They must be working a completely different angle.
Charles was certain that if he could use this downtime to learn what Keeley and his team had in their meeting room, and combined it with his picture puzzle, he would emerge from the library victorious.
“Do not despair, Andrew,” Charles said confidently. “We are still going to win.”
“How?”
Charles leaned in and cupped a hand around his mouth so no security cameras could read his lips.
“Remember,” he whispered, “you need to pay me back for wasting a ton of time in finding Anne of Green Gables.”
“What? You’re the one who picked the stupid green envelope with the stupid Clunker Card!”
Charles narrowed his eyes and chilled his hushed voice. “So?”
“Um, nothing,” said Andrew nervously. “Just thought I’d, you know, point it out.”
Charles turned his eyes into blue ice.
“So,” whispered Andrew, swallowing hard, “what exactly do you want me to do?”
“Find a way to sneak into Community Meeting Room B.”
Andrew wheezed in panic. “That’s impossible.”
“Don’t worry. I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“Two words: Sierra Russell.”
“Ever wonder if this could reek any worse?” said Akimi. “Because it couldn’t.”
“Yo, none of us pulled a Clunker Card,” groused Miguel. “That means somebody on Charles’s team did it.”
“Akimi and Miguel are right, Kyle,” said Sierra. “This really isn’t fair.”
“I know,” was all Kyle could say. “But it’s like in Mr. Lemoncello’s Family Frenzy, where one player pulls the Orthodontist card and everybody has to move back seven spaces to buy their kids braces.”
Kyle and his teammates were back in Community Meeting Room B. They’d been staring at the clue board, wondering what a wailing blackbird had to do with Willy Wonka and the Ten Commandments—not to mention that long list of books and all the statues—when the voice in the ceiling made its announcement about the Dewey decimal doors being locked for fourteen hours.
“Well, Mr. Lemoncello better have a good reason,” said Akimi.
“Oh, I do,” said Mr. Lemoncello.
His face appeared on one of the meeting room walls, which was really a giant plasma-screen video monitor.
“Team Kyle is not being penalized for Team Charles’s blunder,” he said. “Far from it. In fact, you are being rewarded.”
Akimi arched her eyebrows in disbelief. “Really? How?”
“The other team’s penalty gives you a wrinkle in time.”
“A wrinkle in time?” said Kyle. “Is that a clue?”
“No. It’s a book. And sometimes, Kyle, a book is just a book. But thanks to the Clunker Card, you have the gift of wrinkled time to seek clues outside the ten Dewey decimal rooms. Speaking of Time, a magazine available in our periodicals section, it’s dinnertime!”
“So the game is basically suspended until ten o’clock tomorrow?” said Kyle.
“Well, Kyle, that’s up to you. You can use this time as a bonus, to think, read, and explore. Or you can run upstairs and play video games all night long. The choice is yours.”
“We want to win this game,” said Kyle. His teammates nodded in agreement.
“Wondermous!” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Keep working the puzzle but try to avoid Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files. They’re all mixed up. And before you turn in this evening, you might want to spend some time curled up with a good book.”
“Um, they just said the book rooms are locked,” said Akimi.
“The nice lady in the ceiling was only talking about the ten Dewey decimal rooms. There is plenty of first-class fiction in the Rotunda Reading Room. Dr. Zinchenko has even selected seven books specifically for our seven remaining contestants. After dinner, you’ll find those books on her desk.”
When he said that, Mr. Lemoncello started winking.
“I think you’ll find the books to be very enlightening. Inspirational, even.”
And then he winked some more.
“And now, I must return to my side of the mountain. See you in the morning, children! I have great expectations for you all!”
Mr. Lemoncello’s image disappeared from the wall.
“Okay,” said Akimi, “from the way Mr. Lemoncello was just winking, either somebody kicked a bucket of sand in his face or our recommended reading list is another clue.”
On the other side of the rotunda, Charles huddled with Andrew in Meeting Room A.
“I don’t trust Haley,” he said.
“Why not?”
Charles placed his hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “Well, my friend, I’m not sure if I should tell you this, but Haley told me she didn’t think you were ‘handsome enough’ to appear in Mr. Lemoncello’s holiday commercials with us when we win.”
“Because of my glasses?”
Charles bit his lip. Nodded. “Of course, I totally disagree.”
“I see,” said Andrew, his ears burning bright red. “Then she doesn’t get to see what we found in that Anne of Green Gables book.”
“Very well, Andrew. If that’s how you want to play it.”
“You bet I do.”
“Fine. Let’s go see what’s for dinner. I’m starving.”
When Charles and Andrew entered the café, the Keeley team was already inside, filling their trays.
“Hey, way to go, Charles!” joked Miguel Fernandez. “You guys pulled a Clunker Card?”
“Indeed we did. However, not even that bit of bad luck can derail our juggernaut!”
“Huh?” said Akimi.
“He means we’re still gonna win!” said Andrew.
Charles and Andrew crossed to the far side of the room to join Haley, who was sitting in a corner.
“You guys find any clues this afternoon?” she asked.
“Sadly, no,” said Charles.
“All we found was that door-locking penalty,” said Andrew, who could lie almost as well as Charles.
“How about you, Haley?” Charles asked. “Find anything interesting?”
“Nope. Nada.” Then she yawned and finished her dinner. “I think I’ll head upstairs and sack out.”
“Really? It’s only eight-forty-eight.”
“I know. But I’m totally pooped.” She yawned again. “Plus, I want to be up bright and early, before the Dewey decimal doors reopen. We have more clues to find. See you guys tomorrow. Unless we have more team business to discuss?”
“No. Nothing.”
She walked out of the café.
“Very interesting,” said Akimi, looking through the café’s glass walls and into the Rotunda Reading Room.
“What?” said Miguel.
“I think Clarence just dropped off our books.”
Kyle pushed back from the table. He could see the shadowy figure of the bulky security guard slinking away from the round desk at the center of the rotunda. He left behind a stack of books.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see what sort of ‘inspirational’ reading Dr. Zinchenko has selected for us.”
“What about those guys?” said Miguel, gesturing toward the table where Charles and Andrew were finishing their desserts.
Kyle was torn.
On one hand, he didn’t want to give away the bonus his team had received thanks to the other team’s penalty. On the other hand, he didn’t want people saying he and his friends won because Mr. Lemoncello had tossed them an extra clue.
He came up with a compromise.
“Hey, Charles? Andrew? We’re all going to go grab some books to read to kill time till tomorrow morning. You two might want to do the same thing.”
“No thanks.” Charles stood up. “We pretty much have this thing figured out. In fact, I think Mr. Lemoncello steered us toward the Clunker Card so we wouldn’t win too easily. I mean, how would it look if we escaped from his library in less than twent
y-four hours?”
“Bad,” said Andrew. “Real bad.”
“Indeed,” said Charles. “In fact, I suspect nobody would buy Lemoncello games anymore if we showed them how consistently easy they are to win. Anyway, we’re going upstairs so I can give Andrew a tour of my private suite. Would any of you care to join us?”
“No thanks,” said Akimi.
“Suit yourself. Oh, by the way, Mr. Lemoncello has a real video game console upstairs.”
Kyle felt his mouth going dry.
“It’s top-of-the-line equipment. And it plays real games. Not just educational stuff. Care to join us, Keeley?”
“Um …”
“We’re going to play Squirrel Squad Six. The new edition. According to the game box, it won’t be released to the general public until early December.”
Kyle felt sweat beading on his forehead. His palms were moist. His fingers were twitching, itching to thumb-toggle a joystick.
But finally, after the inside of his mouth had turned to sandpaper, he said, “No thanks, Charles. We’re just gonna, you know, read.”
After Charles and Andrew headed up to the third floor to play what was probably the most awesome version ever of Mr. Lemoncello’s most awesome video game ever (if Charles Chiltington was actually telling the truth), Kyle and his teammates hurried out to see what books were waiting for them on the librarian’s table.
They found seven different versions of the same book: The Complete Sherlock Holmes. One was a leather-bound limited edition; another was a tattered paperback; three were hardcovers with different illustrations on their fronts; one was a bigger kind of paperback with lots of scholarly essays; and the seventh was an e-reader with only the one title loaded onto it.
“I think Mr. Lemoncello wants us to start a book club,” said Sierra.
“What do you mean?” asked Kyle.
“You know—we all read the same book and then get together later to discuss it and share our opinions.”
“It’s fun,” said Miguel. “We have a book group at school.”
“Are you in it?” asked Sierra.
“Yeah. Maybe you’d like to join us sometime?”
“I would. Thank you, Miguel.”
Akimi cleared her throat. “Now what?” she said to Kyle.
Kyle shrugged. “Like I told Charles. We read.”
Everybody grabbed a copy of the Sherlock Holmes book.
Nobody went for the e-reader.
Upstairs on the third floor, Haley tiptoed around the Lemoncello-abilia Room.
When she had visited the mini-museum earlier, she hadn’t really looked around. Now she hoped to find another book from the “memorable reads” display, a Little Golden Book called Baby’s Mother Goose: Pat-a-Cake, which could’ve been something Mr. Lemoncello read (or had read to him) when he was a very young boy.
Haley made her way past the orderly stacks of boxes through a doorway and into what looked like a re-creation of Mr. Lemoncello’s childhood bedroom—a cramped space crammed with two bunk beds that he had shared with his three brothers. Next to one of the lower bunks was a bookcase made out of plastic milk crates.
There it was, filed away with maybe three dozen other skinny, hardboard-covered picture books.
Haley pried open the cover.
Out plopped a four-by-four art card:
She quickly folded it in half and stuffed it inside her sneaker with her “BANDITS” clue.
Because now she was pretty certain that “bandits” had, at one time or another, “crawled in” to this building back when it was a bank.
The silhouette of Indiana didn’t represent the Indianapolis 500 like Charles had insisted.
It stood for “IN,” the official post office abbreviation for the Hoosier State.
First thing in the morning, when the doors reopened, she needed to search through the Dewey decimal rooms to find a clue that would tell her exactly how and where the bandits had crawled in.
A tunnel? An air vent? A secret passageway on the first, second, or third floor between the old bank and the office building behind it?
There was only one thing Haley was certain of: They hadn’t crawled in through a book return slot.
Everyone in the reading room was quietly lost in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Kyle had just finished a pretty cool story called “A Scandal in Bohemia,” about a king who was going to get married to a royal heiress with maybe six names. But the king was being blackmailed by an old girlfriend, an opera singer from New Jersey named Irene Adler.
Something Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson early in the story really stuck with Kyle: “You see, but you do not observe.”
Kyle figured that was why Mr. Lemoncello wanted them all to take a break from chasing clues and read these classic mysteries. Not to find new clues but to become better puzzle solvers. Had they been seeing things without really observing them? Probably.
Reading the story was also kind of fun. Kyle could totally see Holmes’s apartment at 221b Baker Street and the snooty king and the horse-drawn carriages on the foggy London streets and the disguises Holmes wore and the smoke bomb Dr. Watson tossed through a window and everybody on the street screaming, “Fire!”
It was like he was watching a 3-D IMAX movie in his head. Kyle couldn’t wait to start the second story in the book, “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League.”
“How’s it going?” whispered Akimi.
“This book is pretty cool. This Sir Arthur Conan Doyle guy knows how to keep his readers hooked.”
“His characters leap off the pages,” said Sierra.
“Yeah,” said Miguel. “I dig the ‘consulting detective.’ ”
“Huh?” said Kyle.
“That’s what Holmes calls himself sometimes.”
“Oh. I’ve only read one story so far and …”
Suddenly, something seemed odd to Kyle.
“Hey—how come Conan Doyle isn’t one of those statues up there?”
“What do you mean?” said Akimi.
“He’s a famous author, right? How come they’re projecting a statue of a modern writer like Pseudonymous Bosch but not the author who created a classic like Sherlock Holmes?”
“Good question, bro,” said Miguel.
“I need to consult with my brother Curtis.”
“How come?”
“Curtis has read more books than anyone I know, except maybe Sierra. He scored an 808 on his SAT Subject Test in Literature.”
“Uh, Kyle?” said Akimi. “I think the top score for any SAT test is 800.”
“Yep. Then Curtis took it. They had to raise it.”
“So maybe he can help us figure out what’s up with all the statues,” said Miguel.
“Exactly. Why these ten? Why not ten other writers?”
“Why not the same ten Bridgette Wadge had for her Extreme Challenge?” added Sierra.
Kyle looked around the room.
“Mrs. Tobin? Hello? Mrs. Tobin?”
The hazy holographic image of the 1960s librarian flickered into view.
“How may I help you, KYLE?”
“I’d like to talk to an expert.”
“And whom do you wish to speak to?”
“Mr. Curtis Keeley.”
“Your brother?”
“And an SAT-certified expert on the subject of literature and authors and other literary-type junk.”
Suddenly, the hologram vanished and Dr. Zinchenko’s voice came over the ceiling speakers.
“This is a rather irregular request, Mr. Keeley.”
“Hey,” said Akimi, “this whole game is rather irregular, don’t ya think?”
“We just need some more data,” said Kyle. “Because, like Sherlock says to Dr. Watson, ‘it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.’ ”
“I take it you’re enjoying your book?” said the librarian.
Kyle gave the closest security camera a big thumbs-up. “Boo-yeah. Can’t wait to see what’s up with tha
t league of redheaded gentlemen.”
“Ah, yes,” said Dr. Zinchenko. “A fascinating story. I recently reread it myself. Very well, Kyle. We will contact your brother to determine if he does indeed qualify as a literary expert. It may take a while.”
“No rush,” said Kyle. “I’ve got a good book.”
Kyle was busy helping Holmes figure out that the Red-Headed League was just a clever ploy pulled by some robbers to get a red-haired pawnbroker to leave his shop long enough for them to dig a tunnel from his basement to the bank next door when the librarian’s voice jolted him out of London and brought him home to Ohio.
“My apologies for the interruption.”
Akimi, Miguel, and Sierra closed their books, too. It was eleven-fifteen. Everyone had sleepy, dreamy looks in their eyes because they’d been kind of drifting off in their comfy reading chairs.
“What’s up?” said Kyle.
“We have arranged for your expert consultation with Mr. Curtis Keeley.”
“Awesome! How do we do it?”
“You and your expert may have a five-minute video chat on my computer terminal, which is located behind the main desk.”
Kyle hurried over to the round desk in the center of the room. His three teammates hurried right behind him.
“Your consultation begins … now.”
And there was Curtis. Sitting at his computer in his bedroom.
“Hey, Curtis!”
“Hi, Kyle. How’s it going in there?”
“Great.”
Kyle’s oldest brother, Mike, popped into the doorway behind Curtis.
“Ky-le, Ky-le,” Mike chanted. “Whoo-hoo!”
Kyle had never had his own cheerleader before.
“We need you to give us one hundred and ten percent in there, li’l brother!” Mike squinted at the screen over Curtis’s shoulder. “Who are those other guys?”
“My teammates, Miguel, Sierra, and you know Akimi.”
“You guys are a team? Smart move. Even I can’t win football games without help from ten other guys.”
“Um, Mike?” said Kyle. “Curtis and I only have five minutes to chat.”