Free The Stone Child by Dan Poblocki

librarian. “Maybe they know something we don’t.”
    Before Harris could answer, there was a knock at the door. The boys jumped as Frances opened the door a crack.
    “Dinner’s ready,” she said. “Hope you’re hungry.”
    Before Eddie got on his bike to ride home, Harris asked him to see
The Enigmatic Manuscript
one more time. Eddie hesitated for only a second before pulling the book out of his bag. After everything they’d gone through today, he felt it belonged to Harris as much as it belonged to him now. He watched as Harris flipped through it, scanning the strange writing.
    “What is it?” asked Eddie. “Do you see something?”
    “I’m not sure,” said Harris, looking up. “Do you mind if I keep this tonight?”
    Eddie looked into Harris’s eyes, and what he saw there, he knew he could trust. This is what came with friendship. “Okay,” Eddie said. “That’s cool.”
    “I’ll give it back to you tomorrow,” said Harris. “I promise.”
    Eddie refrained from telling Harris to
be careful
with it, as he got on his bike and waved goodbye.

8
    Harris returned the book to Eddie during lunch the next day, just like he said he would.
    The day after that, Eddie brought the code-breaker book to school. One small section had caught his eye. It mentioned the history of secret decoder rings—a toy popularized in the 1930s that allowed kids to send encrypted messages to each other. The ring consisted of two alphabets lined up next to each other on two attached discs. To create the secret code, you simply rotated the discs, offsetting the two alphabets, so that the letters no longer matched up. The letter
A
offset by three would become the letter
C
. To solve the message, you simply had to know the offset number.
    “Something like this could be the answer to the code in
The Enigmatic Manuscript,”
Eddie said.
    “Yeah, but that’s assuming the code we’re trying tosolve is a simple letter puzzle,” said Harris, “that this book only needs to be translated, then
bam
, we’re done. Mystery solved.”
    “What do you mean?” said Eddie. “What else would the code be?”
    “Well … anything, really,” said Harris. “When was the last time you read an entire book that had only three-letter words?”
    Eddie blinked, frustrated. “Don’t you think we should at least try?”
    “I guess so.” Harris shrugged, unconvinced. “If this decoder-ring thing is the answer, and that’s a big
if
, how are we supposed to know what offset number Nathaniel used?”
    Eddie shook his head. “We could go through the whole alphabet,” he said, “offsetting each letter.”
    “A through Z?” said Harris. “That’s going to be a ton of work.”
    Together, they spent a week of lunches trying to figure the code out. In the evenings, sometimes, Harris would come home with Eddie, and they would work on their project in his bedroom. Eddie’s mother was constantly writing in her notebook at the kitchen table, and his father was always out in the barn, sorting through his antiques, so the house’s quiet was suitable for the boys’ concentration. They finally made it through the entire alphabet, offsetting the letters one by one.Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The only pattern they could discern was the arrangement of letters into groups of three. Still, they wondered how, or why, anyone would write an entire book using only three-letter words?
    Near the end of September, as the leaves finally changed color, and the north wind brought colder, drier air to Gatesweed, Eddie began to feel more at ease in his new school, especially the one day his English teacher introduced his class to Gothic literature. Mr. Weir had asked the class to give a report on a spooky book of their choice. Even though English was his favorite subject, Eddie was still nervous to talk in front of his class. He had prepared the night before by rereading
Whispers in the Gingerwich House
, a book with which he was quite familiar.
    His report went