by Penny Warner
“I thought I got my looks from you,” Cody said, stuffing the lunch and the money into her backpack.
“Oh, no, you can thank your dad for your adorable freckles and red hair.”
Even though her mother and father were divorced, they still got along, which was a relief. They’d just gone their separate ways, for reasons Cody didn’t fully understand. Her dad was an attorney—a public defender—and before the split, her parents had often argued about criminal justice matters. She figured that was probably the reason they no longer lived together. But her dad was almost as involved in Tana’s and her lives as her mother. Yet Cody didn’t enjoy spending every other weekend with her dad. Not that she didn’t love her time with him—they always did something fun, like go to the zoo, eat weird foods, or check out the animal skeletons at the University of California campus lab. But it was hard leaving her main home, her cozy bedroom, and her neighborhood friends for her dad’s across-town condo.
Cody drank her juice and grabbed the bagel that was waiting for her, then headed for the front door with her backpack.
“Have fun on the Rock!” Mrs. Jones called. “And be good. I don’t want you to end up in solitary confinement.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Cody called back from the front door. “I’ll escape. I’ve got a nail file and a compass in my backpack. I should be home by Christmas.”
“Don’t forget your wet suit. It’s a mile-and-a-half-long swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco in fifty-degree water.”
“I’ll add an inflatable—!” She was cut off by Tana’s running up and hugging her good-bye.
“I love you,” she signed.
“Me, too,” Cody signed back.
Cody closed the door behind her, still smiling at her mother’s good-bye. As a cop, Mrs. Jones was often serious and strict, but she loved to play games with Cody, especially word games like Bananagrams, Scrabble, and Wacky Words. Every day she’d find a word game that her mother had left in her lunch bag. She peeked in the bag and pulled out today’s puzzle—a Wacky Word. Inside a box was a rebus-type puzzle. Cody had to figure out how the words related to the box to figure out the answer.
Code Buster’s Solution found on this page.
Cody figured it out quickly, smiling at how the puzzle related to her field trip, then tucked it back in her lunch bag to share with the other Code Busters.
As was her habit, Cody stopped by the ash tree in her front yard to check the secret compartment—a hidden knothole the size of her fist. Each of the Code Busters had a secret hiding place where they could receive coded messages from one another. M.E.’s was in her flower box. Quinn’s was in his doghouse. And Luke found his messages under the front porch of the house where he lived with his grand-mère.
Today the knothole was empty. Cody felt a little disappointment that there wasn’t a secret note for her, but since they were all going on a field trip, she wasn’t surprised.
“Cody!” her mother called from the porch. “Did you drop this?” Her mother held up a scrap of paper. “I found it on the mat.”
Cody ran back and took the paper from her mom.
She unfolded it, revealing a message inside. She noticed the note had been torn—the right side and the bottom side had ragged edges. She looked over the letters on the remaining piece of paper, typed in a bold font.
“Is that another one of your Code Buster secret messages?” her mother asked.
“I guess so,” Cody said, although the Code Busters had never left notes on the porch before. She glanced around to see if she could spot any of her friends lurking nearby.
Maybe the note was from Matt the Brat. He was always snooping around the Code Busters, spying on them and trying to intercept their messages. Maybe he had even sent the strange e-mail that Cody had received last night. He was always up to something.
She looked at the message again. Was this some kind of code? It sure looked like it. But why write a message, tear it up, and leave it on the porch? It made no sense.
“Cody!”
M.E. was walking toward her, wearing another one of her arty outfits. Today she had on bell-bottom jeans covered with purple-and-blue embroidered flowers, and a pink top with a rhinestone heart on the front. Purple striped socks and red Converse shoes covered her feet, the shoelaces crisscrossed backward so they tied at the toe. In spite of the winter chill, she’d wrapped her denim jacket around her waist instead of putting it on.
“Did you get a message, too?” M.E. asked when she reached Cody’s front yard.
Cody looked at her friend. “You got one?”
“Yeah, I found it on my front porch this morning. It was ripped in half. I couldn’t really read it.” M.E. dug the note out of her jeans pocket and showed it to her.
Cody took the note and tried to read it out loud, but like her own message, it didn’t make any sense. And it had been torn at the top and right-hand side. It said:
“What’s it supposed to mean?” Cody asked.
“I was hoping you’d know,” M.E. said, her face crestfallen with disappointment. “Isn’t it the same as yours?”
Cody shook her head. She held up her note to M.E.’s message to compare.
“It still doesn’t make any sense,” M.E. said. “Look, yours is torn, too.”
Cody examined the two torn sides of both notes and tried to match the torn bottom of her note to the torn top of M.E.’s.
Bingo. A match.
“They obviously came from the same sheet of paper. See, they’ve been torn in half right here.” She pointed to the ragged right sides of both notes. “And whoever wrote it used the same font. But I still can’t make out the message.”
Cody and M.E. looked at each other.
“The boys!” Cody said.
“They probably have the other pieces of the message!” M.E. added.
“I’ll bet this is Quinn’s doing. He loves leaving messages for us to solve. He probably—”
“Dakota Jones!” Cody’s mother’s voice cut her off.
Cody spun around to see her mother standing at the doorway, one hand holding Tana’s hand, the other on her hip. “You’re going to be late for school! Get going!”
In all the excitement of finding the message, Cody had lost track of the time. “Sorry, Mom!” she said. She waved ’bye to Tana and finger-spelled,
Code Buster’s Key and Solution found on this page, this page.
Then Cody hurried down the street toward Berkeley Cooperative Middle School. M.E. had to jog along at Cody’s side to keep up with her long strides.
“We’ll talk to Quinn and Luke at recess and find out what this is all about,” Cody said. “I’m sure Quinn is up to something.” Quinn often left cryptic notes for them, usually to arrange meetings at the clubhouse after school. No doubt this was another of his puzzles to solve, summoning the kids together.
“Wait a minute,” M.E. said. “We don’t have recess today. We’re going to Alcatraz!”
“Oh yeah, I forgot,” Cody said. “Well, we can talk to them on the bus ride over. Maybe the message has something to do with the field trip—like that e-mail I got last night.”
She suddenly felt a chill run down her spine. It could have been the cold, but she suspected it was something else.
What if the notes weren’t from Quinn or Luke?
Cody pulled out the two messages and studied them in class, while Ms. Stadelhofer—Ms. Stad, as the kids called her—took roll.
Cody was usually good at solving codes and puzzles, but this one had her stumped—and frustrated. If it came from Quinn, he’d be pleased that she hadn’t been able to decipher the message.
But if it wasn’t from Quinn …
She looked it over again. Were some letters missing? Words missing? Why was the letter B capitalized one time but not the other time? Why were the letters y and B spaced by themselves?
Cody couldn’t wait to meet up with Quinn and Luke to see if they had other parts to the message.
“Class,” Ms. Stad
elhofer said in her attention-getting voice. Her puffy brown hair framed her round face, and her blue eyes matched her themed vest—the San Francisco city skyline, complete with an embroidered Alcatraz resting under the Golden Gate Bridge. “Do you all have your permission slips? Lunches? Money for souvenirs?”
Cody could tell everyone was excited about the field trip to Alcatraz. The prison had once been home to the infamous gangsters Al “Scarface” Capone, Alvin “Creepy” Carpis, and Diamond Dave. Cody loved the gangsters’ nicknames. They were kind of like the Code Busters’ code names—Kuel-Dude for Luke (Kuel was an anagram of his first name), Lock&Key for Quinn (his last name was Kee), Em-me for M.E., and CodeRed for Cody’s name and her red hair.
She’d once seen a movie on TV about Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” who had raised birds in his prison cell. While he had seemed like a gentle animal lover, he had also been a violent killer. How could someone so evil be so kind to birds? she’d wondered. When she asked her mother about him, not even Mrs. Jones could explain the Birdman’s two-sided personality. That was a real mystery.
“Students,” Ms. Stad said, pulling Cody out of her thoughts. “Please say hello to the parents who have so kindly agreed to chaperone our trip to Alcatraz.” The teacher gestured toward the classroom door as four parents shuffled into the room—two women (one who looked familiar) and two men. Cody caught her breath when she saw the last parent enter.
“Dad!” she shrieked. Everyone in class turned to her. She blushed.
He waved at her. Her face turned even hotter, and she tried to shrink back into her desk.
What was he doing here? He hadn’t said a word about coming! A little warning would have been nice. Cody wasn’t sure she liked the idea of her father tagging along. What if she did something wrong and got in trouble, right in front of him?
Or worse, what if he did something to embarrass her, like tell one of his lame jokes or argue with the teacher like he did in court? Although he was an attorney, her dad could be a goofball sometimes. And he had a tendency to hover when she needed some space.
Cody turned around and gave M.E. a wide-eyed look of desperation. M.E. got the message and pressed her lips together sympathetically. Oh, well. She’d just have to make the best of it. She only hoped he didn’t try to hold her hand when they crossed the street or use his pet nickname for her—“Punkin.”
After Ms. Stad introduced each parent, she told the students to put on their name tags and line up at the door. Once everyone was quiet, she led the single-file line to the bus. The parents brought up the rear. Halfway to the bus Cody stepped out of line to let the other students go by and waited until her dad caught up with her.
“Dad!” she whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“Hi, Punkin,” he said. He’d called her that ever since she was a baby, thanks to her red hair. Punkin was also the name she’d given a cat she’d rescued from Skeleton Man’s house, hoping her dad would stop calling her that. So far it hadn’t worked.
“Don’t call me that!” she said, glancing around to see whether anyone had heard him.
Mr. Jones grinned. “Sorry, I promise to behave. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to surprise you.”
“Well, you did!” Cody’s green eyes flared.
“You know,” her dad said, “I took a trip to Alcatraz when I was a kid, many years ago. I thought it would be interesting to see the place again. Back then it was pretty spooky. It made me think about how awful it must have been for the prisoners—cold, damp, foggy, isolated. I had nightmares about solitary confinement after that trip. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I became a public defender.”
Cody’s discomfort at having her dad along softened. She was proud of him—he’d kept a lot of innocent people out of prison, while her mom had put a lot of criminals behind bars. She just wished he’d stop hovering over her and stop calling her “Punkin” in front of other people.
They climbed aboard the big yellow bus. Ms. Stad told them to sit wherever they wanted for the ride over, rather than assigning them seats. “After all,” she said, “this is supposed to be fun as well as educational, so as long as you behave, you may sit with your friends. Otherwise, it’s back to alphabetical order.”
M.E. had saved Cody a seat, right in front of Luke and Quinn, whose teacher was Mr. de Lannoy. Cody couldn’t wait to show them the messages she and M.E. had received. As soon as the bus left the school parking lot, she pulled out the notes and turned to show them to the boys.
“Look what we found on our front porches,” Cody said softly so the other kids sitting nearby wouldn’t hear. Luckily, Matt the Brat had taken a seat at the front of the bus and was currently annoying the bus driver. “Did you do this, Quinn?” She passed the notes over to him so he could have a closer look.
Quinn’s eyes widened as he glanced over the messages. He rustled through his backpack until he found what he was looking for—another folded note. Excited, Cody looked it over. It, too, was torn, this time at the top and left side.
“ ‘Lock B? Tween two seats?’ ” Cody said.
“Yeah, I know,” Quinn said. “It makes about as much sense as yours.”
Luke pulled a piece of paper from a pocket in his oversized skater shorts and smoothed it open. “I got one, too. But it’s even more confusing than yours.” He showed it to the others. This one was torn on the left side like Quinn’s, but at the bottom instead of the top.
“Sound like anything to you?” Luke asked.
“Look,” Cody said, pointing to the papers. “All four notes have two torn sides. Obviously, these are part of the same note. Let’s piece them together.”
Quinn got out a notebook to use as a flat surface and placed his piece of paper on it. He set Cody’s note next to it and tried to match the two torn sides. No match. He moved his piece next to M.E.’s.
“They go together!” M.E. squealed.
“Shh!” Quinn said. He took Luke’s piece and lined it up next to Cody’s. Another match.
Luke read it aloud, running some of the separated letters together to form words:
“On the Rock, B ware
When you get 2 cell block B
Look B tween 2 seats”
“Hey,” M.E. said, “it’s like a haiku—that type of poetry that comes from Japan. Each line uses a specific number of syllables—five in the first line, seven in the second, and then five again.”
“So what does it mean?” Quinn asked.
“And why are there so many capital Bs, like B ware, cell block B, and B tween?” Luke asked.
“You really sure you didn’t write this, Quinn, as some sort of game?” Cody eyed him suspiciously.
“No, I swear. I found it on my porch.”
Satisfied, Cody copied the message into her Code Busters notebook so she could study it more. She twisted back in her seat and read over the lines again, trying to decode the meaning.
“On the Rock …” Did that refer to Alcatraz, also known as the Rock?
“B ware” was obviously “beware.” But why the capital B?
“When you get 2 cell block B …” That had to mean Alcatraz.
“Look B tween 2 seats …” Between two seats? What kind of seats? Did it have something to do with the electric chair? Did the prison even have an electric chair? Cody shivered at the thought. That was not something Cody was eager to see on this field trip. It was just too gruesome.
Before she could work on the message some more, the bus pulled to a stop. Cody had been so absorbed in trying to decipher the note, she’d lost track of time and was surprised to see they had arrived at the parking lot of the ferry service to Alcatraz. She could smell the bay—it smelled fishy—and scrunched up her nose. Looking through the grimy school-bus window, she spotted one of the ferries that would take them to the fog-covered island. Those boats were the only way to—and from—Alcatraz prison.
“Attention, students,” Ms. Stad called out. “As you leave the bus, I’ll g
ive you a puzzle to solve about some of the prisoners who lived on the Rock. They’re cryptograms, which means each letter has been substituted by another letter in the alphabet. Once you figure out a couple of the letters, you should be able to crack the code and read the names of the convicts, because the letter substitutes stay the same throughout the puzzle. But there’s a catch. One of these guys did not spend time on Alcatraz. So after you crack the code, figure out which one doesn’t belong, then give me your answer for extra credit.”
“Cool,” Quinn said. “This is sort of like the ABC code or Caesar’s cipher, only with letters instead of numbers. Should be easy.”
Cody looked at the sheet the teacher had just passed out to the students. Quinn was right; this was going to be easy. She looked at the name on top—the first name was two letters. Duh—that was obviously AL. She wrote the letter A under the T, then the letter L under the Q. From there, she translated all the T and Q letters to A and L. Letter by letter she solved the puzzle.
TQ ETJGZO
FTEALZO KVZ BOQQX
EPOOJX ETPJLN
HLPRFTZ
RGE HTPBOP
JPODDX HGX CQGXR
Code Buster’s Key and Solution found on this page, this page.
Now, all she had to do was figure out which one of the convicts wasn’t at Alcatraz. She remembered Ms. Stad talking about all of them—except one: Pretty Boy Floyd. He had to be the one missing from the Rock.
Cody glanced at her co–Code Busters. They, too, had solved the puzzle.
She handed her paper to Ms. Stad as she stepped out of the bus, then stared out at the small island and wondered about the prisoners. Alcatraz might be an interesting place to visit, but the idea of staying there permanently made Cody break out into goose bumps.
The fishy smell grew stronger as Cody stepped off the bus at Pier 33 in San Francisco. Berkeley had its unique odors, mostly ethnic foods that represented the city’s cultural diversity, but nothing like this. She zipped up her jacket, pulled her hood over her head, and stuck her hands into her pockets. Brrr. The wind coming off the bay chilled her to the bone, and she wished she’d worn a heavier jacket.
