Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

It hadn’t really occurred to her that the others would be so disappointed. Yes, everyone wanted to go to Taproot Valley, but surely a week of ropes courses wasn’t as important as truth! And justice! And all that kind of stuff!

“Now listen up, people!” Bethesda said forcefully. Suzie, Shelly, and Hayley stopped eating. Todd Spolin looked up as the bird flew off with a morsel of Ding Dong clutched in its beak. Everybody waited, staring at Bethesda: Marisol Pierce, her face cradled glumly in her hands; Braxton, slurping noisily from a Capri Sun; Pamela, her blue eyes bright and skeptical beneath her perfect blond eyebrows.

“I’m going to solve the mystery,” Bethesda proclaimed, looking from picnic bench to picnic bench, summoning her most confident and convincing lawyer-lady voice. “I’ll figure out who did it, get Pamela’s trophy back, and our trip will be saved!”

“Okay,” said Suzie. “I hope so.” Rory muttered something Bethesda couldn’t quite hear, but it sounded like “you better.” Only Todd, of all people, offered something approaching support.

“Don’t worry about it, dude,” he said. Todd, Pamela’s second-best friend after Natasha, had long, stringy brown hair and wore a battered old baseball cap every single day. “Maybe this whole trophy thing isn’t that big a deal.”

Pamela tilted her head, narrowed her eyes, and swiveled toward Todd; Natasha repeated each gesture a split second later. “What do you mean, not that big a deal ?”

“I don’t know.” He shoved the rest of his Ding Dong in his mouth, crumpled up the bag, and tossed it in the trash. “Whatever.”

Pamela and Natasha shook their heads and turned their backs to Todd. Everyone else went back to their lunches—except Bethesda. No longer all that hungry, she grabbed her backpack and walked inside. Fleetingly she wished Tenny Boyer was still here; in a roundabout way, he had become her closest friend last year, before transferring to St. Francis Xavier Young Men’s Education and Socialization Academy. Tenny was mumbly and tended to get distracted and space out in the middle of conversations, but he would never shut her out like this.

But Tenny wasn’t here. She was on her own.

Well, Bethesda thought, I wanted to solve the mystery.

Now I have to.

Afew hours later, after the seventh-period bell and the mad rush that marked the end of the school week, Ms. Finkleman ushered an eighth-grade girl named Reenie Maslow into the Band and Chorus room. She offered Reenie a seat across from her and a clementine orange from the bowl on her desk. Reenie took the seat, carefully placing her backpack on the ground beside her, but politely declined the fruit. Reenie was a short, delicate-featured girl with dark red hair and glasses, and at this moment she was looking just a little bit puzzled. This puzzlement was something Ms. Finkleman could well understand. If Reenie wasn’t the guilty party, then she must be wondering what she was doing in the Band and Chorus room for a one-on-one after-school “talk.” And if she was guilty, she must be wondering why the school music teacher was the one interrogating her about it.

“So, Reenie,” Ms. Finkleman began tentatively. “How has your experience at Mary Todd Lincoln been thus far?”

“Fine, I guess.” Reenie paused, shrugged. “It’s nice here.”

Ms. Finkleman nodded. “Good, good.”

Reenie sat politely, looking more puzzled by the second. Ms. Finkleman sighed and shifted uncomfortably on her chair, thinking of various places she’d rather be: browsing at the record store; at home drinking tea, listening to Chopin’s waltzes.

Okay, Ida, she chastised herself. Let’s get this over with, shall we?

“Reenie, did you steal Pamela Preston’s gymnastics trophy?”

Bethesda was halfway down Hallway B, bicycle helmet already on, Semi-Official Crime-Solving Notebook tucked under one arm, ready to be stowed in her bike basket. She was going to stop at the Wilkersholm Memorial Public Library to research a couple questions, maybe check out some of her favorite mysteries again, to read over the weekend for inspiration. With the whole eighth grade now officially expecting a solution, it was time to kick this investigation into high gear.

“Psssst! Bethesda!”

In the doorway of the art room, a dark figure was beckoning her with one crooked finger.

“Ms. Pinn-Darvish?”

“Step in for a moment, young lady. We need to talk.”

Pale, raven-haired Ms. Pinn-Darvish stepped aside with a dramatic flourish as Bethesda entered her domain. The art room had an odd smell, sweet and chemical, a mixture of acrylic paint, paste, and the ginger-scented candles that Ms. Pinn-Darvish was now unloading from a shoebox. Bethesda perched on one of the tottering stools that lined the art room’s long rectangular tables. Some kids liked to say Ms. Pinn-Darvish was a witch, but Bethesda knew that was silly; she was just witch like .

“So…,” Bethesda began, intrigued.

“Patience. Patience,” whispered Ms. Pinn-Darvish. “Let me just finish setting up my candles.”

If Ms. Pinn-Darvish was getting candles ready, it meant that Monday they’d be having Slide Day. This was a semi-occasional feature of Ms. Pinn-Darvish’s class that was bizarre and fascinating the first time, and pretty boring every time thereafter. On Slide Day, students didn’t make art, they looked at art, and thought about art. As Ms. Pinn-Darvish liked to say, they communed with art. To facilitate that mystical communion, Ms. Pinn-Darvish would light candles, dim the overhead halogens, and project famous paintings from her computer onto the side wall of the room, while electronic music gurgled from the small black stereo in the corner of the room.

“Bethesda,” Ms. Pinn-Darvish began as she set out the candles in little clusters, one cluster per table. “I understand you’re trying to solve the Mystery of the Purloined Statuette.”

Ooh, thought Bethesda. Purloined Statuette sounds a lot cooler than Missing Trophy.

“This unfortunate incident occurred on Monday, did it not?”

“Yes,” Bethesda confirmed. She took off her bike helmet, stuck it on the table, and opened the Sock-Snow. Was Ms. Pinn-Darvish, of all people, about to provide her with a crucial clue? She breathed deeply, and the ginger scent of the unlit candles filled her nose.

“On Monday evening, I was walking past the school.” Ms. Pinn-Darvish made a final adjustment to the last grouping of candles and settled on a stool across from Bethesda, her hands steepled before her.

“Monday evening? What time?”

Ms. Pinn-Darvish twisted up her mouth and tilted her head back and forth, thinking.

“About five forty-five, I suppose. That’s when I walk Tiberius.”

“Tiberius is your dog?”

“ Dog? No. Tiberius is a potbellied pig.”

“You have a pet pig?”

“In a way, young lady, I am his pet, as much as he is mine.”

“Okay… so…”

“Our walk was disturbed by a noise. A loud noise. A bang kind of a noise.”

The glass! Bethesda thought. Ms. Pinn-Darvish heard the breaking glass of the trophy case! Except…

“Wait. More like a crash, right?”

“Well, that’s the odd thing, you see. There was a crash, but it came a second later. The bang came first, and that’s what startled Tiberius. Poor little fellow was quite confused.”

A crowd of thoughts jostled for space in Bethesda’s mind.

She thought: A bang, and then a crash?