The Unbreakable Code

by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman

  Emily scurried to the back, up the metal stairs, and over to the stacks of boxes labeled for decorations. Several were labeled CHRISTMAS/HANUKKAH, and there were THANKSGIVING and BACK TO SCHOOL. Finally she spotted one labeled NEW YEAR/CHINESE, just as the entrance bells chimed again. Or was that a sound in the store music? The jazz Hollister played through the speaker system was louder up here, but she was pretty sure that far-off tinkling was from the door. Mr. Quisling couldn’t be leaving already, could he? Emily moved to the half wall that bordered the storage area, but most of the store was obscured from her view.

  Emily hurried back to the bins. Of course the one she needed was underneath three others. She lifted off the first one and placed it on the ground. The bells chimed for sure this time, and Emily hoped it was just a busy morning with customers arriving. As quickly as she could, she moved the rest of the boxes and finally unsnapped the lid of the New Year/Chinese decorations. She shifted through the contents, pulling bagged items out to read Hollister’s handwriting on the masking tape labels. No paper dragon. The doors chimed again. She snapped the lid back on but left the bins in disarray. She’d restack them later. She was about to head down the stairs when she heard the pop of a balloon. At least that’s what it sounded like. But there weren’t any balloons in the store.

  At the top of the stairs, she called haltingly, “Charlie?”

  As if in response, she heard the door chimes again, loud and clear, the way they sounded when the door got opened or shut forcefully. Then Emily heard something like the hiss of an enormous snake, and she froze. What could that be? From her vantage point, the store looked empty, but that was impossible. Charlie, at least, was somewhere. She gripped the railing and hesitantly placed her feet step by step down the stairs. Every movement was an argument between her body wanting her to cower in the Treehouse and her mind urging her forward.

  At the bottom, a switch flipped in her nose and the dusty smells of paper and books were tainted by something that reminded her of burnt popcorn. She dashed to the front of the store. Even before she got there, she could see a hazy cloud at the end of the bookcases, twisting and turning around itself into a dark plume.

  Emily’s throat tightened, and she coughed, maybe more from the suggestion of smoke than the actual smoke. The front of the store was completely empty.

  “Charlie?” Her voice came out in a whisper.

  Flames licked against the tote bag display, the bottom bags blackening from a fire. Her breath zipped up inside. Her limbs were sandbags. Where did Hollister keep an extinguisher? What did you throw on the fire if you didn’t have an extinguisher? Water? Should she run all the way to the bathroom in the back to get that? How quickly did a fire get out of control? Should she stay in the store and pick up the phone so help could get there as soon as possible, or should she run outside and find another phone?

  Why wasn’t somebody here to help her?

  Emily pressed the crook of her elbow to her mouth and nose, one cough turning into a succession. She remembered hearing you could smother a fire with a blanket, so with her free hand, she grabbed a folded Great Gatsby T-shirt from a display and hurled it toward the blaze, hoping to smother it, but the fire’s flickering arms only snapped around it.

  She stepped forward and hurled another shirt, then retreated, coughing into her elbow. The fire crackled, laughing at her, and pulled itself up the side of the bookcase, then leaped from the tote bags to the greeting cards.

  Her eyes stung. Smoke streamed upward, like a reverse waterfall flowing to the ceiling. She couldn’t believe how rapidly it filled the front of the store. She had to leave. With her nose still pressed to her elbow, Emily ran bent over, because the air was less smoky down low. She hit the door with her shoulder and pushed it open, the bells jangling wildly.

  She expected relief when she stumbled outside, but the day was warm and breezeless. It was like stepping from a hot shower into a humid room. Her coughs battled with each other. A deliveryman raised the back door of his truck with a thunderous rumble and dropped the ramp with a clank. He was lifting a crate onto a handcart when Emily lunged forward, slapping her hand on the floor of the cargo area to get his attention.

  Her voice came out in a rasp—“Fire.” The man squinted at her, uncertain, and she jabbed her finger toward Hollister’s large front window.

  He leaned out the truck, looking to the bookstore, swore, and dropped the crate with a boom. Clear liquid leaked through the cracks, drip-dripping over the lip of the van. The man swore again and tugged a phone from his pocket. Emily didn’t wait for him to dial. She ran into the café, elbow folded over her mouth as she erupted in another coughing attack. She dropped her arm and forced the words to scratch their way out of her throat: “Fire! The bookstore is on fire!”

  CHAPTER

  28

  EMILY STOOD in the middle of a crowd of onlookers who had gathered outside Hollister’s store, but she’d never felt more alone. She shivered, even in the warmth of the sunshine. Someone draped a blanket over her shoulders.

  Hollister’s main window cracked, and Emily watched numbly as a triangular pane of glass dropped. The group around her collectively jumped back, but she didn’t move. She didn’t even feel like she was actually there on the street anymore.

  The in-store sprinkler system had kicked on, and through the broken gap of window she could hear water hiss in its battle with fire. There were sirens, and emergency responders got there quickly. Or was it slowly? Her perspective of time wasn’t working right.

  A paramedic looked Emily over. A man with the fire department spoke with her. She felt useless not being able to give any sort of insight into why the fire began.

  “I heard a sound,” she said.

  “Could you describe it?” the detective asked.

  She tried to remember, but it was difficult to recall amid the hum of idling vehicles, the background medley of excited and agitated and hushed voices, and the crunch of firefighters’ boots stepping on shards of glass from the piece that had splintered on the sidewalk.

  “There was a pop, I think, and then a kind of … sizzling sound.”

  “Sizzling?”

  “Or crinkling. With a sizzle. Like paper when you toss it in a fireplace.”

  The detective nodded succinctly, and Emily realized how unhelpful her answer must be. Of course a bookstore fire would sound like paper burning.

  “It was more than that, though—it was…” Emily studied her clasped hands. “I can’t remember,” she said.

  The detective placed a firm hand on her shoulder. “You did just fine. You’ve been a great help.”

  Emily spotted Hollister walking up the street from more than a block away, and her heart felt like it had been plunged in ice water. His brown skin shone with sweat, and his familiar side-to-side sway looked so upbeat it made her eyes tear up. He tilted his head in a wondering kind of way, focused on the flashing lights and double-parked vehicles. They would have passed him as he came back to the bookstore. She imagined how he might have been curious about them at first in that distant sort of way where you feel bad for the strangers who must be on the end of the emergency call, and then when he saw they were parked in the street right by his store, his concern probably tightened to worry that a friend was in trouble. When Hollister stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, Emily knew he had realized it was his store that was the emergency. She would never forget that moment.

  The second thing Emily would never forget was noticing the door next to the bookstore. She must have walked by it a hundred times on her way to and from school without giving it a second glance. After the fire, it was propped open and revealed a staircase. Emily realized it was the entrance to the apartments overhead. She didn’t know what that said about her that she’d been worried about the books and Hollister, who hadn’t even been there, but hadn’t given any thought to the people who lived upstairs.

  The authorities wanted to talk to her parent or guardian before she left, so Emily sat n
ext door in the café waiting for her family to arrive. Her parents had been across the city with Matthew at the beach. Now that she was sitting in a tranquil café with a woman complaining about the pickles on her sandwich and an old doo-wop song on the radio, she could clearly picture Hollister’s fire extinguisher around the corner from the front counter, feet from where she’d been standing if she had looked in the right direction.

  It twisted Emily’s insides to relive everything. Maybe if she had done something different, the fire wouldn’t have happened.

  She thought about the lightbulb near the front of the store that always flickered. Every time she’d been in Hollister’s store, she’d noticed that lightbulb, but never once pointed it out to him. He didn’t have the best vision—maybe he’d never noticed. Could the flickering lightbulb have sent off a spark that started the fire?

  Emily had overheard a firefighter say the fire had been contained before it spread all the way to the back, which sounded like a good thing, but then he also said something about damage from smoke and the in-store sprinklers. She wished she’d grabbed something for Hollister, maybe his notebook from under the front counter or the framed photo from the day he and Mr. Griswold first opened the store back in the ’70s.

  Someone placed a glass of water in front of Emily, breaking her from her reverie. She looked up to see Charlie. Her eyes narrowed. “Why did you leave the store?” she demanded.

  He kept his eyes on the glass. “I … I’m sorry,” he said. “I left because…” Charlie looked out the window. Hollister paced by, a cell phone pressed to his ear.

  “I had to feed my meter,” Charlie said meekly. “I didn’t think I would be gone long. And I didn’t expect…” Charlie wiped droplets of condensation from the side of the glass and left his sentence unfinished. “Anyway.” He slid the glass closer to Emily and said, “In case you’re thirsty,” before walking away.

  Emily stood up from the table and went outside. Maybe it wasn’t fair to be mad at Charlie, but she shouldn’t have had to face that fire alone.

  Hollister was off his phone, sitting on the curb between two parked cars, his head in his hands. She was simultaneously compelled to go sit next to him and afraid to. She worried she had let him down, even though the first thing he had done after he ran to his store was find her and make sure she was okay.

  All Emily could think about as she looked at Hollister’s bent form were her favorite things in his shop. The purple chair that curved perfectly around her when she sank into it to read a book. The cat-shaped pillow that Hollister perched on top of a bookshelf, which occasionally tricked people into thinking it was a real cat. The guest book signed by visiting authors. The bookmark shaped like Herb Caen that she and James moved around the store to surprise browsers. Where had they last hidden Herb?

  She wanted to say something to make Hollister feel better, but it was hard to offer hope when you felt hopeless.

  Someone said her name, and she jumped to see James standing beside her, his face slack with shock. Normally, the sight of Steve standing at attention filled her with comfort and smiles, but now it made her want to crumple up and cry. She and James should be making paper lanterns to hang in Hollister’s window display, not watching firefighters stomp in and out the front door.

  “There was a fire?” James said when she reached him. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said.

  A van double-parked behind one of the emergency vehicles with the letters KSAN on the side. Out jumped the woman reporter who had been at the Poe book launch party and her cameraman. A few of the people lingering in the crowd outside the barricade recognized the reporter and greeted her. It was jarring to hear people coo praise and the reporter reply, “Thank you! You look great in person, too!”

  The reporter talked conversationally with some of the bystanders. Were you here when it happened? Did you see anything?

  A fireman walked out of Hollister’s store holding a clear bag with a blackened lump inside.

  “This one might be evidence,” he called to the detective who had talked to Emily earlier.

  The reporter stood on her tiptoes, not at all shy about trying to see. “What is that?” she called over to the fireman. “Is it what I think it is?” But he went back inside without answering.

  “What did he mean by evidence?” Emily said to James. “Isn’t that something you need to prove a crime?”

  The reporter overheard her and replied, “How else would you categorize arson if not a crime?”

  “Arson?” Emily felt a little dizzy. “You think someone set this fire on purpose?”

  “If what’s in that bag is what I think it is, then I most definitely think this was arson.”

  James asked in a low and halting voice, “What … what do you think is in the bag?”

  “I think it’s a fireproof pouch holding a copy of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain,” the reporter replied.

  CHAPTER

  29

  “IT’S FIREPROOF?” James said. Emily knew he was picturing the green pouch they had found at the redwood park. Well, that Mr. Quisling had found. They had kept the book in the pouch in case it was something that their teacher and Coolbrith always included in their book trading. They hadn’t known it was fireproof.

  The reporter didn’t understand James was familiar with the pouch, of course, so she said, “Amazing what they can make nowadays, isn’t it? This will be the fourth one to survive an otherwise random”—she used air quotes when she said random—“fire in the last several months.”

  Emily was too stunned to say anything.

  “Four fires?” James asked.

  “That I’m aware of.” The reporter ticked names off her fingers. “The pier at the Ferry Building, one in the Mission, one at Washington Square, and now here at Hollister’s. This is the first indoor fire, though. The others didn’t cause personal damage. I wonder if that means the arsonist is getting bolder … or more desperate.” The reporter chewed on her pen, mulling this over.

  “The pier at the Ferry Building?” Emily repeated. “A copy of Tom Sawyer survived a fire there? In October?”

  The reporter looked surprised. “How did you know it was in October? None of the media outlets picked up the story. At least I didn’t think any did.” She frowned, surveying the crowd loitering outside Hollister’s bookstore as if a traitor were among them.

  Last October, Mr. Quisling had poached the copy of Tom Sawyer Emily had hunted at the Ferry Building. At least she’d assumed he’d poached it, because it wasn’t there when Emily and James had arrived. She remembered that she had also flagged that post in order to make it worth more points, so Mr. Quisling had known someone else was on the hunt for it. Which, now that she knew he needed to find that particular edition in order to decipher the message from Coolbrith, she could imagine her flagging the book would prompt him to seek it out as soon as possible.

  Emily assumed one of the door jingles she’d heard while up in the Treehouse had been Mr. Quisling leaving the store. She figured he’d found their hidden copy of Tom Sawyer, decoded the fake Coolbirth message, and then left. Did he have any idea about the fire? Had the same sequence of events happened with the earlier copies of Tom Sawyer that he had found?

  When she got home, Emily was going to check Book Scavenger to see if the hiding places for Coolbrith and Babbage’s books matched the fires the reporter had just listed. She mentally recited the locations to herself so she wouldn’t forget: Ferry Building, Mission, Washington Square, and Hollister’s.

  “What about the redwood park? Downtown?” Emily asked. “Was there a fire there?”

  The reporter looked at her very oddly. “No. Why would you ask that?”

  Emily felt as if she were toeing the edge of a trap. To her relief, she heard her mother calling her. She turned to see her family rushing down the sidewalk from wherever they had parked the minivan. Her parents grouped her into a hug; Matthew stood back and offered a good-natured eye roll at their over-the-to
p affection. Her dad went to talk to an officer while her mother stood behind Emily, arms wrapped firmly across her shoulders.

  Matthew dropped next to Hollister on the curb. Her brother put a hand on Hollister’s shoulder and said something. Hollister nodded, patted Matthew’s knee. Matthew said something else that made Hollister tip his head back and laugh. Emily smiled at the sound of it and marveled at how her brother could do that: jump into a situation and do or say something without any second-guessing. So often his impulsive actions provoked positive responses. If her brother had been the one in Hollister’s store when the fire started, he would have run to the front at the first thought of anything being wrong. Emily had hung back, not sure of what to do.

  As the Cranes and James drove back to their home, Emily was lost in thought. Did someone really start that fire on purpose? Who would do that to Hollister’s store? Were there really copies of Tom Sawyer recovered in four different fires? If so, and if they were the same ones Mr. Quisling had found, then how and why was their teacher involved?

  Staring out the window as the minivan climbed a hill, she spotted Charlie getting into his car. He didn’t recognize her parents’ van, and she wasn’t about to wave or call hello. Now that she saw how far away he had to park, she could understand why he’d been gone from the store for so long, but she was still mad at him for leaving her alone in the first place.

  When the van reached the top of the hill, Emily saw a two-hour parking sign that made her twist around to look out the rear window. Charlie’s car was at the bottom with its blinker on, waiting to turn left.

  “What is it?” James asked.

  “This whole block is two-hour parking,” Emily said.

  “Yes…” James said.

  “No parking meters,” Emily said.