The Mystery of the Missing Everything

by Ben H. Winters

  She tilted her head, squinting to make out the tiny writing. IOM.

  “Bethesda?” warned Violet Kelp, her pigtails bouncing as she raced by. “You do not want to be late for Galloway!” But Bethesda ignored her. She stepped back into the alcove, taking one last careful look at this new clue. Was it actually I zero M? Was it an upside-down WOI?

  Bethesda flipped back open her notebook and scribbled wildly on a fresh page. She punctuated this new piece of evidence with a cluster of exclamation points, like a little forest had sprung up at the end of the sentence.

  Clue #3. IOM!!!!!!

  Finally, and with great reluctance, Bethesda left the crime scene behind.

  Chapter 6

  “Police and Thieves”

  That Thursday afternoon, at precisely 4:47 p.m., an unremarkable woman with mousy, shoulder-length brown hair, clad in a simple brown dress, brown sweater, and sensible brown shoes, examined the dusty sleeve of an old LP record and shook her head patiently.

  “No, young man. I’m looking for the first Clash album. The one with ‘Police and Thieves’ on it.”

  “Oh. All right. Hold on a sec, lady.” The record store clerk gave the woman a tight-lipped, irritated smile and strolled lazily to the back of the store.

  Ida Finkleman flipped through the racks while she waited, pulling out a Jawbox album and running her finger down the track listings, trying to remember if this was the one she had already. The drive to this record store was quite long, and the clerks were preposterously rude, especially considering that Ida was frequently the only customer. But it couldn’t be helped. Once upon a time, all Ms. Finkleman listened to was classical music—Tchaikovsky and Haydn, Brahms and Bach, and especially her beloved Mozart. But that was before last semester. Before the Choral Corral and the Careless Errors; before Bethesda Fielding used a project in Mr. Melville’s class to dig up her punk rock past and broadcast it to the world.

  In the aftermath of these extraordinary events, Ms. Finkleman had, to all outward appearances, returned to her former role in the Mary Todd Lincoln landscape: the boring and unremarkable Band and Chorus teacher, walking briskly through the halls with her head down and her violin case clutched to her chest. Except Ida had not come away unchanged, not really. What she had gained—besides a keen determination to avoid student projects of all kinds—was a newfound passion for rock and roll.

  “Say,” Ida asked the returning clerk, gesturing to the in-store stereo system. “This is the Flaming Lips, right?”

  The clerk grunted in the affirmative and handed her the Clash album she’d asked for.

  Ms. Finkleman rarely had a chance to drive all the way over here and indulge her new obsession; she was not terribly pleased, therefore, to feel the insistent vibration of her cellular phone. She was even less pleased to discover on the other end a nervous female voice she didn’t recognize.

  “Hello, is that Ida? It’s Tracy.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Tracy Fischler? From the math department? I’m here with some of the other teachers. Ida, we, uh . . .”

  “Yes?” She ran her finger over the record, checking for nicks and scratches. “What?”

  “We need your help.”

  Chapter 7

  Chester Did It!

  On Friday morning her trophy had been gone for four days, and Isabel Van Vreeland decided it was time to get serious. It was time, in other words, for some classroom visits. All morning she prowled the hallways, selecting classrooms at random, throwing open their doors and sweeping inside.

  “Who stole my trophy?” she hollered, pointing an angry finger at whatever student she found suspicious. “Did you steal it? Did you?” Principal Van Vreeland’s criteria for suspiciousness were somewhat nontraditional: for some reason she seemed to distrust really tall children, left-handed children, and those with purple backpacks.

  “Was it you?” she demanded, bursting into Ms. Aarndini’s Home Ec. room midway through fourth period, violently emptying the purple backpack of a sixth-grade girl named Heather Long.

  “Oh dear,” said Ms. Aarndini helplessly. “Oh dear.”

  But the result was the same in Ms. Aarndini’s room as it had been in every other room, all morning long. All the children denied it, and Principal Van Vreeland hissed and huffed and finally slammed the door, leaving behind a mightily flustered Ms. Aarndini and a room full of rattled, restless students, their hands trembling too much to safely use craft scissors.

  “Why can’t I simply seize these children and shake them by the lapels until they confess!” she demanded of poor Jasper, who raced down the hall at her heels, barely keeping up as she stomped toward another classroom.

  “Well—that is—” he stammered. “I don’t think children really wear lapels. . . .”

  Principal Van Vreeland wasn’t listening. She’d already flung open the door to the next room and charged inside, hands cupped around her mouth like a megaphone. “Who stole my trophy?!”

  As it happened, this next room was Mr. Darlington’s. When the door slammed open, with a loud BAM!, it so rattled the mild-mannered science teacher that he dropped his sample weather-system diorama, a flood-plain ecosystem, requiring fifteen minutes and a significant deployment of paper towels before class could resume.

  By the time the floor was dry and the principal was gone, the period was almost over, and Mr. Darlington was struggling to regain his students’ attention. “Children? I know there’s a lot going on around here this week. But there’s also a lot going on in the swirling eddies of a sandstorm. Like, for example—”

  BAM! The door swung open and cracked against the wall again. Mr. Darlington jumped and brought a hand up to his chest, while all eyes turned to the doorway.

  There stood Suzie Schwartz, Shelly’s identical twin sister, clutching a bathroom pass. Suzie’s eyes were wide with excitement behind the neon pink, non-prescription glasses she had recently started wearing to distinguish herself from Shelly. “It was Chester! Chester Hu stole the trophy! He’s going to the principal to confess right now! Can you believe it? I can’t even believe it. Hey, Shelly! Got to go. ’Bye!”

  She slammed the door shut behind her.

  “Chester?” said Rory.

  “Chester Hu?” said Carmine Lopez.

  The ensuing chaos was far too much for Mr. Darlington to even try to control. A confession! The punishment was over! Taproot Valley was back!

  Only Bethesda remained quiet, her brow furrowed pensively behind her glasses. Something wasn’t right. Chester? Really? An idea began to flash in her mind, blinking on and off like a neon exclamation point. For a long minute she tuned out the babble of the room, nodding her head rhythmically, connecting dots, tapping her sneaker on the floor beneath her desk.

  “Right,” Bethesda said to herself. “That’s right.”

  Then she raised her hand and, speaking loudly to cut through the noise, asked Mr. Darlington if she could go to the bathroom.

  “That’s fine, Bethesda,” he answered as she pushed back her chair and jumped out of her seat. “Although, you know, class is—”

  BAM! The door slammed against the wall again, and Bethesda raced out. Mr. Darlington exhaled weakly.

  “Class is nearly over anyway.”

  Chapter 8

  Just in Time

  Bethesda raced down Hallway B, rounded the corner, and sighed with relief: There he was.

  “Skabimple,” Bethesda whispered, borrowing a favorite made-up expression of her father’s. (“Skabimple” meant “this could have been bad, but it’s good.” It was Bethesda’s dad’s second-most-used made-up expression, after the perennial favorite for expressing sudden shock or pain, “argle bargle.”) There was Chester, standing alone at the big wooden office door with its pane of frosted glass, one hand hovering at the knob, eyes closed, psyching himself up to go inside. She had arrived just in time, and now it was up to Bethesda to save Chester from certain doom.

  She walked toward Chester slowly, gingerly, almost on
tippy-toes, like a nature documentarian approaching a herd of easily spooked zebra. “I have a confession to make,” Chester was muttering to himself. “I have a confession to make.”

  He’s practicing, Bethesda thought.

  Edging closer, she spoke softly but firmly. “Don’t do it, Chester.”

  “What?” He jerked suddenly and wheeled around. “Oh, Bethesda. Hey.”

  Chester Hu was a thin, wiry kid with choppy black hair that went off in every direction. His default facial expression was a kind of nervous goofiness, but today the proportions were out of whack: He looked about 80 percent nervous, 20 percent goofy. A little bead of sweat sat on the bridge of Chester’s nose.

  “Don’t open that door,” Bethesda commanded, taking another step closer.

  A halfhearted grin quickly appeared and disappeared on Chester’s face. “I just have to talk to Principal Van Vreeland about Pam’s trophy.” Chester leaned with comically fake casualness against the door frame.

  “But why? You didn’t steal it.”

  “Actually, yeah. I did. So, you know. Gotta confess or whatever.” Chester’s nervousness/goofiness proportion turned itself up to about ninety/ten.

  “Oh yeah?” she asked. “So where is it?”

  “I, uh.” He looked around helplessly. “I sold it. To some guys.”

  “Oh yeah?” Bethesda said again. “What did they look like?”

  “Um . . . one of them was missing an arm. And the other one was really tall. I think, like, nine feet tall.” Bethesda felt like she could actually see Chester’s brain working. “I mean, eight feet tall. Seven and a half?”

  “Come on, Chester,” Bethesda said. “It’s really sweet that you want to save the Taproot Valley trip for Marisol Pierce. But you didn’t do it.”

  Chester turned red, as quickly and as completely as if someone had splashed paint on him. “What?!” he protested. “For Marisol? What? That’s crazy talk, Bethesda.”

  He turned away, developing a sudden and consuming interest in the flyers posted outside the office door. “Wow, look at that,” said Chester, pointing randomly at an ad for a community theater production of The Mikado, featuring Assistant Principal Ferrars in the role of Ko-ko. “Performances at four and seven every day! How ’bout that?”

  Bethesda shot a look at her watch. Pete Townshend’s windmilling hands informed Bethesda she only had a couple minutes left before the hallway flooded with kids and Chester got spooked and bolted into the office . . . toward certain doom.

  “Look,” she said. “Chester, if you confess to this crime, you are going to be in Big Trouble. Serious, Permanent-Record Big Trouble. And Principal Van Vreeland might not give us back the Taproot Valley trip, anyway! You know her. She might leave it canceled, to teach us all a lesson or something. Then what?”

  Chester considered this, nodding, his eyes darting worriedly from The Mikado flyer to Bethesda and back again.

  “And look, if you want to show Marisol you like her . . .” Bethesda paused. Now she was the one blushing; she could feel the warmth creeping up her neck toward her face. This was so not her area of expertise. “Just write her a note or something.”

  “A note?” Chester barked a high, embarrassed laugh. “Have you seen my handwriting? Dr. Capshaw says it’s like an orangutan’s. Who wants to get a crush note from an orangutan? Besides another orangutan, I mean.”

  By now, Chester was moving away from the office door. Very carefully, making no sudden movements, Bethesda guided him back toward Hallway B, and Chester allowed himself to be guided, even as he continued his embarrassed denials. “I mean, even if I did have a crush. Which I don’t. Seriously. Orangutans are so funny, don’t you think?”

  Bethesda had saved the day, and just in time. The bell rang, ending fourth period and sending a torrent of rambunctious kids spilling into the halls, diving for their lockers, grabbing lunch bags, loudly discussing the day so far. As Bethesda and Chester made their way up the back stairs to the eighth-grade lockers, she felt a warm, prideful glow in her chest. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d faced serious, Permanent-Record Big Trouble of her own, after the debacle with Mr. Melville’s Floating Midterm and the Choral Corral. She knew how it felt to sit on that long bench outside Principal Van Vreeland’s office, knew the nauseating gut-terror of impending doom. And now she had rescued Chester from the same fate, and for something he didn’t even do!

  Never did Bethesda suspect that a day would come, in the not-too-distant future, when she’d wish she’d let Chester make his fake confession after all.

  Chapter 9

  All This Trophy Nonsense

  As Bethesda guided Chester away from the Main Office, Ms. Finkleman walked toward it, dreading the job she had foolishly agreed to do.

  Hers was a ridiculous and utterly useless mission, one that everyone else on the faculty was either too scared or too smart to attempt. Ask Principal Van Vreeland to change her mind? Ms. Finkleman chuckled mirthlessly as she turned the corner into the Front Hall. Principal Van Vreeland never changed her mind. Once, when she accidentally had typed three a.m. instead of p.m. in an all-faculty email, the principal had refused to admit her error, and they’d all had to attend a two-hour curriculum-planning meeting in the middle of the night.

  Besides, Ms. Finkleman had really hoped not to get involved in all this trophy nonsense. She had so much on her plate already. There was the sixth-grade winter concert—“A Big Boatload of Bernstein!”—she had to prepare. There was the eighth-grade student she was privately mentoring. And there was her seventh-grade Music Fundamentals class, who of course were clamoring to do rock and roll like last year’s kids.

  But the other teachers had begged her to go ask Principal Van Vreeland to give the kids their extracurriculars back, so everything could return to normal. “She respects you,” Ms. Fischler had argued. “I mean, after the whole thing with the Choral Corral, she didn’t kill you.”

  That seemed like a pretty low standard for respect to Ms. Finkleman, and yet here she was, slowly pulling open the door of the Main Office. And there was her elegantly dressed, agitated boss, perched on the edge of Mrs. Gingertee’s desk, reviewing student records with the help of the cowering assistant principal.

  “Principal Van Vreeland?” Ms. Finkleman ventured. “I—”

  “Whatever it is, it can wait!” snapped the principal, waving a folder as if evidence would fly out if she shook it hard enough. “All that matters right now is finding that trophy!”

  “That’s just it, Principal,” Ms. Finkleman began. “The other teachers and I have noted, it somewhat interferes with the educational process—”

  “Ms. Finkleman! Please! No time!”

  “No time! No time!” echoed Jasper, like a parrot. He gathered up an armful of student folders, and the pair of them disappeared into the principal’s private office.

  “Well, then,” said Ms. Finkleman to the empty air. “Thanks anyway.”

  She sighed. What a waste of time.

  But if Ms. Finkleman hadn’t been the one to take on the useless mission, she wouldn’t have been the one standing outside the Main Office at that moment, turning her head by happenstance toward the Achievement Alcove, directly to her left. She wouldn’t, then, have seen the clue—the same three little letters, IOM, written on the back wall beneath Marisol Pierce’s fruit-bowl drawing, that Bethesda had seen two days earlier.

  But Ms. Finkleman did see the clue—and knew immediately, or thought she knew, what it meant.

  She was involved in all this trophy nonsense now, like it or not.

  Bethesda, still enjoying the pleasant sensation of having done Chester a good turn, adjusted her butterfly barrettes in the mirror in her locker, cheerfully saluted her Benjamin Franklin action figure, and grabbed her lunch. A few minutes later she emerged from the school and found her favorite seat at the picnic tables.

  On that list of inalienable rights belonging exclusively to eighth graders, eating lunch outside at the picnic tables was very near t
o the top, second only to the Taproot Valley trip itself. The cluster of sagging, battered tables, arranged in a loose semicircle just to the right of the school’s front entrance, was officially open to any Mary Todd Lincoln student who felt like eating there. Unofficially, however, it was eighth-grader territory.

  It was a beautiful day, and everyone was outside. Hayley, her retainer resting snugly in its orange case. Shelly Schwartz, with her sister Suzie beside her in the pink-framed glasses. Kevin McKelvey, tall and thin in his rumpled blue blazer, munching an apple and flipping through a thick book of sheet music. Pamela and Natasha, whispering to each other.

  But still something . . . Bethesda couldn’t put her finger on it, but something was off somehow. Was it just that Todd Spolin, whose interests were traditionally limited to heavy metal music, pro wrestling, and spitballs, was whistling gently to the little blue-green swallow, sweetly offering it bites of his Ding Dong?

  Bethesda opened her lunch bag and carefully removed three click-top containers. “Oh, sweet,” she said, cracking open the first translucent box. “Spaghetti!” She looked around, prepared for the onslaught of would-be bite-havers. Bethesda’s dad’s cooking skills were semilegendary among her friends, as was his uncanny ability to arrange even the messiest, most complicated meals into neatly stacked portable containers.

  “All right, who wants?” offered Bethesda, waggling a sloppy forkful.

  “No thanks,” said Shelly, and Suzie remained silent. Hayley, on the far end of the opposite bench, muttered, “Can’t,” and gestured vaguely to her retainer. Bethesda angled the pasta-laden fork toward Violet Kelp, who shook her head.

  “Okay . . .”

  This was weird. Violet always took a bite, as would anybody who had peanut-butter-and-jelly packed for her every day. But today Violet kept nibbling her sad little sandwich.