Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

“So Sergeant Moose says, ‘this trail of banana peels can only mean one thing.’ And Wellington goes, ‘Really, my antlered friend? I think it would behoove you to think again!’”

“Dad?”

Bethesda was itching to get to work, but her father had started telling Tenny stories from Wellington Wolf, and once he started it was nearly impossible to get him to stop.

“Get it? He’s already be hooved ! He’s a moose!”

“Dad?”

“And it’s not Bubbles the Baboon they find, after all. It’s Wellington’s arch-nemesis, Fiendish Fox, in a baboon costume !”

“Whoa,” said Tenny, wide-eyed. “That’s crazy.”

“Yes. Crazy.” Bethesda had seen the episode in question (Episode 19, “A Barrel Full of Monkey Business!”) and heard her father describe it many times before. Bethesda’s father clapped Tenny on the shoulder, sighing with pleasure. “Wellington was right again!”

“Totally,” said Tenny. “Though it’s sort of like, why would a fox want to rob a bank in the first place?”

“Right,” said Bethesda’s father, although it was clear from his slightly confused expression that he’d never actually thought of that.

“Dad, we really need to get started.”

“I know, pumpkin butter. I’m not bothering you. I’m not even here.” Bethesda’s father turned back to the gigantic pot of chili on the stove, his latest attempt to perfect his recipe for the charity dinner.

Bethesda hated to be rude, but the Taproot Valley trip was a mere sixteen days away, and they didn’t have a moment to waste. For today’s crime-solving session, Bethesda had prepared a good selection of supplies: a box of sharpened #2 pencils, an up-to-date map of the school she’d gotten from Mr. Ferrars; and of course the all-important Semi-Official Crime-Solving Notebook (Sock-Snow), which Tenny was now perusing with intense concentration.

“Huh,” he murmured, then looked up and said it again. “Huh.”

“What?”

“What’s this, here?”

“Just my notes from my conversation with Janitor Steve.”

“Huh,” said Tenny again, reading. “So… wait. He said there was glass ‘all over the floor’?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” Tenny said a fourth time. He tilted his head back and thought for a long time. So long, in fact, that for a second Bethesda thought maybe he had fallen asleep.

But then he said, “Excuse me? Sir?”

Bethesda’s father turned from his stockpot in surprise. “‘Sir?’” he repeated, eyes wide with pretended shock. Bethesda was thinking the same thing: Sir?

“Do you mind if I fake-punch your microwave?”

Now Bethesda’s father looked really surprised. “You know, I bet in the whole history of the English language, no one has ever spoken that sentence before.”

Tenny was already out of his chair, pushing up one sleeve of his blue-hooded sweatshirt. Bethesda watched, intrigued. What did the microwave have to do with anything? Bethesda’s father stepped back, ladle in hand, while Tenny approached the counter, drew back one fist, and gently punched the small appliance in its thick plastic door.

“Ow,” he said. But then he punched a second time, slightly harder, and then a third time. Bethesda’s father gave a low whistle and said, “Wow. He really hates that microwave.”

“Okay, Tenny. What’s up?” said Bethesda finally.

“I’m just trying to think logically here, y’know?”

Think logically? Tenny?

What happened to him at St. Francis Xavier? Bethesda marveled. It’s like he’s been replaced by some sort of pod person . But then, the next moment, Tenny absentmindedly picked up a chili-crusted spoon from the counter and scratched his ear with the handle.

Nope , she thought with amused relief. Still Tenny.

“The glass of the trophy case was as hard as this on the microwave, right? Maybe even harder?”

Bethesda thought for a second, remembering the little unveiling ceremony, when Mr. Wolcott had set up the glass case built by his sixth-grade Industrial Arts class. “That right there, that’s double-paned,” Mr. Wolcott had bragged, his thick shop-class goggles dangling around his neck, big sweat stains in full blossom under his arms. “Thickest glass around.”

“Harder,” said Bethesda. “Way harder.”

“Okay, then. So here’s observation number one: Our trophy thief would need something a lot harder than a fist to break the glass.”

“Smart,” Bethesda agreed, and carefully wrote this down on a fresh page of the Sock-Snow, heading it tenny observation #1.

“And here’s observation number two. The glass would go in here .” He opened the door of the microwave and pointed inside. “Not on the floor. Right?”

“Yeah,” Bethesda said, and then again: “Yeah!” As she wrote tenny observation #2 under the first one, her right foot was squeaking against the linoleum of the kitchen floor. “Of course!”

“Now you’re cooking!” interjected Bethesda’s father from the stove.

“There might be a little glass on the ground, right here around the base,” Tenny continued. As if the kitchen cabinet were the trophy case, he traced a tight arc with the toe of his sneaker on the floor. “But not, not…” He plucked Bethesda’s notebook off the table and flipped back to the interview page. “Not ‘all over the floor.’”

“Right! So the question is, what does this mean?”

“Uh, yeah…” Tenny shrugged, and slumped back in his chair. “I have no idea.”

“But I do!” Bethesda got up and began pacing back and forth across the kitchen. “Our crook smashes the glass and grabs the trophy. But then, for some reason, he pushes all the bits of glass onto the floor.” She approached the microwave, pretending to be the thief, acting the whole thing out. “I think he was trying to clean the glass from the case.”

“But why?”

“To… to…” She gasped, and stared intensely at Tenny. “To put something else in there!”

“Whoa.”

“Whoa,” echoed her father.

Tenny scratched his head. “But, uh, then he didn’t? Put something else in there?”

“Right.”

“I don’t know, Bethesda,” Tenny said. “What kind of crook would do that?”

Bethesda grinned and lifted her eyebrows. “Excellent question, Watson. Let’s talk suspects.”

Returning to her seat at the kitchen table, Bethesda unveiled a slim stack of nine index cards, each one bearing a carefully printed name: one card for each person with a key to the building on the Monday when the trophy was stolen, according to Jasper’s top-secret list. Each card was a different color, with the suspect’s name written in blue ink at the upper-left-hand corner, and Bethesda had three more colored pens at the ready—a red pen for alibi, a green pen for motive, and a purple pen for any additional, miscellaneous information.

“Sweet system,” said Tenny, flipping through the cards, and Bethesda grinned. Let Sherlock Holmes have his magnifying glass, she thought, arranging the nine cards into a neat three-by-three square. Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, has her office supplies.

“So who’s first?” said Tenny.

Bethesda flipped over a card: pamela preston, it said.

“Okay, so we can cross her off the list,” said Tenny. “It was, like, her trophy, right?”

“Right.” But Bethesda hesitated, running the tip of her finger along the edge of the card. She had a theory about Pamela. The theory was probably preposterous, and she definitely wasn’t ready to share it. But she wasn’t ready to eliminate Pamela as a suspect, either.