Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

Bethesda returned to her sadly damaged bike and unfolded the note she found Scotch-taped to the handlebars.

BETHESDA! it said.

I MUST ASSERT MOST VOCIFEROUSLY THAT YOU DESIST FROM YOUR INVESTIGATORY EFFORTS WITH ALL DUE HASTE!

“Vociferously?” said Bethesda to the squirrels. “Inves-tigatory?”

Whoever this anonymous bike-vandal was, he or she definitely owned a thesaurus. But the gist of the note was perfectly clear. Somebody out there did not want her to solve this crime. There was no signature. Just the cryptic message, filled with what Ms. Petrides, the seventh-grade English Language Arts teacher, called twenty-five-cent words. And then, on the back in smaller print:

(I’M REALLY SORRY ABOUT YOUR BIKE.)

Bethesda stood for a long moment on her lawn. Then she carefully folded up the note, shoved it in her bag, and marched steadily down Chesterton Street, head held high, sneakers crunching on the asphalt. She was a detective on a case, by god, and she had work to do! Truths to ferret out! She was going to solve this mystery, and no cowardly, bike-mangling, thesaurus-hugging maniac was going to get in her way!

Bethesda rounded the corner onto Friedman Street and turned into the horseshoe driveway leading to school. And there was her next suspect, sitting at the picnic benches, all alone, as if for a prearranged meeting. Perfect, thought Bethesda, striding boldly across the horseshoe driveway.

“Natasha?” she said firmly. “We need to chat.”

“Oh.” Natasha yawned and smiled weakly. “Okay.”

Bethesda, in no mood to beat around the bush, rapidly dispensed with the preliminaries. She told Natasha she knew about the key she’d gotten from Assistant Principal Ferrars, and curtly informed her that she was on the list of potential suspects. Natasha just nodded.

“You went to the mall on the afternoon of Monday, September twentieth, to get your nails done, is that correct?”

“What?” Natasha looked down at her hands, then back up at Bethesda. “Oh. Yeah.”

“And then went to dinner with Guy Ficker and his family?”

“Yes. At Pirate Sam’s. We had the Arrrgh-Ti-Choke dip.” She pronounced the dish like it was written on the menu, with a deep, throaty pirate’s argh.

“Arrrgh-Ti-Choke,” echoed Bethesda. “Cute.”

“What is?”

“Never mind. What time was dinner?”

“Um…”

While Bethesda waited for the answer, she glanced at the open notebook in her lap, where she had the timeline carefully penciled in.

“We met at five thirty, I think,” said Natasha.

Well, that was that. The bang and the crash were at five forty-five, and the mall was at least a twenty-minute bike ride away. Except then Natasha looked up again, bit her lower lip, and shrugged. “You know, it might have been six thirty. Maybe six. It was kind of a while ago, you know?”

Hmm , thought Bethesda, and jotted a quick notation in the margin. C.P.S. Call Pirate Sam’s.

Natasha yawned and gave Bethesda a tired little smile, and Bethesda thought what a relief it was to have someone reacting to her questions without getting all offended and upset. Natasha didn’t look angry at all, in fact, she looked just kind of… worn out or something. She was usually the kind of person who spent an hour at the mirror in the morning, putting on lip gloss, trying different earrings, texting friends to find out what they were wearing. Today she was just the slightest bit of a mess: her shirt was rumpled, her skin a little pale, her eyes shadowed with dark circles. The dark red of her nails looked faded and chipped in spots.

“Hey, um, Natasha?” Bethesda asked softly. “Are you doing okay?”

Natasha shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know.”

A leaf drifted down from the oak tree and settled in Natasha’s hair, but she didn’t seem to notice. Bethesda reached over and brushed it away.

“Is this”—Bethesda leaned forward slightly—“about Todd?”

There was a pause before Natasha replied—and it’s a funny thing about that particular pause. If you had asked Bethesda Fielding if she was asking Natasha about Todd as part of her duties as a semi-official private investigator, or just to be a nice person, she would have selected option B. She was friends with Natasha (well, sort of friends), and she was just being a nice person. The girl was obviously a little out of sorts, and it had been pretty clear for the last couple days—couple weeks, now that Bethesda thought about it—that there was something weird going on between her and her old friend Todd.

So she was asking to be nice. But all the same, Bethesda’s foot—which often had better instincts than she did—was tapping a rapid, enthusiastic bippity-bop against the metal base of the picnic table. Her foot in its Chuck Taylor sneaker clearly thought that the innocent, friendly question she’d put to Natasha was relevant to her ongoing investigation.

It didn’t matter, because Natasha didn’t answer. She was distracted by a bird.

It was the blue-and-green swallow, hopping in a crook of the fat old oak tree that oversaw the outdoor seating area. As Bethesda watched, Natasha’s gaze drifted up to where the bird nestled in its branch, and her face glowed with tenderness. Then she waved at the bird, almost as if they were old friends.

“Hey, buddy,” said Natasha to the bird, in such a sweet and simple way that Bethesda said it too. “Hey, buddy.”

The bird tilted its tiny head and chittered politely to Natasha and Bethesda in reply. Then the five-minute bell rang, and all three of them went on their way.

There was, alas, no time left for mystery solving that day. Bethesda had been a total slacker on the weather-phenomenon project for Mr. Darlington’s class, and all of a sudden it was due tomorrow. Victor Glebe, sweetly, acted like he was the one who’d been a jerk—he told her he’d finish the diorama, and if she’d just come up with something for the in-class presentation, they’d be even steven. Bethesda thanked him copiously, and put aside her investigation that night to concentrate on a Flash Flood Fact Wheel of Fun (“Take a Turn! Spin the Wheel! Learn About Sudden and Rapid Torrents of Rain or River Water!”) And their presentation in Science the next day ended up totally great, with Mr. Darlington clapping vigorously for their efforts—as he did for Natasha, Pamela, and Reenie’s group, who gave an emotional description of how windstorms affect migrating falcons; and for Todd and Tucker, who performed a rap Todd had written about a baby eagle dying in a mudslide.

Man, Bethesda thought, what is it with birds around here lately?

That night, in her unglamorous high-rise condomin-ium apartment, clad in her favorite fuzzy slippers and sipping tea from her favorite mug, Ida Finkleman was having trouble getting her work done. Staring at her from her dining-room table was the score of the West Side Story overture, which her sixth graders would somehow need to master in time for the winter concert. And those quiz questions—there remained a mountain of quiz questions to write.

But instead of doing any of this, Ms. Finkleman booted up her laptop and checked her email. Impatiently she scanned her inbox: an email from her mother about her plans for Thanksgiving; one from her sister Clementine recommending a Tom Waits album, and asking if there was something by Brahms she could recommend in turn.

Nothing from Mr. Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky of St. Louis, Missouri.

She quickly answered her emails (“still not sure” to her mother, “violin concerto in D” to her sister), stirred a half teaspoonful of sugar into her mug of tea, and picked up her pen to write some quiz questions.