Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

Now Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky stood in the center aisle of the auditorium of Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School, one hand resting on the handle of a rolling suitcase, quasi-apologizing to Ida Finkleman for not returning her multiple emails. “I never let people know when I’m coming. Never! Element of surprise, get it?” He snapped his gum, tilted back his large, diamond-studded cowboy hat, and gave her a cheery thumbs-up. “Now! Where’s this Chester character?”

Chester warily raised his hand.

“Step up here, fella. C’mon. Nothing to be afraid of. Yes, my boots are made of genuine one-hundred-percent alligator skin, but those gators have been dead a long time.”

Principal Van Vreeland stirred from her faint, struggled slowly to her feet, and whispered to Ms. Finkleman, “Is that who I think it is?” Ms. Finkleman nodded. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

“All right,” said Mr. Piccolini-Provokovsky, grabbing Chester’s shoulders and looking him up and down. “It’s my understanding that you’ve demonstrated certain qualities. Qualities like pluck and moxie. Gumption and chutzpah.”

“Um…” said Chester. He shot a questioning glance at his best friend, Victor, who happened to have a really good vocabulary. Victor gave him a reassuring nod. “Um, thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank this lady over here.” He jerked his thumb at Ms. Finkleman, who beamed. Principal Van Vreeland whispered again. “Is he about to do what I think he’s going to do?”

“Yes,” said Ms. Finkleman, keeping her eyes on Chester and the fast-talking stranger in the alligator boots. “Yes, he is.”

“It is an honor and a privilege and all that blah-di-dee-dah,” Mr. Piccolini-Provokovsky continued rapidly, “to declare this school, the name of which I’ll find out later, the winner of the Piccolini-Provokovsky Award for the Encouragement of Studential Excellence. And nobody better tell me that studential isn’t a word, because I’ve heard it before.”

Bethesda and Pamela, both of whom had raised their hands, lowered them again.

“The award, to be divided between school improve-ments and extracurricular activities, shall be in the sum of fifty thousand dollars.”

He thrust a check at Chester Hu, whose eyes got as big and round as crash cymbals. The whole room burst into applause, with no one cheering louder than the “Save Taproot Valley” team (except Natasha and Todd, of course). “Woo!” shouted Suzie. “Bravo!” added Kevin. “That’s what I’m talking about!” said Braxton. Marisol Pierce was too shy to shout, but she grinned from ear to ear and clapped till her hands were sore.

“Well, I gotta ramble,” said Mr. Piccolini-Provokovsky suddenly, and pivoted on the heels of his lustrous boots. “Oh, shoot. One more thing. In addition to the money…” He bent over and unzipped the rolling suitcase.

“Is he going to say what I think he is?” said Principal Van Vreeland.

“Yes,” Ms. Finkleman replied. “I think he is.”

“… the award includes this puppy right here.”

The trophy was gleaming and massive, easily three times as big as the one that had been lost. Principal Van Vreeland shrieked with girlish glee, like a child for whom Christmas has come at last.

All through Mr. Piccolini-Provokovsky’s rapid-fire presentation, Bethesda kept her eyes on Natasha and Todd. She watched as they settled uneasily back into their seats, and imagined what they were feeling—that awful, gut-wrenching anticipation of big trouble to come, leavened by relief at having finally spilled the beans. That was one thing Bethesda had learned a time or two—as awful as it is to have to tell a painful truth, it sure beats carrying it around.

Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, leaned back in her auditorium seat and let her tough-guy private-investigator face relax into a satisfied smile.

Case closed.

So the bus to Taproot Valley left that Monday morning after all, right on time and with just three empty seats.

The first empty seat was Natasha’s, Principal Van Vreeland having decreed that, since she was the one who had lost the gymnastics trophy, she would be excluded from the trip.

The second empty seat was Todd Spolin’s. “No way,” he argued vigorously. “If she stays, I stay.”

The third empty seat was the result of a special favor granted Chester Hu by Principal Van Vreeland, as a reward for bringing Mr. Piccolini-Provokovsky and his gigantic trophy to the school. Told that he could have anything he wanted, Chester had asked for a bazooka that shoots candy. When it was clarified that he could have anything he wanted, within reason, Chester had requested that his best friend, Victor, be allowed to skip out on the trip, no questions asked.

For the forty-five-minute bus ride to Taproot Valley, Tenny Boyer sat by himself way in the back, gazing absently out the window as the highway rolled by. Sliding into the seat beside him, Bethesda heard the tinny blare of something epic and punky from his earbuds; she guessed it was either Braid or Sunny Day Real Estate.

Bethesda leaned over and brazenly plucked the little white buds out of his ears.

“Hey!” Tenny protested.

“Sorry,” she said, hurriedly replacing the snatched-away earbuds with her own. “But you gotta hear this.”

Bethesda smiled with embarrassment as she hit play. She had recorded the whole thing on the computer, which she didn’t really know how to do properly. But what the song lacked in quality, it more than made up for in spirit. “Because I was wrong, so very wrong,” she sang, accompanied by energetic strumming on her dad’s old guitar. “I wrote you this terrible song!”

It was an off-key, off-kilter performance, full of purposefully awful singing and purposefully awful lyrics, like where she rhymed “I stuck my nose in” with “so forgive me, is what I’m proposin’.” After a minute or two, Tenny’s mask of annoyance dissolved and he cracked up, stabbing for the pause button. “Please!” he yelped. “Make it stop!”

“So you forgive me?”

He nodded, laughing helplessly. “Make it stop! Make it stop!”

Tenny told Bethesda the whole story that evening, during the half hour of free time the eighth graders were afforded after their daylong “ecological hike” and before that night’s recreational activity. (Which was, as it turned out, a giddy, exhilarating, and exhausting game of capture the flag, organized by Coach Vasouvian, that they’d still be talking about years later. It would emerge as one of the famous facts about the Taproot Valley trip, along with Dr. Capshaw’s nonstop reciting of Robert Frost poems during the apple-cider demonstration, and Braxton Lashey stomping around after lights-out in his bear costume.)

Tenny had not been expelled from St. Francis Xavier. He hadn’t set any fires, or driven any cars into any lakes. After just a couple weeks, right when he was getting the hang of the place, his parents had pulled him out because they were getting divorced.

“I guess it’s not, like, one of those really easy, everybody’s-all-cool-with-everybody divorces,” Tenny said. They were sitting together on two of the oversized deck chairs that lined the edge of Lake Taproot. As he talked, Tenny kept his eyes locked on the lake, where minnows dived and darted in little clusters. “So there’s a big fight about money, and I guess St. Francis costs a ton.”

“Tenny…”

“Yeah. So, anyway. I really didn’t want anyone to know. Didn’t really feel like talking about it, you know? I did call Ms. Finkleman, though, when—when it was all getting going.”

Bethesda nodded. Of course.

“The real bummer is, I was sort of digging the place, a little.” Bethesda thought about the ways Tenny was different since he came back: polite Tenny, logical Tenny… but still good ol’ Tenny, just the same.