Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library (21 page)

“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.”

“Cool. I’m outta here. Win, baby, win!”

Mike backpedaled out of the bedroom, making double fist pumps the whole way.

“You have four minutes remaining,” advised Dr. Zinchenko.

“Okay, Curtis, here’s my question. What do these authors have in common?”

Kyle rattled off the list of the statues in order.

And Curtis stared blankly into his computer cam.

For a real long time.

Then he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Kyle. I have no earthly idea.”

“Really?” Kyle was astonished. “You’ve got nothing?”

“Well,” said Curtis, “the only connection I can see is Thomas Wolfe wrote
Look Homeward, Angel
and Lewis Carroll wrote
Through the Looking-Glass
. Both titles have the word ‘look’ in them. But the two books are otherwise completely different. The two authors as well.”

Kyle and his whole team stood in stunned silence.

Until Sierra started jumping up and down.

“Of course!” she shouted.

“Your time is up,” announced Dr. Zinchenko.

“Um, okay,” Kyle said to the computer screen. “Thanks, Curtis. That was, uh, really helpful.”

“It was!” said Sierra, daintily clapping her hands together like a very polite seal. The computer screen faded to black.

“What’s up?” asked Miguel.

“I think I know how to crack the statue code.”

“There’s a code?” said Akimi. “Who knew?”

“It’ll take time,” said Sierra. “And I need a computer.”

“Oh-kay,” said Kyle, who was sort of shocked to see Sierra so completely jazzed. “We’ll be in our meeting room, putting together a list of new Dewey decimal numbers from the Bibliomania cards so we’re ready to hit the ground running when the doors reopen at ten tomorrow morning.”

While Sierra settled in at a desktop computer pad, the rest of the team returned to the Bibliomania board game.

“We should just start flipping over cards and putting together a list of call numbers,” Kyle suggested.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Akimi.

She plucked a purple card out of the pile.

Lose a Turn was all that was printed on the other side.

“Try a different color,” urged Miguel.

Akimi flipped up a blue card.

Take an Extra Turn was printed on it. So Akimi flipped over all the other blue cards while Miguel flipped over all the purples.

The purple cards all said Lose a Turn. The blue ones all said Take an Extra Turn.

Kyle had been checking out the red and maroon piles.

“The reds all say ‘Pick a Yellow Card,’ ” he reported. “The maroons say ‘Grab a Green.’ ”

“The grays do the same thing,” said Miguel. “Only they say ‘Pick a Pink.’ The tan cards say ‘Go Grab an Orange.’ ”

“So that leaves the colors we’ve already played.” Kyle flipped over a yellow card. “ ‘In the square root of 48,629.20271209 …’ ”

“What the …?” said Akimi.

“Hang on,” said Miguel. “There’s a calculator app in this desktop computer.”

Kyle read the rest of the card: “… ‘find half of 4-40-30.’ ”

“Well, that’s 2-20-15, again,” said Sierra.

“And the square root of forty-eight thousand whatever is 220.5203,” said Miguel. “The King James Bible we already found.”

Akimi flipped through the rest of the yellow cards. “Same with these. They all send us into the Religion section to find that Bible verse.”

“Ditto with the greens,” reported Miguel. “All clues leading to
Bird Songs, Warbles, and Whistles
.”

“And the pinks all lead back to 027.4,” said Kyle. “I guess they really wanted to make sure we found
Get to Know Your Local Library
.”

“Which leaves the wild cards,” said Akimi. She examined the orange deck. “Find a rhyme for ‘cart and paperbacks,’ ‘smart and zodiacs,’ ‘tart and potato sacks.’ ”

“The Art and Artifacts Room,” said Miguel with a sigh.

“Where,” Akimi continued, “we need to find a rhyme for ‘Randy,’ ‘Sandy,’ or ‘Brandi.’ ”

“The Willy Wonka candy,” said Miguel.

“So,” said Kyle, “I’m guessing the Bibliomania game was only supposed to help us find the four clues we’ve already found.”

“But we need to know more numbers,” said Miguel. “Because a library should be a know-place for know-bodies.”

When Miguel made his pun, Kyle and Akimi both groaned.

But then Kyle thought of something: “This is why Mr. Lemoncello called our time-out a bonus. He knew we’d need a ton of time to find a new source of numbers.”

Just then Sierra burst into the meeting room.

“You guys! I found a whole bunch of new numbers!”

“What?” said Kyle, Akimi, and Miguel. “Where?”

“Up on the ceiling!”

“You need to look up at the Wonder Dome,” said Sierra.

“Huh?” said Kyle.

Sierra and her whole team were standing together outside the door to Community Meeting Room B. She hadn’t been this happy or excited in a long time.

“Um, Sierra?” said Akimi. “Why exactly are you suggesting we all give ourselves a crick in the neck by staring at the ceiling?”

“Okay. This is a game some of us play online called What’s the Connection? I put up a list of authors and you have to figure out how they’re linked by the titles of their books.”

“Whoa,” said Akimi, sort of sarcastically. “Sounds like fun.”

“It is. But believe me, it’s not easy.”

“What’d you figure out?” asked Miguel.

“Well, like Curtis said, Thomas Wolfe wrote
Look Homeward, Angel
and Lewis Carroll wrote
Through the Looking-Glass
. That got me thinking. And running computer searches. Stephen Sondheim wrote a book called
Look, I Made a Hat
. Maya Angelou wrote
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
, and Pseudonymous Bosch wrote
This Isn’t What It Looks Like
.”

“They all have ‘look’ in the title,” said Kyle.

“What about the other five authors?” asked Akimi. “Did they write ‘look’ books, too?”

“No, they’re up there for a different word.”

“Huh?”

“Booker T. Washington wrote
Up from Slavery
and Shel Silverstein wrote
Falling Up
.”

“And Dr. Seuss?” said Kyle.

“
Great Day for Up
. George Orwell did
Coming Up for Air
, and Todd Strasser has a book called
If I Grow Up
.”

“So the ten statues give us two words,” said Miguel.

“Yep. ‘Look’ and ‘up.’ So I did. I looked up. At the Wonder Dome. There! Did you see it? That string of numbers that just drifted across the two hundreds screen under the Star of David?”

“220.5203,” said Miguel.

Akimi knuckle-punched Kyle in the arm. “This is just like that bonus code thingie you showed me on the school bus!”

“Of course,” said Kyle. “This is a Lemoncello game.
He always hides secret codes in screwy places. Way to go, Sierra!”

“Thanks,” said Sierra, realizing how much more fun it was to play this kind of game with real friends instead of virtual ones on the Internet.

“But we already found that same two hundreds number playing Bibliomania,” said Miguel.

“True,” said Kyle. “Check out the sections for numbers the cards wouldn’t give us.”

Everybody craned their necks and focused on the graphics swimming across the ten panels overhead.

“Here comes another one!” said Sierra. “In the six hundreds. Right underneath the floating stethoscope.”

“Got it!” said Kyle. “624.193.”

“Whoo-hoo!” said Akimi.

“Sierra, you’re my new hero,” said Kyle. “You saved the day.”

Sierra blushed. “Thanks.”

“The spinner,” said Akimi.

“Huh?” said Miguel.

“That was another clue. The Bibliomania game was pointing us to the ceiling, too. Because in Dewey decimal mode, the Wonder Dome looks like a giant 3-D version of the board game’s spinner.”

“Awesome, Sierra,” said Miguel. “Absolutely awesome.”

Sierra and her teammates stared up at the ceiling for over an hour. At 12:30, they finally lay down on the floor so they wouldn’t cramp their neck muscles.

Because every fifteen minutes, the animated ceiling looped through call numbers for every Dewey decimal room in the library.

Except one.

And then the sequence repeated itself.

“How come there’s no three hundreds number?” said Miguel.

“Probably because that’s the one book we really, really,
really
need,” said Kyle.

“That Lemoncello,” said Akimi. “What a comedian.”