Mr. Lemoncello's Great Library Race

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Well put, Mr. President!” exclaimed Mr. Lemoncello. “My most famous quote is ‘My best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.’ ”

  “I believe I said that one, too,” said Lincoln.

  “I know. But I just love quoting you.” He turned to the two teams. “Researchers, you have a choice. Both teams can go for the Lincoln fact or both can go for the Lemoncello fact. Then again, one team could go for Lincoln, the other for Lemoncello. Or vice versa. Or the opposite of vice versa, which I believe is virtue versa! It’s totally up to you. But remember, the last team back is a pair of rotten eggs.”

  Kyle looked at Abia. “Lemoncello?” he mouthed.

  She nodded.

  Next to them, Akimi and Angus were mouthing the same thing.

  “All right, teams, are you ready?” Mr. Lemoncello raised his arm. “On your mark, get set, Lemon, cello, go!”

  The four remaining contestants dashed for the circular doorway. There was a bit of a traffic jam at first, but they all finally worked themselves free of the arm-elbow-leg tangle and raced down the steps to the sidewalk.

  Kyle grabbed a yellow bag.

  So did Akimi.

  Nobody wanted to fly all the way to Columbus to learn about Lincoln, even if they could take the private jet, not if Mr. Lemoncello’s fun fact could be found faster by bike.

  Kyle and Abia scurried away from Angus and Akimi, who were scurrying away from them. Both teams huddled over their backpacks and searched through the pockets and flaps looking for a clue.

  They couldn’t find one!

  Kyle looked down the sidewalk at Akimi and Angus. They were stumped, too.

  That’s when everybody’s lPads started buzzing. A text message scrolled across the screen:

  I told you I get tired of the same old, same old.

  This was followed by another text:

  Here comes your clue.

  And another.

  Get ready for it.

  And several more:

  Any second now.

  Mr. Lincoln is bummed nobody wants to find his fact.

  I reminded him that most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

  Where did I put that clue?

  Ah! Here it is!

  The tablet screen filled with a jumble of letters:

  “It’s a classic word search,” Kyle told Abia. “Start circling!”

  “I found ‘Lemoncello,’ ” said Abia. “It starts in the lower right corner and runs in a backward diagonal to the upper left!”

  “Excellent.”

  They both started circling words with their fingertips. The circled letters changed color and flashed when they were correct. Down at the other end of the sidewalk, Akimi and Angus were doing the same thing.

  In about three minutes, Kyle and Abia had discovered all nine words in the ten-by-ten box:

  CHILDHOOD

  HOME

  ITALY

  LANE

  LEMONCELLO

  LITTLE

  ONE

  POPLAR

  TWO

  “When Mr. Lemoncello was little, was his home in Italy?” asked Abia.

  “No,” said Kyle. “His ‘childhood’ ‘home’ was right here in Alexandriaville. In a neighborhood called ‘Little’ ‘Italy.’ There’s a street in that part of town named ‘Poplar’ ‘Lane.’ ”

  “So,” said Abia, tapping the words “one” and “two” on her screen, “he either lived at Twelve Poplar Lane or Twenty-One Poplar Lane.”

  “Come on,” said Kyle. “Let’s grab a bike. Twelve and Twenty-One have to be pretty close to each other, maybe even on the same block.”

  They hurried to the bikes.

  Just in time to see Akimi and Angus already pedaling away.

  Akimi and Angus were in the lead as the four bikes raced across town.

  “I know a shortcut!” Kyle hollered to Abia.

  “Of course you do!” Abia shouted back.

  He swung down Birch Street to cross the train tracks. Abia followed him.

  They made it to Poplar before Akimi and Angus. The street was lined with simple brownstone apartment buildings, five stories tall.

  “There’s Twenty-One,” said Abia. “How do we know if that was Mr. Lemoncello’s childhood home?”

  “Maybe there’s a plaque or something….”

  They propped their bikes on their kickstands and hurried up the stoop to the front door to see if they could find some sort of sign labeling it as the childhood home of the most famous son of Alexandriaville, Ohio.

  “Hey, look!” someone shouted. “Here’s a plaque! ‘Boyhood home of master game maker Luigi L. Lemoncello’!”

  It was Angus, up the block on the other side of the street at 12 Poplar Lane.

  He and Akimi were on the stoop with a sweet-looking old lady in a black housecoat who’d come out to greet them.

  “Buongiorno! Welcome to my nephew little Luigi’s childhood home. Come in, come in. I have almond biscotti upstairs.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Kyle heard Angus say, “but we’re kind of in a hurry. May not have time for a snack.”

  “But you are so skinny….”

  “They’re going in,” said Abia.

  “Um, ma’am?” shouted Kyle. “We’d like to see the house, too.”

  “You’re gonna have to wait,” said the lady. “I can only do one tour at a time. My feet are killing me.”

  Angus waved a twiddle-fingered “buh-bye” to Kyle. He and Akimi hurried into Mr. Lemoncello’s childhood home with their tour guide.

  “Come on,” Kyle said to Abia. “We’ll search the outside of the building while we wait.”

  They biked down the block.

  The brownstone behind the rusting wrought-iron fence looked so cramped, Kyle couldn’t imagine Mr. Lemoncello living there with his nine brothers and sisters.

  “Hmm,” said Abia, “look at this. Someone has scratched a strange and nonsensical message into this fence post.”

  Kyle bent down and examined the etching:

  !KNIHT FLESYM RAEH OT DEEN I

  “It could be some kind of code,” said Kyle. “Mr. Lemoncello loves secret codes. Always has. Even when he was a little kid. The first game he ever tried to make was called First Letters, where…”

  Kyle stopped.

  “It’s like ‘Lemoncello’ from the word jumble and ‘open sesame’ on his front door. It’s backward. ‘I need to hear myself think!’ ”

  “What does it mean?”

  “That we need to race back to the library!”

  “Why?”

  Kyle was so glad he’d just done that school report on Mr. Lemoncello.

  “His childhood home was so crowded and noisy, the public library was the only place where the twelve-year-old Luigi could ‘hear himself think’ and work on his game ideas!”

  “Excellent research analysis, Kyle Keeley!”

  They hopped onto their bikes and, pumping hard, made it back to the library in record time. When they bounded up the front steps and into the lobby, Mr. Lemoncello wasn’t there.

  But his hologram generated by the Nonfictionator was.

  “Do you like the semitransparent me?” asked the Lemoncello illusion. “The real me used the three-D camera hidden inside the beak of a ceramic raven in his office to pose for me. I think I look a lot like me, don’t you? The ear, the eye, and the arm. I sound like me, too, because that was a book title I just cleverly dropped into my speech.”

  “Um, this is all great, Mr., uh, Fake Lemoncello,” said Kyle. “But we found a clue at your childhood home that sent us back here….”

  “As it should’ve!” replied the hologram. “There is one fascinating fact missing from my database, because, well, I’m embarrassed to say, the real Mr. Lemoncello forgot to tell the equally real Mr. Raymo the inspiration for my very first board game.”

  “Your family!” said Kyle, surprised at how easy the answer was.

  “Can you give me na
mes? Because as a data-driven interactive device, I need details, specifics, and, most important, data!”

  “Come on,” Kyle said to Abia. “We’ll look upstairs. The Lemoncello-abilia Room. There’s probably a family scrapbook or Bible with all the names listed inside it.”

  Kyle and Abia hurried up the grand staircase to the second floor and made their way around the balcony to a spiral staircase they could take to the third floor.

  They burst into the Lemoncello-abilia Room, which was cluttered with a mishmash of knickknacks and souvenirs from Mr. Lemoncello’s past.

  “Dig in!” said Kyle as he started pawing his way through the piles of unorganized junk. It was more cluttered than his grandmother’s attic (which was more cluttered than his grandfather’s workbench). Kyle found a stack of antique comic books. A bag full of brightly colored tiddledywinks. A snow globe from the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

  “Is this the game referred to in Mr. Lemoncello’s question?” asked Abia as she pulled out a long, slender box that had been jammed between two big cardboard crates.

  “No,” said Kyle. “Mr. Lemoncello’s game is called Family Frenzy, not Family Frolic. There’s no Imagination Factory logo in the corner, either. That’s not even a Lemoncello game.”

  “So what is it doing in the Lemoncello-abilia Room?”

  “Good question.”

  Curious, Kyle studied the box top. There was a photo-graph of a young woman with a bright smile, heavy black eye makeup, and blond hair that curled in to brush her apple cheeks. The words “Family Frolic” bounced across the box in letters that reminded Kyle of the titles from that 1960s TV show Gilligan’s Island, which he’d checked out on YouTube after hearing Emily Dickinson sing her poem.

  “Have fun frolicking with my groovy family!” was written in a cartoon balloon coming out of the blond lady’s smile.

  Kyle lifted off the lid and unfolded the game board.

  “Wow. It looks almost exactly like Family Frenzy. See, there’s the apartment building, the church, and the dog pound. Here’s Millionaire’s Mansion. Huh. One of the playing pieces is a red boot. Another is a pouncing cat.”

  “Those are both in Family Frenzy, are they not?” asked Abia.

  “Yeah,” said Kyle as he riffled through the deck of game cards.

  While he did that, Abia examined the inside of the box top.

  “You are assessed fifty dollars for sewer repairs,” said Kyle, reading the top card. “There’s one just like that in Family Frenzy. Somebody stole Mr. Lemoncello’s idea!”

  “When did Family Frenzy first come out?” asked Abia.

  “I don’t know, exactly.” Kyle looked around the room and saw a dusty heap of antique Lemoncello board games, including a classic edition of Family Frenzy.

  He opened the game and read the information printed inside the box lid. “Copyright Luigi L. Lemoncello, 1974.”

  Abia had a sad look on her face.

  “What?” asked Kyle. “What’s wrong?”

  Abia read what was printed inside the lid of the Family Frolic box: “Family Frolic. Copyright Irma Hirschman, 1969.”

  “Impossible,” said Kyle. “That was five years before Mr. Lemoncello invented it.”

  “Exactly,” said Abia. “Perhaps, given his devotion to the truth, this is the answer Mr. Lemoncello wanted us to find—the one he was too ‘embarrassed’ to tell Mr. Raymo. The inspiration for his first game may very well have been a game created five years earlier by Irma Hirschman.”

  “What? You think he stole the idea from her? That Mr. Lemoncello made his first millions with someone else’s game?”

  “I think we need to do more research to learn the truth. Or we could race back downstairs and give our first answer: It seems the inspiration for Family Frenzy was Family Frolic, a game created by a woman named Irma Hirschman in 1969.”

  “But that can’t be true,” said Kyle. “Can it?”

  While Kyle and Abia sat in the Lemoncello-abilia Room contemplating their next move, Akimi and Angus came flying through the door.

  They were both out of breath from running so hard.

  “Your clues sent you up here, too?” asked Akimi.

  “Yeah,” said Kyle as he mindlessly set up the playing pieces and cards for Family Frenzy on what had once been the Lemoncellos’ kitchen table. He’d placed the Lemoncello board game next to Irma Hirschman’s Family Frolic so he could make a detailed, side-by-side comparison.

  “Did y’all find the answer?” asked Angus.

  “Maybe,” said Abia, handing the Family Frolic box lid to Akimi and Angus.

  “We don’t like what we found,” added Kyle.

  Akimi flipped the Family Frolic lid back and forth a few times.

  “Why are you guys even bothering with this game?” she asked. “It’s not a Lemoncello. It’s from some bubble-haired blond lady named Irma Hirschman. She looks like she’s going to a 1960s costume party as Doris Day.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Abia.

  “We had a sixties theme at school a couple years ago. I wore tie-dye. Haley Daley went as Doris Day.”

  Akimi set down the box top and stared at Kyle, who had his head in his hands while he studied the two game boards.

  “Oh-kay,” she said. “You’re certainly acting weird today. You needed to stop and play some ‘groovy’ 1960s game in the middle of our Fabulous Fact-Finding Frenzy because…?”

  “I believe Kyle Keeley needs some time to think,” said Abia.

  “Oh, really?” scoffed Angus. “Well, we need a list of names for the rest of Luigi’s brothers and sisters. His aunt gave us Massimo, Francesca, and Fabio at the apartment.”

  “We need six more,” said Akimi. “Plus, his father’s and mother’s names.”

  “His aunt told us his mom’s name was Angelica,” added Angus. “But, like all good researchers, we want to verify her statement with a second source.”

  “There might be a family Bible over there in that stack of books,” said Kyle, gesturing limply, his eyes still glued to the two game boards.

  “Good idea,” said Angus. “A lot of families inscribe the names of their children and ancestors in the front of a Bible on a family tree.”

  Akimi and Angus rushed to the stack of books.

  And froze.

  “Wait a dadgum second,” said Angus. “If you two know where and how to find the answer, plus you had a ten-minute jump on us, why didn’t you just go ahead, jot down what was in the Lemoncello family tree, and win this thing?”

  “They’re trying to fake us out!” said Akimi. “Very clever, Kyle. Come on—for years you’ve told me Mr. Lemoncello based his first game on his big, crazy Italian family. If that’s the right answer, why didn’t you guys do the Bible family tree thing yourselves?”

  Kyle didn’t answer. He robotically rolled some dice and moved the boot token around the Family Frolic board.

  “He even got the boot from her,” he mumbled. “There has to be some mistake. Mr. Lemoncello would never do something like that….”

  “Hello?” said Akimi. “Earth to Kyle. What are you mumbling about?”

  Abia sighed. “We are afraid,” she said, “that ‘Mr. Lemoncello’s family’—with a list of the names of his parents, brothers, and sisters—may not be the correct answer to the question ‘Who or what was the inspiration for his very first board game?’ ”

  She picked up the lid for Family Frolic that Akimi had dropped.

  “It appears as if Mr. Lemoncello may have received the inspiration for his game from a very similar game that was invented five years earlier by a woman named Irma Hirschman, who apparently looked like this Doris Day you spoke of.”

  “He stole the idea?” said Angus.

  “So it would seem,” said Abia.

  “No,” said Kyle. “It’s not right.”

  “Well, duh,” said Angus. “That’s why they call stealing stuff a crime!”

  “But Mr. Lemoncello wouldn’t do that. He has so many ideas of hi
s own. He doesn’t need to steal them from somebody else….”

  “Akimi?” said Angus. “What the heck are we waiting for?”

  “Hang on,” said Kyle, snapping out of his funk. “This could ruin Mr. Lemoncello.”

  “So?” said Angus. “Facts are facts. It’s like that deal with Thomas Edison and the lightbulb.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions,” said Kyle.

  Akimi couldn’t help but smile. “Something you know how to do better than anybody, Kyle.”

  “True. But…”

  “But what?” said Angus.

  “Well, what if Mr. Lemoncello isn’t the one who put this board game in this room? What if somebody did it just to make him look bad? We need to dig deeper.”

  “No. We don’t,” said Angus. “We need to win! Come on, Akimi.”

  She didn’t budge. “Kyle is right. Stealing ideas? Plagiarism? Those are major accusations, Angus. We could destroy Mr. Lemoncello, his game company, this library—everything.”

  “But,” said Angus, “what if it is true?”

  “What if it’s not?” demanded Kyle. “We owe it to Mr. Lemoncello to examine all the facts, not just a box lid. The way I see it, he’s innocent until totally proven guilty. We should ask for a delay so we can do more research.”

  “If both teams ask for a postponement,” said Akimi, “I bet they’ll give it to us.”

  “And then what?” said Angus.

  “The four of us investigate further,” said Abia.

  “And when the four of us find the truth,” asked Angus, “who gets to race back here, give the correct answer, and win the game?”

  Kyle looked at Abia.

  She nodded.

  He turned back to face Angus and Akimi.

  “You guys,” he said.

  “Right here’s your answer,” said Angus.

  The four remaining data dashers had gone into the Young Adult Room on the third floor to use one of the computers.

  “Justice for Irma dot org. The whole ugly story is laid out for everybody to see.”

  Kyle looked at the screen. There was a grainy black-and-white photo of a sweet little old lady wearing granny glasses and an apron over a checked gingham dress. Her gray hair was pinned up in a bun shaped like a cheese Danish.