like it—we love it!” June said, and Indigo wriggled up to lick him on the cheek.

  Joe looked startled and blushed again. “He’s kind of like a dog, I guess.” It was a measure of how much Indigo had enjoyed the tractor ride that he wasn’t offended by this remark. Joe jumped off and June handed him Indigo, then climbed down after him. Joe gave one of the tractor’s enormous wheels an affectionate pat, as if he was leaving his horse tied to a hitching rail, and led the way to the front door of the library.

  The library was actually inside a trailer, June realized as she got closer, with the outside painted brown to make it look like wood. She wondered if it was the kind of trailer that had wheels so it could be a mobile library. There were mobile book trailers parked along the edge of Central Park, near the zoo, and June used to love to browse these mini bookstores. It was the perfect way to end a day in the park with Indigo. But this was a real library, so June tried to hide Indigo so that he wouldn’t be seen. She and Joe pulled open the front door, which had a small brass bell on a string.

  The library looked bigger once you were inside. The librarian was the only person there, sitting behind a d
esk at one end of the long room. Two study carrels with computers took up the center of the trailer, and the walls were all bookshelves. At the opposite end was the children’s corner, with picture books displayed on low shelves, wooden puzzles, and a comfy-looking armchair for reading.

  “Hello, Miss Flores,” Joe said.

  “Hello, Joe.” Miss Flores looked just the way a librarian was supposed to look—the nice kind of librarian, that is. She was wearing a rose-colored cardigan and had her dark hair pulled up in a bun. Her glasses were tortoiseshell, and they somehow made her look prettier as well as smarter.

  “I’m June Sparrow,” June said, walking over to the desk. “I’ve just moved here and would like to apply for a library card, please.”

  “Certainly,” Miss Flores said. “All we need is your address.”

  June struggled for a moment to remember the name of Aunt Bridget’s road. She looked at Joe. “She’s over with Miss Andersen, on Phoenicia Road,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the street number.” June looked down. “I only just moved here.”

  Miss Flores nodded. “No problem. You can start using the library right away. Joe comes all the time, don’t you, Joe?” Joe blushed and didn’t say anything. June wondered why he would be embarrassed about using the library, but Miss Flores kept talking. “Joe can show you how to use the online catalog. We can also order books from other libraries if you need them. Our collection is a bit limited, because of space.” She gave a small sigh. “On the other hand, Sioux Falls doesn’t mind shipping books over to us, though it may take a few days.”

  June decided not to say that she was already familiar with how to use the online catalog at the New York Public Library, since Miss Flores and Joe both looked so pleased at having a new person to show around. Joe took her to one of the study carrels, pulled up a second chair, and turned on the computer.

  “I just started working for the school newspaper,” he said. “So I come over here a lot to do my research.”

  “Research?”

  “When you’re a reporter, you’d better have your facts straight.”

  “Wow!” June was impressed. “You’re kind of like Clark Kent and Superman.”

  Joe gave her a shy smile. “Without the Superman part.”

  “No! Really, Joe!” Indigo pushed his face up out of her jacket and looked from one to the other, trying to find out what all the excitement was about. June pushed him back down so Miss Flores wouldn’t see him and spoke in a whisper. “You seem like just a regular kid, but really you’re a reporter!”

  Joe blushed hard. “I’d love to be a real reporter someday.”

  “Why not?” June said. “Let’s pretend this is your first assignment! We can look up pennies, and maybe we can figure out which is the Big One that Aunt Bridget stole from my mom.”

  “Whaaat?” asked Joe. So while June Googled “rare pennies worth a lot of money,” she explained to him what had happened the night before, and that morning, and why the Penny Book was so important not just because of her mom, but because of the missing penny itself.

  “Really?” Joe said when she was done. “You think your mom had a penny that could make you rich?”

  “Sssh!” June said, looking at Miss Flores, who was putting up a new poster on the door and trying not to listen. “I don’t want anyone to know about this. Except Moses, and now you, I guess. But you can’t tell anyone—really, you can’t. Pretend you’re breaking a big news story and you can’t tell anyone until it’s on the front page.”

  “Okay,” Joe said seriously. “But why do you think your aunt stole it?”

  “It’s missing, isn’t it?” asked June. “Besides, you saw how weird she was acting about my not getting the Penny Book.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “That was weird, considering it’s your mom and all. But your aunt isn’t rich, and if she did steal the Big One, then how come—”

  “That’s exactly what Moses said.” June sighed. “Okay, maybe she didn’t steal it. Or maybe she stole it and still has the money hidden somewhere. Maybe she’s still living off the money since she only works on the farm.”

  “Lots of people around here only work on the farm,” said Joe doubtfully.

  “Well, maybe my mom took it with her. I don’t know! But Aunt Bridget must know something since she didn’t want me to keep looking at the Penny Book.” June suddenly broke off, staring at the screen. “Hey! Numismatics! That’s the name of my parents’ company! I never knew what it meant—I figured it was some old family name and never bothered to look it up. ‘The study or collecting of coins, metals, and the like.’ It says that a coin collector is called a numismatologist. Then there’s ‘numismatical’ and ‘numismatology’—”

  “How come your parents’ company was called that?” Joe interrupted.

  “I don’t know,” June said slowly. “They did have a valuable coin collection, but they collected lots of things. Tin soldiers, old toys, seventy-eight records . . . my apartment was full of really cool stuff.”

  “What kind of a company was it?” Joe asked.

  “Mom and Dad invented Sticky Glue,” she said. “You know, that stuff they put onto regular paper to turn it into a Post-it note?”

  Joe might be an investigative reporter, but he was clearly not a stationery nerd.

  “Look.” June nodded toward Miss Flores. The librarian was rubbing what looked like a glue stick across the back of the poster and sticking it to the door.

  “Sticky Glue,” June said matter-of-factly. “Everybody uses it. It was bad news for Post-it notes but good news for everybody else. You can use it to stick any piece of paper onto the wall, or even a computer screen. Better than glue because it doesn’t leave a mark when you move it around. See?”

  “Holy moly,” Joe said, watching Miss Flores move the poster a few inches higher. It stuck to the door like magic. “I know that stuff. So you’re, like—the Sticky Glue heiress?”

  “I was,” said June. “The company had to be sold, right down to the last Sticky Glue stick.” She turned to Joe with a weary smile. “Sad to say, I’m no longer an heiress to anything.” She looked back at Miss Flores, who was happily sliding Sticky Glue across an index card and sticking it on the top of her computer. “Good invention though, huh?”

  “Really good.” Joe stared at Miss Flores and then back at June.

  June waved her hand in front of him. “It’s over now, remember? I’m broke, stuck in South Dakota—no offense—and my aunt hates my guts. So let’s get back to work.”

  She turned back to the computer screen and started trolling through sites about valuable pennies. “The Big One . . . the Big One . . .” There were many charts of pennies shown by year and current value, but none of them were labeled “the Big One.”

  “Wow, some of these are really worth something,” Joe said. “Look at this one: four dollars and sixty-five cents!”

  “That’s not that much,” said June, still skimming.

  “Compared to the original value, though, if you do the math—”

  “Wait! Wait! Look at this—from the U.S. Mint site,” June said. “The 1943 penny, struck in copper.”

  They both leaned in and read together:

  According to the American Numismatic Association, the 1943 copper-alloy cent is one of the most idealized and potentially sought-after items in American numismatics.

  “That’s a great name for a band,” said June. “The Numismatics.”

  Joe kept reading:

  Nearly all circulating pennies at that time were struck in zinc-coated steel because copper and nickel were needed for the Allied war effort. 40 1943 copper-alloy cents are known to remain in existence. Coin experts speculate that they were struck by accident when copper-alloy 1-cent blanks remained in the press hopper when production began on the new steel pennies. A 1943 copper cent was first offered for sale in 1958, bringing more than $40,000. The highest amount paid for a 1943 copper cent was $82,500 in 1996. More recently one was auctioned
for more than $1,000,000.”

  Joe and June stared at each other.

  “A million dollars,” whispered June.

  “But we don’t know if that’s the one your mom was writing about,” Joe whispered back.

  “Listen to this!” June was still reading down the page at lightning speed.

  The easiest way to determine if a 1943 cent is made of copper is to use a magnet. If it sticks to the magnet, it is not copper. If it does not stick, the coin might be made of copper and should be authenticated by an expert.

  “This is it!” June said, jumping up. “I know this is the Big One, Joe. I just know it!”

  Indigo squealed. Miss Flores looked up, even though there was nobody else in the library, and put a warning finger to her lips. June hoped she hadn’t heard Indigo. “Sorry!” June whispered loudly, then more quietly to Joe. “It all makes sense. My mom and Bob were looking for the Big One, and this is the Biggest One there is! See, it says right there: ‘one of the most idealized and potentially sought-after items in American numismatics.’ That’s the Big One.”

  Joe looked at June, then back at the screen.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said slowly. “We’d better get a magnet.”

  “A magnet?”

  Joe pointed at the screen. “If it’s the Big One, it won’t stick to a magnet. That’s how we’ll know for sure.”

  June suddenly sat down.

  Find metal that won’t stick to a magnet

  “Is there a bathroom here?” she asked a little shakily. Joe pointed toward the end of the library, and June walked there in a daze. She locked the rickety door behind her and pulled out her mother’s list. Indigo popped his head out so that he could look over her shoulder, and there it was:

  Travel inside a beehive

  and

  Find metal that won’t stick to a magnet

  “It’s like Mom knew I would be here, looking for the Big One, meeting Moses and riding in his truck, but how could any of that be possible?” she said to Indigo, who shook his head, looking as confused as she was.

  “This whole list is a riddle,” she said. A riddle she was supposed solve with her mother. June quickly scanned what was left on the list: