The Friendship Riddle (2 page)

There were a lot of images and musings on how snowy days can make you relax—clearly written by people who don't live with feet of it to shovel. Then there were some of those
sites where someone posts a question and others answer, and sometimes it's good, but often you're dealing with a bunch of ding-dongs with too much time on their hands. I couldn't find anything substantial, so I went to ask Ms. Pepper for help, but there was a sign on the youth services desk that said to go downstairs for assistance. So I did, and found Eliot, the reference librarian who was also Charlotte's other dad, at the circulation desk.

“Ruth!” he said, looking pleased. “How would you like to earn free books from the book swap?”

Eliot thought he had my number, but I'd seen those book-swap books. People clean out their basements and attics and bring their old, beat-up books to the library like they're doing this big, honking good deed, but the library doesn't want their old books, either, so they sell them for a quarter each or a dollar for a whole bag.

I gave him my best side-eye look, and he said, “Oh, did I say book swap? What I meant was, how would you like to earn advance copies of books that haven't even been published yet?” He picked up a stack of paperbacks from the counter behind him. “Ms. Pepper thought you might like this one in particular.” He held up a book written by Harriet Wexler.

Harriet Wexler is my absolute favorite author. She writes the Taryn Greenbottom books. Taryn is the daughter of a knight and an elf, although you don't learn about her elfishness until book three; she looks human. Each book is basically a different quest. She's a squire, allowed to train for
knighthood because her father was such an amazing fighter for the king. He's missing, though. That's the overarching saga: Taryn trying to unravel the mystery of her father. Harriet Wexler herself is a mystery. Supposedly she lives on a tiny island in Lake Champlain that isn't part of New York or Vermont but is its own entity all to itself. When she finishes a draft of a novel on her old typewriter, she takes a motorboat to Burlington and mails it off to her publisher. Other than that, she never leaves the island. There are no pictures of her on her books or online or anything, so no one even knows what she looks like. I think all of that is absolutely magnificent. I've read all her books, some of them three or four times, but I had never heard of this book,
The Riddled Cottage
.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“Now, when I explain this job, you might think it sounds boring, but you should know I don't trust just anyone with this task. I don't even let the students who volunteer as pages do it.”

“You don't have to flatter me, Mr. Diamond. I'm in.” When I'm at the library, I'm supposed to call him Mr. Diamond.

I didn't ask him if he ever let Charlotte do it. Eliot and I don't talk about Charlotte.

He led me deep into the stacks and gave me the shelf-reading instructions: I had to read along the shelves, looking at the spine labels and making sure every book was in the right place. Like if by accident 822.92 MAL was put before 821.1 SIR, I would need to move them into the
correct positions. He also gave me a cart where I could place any books that were in the completely wrong section. The cart made me feel official. I thought it might be fun to be a librarian. Still, shelf reading was about the most boring job you could think of.

Most of the books were in order, but I did find some strange things, like a tennis ball stuck behind some books, and someone's shopping list crumpled on a bottom shelf: milk, eggs, ladyfingers, bacon.

I found some books wildly out of place, like a book on solar heating in the philosophy section. And, hiding in the mythology section, a book called
It's Perfectly Normal
, which I actually owned, since Mom gave it to me for my eleventh birthday. It was all about the body and sex and stuff. Eliot would probably think that was funny. I had it in my hands to bring to show him when I came around the corner and almost smacked into Lucas Hosgrove. He was holding a yo-yo in his hand. “I can walk the dog, you know.”

“Great,” I said.

Lucas had been showing everyone his yo-yo tricks for the last three weeks.

As he was preparing himself, I remembered what book I was holding. I clutched it to my chest, but it was so big that I couldn't hide the cover. So I tried to put it behind my back.

“Are you even watching?” he asked.

“I am.”

“You're not.”

He was right. I wasn't. I didn't really care about yo-yo tricks. But Lucas was one of those kids you're supposed to be patient with.

He did the trick again, the yo-yo swinging out in front of him, then curling back. Walking the dog was a strange name for it. Sure, when it rolls out, the yo-yo looks like a dog on a leash, but when you tug back on a leash, it's not like the dog glides back to you as if on roller skates. He might stop and look back with his tongue lolling out. If you were lucky.

“Wonderful,” I told him.

“I know,” he agreed, and then he left without saying good-bye.

I dropped the book on Ms. Pepper's desk, but after that I decided to just do what Eliot said and leave the misshelved books on the cart.

It was in the second row that I found the note, not too long after I put the solar heating book on the cart to be reshelved. I was supposed to read only the Dewey decimal numbers on the spine, but I couldn't stop myself from reading the titles. Most of them were bland and didn't even tell you what the book was about. But I found one called
The True Story of the Loch Ness Expedition
by Mervin R. Shuttlecock. I knew, of course, that the Loch Ness myth had been debunked. The man who took the picture admitted that he had faked it. Still, it sounded like an interesting story even though it had the ugliest cover: brown, with the dust jacket torn beneath the plastic protective coating. I slid it off the shelf and flipped it open.

The note was in a tiny envelope no bigger than a trading card. It was made out of origami paper that was black with tiny gold flowers. Inside, an index card was folded in half. One half was blank, but the other half had a seal drawn on it in red pencil. It was made to look like it had been pressed into wax, and the artist had used a heavy hand with the pencil. The center of the seal was a bird with a thin, sharp beak and a bright eye. I unfolded the card. A border was drawn around the card, a vine of green leaves and red thorns. Printed in green ink in small, even letters were the words:

“What's the question?” I asked.

I looked up, but there wasn't an answer there. There wasn't a question, either.

I was still looking up, trying to figure out the question or the answer, when Charlotte walked by the end of the aisle. She saw me, turned around, then came back to ask, “What's that?” She was wearing jeans, puffy leather boots, and a
sweater that was long, almost like a dress. A school outfit. A nice school outfit. Not the sweats and turtleneck I wore.

“Nothing,” I said.

Her eyes flicked from the note in my left hand to the envelope in my right. “Nothing. Okay, sure.” She slipped her hands into the pouch at the front of her sweater.

She knew I was lying. She probably knew I knew she knew, but I was not going to say anything. This was my note. My mystery.

She turned on her heel as if to go. But then she stopped. She looked right at me, her brown eyes sparking like amber. “So, what does the origami riddler have to say for himself?”

That Charlotte knew something about the note stopped my heart, and it took three little elves inside me to stomp on it and get it going again. I blinked twice. I considered acting confused, but she knew me too well. Anyway, I wanted to suss out what she might know. “He says to find the answer, look up.”

“The note I found was more of a riddle.”

“You found a note, too?”

“Yep. In red origami paper folded into a tiny envelope.”

“What did the note say?”

She slid one foot to the side and jutted her hip out. I could see her deciding whether or not to tell me, but, more than that, whether or not to let me back into her life just
this little bit. “I can't really remember it all. Something about meanings.”

“Where'd you find it? When?”

She shrugged, and her long, straight black hair shimmered off her shoulders. “A month ago. Maybe two. I was helping my dad weed some books, you know, stamping them ‘discarded' and stuff. He gives me a nickel a book. It adds up quick. I'm going to buy tickets to the April Showers show. Melinda and I are going to go together. Her mom said she'd drive us and would let us sit three rows in front of her.”

“Great,” I said. April Showers was not, shall we say, my cup of tea. She played the guitar and sang songs about boys she loved and boys who broke her heart and boys who existed only in her fantasies.

“I already have thirty-seven dollars saved. I'm more than a third of the way there. Dad said he went to see Madonna when he was my age, but Pops isn't so sure. But they said I could go.”

“So you opened a book and it was there? Which one?” I prompted.

“It fell out. I found it on the floor. I thought the paper was pretty. It had these gorgeous, shining dragons on it.”

The golden flowers on my paper might have been pretty and shiny at one point, but they had grown dull and flat. “And there was a riddle inside?”

“Yeah. It was like a poem. ‘Under cover there are stored, meanings, maybe three or four.'
 
” She leaned in as she spoke,
but then stopped herself. “Something like that, anyway. I didn't give it too much thought.”

She had, though. She had because she remembered it, and Charlotte had the worst time memorizing things. In third grade when we had to memorize and recite poetry, she ended up running from the room in tears when she couldn't remember past the third line of her Jack Prelutsky poem.

“There was more?”

“A little, maybe. I think so.”

“I could figure it out, I bet, if you remembered it. With both of us thinking about it, I know we could get it.” We used to make up mysteries for ourselves to solve. We would hide in corners of the library and write down observations of the people we saw and then make up stories of their nefarious lives. That woman getting the book on raw foods was contemplating cannibalism. The man in the Yankees jersey was a mobster in the witness protection program. These clues, the riddle—it could be like that again.

Charlotte scuffed her furry-puffy boot on the floor, then turned and glanced over her shoulder as if one of the other berry girls from school might come around and find us talking together. Instead, it was Lucas who cruised by on his backpack with a scooter built in. Charlotte rolled her eyes at me, but I didn't play along.

“Can I see it?” I asked.

“See what?”

“The note.”

“Oh, that.” She waved her hand in the air. “I threw it away, I think. Maybe I have it at home. I don't know. I guess I could look for it.”

“Thanks!” I tried to make my voice sound chipper, like I hadn't expected her to run right upstairs and grab the note, and maybe one of our old little notebooks, while she was up there. I kept mine in my bottom desk drawer. Did she know where hers were?

She blinked and stepped back. “Calm down, already. It's not like I'm offering you my kidney or something.”

There was a time when she would have offered me her kidney. Without hesitation, and probably without even knowing that we have two of them and only need one. “Well, thank you all the same.” Even without Charlotte, I wanted that clue. Taryn Greenbottom was always going on quests, always seeking something. I had not yet had a saga-worthy event in my life. Maybe this could be mine. And maybe it could be Charlotte's, too.

“Sure,” she said. As she turned, her hair spun out around her like in a shampoo commercial.

“And I hope you get the money to go see April Showers. She's really, um, cool.”