The Mystery of the Missing Everything

by Ben H. Winters

  “Anybody else going insane about Fischler?” asked Bethesda, raising her voice to reach all four tables. The first big math test of the year was looming, and complaining about it had become a daily routine. But today, no one seemed to be up for a gripe session. Even Braxton, who could usually be relied upon to complain about any subject, at any time, wouldn’t meet Bethesda’s eye.

  “All right,” said Bethesda finally. “Shelly? Is something going on?”

  Shelly sighed and laid a firm hand on Bethesda’s shoulder. “Okay. Well, it’s not a big deal, but people are kind of mad at you.”

  “Really?” Bethesda swept her gaze anxiously around the tables again. Like most people in the universe, Bethesda liked to think she didn’t care when people were mad at her; also like most people in the universe, she actually cared a lot. “Who?”

  “Oh, you know . . . ,” Shelly began, then glanced pleadingly at Suzie, who reluctantly finished the thought: “Everybody.”

  A small twisted leaf came unstuck from the oak and drifted down into Bethesda’s open container of spaghetti, but she ignored it.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, Violet said that Ellis said Lindsey Deming saw you talking to Chester, when he was right about to go in and confess, and that you stopped him.”

  “So?”

  Shelly and Suzie looked at each other, shaking their heads. “It’s Taproot Valley, Bethesda.”

  “I know. But—”

  Violet put down her sandwich and chimed in. “It’s so obvious. You want to solve the mystery yourself, so you stopped Chester from confessing, which would have saved the trip.”

  “Just so you can be the one to figure it out,” added Suzie. “And be like this big hero, or whatever.”

  “That’s crazy, you guys,” Bethesda protested. She raised her voice. “I mean, Chester is innocent.”

  “Maybe,” answered Ezra. “How do you even know?”

  “Because . . . well . . .” Bethesda’s nervous fingers clacked and unclacked the lid of her smallest lunch container, which held three miraculously crisp pieces of garlic bread. She did know, but explaining would mean betraying Chester’s crush on Marisol. “I dunno,” she said, feeling impossibly lame. “I just do.”

  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.

  Chapter 10

  A Bang and Then a Crash

  A few 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 witchlike.

  “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 tabl
e. “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?

  She thought: Did anyone else hear that bang?

  She thought: How do you know when a potbellied pig is confused?

  A little before four o’clock, Janitor Steve yawned a big, long, end-of-the-week yawn and resumed his slow progress down the Front Hall. He was pushing his extrawide bristly broom and his gigantic rolling trash can, gathering up dust balls and crumpled-up late passes and granola-bar wrappers from his beautiful floor. Bending to pick up one tattered sheet of loose-leaf, he saw that it was decorated with a not-half-bad cartoon of Principal Van Vreeland, shouting and waving two stick-figure fists in the air.

  “Heh heh,” said Janitor Steve, and then jerked nervously at the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway. But no—it wasn’t the clack of Van Vreeland’s heels, but the squeak of sneakers on linoleum. It was that bubbly kid with the glasses, Bethesda, the mystery solver, hurrying from Hallway B toward the front door, her head bent down, scribbling furiously in a notebook. Janitor Steve had barely resumed his sweeping when another student—a new girl, Irene or something—stormed down Hallway C and swept past him like a fast-moving thundercloud.

  And then, just as the door slammed behind her, along came Ms. Finkleman, the music lady, looking exhausted. She nodded politely, like always, and pushed open the front door.

  Now that he was reasonably sure the school was empty, Janitor Steve lifted his broom handle and tapped on the air ducts, just as Bethesda had seen him do on Wednesday, when she came to investigate the Achievement Alcove. He tapped, and then listened—tapped again—nothing. Last week the vents had been making strange noises, noises that had kept Janitor Steve on edge: little pops and pings and bangs. Now, though, nothing.

  “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” he said, peering up at the silent ducts. “You got what you wanted and now you’re gone.”

  He knew. Janitor Steve knew exactly who had stolen that trophy, and he knew why. But nobody had bothered to ask.

  Chapter 11

  Take That, Freakazoid!

  It was Bethesda’s habit, when she needed the internet, to use the computers at the library. They had a computer at home, of course, in her father’s messy den, but Bethesda preferred the library computers, because (A) they were a heck of a lot faster, and (B) when she was on the library computers, her father wasn’t standing behind her, telling her the fascinating origin of the term “mouse pad” for the seven hundredth time.

  Unfortunately, only one of the library computers was working, and a wide-eyed fourth grader in a plaid button-down shirt and headphones was immersed in some sort of outer-space alien-shooting game, bouncing crazily in his seat, whispering, “Take that, freakazoid!” over and over. Bethesda put her name on the sign-up sheet, and was heading to the detective fiction section to kill some time when she saw Reenie Maslow.

  “Oh. Hey, Reenie,” said Bethesda in a quiet library voice. She gave a little wave as she walked over to the beanbag chair where Reenie was settled, a book balanced on her lap, one finger idly twisting her hair. “What are you doing here?”

  Reenie looked up and scowled fiercely, and Bethesda stopped. All she had meant by “What are you doing here?” was just “Why are you at the library today?” Nobody came to the library on Friday afternoons—nobody but Bethesda, anyway. But Reenie clearly thought she meant “What are you doing here?,” as in “You don’t belong here.” Reenie didn’t answer, just made a kind of irritated noise in the back of her throat and went back to her book.

  Argle bargle!

  Bethesda had tried over and over to be friendly to Reenie Maslow, just as she tried to be friendly with all new kids. But Reenie always seemed to take things the wrong way, always seemed to be actively seeking out reasons to be annoyed. It was especially frustrating because, in theory, Bethesda and Reenie Maslow should have gotten along great.

  Fact: they were both short.

  Fact: they both had tannish-reddish hair that they wore pulled back, Bethesda in barrettes or a pair of short pigtails, Reenie clipped above her ears.

  Fact: they both liked to read. Her whole life, Bethesda had never known anyone who liked books as much as she did, a fact she had always taken secret pride in. Back in elementary school, Mrs. Levine had posted a reading chart, on which each completed book earned you a new sticker. Eventually she had to staple an extra strip of poster board at the end of Bethesda’s row, which poked haphazardly off the side of the chart, overladen with stickers like a bent, snow-covered tree limb. But Reenie was even more of a bookworm than Bethesda; every time you saw her, her backpack was bulging with books.

  So they should have been friends: two short, book-loving, glasses-wearing girls with reddish hair. And yet . . .

  “Hey, what are you reading?”

  Reenie looked up at Bethesda, exhaled with impatience, and said, “A book, okay?” Then she looked back down, exaggeratedly flipped to the next page, and kept reading.

  “Bethesda?” called the librarian, Ms. Gotwals, from the computer desk. “Bethesda Fielding?”

  Thank god. It was four fifteen, the alien-slaying fourth grader was forced to relinquish his seat at the computers, and Bethesda had an excuse to escape this awkward non-conversation. She settled into the hard plastic chair, flipped open her Sock-Snow, and commenced her research. In half an hour she filled her notebook with all sorts of brilliant mystery-solving advice. She found tips on making timelines, tips on evaluating evidence, and (best of all) tips on what one website called the “classic physiological signs of guilt”: sweating, shaking, eyes darting around the room, long pauses in speech. . . .

  And then, too soon, it was four forty-five, and Bethesda had to give the computer back to the fourth grader, who was waiting anxiously to reclaim it. She was strapping on her bike helmet, getting ready to go, when Bethesda’s eyes landed again on the small, thin figure of Reenie Maslow, lost in the smooshy heap of the beanbag chair, her legs tucked beneath her, immersed in what she was reading. The pose of book-loving absorption was so familiar, Bethesda felt like she could be looking in a mirror.

  Should she try to talk to Reenie again? She heard her father in her head, gently encouraging her to try. Resentment is the worst tasting mint of all, he’d say. It takes more muscles to frown. Only you can prevent forest fires. (Or whatever.)

&nbs
p; “I’ll see ya round, Reenie.”

  “’Bye,” Reenie answered, and flashed a quick, half-friendly smile before bending back to her book. Well, Bethesda thought, it’s a start. Now what?

  “Oh, hey, Reenie, random question for you,” Bethesda said. “You weren’t by any chance hanging around school on Monday evening, were you?”

  Reenie tensed, slammed the book closed, and glared at Bethesda. “No! God! Why would you even accuse me of something like that?”

  “Accuse you? No! I wasn’t! Reenie . . .”

  Too late. Reenie Maslow heaved herself up out of her beanbag chair, grabbed her bag, and stomped out of the library.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Bethesda protested helplessly, but no one was listening. Ms. Gotwals was away from her desk, the boy at the computer was immersed in freakazoid destruction, and Reenie Maslow was long gone.

  Bethesda left the library, unchained her bike, and pedaled slowly home.

  Chapter 12

  “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”

  The next day was a perfect autumn Saturday, cool but not cold, where the whole world smells like crisp leaves and warm apple cider. It was the kind of day that says, “Hey! Kid! Grab a ball of some kind and get out here! Enjoy the day!”

  But Tenny Boyer was in his windowless basement, playing guitar. He was trying to teach himself a song called “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” by a British singer-songwriter named Richard Thompson, who Tenny had only just recently discovered. The song had lyrics, about this dude with a motorcycle and this girl he falls in love with. Or maybe the dude is in love with the motorcycle. Tenny wasn’t totally clear on that—what he dug was the guitar part on “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” and for the last three hours he’d been sitting in the dimly lit unfinished basement, trying to nail it.

  He sailed through the first sixteen bars and launched into the first verse. “Says Red Molly to James, that’s a fine motor bike . . .”