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.

She tugged her pencil free, and soon she had (a)   his message: What are you doing?

Emily sent her reply together with the book she was reading. While she (a)   for James to send it back, she thought about how weird it was for a book to look so perfect on the outside, but have to many mistakes on the inside.

(a)   made it must not have hired someone like her dad to fix the errors.

There was a knock and the bucket was lowered back to her window. Look what I found. Emily opened the book and saw that James had circled consecutive letter corrections in (a)   to spell out the words fort, wild, and home.

Emily’s (a)   pounded in her chest. Could there be a secret message inside this book?