Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

Pamela Preston, meanwhile, was staring with horror at Todd and Natasha, her two best friends. “You guys?” she said, and for once the little tears in her eyes looked real. “ Why?”

“Oh, Pam…” Natasha murmured.

“It’s, uh, well,” said Todd. He took off his baseball cap and twisted it between his hands. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“Please,” barked Principal Van Vreeland. “We’d all love to hear it.”

Bethesda had the details pretty much exactly right, although it took Natasha and Todd a lot longer to tell the story than it had for her to tell it to Reenie and the others that morning. This is very likely because Todd and Natasha weren’t nearly as excited to reveal the truth as Bethesda had been, and also because they were continually bombarded by enraged interjections from the principal.

The first of these interjections came almost immediately after Todd began.

“So, it was that Monday night about five ten. I was biking past the school, on my way home from karate, and I saw that the door was propped open.”

“The door was what ?”

Mr. Darlington was seated all the way at the front of the room with his seventh-period sixth graders, so Bethesda couldn’t nudge him in the ribs or look at him significantly. Turned out she didn’t have to.

“If these children can, uh—that is, if they can tell the truth, so can I,” said the science teacher, rising to his feet. Looking anywhere but at Principal Van Vreeland, Mr. Darlington explained haltingly how he’d been unloading Mary Bot Lincoln after school, and how he’d made things easier for himself by jamming open the front door. The principal nodded curtly, assuring him that they would discuss the matter in more detail later. “Great,” Mr. Darlington replied, sinking slowly back into his seat. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“Okay, so, anyway,” Todd said when the principal gestured for him to continue. “The door was open, and I went inside.”

“For what purpose?”

“It’s going to sound crazy. To, uh…” He shuffled a little and looked at Natasha, who looked at her feet. “To, uh…”

Bethesda couldn’t take it anymore. “To save a bird that was trapped in the vent!”

Todd and Natasha looked at each other, astonished, and then at Bethesda.

“Oh my god,” said Natasha. “How did you know that?”

She knew because she’d seen the little swallow on the morning after the trophy’s disappearance, and had noted to herself that it was the first time it’d been around in a while. She knew because she’d heard the silly song they made up, about setting free the poor trapped animal. She knew because she’d found the tiny screw on the floor of the Alcove, where Todd had accidentally left it behind after unscrewing the vent cover. She knew because she’d observed both of them, in the weeks since, paying special attention to the sweet blue-and-green bird, now living happy and free in the old oak.

“Todd and Natasha had noticed that a bird had somehow flown inside and gotten itself trapped in the ventilation pipes,” Bethesda explained. “Janitor Steve noticed it, too, except he thought we had a ghost.”

Principal Van Vreeland cocked an eyebrow at Janitor Steve, who shrugged, unembarrassed.

“Maybe we have birds and ghosts,” he said.

The sad culprits took over their story again. Borrowing Janitor Steve’s ladder from the basement and dragging it awkwardly down the hall (“I might have heard like a, like a scraping noise in the hall,” Mr. Darlington had said) , Todd unscrewed the duct cover, coaxed the swallow out, and carried it gently to the front door. But then, as he was folding up the ladder, disaster struck: Startled by a loud sound from down the hall—the bang! as Mr. Darlington kicked shut the front door of the school—Todd whipped around and the heavy foot of the ladder smashed the glass of the case. A scrape, and then a bang, and then a crash.

“Okay, well, that’s, like, an amazing story, and I’m sure your bird friend is very happy,” said Pamela, her hands on her hips. “But where’s my trophy?”

“Well, uh—when the glass broke I sort of freaked out. Natasha knew about the bird, so I called her to help me clean up.”

Natasha, in a low, weary voice, took over the story.

“I was at the mall when Todd called, getting my nails done before dinner.” (Nobody asked what color, but if they had, Bethesda could have told them: red. Red as strawberry lollipops, red as blood.) “I biked over to the school, let myself in, and found Todd at the trophy case.”

“Wait. Stop. Halt.” Principal Van Vreeland held up one flat palm like a policewoman. “You let yourself in? But the door was now shut. Where did you get the key?”

Natasha grimaced. “Um… you see…”

Assistant Principal Jasper Ferrars, who since Principal Van Vreeland shook him off had been squatting in the aisle, sweating more and more profusely as the story went on, jumped to his feet. Shrieking incomprehensibly about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a bass-baritone, he ran down the long aisle of the auditorium, up the steps of the stage, and out the door. Wordlessly, Principal Van Vreeland watched him go, then sighed, shook her head, and turned back to the children. “Go on.”

The trophy case was full of glass, so Natasha carefully held the trophy while Todd pushed the shards out onto the floor. But when Natasha went to put the trophy back, they saw that she’d covered it with spots of still-sticky nail polish.

So now they had glass all over the floor, a broken case, and a gymnastics trophy that looked like it had the measles. The two friends, totally panicked, decided to bolt.

“I was already late for dinner,” Natasha said. “So the plan was, I’d stick the trophy in my bag and take it to Pirate Sam’s, then clean it later with nail polish remover.”

“So you dragged the ladder back downstairs and got the heck out of there,” Bethesda concluded. The crooks nodded miserably.

But of course they weren’t crooks at all, Bethesda reflected, just two well-meaning eighth graders who had made a mistake. And then in trying to make things better they made them immeasurably worse.

“I knew it,” Victor Glebe whispered glumly to Chester. “I knew she’d solve the mystery.”

“But…” began Principal Van Vreeland, and then she and Pamela finished the sentence in unison: “Where’s my trophy?”

Natasha blushed a deeper red than her nails had ever been. “Well, that’s the thing. Somewhere between dinner at Pirate Sam’s and my house, I, um… I lost it.”

Pamela threw up her hands. The principal went pale, knees wobbling, and murmured, “Catch me, Jasper.” Unfortunately, Jasper had fled the room, and the stunned principal landed with a dull thud on the thick auditorium carpet.

It was at that moment that Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky strode purposefully into the room.

Mr. Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky owed his rather extraordinary wealth to Ping-Pong paddles. Playing the game one afternoon with his niece, Lucy, he had noted with dismay that the paddle left something to be desired, in terms of grip strength; that same evening, in the workshop in his garage, he corrected the problem. If a new and improved Ping-Pong paddle doesn’t sound like a way to become rather extraordinarily wealthy, consider that Ping-Pong happens to be the most popular sport in China—a nation of well over one billion people.

But long ago, long before he became extraordinarily wealthy, little Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky was a middle school student prone to creative misbehavior. Like adding chocolate syrup to the cafeteria milk and reselling it at a margin. Or padlocking the teacher’s lounge vending machine and ransoming the combination. Or gluing a construction-paper horn to the class hamster and selling pictures of The Amazing Unicorn Hamster to the local news. Now, reviewing his life from atop his giant Ping-Pong fortune, Mr. Piccolini-Provokovsky saw his middle school years with regret. Why had he only been punished? Why not encouraged to channel his imaginative impulses into more meaningful pursuits?