Ben Winters - The Mystery of the Missing Everything

The funny thing about clues is, if you don’t know you’re solving a mystery, then they’re not clues. They’re just… stuff.

So when the random piece of plastic poked Bethesda Fielding in the foot as she walked into school on that clear and cloudless Tuesday morning in September, she didn’t gasp and shout “Aha!” Neither did she stroke her chin and say “very interesting—very interesting indeed.” Bethesda wasn’t in detective mode. She didn’t know there was a mystery to be solved. Not yet.

It was, by all appearances, an entirely ordinary day. Bethesda woke to her Three Ducks Quacking alarm clock; she got dressed and plucked her glasses from the bedside table; she wrangled her reddish-tannish hair into twin butterfly barrettes; she tumbled downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast… everything exactly the same as always.

Bethesda biked to school along the regular route: Left down Chesterton, soft right on Dunwiddie, a long easy downhill glide, feet off the pedals, until the final right onto Friedman Street. Bethesda listened to her iPod while she biked, bopping her head to this cool D.C. pop band, Title Tracks, that her friend Tenny Boyer had gotten her into over the summer. After chaining up her bike, Bethesda paused by the big gnarled oak tree that stood guard by the front doors of Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School, and gave it a friendly pat for luck.

A little blue-and-green swallow sat chirping happily in the crook of the tree. Bethesda had seen this cheerful character around a lot the first couple weeks of school, but not at all in the last few days. She smiled to see the sweet bird again. The sun sparkled in the golden leaves; the autumn breeze teased into the sleeves of Bethesda’s lime-green fall jacket.

And then, as Bethesda pulled open the big main door and stepped inside, something jabbed the thin sole of her black-and-white Chuck Taylor sneakers.

“Ouch,” she said softly, though it didn’t really hurt. She paused there, just inside the threshold of the school, to crouch and pick the thing up. It was some cast-off piece of junk, that’s all, a small hunk of off-white plastic, chipped and dirty, about the size of an apple slice.

But Bethesda wasn’t in detective mode—not yet. She didn’t snatch the dingy little crescent and hold it up to the light for further examination. She didn’t preserve it carefully in a sandwich bag and pronounce it to be a most intriguing clue, indeed. She didn’t really have time to do much of anything, because the next second, Shelly Schwartz came hurtling from the other end of the hallway, waving her hands.

“Oh my god ! Bethesda!” Shelly yelped, grinning and seizing her by the arm. “Do you know what’s going on?”

Bethesda grinned back at Shelly. Eighth graders, in general, love it when something is going on. She jammed the hunk of plastic into the front pocket of her backpack and allowed herself to be dragged down the hall. In that instant, the dingy, yellowed piece of hallway flotsam was transformed from a random piece of junk into a vital clue. Whether Bethesda Fielding would figure that out in time—and whether she could solve the bizarre and baffling mystery that was about to consume her life—remained to be seen.

No one at Mary Todd Lincoln had ever seen Principal Van Vreeland quite this angry.

Oh, she’d been angry before. Many times. She had been very angry last year, when Ms. Finkleman’s seventh-grade Music Fundamentals class had tied for second in the All-County Choral Corral, instead of pulverizing Grover Cleveland to a fine dust with their rock and roll magnificence, as she had specifically commanded them to do. She had been extremely angry two years ago on International Day, when the sauerkraut specially prepared by the lunch lady, Mrs. Doonan, had sent the deputy superintendent of schools to the hospital for a week. She had been exceptionally angry three semesters ago, when Mr. Kleban, the sixth-grade math teacher, had turned out to be an unemployed actor who printed his teaching certificate off the internet.

But now, as she glowered down from the stage of the auditorium, gripping the top of the lectern like she was ready to tear it off, it was clear that the principal had achieved an unprecedented level of angriness.

“Whoever committed this crime will pay ,” Principal Van Vreeland pronounced, sweeping her furious gaze across the audience. “You. Will. Pay .” Assistant Principal Jasper Ferrars, seated to her left, twitched visibly and mopped his high forehead with a cloth handkerchief.

“Yikes,” Bethesda whispered to Shelly.

“Seriously.”

The girls were seated in the back of the auditorium with the other eighth graders. Bethesda actually would have preferred to sit closer to the front, because she was kind of short and didn’t like to miss anything. But as the oldest kids in school, eighth graders had a natural and inalienable right to sit way, way in the back during all-school assemblies. And if there was one thing Bethesda liked about being an eighth grader, it was finally doing all the things only eighth graders get to do.

“And as for the rest of you!” the principal thundered, thumping the top of the lectern with the flat of her hand. “If you know anything about this, do not keep it to yourself. I assure you, you do not want to share in the punishment when the criminal is found.”

The auditorium was totally, eerily quiet. Yes, their principal got angry with dismaying frequency, but words like “crime” and “criminal” were something new. No one giggled; no one snapped gum; no one made loud gross noises and then looked around innocently to see who had made the loud gross noises. Mr. Darlington, Bethesda’s science teacher, shifted anxiously in his seat, folding and unfolding his long legs. Kindly Mrs. Howell shook her head sadly, evincing a grandmotherly disappointment in whoever had gotten up to such shenanigans. Even gruff Mr. Melville—who usually reacted to the principal’s melodramatic pronouncements with an audible, dismissive snort—sat gravely, his arms folded across the vast expanse of his stomach.

“ Somebody stole that trophy,” the principal continued. “That person will be found, and that beautiful trophy will be returned to its rightful owner! Me!” Mr. Ferrars coughed meaningfully. “Oh. I mean Ms. Preston, of course.”

Bethesda looked over at Pamela Preston, seated one row up and three seats over, unscrewing the cap from a bottle of pomegranate seltzer. You weren’t allowed to eat or drink during school assemblies, but apparently Pamela had special permission because of the circumstances. Pamela was as pretty and put-together as always, but this morning her perfect light-blue eyes were puffy from crying. She sat stiff and upright, taking slow, measured sips of her seltzer, and even her blond curls seemed more tightly coiled than usual. It was as if her whole body was working overtime to keep her from breaking down into sobs.

Over the weekend Pamela had won the first-place all-around trophy at the first county gymnastics meet of the year, and yesterday the trophy had been ceremoniously installed in a glass case in the Achievement Alcove, a little nook at the end of the Front Hall, by the doors of the Main Office. And then, sometime after school, someone had smashed the glass case and stolen it. This was a pretty horrible thing to do, all the more so because Pamela’s trophy was the first and only trophy ever won at Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School, not counting the Let’s Go Mental for Dental Hygiene trophy—but that was awarded by Molar Brothers Toothpaste, and every school in the county got one.