Book Scavenger

Emily becomes fascinated with the Poe book and begins to read the story. The plot hinges on a cipher that leads to buried treasure. As she reads, she becomes distracted by the number of typos she finds in the book and circles them. When James looks at the typos, he realizes that the circled letters spell out complete words.

Later, Emily sees an article in the paper about Griswold and notices the logo for Bayside Press, his publishing company. It bears a strange similarity to the logo inside the Poe book, but the bird is black instead of a seagull, as in “The Gold-Bug.” Emily deduces that this particular book must have belonged to Griswold himself. Emily theorizes that Griswold hid the book at the BART station rather than entered it into the Book Scavenger site in order to start a new game.

Emily dashes upstairs to James’s room to discuss her finds. They analyze the words that the typos reveal: fort, wild, home, rat, open, and belief. Unfortunately, none of the word combinations make sense as clues.

Later that morning, Emily’s family ventures on an outing to the enormous City Lights bookstore. Although she loves bookstores, Emily can’t enjoy the trip, distracted by the future when her family “[will] inevitably move again” (90).