Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

Bethesda fetched Mr. Darlington an oversized roll of paper towels from the sink, and then stood with her hands clasped behind her back, waiting. As he unspooled great handfuls of paper towel and corralled the creeping pool of paste, she felt like a teacher, standing patiently with a grim expression until everyone was paying attention.

At last he finished and looked up at her. “Okay. There we are. Now, what can I do for you?”

Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, cut right to the chase. “Mr. Darlington, why did you lie to me?”

Mr. Darlington’s eyes widened behind his thick glasses. “Go ahead and kick the door shut, will you, Bethesda?”

She did, and then dragged a student chair into place across the desk from him; Bethesda’s expression remained steely, but her heart was hammering in her chest. She balanced her notebook carefully on a non-paste-smeared corner of the desk, and listened to what Mr. Darlington now swore to be the truth.

“It is true that I was here that Monday after school. It is true that I was dismantling Mary Bot Lincoln, and for exactly the reason I told you. Principal Van Vreeland said that since Pamela won the big gymnastics trophy, there would no longer be space in the Achievement Alcove to show off the robot that my sixth graders and I had worked so hard on.

“But I wasn’t here from after school until four. My wife, Nancy, had dropped me off that morning. She needs the car on Mondays and Wednesdays because she goes to the gym those days. She used to go near our house, but they changed the time of the yoga class. So she found a class at a different gym, but that teacher does Bikram yoga, and Nancy prefers Ashtanga yoga. They’re similar in certain ways, although—”

“Mr. Darlington? Stay on target.”

“Right. So, the point is, I didn’t have the car at school that day, and I needed it to crate up Mary Bot Lincoln and carry her home. You can’t carry seventy-nine pieces of disassembled android on a city bus, Bethesda,” he said, nervously twisting a crusted piece of paper towel. “So I got a ride from Mr. Melville, then came back later with my car and let myself in.”

“With the key that Mr. Ferrars had given you.”

Mr. Darlington’s eyebrows shot up behind his glasses. “I can see I’m not the only one who has crumbled before your powers of interrogation.”

Bethesda beamed inwardly at the compliment, but managed to keep her serious mystery-solving expression in place. “So, how late were you really here that Monday afternoon?”

“I’d say from about five to… I don’t know. Maybe quarter to six.”

Quarter to six. Bingo.

“And during that time, did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“Well…” Mr. Darlington made a puzzled face. “I might have. I might have heard like a, like a scraping noise in the hall.”

A scrape? Ms. Pinn-Darvish had heard a bang, and then a crash. But a scrape?

“When, Mr. Darlington?”

“What?”

“You said you left at about quarter to six. Did you hear the scrape right around then, or was it earlier? Try to remember. It’s important.”

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

“No. No, the scrape was earlier. Around five fifteen or so?” As he put his glasses back on, Bethesda noticed little specks of paste he’d ground into his eyebrows.

“Bethesda, I promise you I did not steal that trophy. I only fudged the truth a bit because… well…”

“Because you left the door propped open.”

Mr. Darlington sighed. “Exactly. I had to make so many trips, getting all those robot parts to my car, that for about a half hour I left the front door jammed open. And I feel terrible about it. I do. I even went to Principal Van Vreeland to try to tell her. But before I could, she started wailing about how she’s always wanted a trophy, how sad this is for her… and then something about hating Christmas. I’m not sure how that was related. But how could I tell her that this whole thing may have been my fault?”

Bethesda reflected, just as she had when Mr. Ferrars first told her about the keys, how Principal Van Vreeland’s fury over the missing trophy was foiling her own desire to get it back. Instead of pressuring the truth out of people, she was terrifying everyone into silence.

“Well, thanks for telling me the truth, Mr. Darlington.”

“Better late than never, I suppose.” He sighed ruefully and reached for his ocean floor. “Now can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How did you know about the door?”

Bethesda smiled and handed over the small off-white piece of plastic, the random little artifact she’d stuffed in the front pocket of her backpack almost a month earlier—before the assembly, before the stolen trophy, before this whole thing began.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Mr. Darlington marveled.

He took back the little broken-off piece of Boney Bones’s left shin, which he had used to prop open the door, and began pasting it back in place.

Bethesda zoomed down Hallway A toward the back stairwell, walking as fast as she could to the eighth-grade lockers. She was dying to find Tenny before school started so she could fill him in on what she’d learned. Galloping up the stairs, two at a time, she went over the timeline in her head:

1. After school, two people are in the music room, singing…

2. Sometime around 5:15, there’s a mysterious scraping noise…

3. At 5:45, Mr. Darlington kicks shut the front door, causing a loud bang…

4. A moment later there’s a crashing sound, presumably from the smashing of the trophy case…

5. And then the crook does… something that scatters around the loose pieces of glass, leaving behind a. red dots that might or might not be blood, b. a tiny screw that might or might not be a clue, and c. no trophy!

But why? Bethesda asked herself for the millionth time.

And how?

And, most important, who? Of the suspects on Jasper’s key list, only…

Bethesda gasped and stopped so suddenly at the top of the stairs that she almost tumbled backward. The list? The list didn’t matter anymore! If Mr. Darlington had propped open the door, the trophy thief didn’t need a key!

All of Bethesda’s and Tenny’s work—all the carefully annotated index cards, all their ingenious feats of detection, all their bravery and determination—it was all moot. The thief could have been anyone!

Bethesda staggered the last twenty feet to the eighth-grade lockers in a state of shock, her eyes traveling at random to different people, every single one of them a suspect.

Maybe it was Anju, the really tall seventh-grade girl who Violet hung out with!

Maybe it was Mr. Muhammed, the technologies teacher with the rumpled sweaters and the BlackBerry clipped to his belt!

Maybe it was Suzie! Or Shelly! Or both of them together!

Bethesda continued to her locker in a daze, trying to rally, to recover her focus. But the nightmare wasn’t over yet. As soon as she touched the dial of the lock, before she even twisted the combination to the first number, the metal door of her locker began to creep slowly open on its own. Bethesda stumbled back and watched, astonished, as the door swung out.

Bethesda brought her hands up to her mouth, stunned. Other kids gathered around, gaping. “Whoa!” she heard Rory mutter. “Oh my god,” Bessie whispered softly.

Inside Bethesda’s locker was a taunting riot of color, like an overturned spaghetti bowl of blues and greens and reds, twisting and overlapping in a dense, squishy tangle. Silly String! Someone had broken into her locker and filled it with Silly String. Her magazine clippings, her heart-shaped mirror, her stack of school supplies cases, her little Benjamin Franklin action figure, all buried in yards and yards of Silly String.