Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

And there, folded into careful eighths and nested in the sticky web of Silly String, was a note.

I FIRMLY REITERATE MY EARLIER INSISTENCE THAT YOU TERMINATE YOUR IMPERTINENT INQUIRIES!

And then, lower down, in slightly smaller letters:

(SORRY ABOUT YOUR LOCKER.)

While her fellow eighth graders buzzed around her, slamming closed their lockers and racing off to first period, Bethesda let the note drop from her hand and flutter to the ground. Whoever this mysterious, fancy-word-slinging bandit was, whoever was so determined that she fail, they were in luck.

Because Bethesda wasn’t even close.

As Bethesda’s conversation with Mr. Darlington unfolded, Tenny was over in Hallway C, conducting his own final suspect interrogation. It was a pretty fast interrogation.

“Hey, so, Ms. Finkleman. Did you take the trophy?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Okay, cool.”

This was Ms. Finkleman we were talking about. She listened to Radiohead, and could play a halfway decent rhythm guitar—her word was good enough for Tenny. Besides, his heart wasn’t really in this whole detective thing today. Even though he really ought to hit his locker before first period, he lingered in the Band and Chorus room, wandering around while Ms. Finkleman sat at her desk, writing quiz questions and occasionally checking her laptop. In the tall instrument cabinet, Tenny discovered an old mandolin and began to experiment, teaching his fingers to find chords on the tiny little frets.

Yesterday, after Social Studies, Tucker Wilson had asked him if it was true that he’d been tossed out of St. Francis Xavier because he drove the headmaster’s car into Lake Vaughn. He’d mumbled something about how stupid that was, but Tucker looked unconvinced. Whatever. It wasn’t any of that kid’s business. It wasn’t anyone’s business. Tenny eased back into a chair, playing a high-octave version of the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the mandolin.

Then, with only a minute or two left until first period, Ms. Finkleman looked up from her desk and embarked very gently on a conversation—the same conversation they’d been having, once every few days, for the last two weeks.

“So? Tenny? How are you doing?”

“Um… all right. Good days and bad days, ya know?” He paused, coughed. “Today’s not so hot.”

“Well.” She shrugged, smiled. “If you need any-thing…”

He nodded, said, “See ya,” and was gone.

This brief conversation didn’t feel like much to Ms. Finkleman. But if there was one thing she had learned from a lifetime in music—coaxing the right rush of notes from a violin, subtly working the pedals of a piano—sometimes a little bit is all you need.

“So there is going to be seventh-grade stuff, plus everything we’ve done so far this year. Got it, people?”

In first period, Ms. Fischler was handing out the testing schedule for next week. Monday, percentage/fraction conversion. Tuesday, algebraic inequalities. Wednesday, she promised, “will be kind of the easy day. We’ll just be mapping binomials, so bring your graphing calculators.”

In second period, Dr. Capshaw announced that they’d be suspending their progress through Animal Farm until after the quiz week, since they’d have no time for class discussions, anyway.

“But we want to know what happens,” said Ellis Walters.

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Capshaw. “But you are of course welcome to read ahead on your own.”

“Like we’ll have time,” grumbled Ellis.

It was like this all over school. Everybody had thought that, somehow, the Week of a Thousand Quizzes wouldn’t really happen. The trophy thief would confess, or be caught; Principal Van Vreeland would, miraculously, change her mind; a tornado would come out of nowhere, lift up the whole school in the middle of the night, and carry it out to sea. Alas, nothing of the sort had occurred, and now, with the dreaded week of testing four days away, Principal Van Vreeland had succeeded in her goal: everybody in the entire school was as miserable and angry as she was. (Except Mr. Melville, whose constant whistling wasn’t helping matters in the least.)

Adding to the general funk was the fact that it was the second Thursday of the month, and that was fish-stick day. By the time the lunch bell rang, the queasy smell of deep-fried cod was drifting out of the cafeteria and suffusing the whole school. Just inside the cafeteria doors, in this thick fog of fish-stick smell, Bethesda was pacing, waiting for her sidekick.

“Tenny! Finally!” she yelped as he slouched into the cafeteria.

“Hey,” he said absently. “So, uh, I talked to Ms. Finkleman this morning. Yeah, I don’t think she did it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bethesda said impatiently. She told Tenny about her dream, about the little piece of Boney Bones, about Mr. Darlington and the propped-open door.

“Whoa,” he said mildly. Clearly the massiveness of the revelation had barely registered. Well, terrific, thought Bethesda. Their investigation was collapsing all around them, and he’d disappeared into one of his fogs of weirdness.

“We can still do this, Tenny, if we focus. The suspect list can’t matter that much. We have tons of other clues.” Urgently, she ticked them off on her hand, trying to fake confidence she didn’t feel. “One. The mysterious singers in the Band room. Two, the scattered glass. Three, the red dots. Four… the… Tenny? Hello?”

She couldn’t take it anymore. He was drumming his fingers on the table, puffing out his cheeks, staring off in random directions.

“What’s up, Tenny? Are you listening? Not listening? Are you writing songs in your head or something?”

“What? No.” He shook his head, made a face. “I’m just thinking.”

“About what? Tenny! ”

Suddenly his spaced-out expression came into sharp focus. “Bethesda, did it ever occur to you there might be other things in the world beside your project?”

“My project?” Bethesda stared back at him. “ Our project!”

“Okay, so the eighth grade doesn’t get to go to Taproot Valley. What’s the big deal?”

“What’s the big deal?” she echoed, flabbergasted. “God! Tenny, we’re supposed to be solving a mystery together, and you’re, like, the biggest mystery of all. You suddenly show up from St. Francis Xavier, and you won’t even tell me why you got kicked out…”

“I didn’t get kicked out!”

His shout drew attention from all over the lunchroom. In the suddenly hushed, staring crowd, Tenny drew the hood of his sweatshirt up over his hair and shrank down in his seat.

“Thanks a lot, Bethesda.”

“It’s not my fault. How was I supposed to know?”

“Did you ever think that there are things you’re not supposed to know?”

Tenny sat with arms folded, his eyes blazing from the depths of his hood.

The anger that had been simmering in Bethesda since 8:20 that morning, when she emerged from Mr. Darlington’s room and had her gut-wrenching epiphany, now came to full boil. She threw up her arms and stomped past Tenny out of the cafeteria toward the front door of the school.

“Bethesda?” said Tenny, close at her heels. “Where are you going?”

“What do you care?”

Bethesda heard the nastiness in her voice and knew instantly that she’d regret it. But it was too late now. She was a missile heading for its target.

Find the thief? she thought furiously. Find her? I’ve known who it was from the very beginning!