When she entered the rotunda, she saw Charles Chiltington slipping out into the lobby again.
Chiltington was a snake. Worse. A garden slug. Maybe a leech. Something oily and slimy that left a greasy trail and liked to mooch off other people’s ideas. That was why Chiltington had tailed the twin library nerds, Peckleman and Fernandez, upstairs during last night’s dessert hunt. Haley was smart enough to know that Chiltington was hoping to steal the book geeks’ ideas.
Actually, Haley was a lot smarter than anybody (except her teachers and whoever scored her IQ tests) knew. With certain people, mainly grown-ups and silly boys, pretending to be a ditzy princess made getting what she wanted a whole lot easier.
And what she wanted right now was money. Lots of money. Her dad had been out of work for nearly a year. They’d run through all their rainy-day savings. They’d had to borrow from relatives and in-laws.
If Haley could win this competition and become Mr. Lemoncello’s spokesmodel, her family’s money woes would be over and they wouldn’t have to sell their home. And once other people saw her on TV for Lemoncello games, they’d want her for their commercials, too. And movies. Maybe her own sitcom. Something on the Disney Channel.
But for all that to happen, Haley needed a winning idea—and fast. Something better than “crawl through a slot that’s barely wide enough for your wrist.” Maybe she should flush herself down the toilet and escape through the sewers like Charles did in that video game.
She headed over to the Book Nook Café so she could sit down and think.
She stepped into the room and checked out the snack table. There were trays of cookies, strawberries, bananas, and brownies. Sitting down to nibble on a macaroon, she studied the row of cookbooks displayed on the bookshelves lining the wall.
One in particular caught her eye: Cupcakes, Cookies & Pie, Oh, My!
Because the cover looked extremely familiar: two googly-eyed sheep made out of chocolate-frosted cakes with gobs of mini marshmallows for fleece. Haley had seen the cover before.
In the lobby!
It was in that glass case of memorable reads selected by the library staff.
She went over to the shelf and picked up the book. When she opened the cover, she discovered two cards.
One was a four-by-four piece of white cardboard with the black silhouette of a sheep on it.
The second card was yellow and about the same size as a Community Chest card in Monopoly. Haley sniffed the card. It smelled like lemons.
She grinned. “For Lemoncello!”
On one side of the yellow card was printed:
SUPER-DOOPER BONUS CLUE
On the other was the clue:
YOUR MARVELOUS MEMORY HAS EARNED YOU EVEN MORE MEMORIES. PROCEED TO THE LEMONCELLO-ABILIA ROOM.
LOOK FOR ITEM #12.
Haley slid both cards into the back pocket of her jeans, pulled out her library floor plan, and found the Lemoncello-abilia Room. It was up on the third floor.
Making certain nobody (i.e., Charles Chiltington) was following her, Haley quietly dashed up a spiral staircase to the second floor. Checking for Chiltington one more time, she tiptoed up to the third floor, where she found the room labeled “Lemoncello-abilia: Mini-Museum of Personally Interesting and Somewhat Quirky Junk.”
Haley opened the door and stepped inside.
The front room was like a storage warehouse. Cardboard boxes were stacked on top of wooden crates sitting on plastic bins stuffed with papers. All the boxes, bins, and crates were numbered. She saw one labeled “#576.”
“Guess Mr. Lemoncello never throws anything away,” Haley remarked as she scanned the heaps, looking for the #12 mentioned on her bonus card.
Weaving her way through the stacks and columns, Haley finally found her Super-Dooper Bonus. Item #12 was an old boot box from an Alexandriaville shoe store Haley had never heard of. Someone had taped a label on the lid: “Paraphernalia, Accoutrements, and Doodads from Mr. Lemoncello’s 12th Year.”
Haley lifted the lid. The box was filled with all sorts of confusing knickknacks: hand-whittled prototypes for game pieces; a star-spangled, red-white-and-blue “H-H-H Humphrey” button; a battered clasp envelope sealed up with tons of tape.
Someone had scribbled “First and Worst Idea Ever” on the front of the envelope with a Magic Marker.
There were also a felt pennant from Disneyland and a rubber-banded stack of cartoony cards for something called Wacky Packages. (The card on top was Weakies, Breakfast of Chumps.)
Haley knew this memory box had to be an important clue.
Why? She had absolutely no idea.
Kyle flipped over his lemon-scented Super-Dooper Bonus card and read what was written on the other side.
YOU WILL FIND THE ULTIMATE VERSION OF THIS BOARD GAME ON THE SECOND-FLOOR BALCONY CIRCLING THE ROTUNDA.
“Huh?” said Akimi. “What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. Let’s roll out the paper and see.”
Akimi and Sierra helped Kyle anchor the edges of the scroll on the tiled floor.
“Okay,” said Kyle. “It looks like the early sketch for a board game. See the circle in the center of the other circle? That’s probably where you place the spinner. You move your pieces around the ten rooms.…”
He stopped.
“Wait a second.”
“What?” said Akimi.
“Do you recognize the game?” asked Sierra.
“Yep,” said Kyle. “I played it this week with my brother Curtis. It’s Mr. Lemoncello’s Bewilderingly Baffling Bibliomania. It takes place in a make-believe library.”
“What about finding the ‘ultimate version’ up on the second-floor balcony?” asked Sierra.
Kyle grinned. “You’ll see.”
Coming up from the basement, Kyle saw Andrew Peckleman in the middle of the Rotunda Reading Room, opening a long metal box sitting on top of the center desk.
The holographic image of Mrs. Tobin was there, smiling patiently, as Peckleman pulled some kind of magazine out of the box. Miguel was also near the librarian’s desk, apparently waiting his turn for a consultation.
“That’s the box we saw the robot pluck off the shelf,” whispered Akimi.
Kyle nodded. He motioned for the others to follow him and slipped around the circumference of the rotunda. Akimi and Sierra slunk after him.
In the shadows on the far side of the room, they saw Haley Daley heading for the staircase they’d just come up: steps that would take her back to the basement.
Kyle wondered if she’d found something else to crawl through. If so, he hoped it was bigger than a mailbox.
“Is this the real magazine?” he heard Peckleman shout at the hologram.
“Yes, ANDREW. This concludes your Librarian Consultation. Next? How may I help you, MIGUEL?”
“Not so fast,” snapped Andrew. “I’m not done.”
“Um, your consultation just concluded,” said Miguel.
“Says who?”
“The librarian.”
“MIGUEL?” said the hologram of Mrs. Tobin. “What is your question?”
“Sorry, bro. I told you.”
“She’s just like Mrs. Yunghans at school,” snapped Peckleman. “All the librarians like you better than me!”
“Yo. Ease up.”
“You’ll see, Mrs. Tobin! You’ll all see. I’m gonna beat Miguel Fernandez, big-time! And when I win, I’m gonna tell Mr. Lemoncello to fire you!”
“She’s a hologram,” said Miguel with a laugh. “You can’t fire somebody who doesn’t actually exist.”
“Then I’ll tell Lemoncello to pull her plug.” Peckleman grabbed his magazine and stormed out of the rotunda into the lobby.
“I guess Andrew’s planning on doing something with the front door,” Kyle whispered to Akimi.
“Well, that’s totally dumb. They already told us the way out isn’t the way we came in.”
“Maybe Andrew doesn’t think Dr. Zinchenko was telling us the truth,” suggested S
ierra.
“Come on,” said Kyle, leading his team toward the closest staircase up to the second floor. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched Miguel place a slip of paper on the table in front of the semi-translucent librarian.
“This item has been temporarily removed from the Stacks, MIGUEL,” said Mrs. Tobin. “You will find it in a display case next to the original Winkle and Grimble scale model. Let me give you that location.”
There was a grinding sound, like when movie tickets shoot up through the slot at the box office. Miguel snatched the small square of paper that popped up from the librarian’s desk and spun around.
He froze the instant he saw Kyle, Akimi, and Sierra sneaking around the room behind him.
“Hey,” said Miguel, hiding the tiny square of paper behind his back. “Yo.”
“Yo,” said Kyle. “Whazzup?”
“Nothin’. Just, you know, workin’ the puzzle.”
“Yeah. Us too.”
“Okay. Later.”
“Later.”
Both boys thumped their fists on their chests like baseball players do. Miguel turned and ran for a staircase winding up to the second floor.
“Come on, you guys,” said Kyle as he took off running for a different set of steps.
When Kyle, Akimi, and Sierra made it up to the balcony, they watched Miguel run up to the third floor. As soon as he disappeared into a room up there, Kyle unrolled the game sketch.
“Look at the drawing, then look down at the floor,” said Kyle.
“They’re the same!” said Sierra.
“Exactly. A circular room with a round desk at the center of that circle.”
“Awesome,” said Akimi. “And there are ten doors ringed around the balcony up here on the second floor, just like on the game board.”
Kyle tapped the rendering of the spinner in the right-hand corner of the game plans. “See how the spinner is divided into ten different-colored sections numbered zero to nine?”
“It looks like the Wonder Dome,” said Akimi, “when it’s not doing its kaleidoscope thing or running a video that makes you think the building is hang gliding across Alaska, which totally made me airsick.”
“Well, in the game, you have to go into all ten Dewey decimal book rooms and answer a trivia question about a book. If you answer correctly, you slip a book into your bookshelf and move on to another part of the library. When you have ten books, one from each room, it’s basically a race to see who can exit the library first.”
“Okay,” said Akimi, sounding pumped. “This is good. This is major.”
“Except one thing’s missing,” said Kyle.
“What?” asked Sierra.
“Mr. Lemoncello always works a clever back-door shortcut into his games. For instance, in Family Frenzy …”
“You can use the coal chute to slide into the millionaire’s mansion at the end,” said Akimi.
“Exactly. And in that castle game, Charles snuck out through the sewers. Anyway, when my brother Curtis beat me at Bibliomania …”
“You lost?” Akimi acted surprised.
“It happens. Occasionally. But only because Curtis used this shortcut.” Kyle tapped a black square on the game diagram. “It took him straight out to the street. He beat me by one spin of the spinner.”
“I don’t see any black squares in the floor of our rotunda,” said Akimi.
“Maybe,” said Sierra, “for this new game, Mr. Lemoncello put the secret square someplace besides the main room.”
Kyle nodded. “And maybe to win this new game we need to play the old one.”
“You’re a genius!” said Akimi.
“No. My brother Curtis is the genius. I just like to play games. So, do libraries even have board games?”
“Sure,” said Sierra. “I think. I mean, the library in my dad’s town has them.”
“Which department?” asked Akimi, pulling out her floor plan.
“Young adult.”
Akimi tapped her map. “Third floor. Stairs over there.”
“Let’s go!” said Kyle.
But before they could take off, they heard Mr. Lemoncello’s voice echoing in the rotunda.
“Are you ready for your Extreme Challenge, Bridgette?”
Kyle and his teammates peered over the ledge of the balcony. Bridgette Wadge was alone in front of the librarian’s desk, staring up at the ceiling.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Mr. Lemoncello’s voice boomed out of hidden speakers. “You still have twenty-two hours to find the exit.”
“I want to go for it now, sir. Get a jump on everybody else.”
“Very well. Dr. Zinchenko? Reset the statues.”
The ten holographic statues in their recessed nooks flickered off, leaving black and empty spaces.
“This Extreme Challenge is based on the classic Game of Authors card game,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Here are the authors in your deck.”
Magically, new holographic statues appeared as Mr. Lemoncello rattled off the authors’ names. “Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, Mario Puzo, Frederick Forsyth, John Le Carré, Dashiell Hammett, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.”
“He wrote Crime and Punishment,” said Bridgette excitedly.
“Indeed he did.”
“In fact,” said Bridgette, “all those authors wrote crime novels.”
“Correct again. However, that’s the easy part. Dr. Z? How do we make this authors game ridiculously difficult enough to qualify as an Extreme Challenge?”
“Simple,” the librarian’s voice echoed under the dome. “You will have two minutes, Bridgette, to name four books written by each of our authors.”
Kyle gulped. “That’s impossible,” he whispered.
“Not really,” said Sierra. She was about to start rattling off titles when Mr. Lemoncello said, “Go!” The sound of a ticking clock reverberated around the room.
“Um, okay,” said Bridgette down on the main floor. “Agatha Christie. Murder on the Orient Express, Ten Little Indians, Death on the Nile, The Mousetrap.”
Somewhere, a bell dinged, and the British lady in the sensible shoes disappeared.
“Poe. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death, The Purloined Letter, The Cask of Amontillado.”
Another ding. Another statue vanished.
Bridgette kept going.
“Man,” whispered Kyle, “what grade is she in? College?”
“Seventh,” said Akimi, “just like us.”
Bridgette Wadge kept tearing through the authors. The bell kept dinging.
But the clock kept ticking, too.
“Ten seconds,” said Mr. Lemoncello.
Bridgette had saved the worst for last.
“Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment. Um, Crime and Punishment … The one about the brothers … The Brothers …”
And then she stalled.
She’d run out of gas.
A buzzer sounded.
“I’m sorry, Bridgette,” said Dr. Zinchenko. “But, as we advised you, the Extreme Challenges are extremely difficult. You will be going home with lovely parting gifts. Kindly hand your library card to Clarence and thank you for playing Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library.”
“That settles it,” muttered Kyle. “I am never, ever asking for one of those Extreme Challenge dealios.”
“Me neither,” said Akimi.
“I might,” said Sierra. “Maybe.”
And then she showed Kyle and Akimi the rumpled sheet of paper where she had written down five book titles for all ten authors.
Akimi grabbed the door handle to the Young Adult Room. “It’s locked.”
“Here,” said Sierra. “Use my library card.”
“Huh,” said Akimi. “Your books on the back are different, too.”
“I think they all are. I got The Egypt Game and The Westing Game.”
“Two books about games?” said Kyle. “Sweet.” r />
Akimi slipped Sierra’s card into a reader slot above the doorknob. The door clicked. Kyle pushed it open.
The walls of the Young Adult Room were painted purple and yellow. There were swirly zebra-print rugs on the floor and a lumpy cluster of beanbag chairs. A couple of sofas were designed to look like Scrabble trays, with letter-square pillows.
Akimi nudged Kyle in the ribs. “Check it out.”
In the far corner stood a carnival ticket booth with a mechanical dummy seated inside. A “Fun & Games” banner hung off the booth’s striped roof. The dummy inside the glass booth?
He looked like Mr. Lemoncello.
He wasn’t wearing a turban, but the Mr. Lemoncello mannequin reminded Kyle of the Zoltar Speaks fortuneteller booths he’d seen in video game arcades.
“That’s not really him, is it?” said Akimi, who was right behind Kyle.
“No. It’s a mechanical doll.”
The frozen automaton was dressed in a black top hat and a bright red ringmaster jacket. Since the booth had the “Fun & Games” banner, Kyle figured you might have to talk to the dummy to get a game.
“Um, hello,” he said. “We’d like to play a board game.”
Bells rang, whistles whistled, and chaser lights blinked. The mechanical Mr. Lemoncello jostled to life.
“If you want a game, just say its name.” The life-size puppet’s blocky jaw flapped open and shut—almost in sync with the words.
“Do you have Mr. Lemoncello’s Bewilderingly Baffling Bibliomania?”
“Did Joey Pigza lose control? Was Ella enchanted?”
“Huh?”
“Just say yes,” suggested Sierra.
“Yes,” said Kyle.
“Well, great Gilly Hopkins,” said the Lemoncello dummy, “here you go!”
Kyle heard some mechanical noises and some whirring. Then, with a clunk, a wide slot popped open in the front of the booth and a game box slid out.
“Enjoy!” said the dummy. “And remember, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. So be sure to read the instructions—so you’ll know how to play the game.”
Kyle took the box to a table.
“Okay,” he said, raising the lid, “let’s set it up and—”