Book Scavenger - Cloze Passage

That night in bed, Emily distracted herself from worring about Mr Griswold and Book Scavanger by reading the new book she had found. Thanks to the odd exchange with Raven earlier that day, she knew The Gold-Bug was an old story of Edgar Allan Poe’s.

She thought that was (a)   at first, an old story in a clearly brand-new book, but her dad reminded her that classics get republished all the time, often with a new cover to “make them more accessible to modern readers”, as he put it.

Emily dipped her nose in The Gold-Bug and breathed deeply. It had a new-book smell with the faintest hint of lemons. The (a)   turned crisply as she went back to the beginning of the story to start over.

The language was old-fashioned, and Emily noticed a spelling (a)   right off the bat and then another sentences later, so she was having trouble getting into the story.

She had flipped ahead and (a)   enough snippets to know it was about a secret message and a treasure hunt. That sounded good, so she stuck with it, but the mistakes bothered her.

Using one of her dad’s purple editing pencils, she correct the misspellings like he did, marking through the incorrect letter and writing the (a)   one above.

Some people thought it was strange or even destructive to write in books, but it was a habit Emily had (a)   up when she was seven and used to play “editor” while her dad worked. Back then she mostly wrote nonsense or drew pictures of cats, but now her notes made up a reading diary of sorts.

Emily sighed with frustration as she (a)   across what was probably the twentieth typo.

From the ceiling she heard a thud, then three fast thuds, followed by another thud. That was the signal she and James had (a)   on when they made up their secret language earlier that day. It meant a bucket message was coming. Emily crossed her room and slid open her window.

For their secret language, they had decided on a substitution cipher. James knew from keyboarding class that the sentences “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” used every (a)   in the alphabet, so they made that the cipher key.

The bucket lowered beside Emily, and she removed James’s note. It said ZKTV TPU DXL QXBFC? Gibberish to anyone else, but Emily knew (a)   to do.