The Mystery of the Missing Everything

by Ben H. Winters

  “Totally,” said Tenny. “Though it’s sort of like, why would a fox want to rob a bank in the first place?”

  “Right,” said Bethesda’s father, although it was clear from his slightly confused expression that he’d never actually thought of that.

  “Dad, we really need to get started.”

  “I know, pumpkin butter. I’m not bothering you. I’m not even here.” Bethesda’s father turned back to the gigantic pot of chili on the stove, his latest attempt to perfect his recipe for the charity dinner.

  Bethesda hated to be rude, but the Taproot Valley trip was a mere sixteen days away, and they didn’t have a moment to waste. For today’s crime-solving session, Bethesda had prepared a good selection of supplies: a box of sharpened #2 pencils, an up-to-date map of the school she’d gotten from Mr. Ferrars; and of course the all-important Semi-Official Crime-Solving Notebook (Sock-Snow), which Tenny was now perusing with intense concentration.

  “Huh,” he murmured, then looked up and said it again. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “What’s this, here?”

  “Just my notes from my conversation with Janitor Steve.”

  “Huh,” said Tenny again, reading. “So . . . wait. He said there was glass ‘all over the floor’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh,” Tenny said a fourth time. He tilted his head back and thought for a long time. So long, in fact, that for a second Bethesda thought maybe he had fallen asleep.

  But then he said, “Excuse me? Sir?”

  Bethesda’s father turned from his stockpot in surprise. “‘Sir?’” he repeated, eyes wide with pretended shock. Bethesda was thinking the same thing: Sir?

  “Do you mind if I fake-punch your microwave?”

  Now Bethesda’s father looked really surprised. “You know, I bet in the whole history of the English language, no one has ever spoken that sentence before.”

  Tenny was already out of his chair, pushing up one sleeve of his blue-hooded sweatshirt. Bethesda watched, intrigued. What did the microwave have to do with anything? Bethesda’s father stepped back, ladle in hand, while Tenny approached the counter, drew back one fist, and gently punched the small appliance in its thick plastic door.

  “Ow,” he said. But then he punched a second time, slightly harder, and then a third time. Bethesda’s father gave a low whistle and said, “Wow. He really hates that microwave.”

  “Okay, Tenny. What’s up?” said Bethesda finally.

  “I’m just trying to think logically here, y’know?”

  Think logically? Tenny?

  What happened to him at St. Francis Xavier? Bethesda marveled. It’s like he’s been replaced by some sort of pod person. But then, the next moment, Tenny absentmindedly picked up a chili-crusted spoon from the counter and scratched his ear with the handle.

  Nope, she thought with amused relief. Still Tenny.

  “The glass of the trophy case was as hard as this on the microwave, right? Maybe even harder?”

  Bethesda thought for a second, remembering the little unveiling ceremony, when Mr. Wolcott had set up the glass case built by his sixth-grade Industrial Arts class. “That right there, that’s double-paned,” Mr. Wolcott had bragged, his thick shop-class goggles dangling around his neck, big sweat stains in full blossom under his arms. “Thickest glass around.”

  “Harder,” said Bethesda. “Way harder.”

  “Okay, then. So here’s observation number one: Our trophy thief would need something a lot harder than a fist to break the glass.”

  “Smart,” Bethesda agreed, and carefully wrote this down on a fresh page of the Sock-Snow, heading it tenny observation #1.

  “And here’s observation number two. The glass would go in here.” He opened the door of the microwave and pointed inside. “Not on the floor. Right?”

  “Yeah,” Bethesda said, and then again: “Yeah!” As she wrote tenny observation #2 under the first one, her right foot was squeaking against the linoleum of the kitchen floor. “Of course!”

  “Now you’re cooking!” interjected Bethesda’s father from the stove.

  “There might be a little glass on the ground, right here around the base,” Tenny continued. As if the kitchen cabinet were the trophy case, he traced a tight arc with the toe of his sneaker on the floor. “But not, not . . .” He plucked Bethesda’s notebook off the table and flipped back to the interview page. “Not ‘all over the floor.’”

  “Right! So the question is, what does this mean?”

  “Uh, yeah . . .” Tenny shrugged, and slumped back in his chair. “I have no idea.”

  “But I do!” Bethesda got up and began pacing back and forth across the kitchen. “Our crook smashes the glass and grabs the trophy. But then, for some reason, he pushes all the bits of glass onto the floor.” She approached the microwave, pretending to be the thief, acting the whole thing out. “I think he was trying to clean the glass from the case.”

  “But why?”

  “To . . . to . . .” She gasped, and stared intensely at Tenny. “To put something else in there!”

  “Whoa.”

  “Whoa,” echoed her father.

  Tenny scratched his head. “But, uh, then he didn’t? Put something else in there?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t know, Bethesda,” Tenny said. “What kind of crook would do that?”

  Bethesda grinned and lifted her eyebrows. “Excellent question, Watson. Let’s talk suspects.”

  Returning to her seat at the kitchen table, Bethesda unveiled a slim stack of nine index cards, each one bearing a carefully printed name: one card for each person with a key to the building on the Monday when the trophy was stolen, according to Jasper’s top-secret list. Each card was a different color, with the suspect’s name written in blue ink at the upper-left-hand corner, and Bethesda had three more colored pens at the ready—a red pen for alibi, a green pen for motive, and a purple pen for any additional, miscellaneous information.

  “Sweet system,” said Tenny, flipping through the cards, and Bethesda grinned. Let Sherlock Holmes have his magnifying glass, she thought, arranging the nine cards into a neat three-by-three square. Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, has her office supplies.

  “So who’s first?” said Tenny.

  Bethesda flipped over a card: pamela preston, it said.

  “Okay, so we can cross her off the list,” said Tenny. “It was, like, her trophy, right?”

  “Right.” But Bethesda hesitated, running the tip of her finger along the edge of the card. She had a theory about Pamela. The theory was probably preposterous, and she definitely wasn’t ready to share it. But she wasn’t ready to eliminate Pamela as a suspect, either.

  “I’m going to keep her in the pile.”

  “Whatever,” said Tenny.

  Bethesda and Tenny worked their way through their suspect cards, debating possible motives, passing the Sock-Snow notebook back and forth, laughing at Bethesda’s father’s occasional Wellington Wolf–related interjections, bouncing wadded-up paper napkins off each other’s heads. “Oh! Wait,” Tenny said suddenly at one point, and attached his iPod to the stereo with a little cord. He cued up a playlist he’d made of classic crime-solving-related rock and pop songs, from “Watching the Detectives” by Elvis Costello to the ridiculous “Private Eyes” by Hall and Oates.

  Some cards they annotated with green for motive, like Mr. Darlington’s (“revenge for not being able to display Mary Bot Lincoln”) or Guy Ficker’s (“mad that Pamela was allowed to use the gym instead of him”). Lisa Deckter’s motive was triple-green-underlined: as Bethesda explained to Tenny, Lisa came in second in the gymnastics tournament. Not a bad showing, unless the other competitor from your own team places first. Some had purple for alibi: Mr. Ferrars’s card, for example, said “was at play practice”; Natasha’s said “at Pilverton Mall?,” since Bethesda had heard her say she was heading over there to get her nails done after school that day—and Natasha rarely went to the mall
for less than three hours at a time.

  Finally, at about 12:30, as Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” segued into Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” Bethesda leaned back and stretched, as Tenny flipped over the last of the suspect cards. It was labeled kevin mckelvey, but the Piano Kid’s card otherwise remained blank. They didn’t know if he had an alibi, and neither of them could imagine any motive for mild-mannered Kevin McKelvey to steal a trophy.

  “Whoa, I gotta jet,” Tenny said suddenly. “Chester Hu asked me to record a guitar solo for some sort of video project he’s doing.”

  Bethesda walked Tenny out to his bike, sprawled haphazardly on the lawn. “Oh, hey, so you never told me what happened,” Bethesda said, as Tenny corralled his hair under his silver-black bike helmet decorated with AC/DC stickers.

  “What happened with what?”

  “At St. Francis Xavier. Why are you back?”

  “Oh.”

  Tenny looked away. But in the split second before he did, Bethesda thought she detected a look of distress glinting in her friend’s eyes, a look suggestive of some deep and mysterious truth buried like pirate’s treasure. Then he shrugged, climbed onto his bike, and pointed it down Chesterton Street.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you another time.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, see you soon.”

  He was already in motion. Bethesda waited as her co-detective pedaled unevenly away, then retreated into the house. Her father was shuffling around in the kitchen, opening and shutting cupboards. “Tabasco . . . Tabasco . . . where art thou, Tabasco?”

  Bethesda told herself it was no big deal, that Tenny was entitled to his privacy. But his weird silence (“It was weird, right?” she asked herself, replaying the moment and categorizing it definitively as weird) stung a little. Master Detective Bethesda Fielding returned to the kitchen and served herself a bowl of chili and a big hunk of cornbread, feeling increasingly like she had two mysteries on her hands, instead of one.

  Chapter 22

  Can Your Hemispheric Placebo Bear Fruit?

  While Bethesda Fielding and Tenny Boyer were working their way through their list of suspects, Marisol Pierce was in her bedroom, the windows thrown open to let in the cool autumn breeze, painting trees. She had unrolled a long piece of butcher paper from the roll she’d bought at the art supply store, and taped it up so it covered one whole wall of the room. Slowly but surely, her brush dipping deftly in and out of golds and greens and browns, she filled the paper with a long, lovely line of pines and firs.

  Outside her door her little cousins, visiting from Puerto Rico, cavorted noisily in the hall, shooting each other with water pistols. “Got you!” “No you didn’t!” “You’re all wet!” “No I’m not!”

  It was rude not to be playing with them, but Marisol tuned out the noise and focused on her trees, carefully adding a cluster of russet leaves to a copse of young oaks. Marisol was, as her grandmother always said, “rather a solitary soul.” In the two years since they’d moved to this area, she still hadn’t become terribly close with many kids at Mary Todd Lincoln; frankly, she had no idea why Chester Hu had invited her to be part of this video project. But he had, and she was secretly delighted. Marisol was happy for any excuse to do some painting. She loved making art, loved the intense focus it required.

  The tricky part was the people. Chester and the others had decided that the backdrops for the video should be filled with people: People playing, people climbing ropes, people looking through binoculars and building fires.

  “Of course,” Marisol had said, not wanting to disappoint the group. “I can do that.”

  But the truth was, when she drew people, they had these stubby little limbs and faces, like sea turtles standing on their hind legs. Marisol sighed and stepped back from her work in progress as her grandmother cracked open her door. “Excuse me, Madame Artiste? I am taking your cousins for ice cream. Are you coming?”

  “No, thanks. I really need to finish this.”

  “Well, it’s incredible so far, my darling. I love the little sea turtles.”

  When her grandmother closed the door, Marisol put down her brush and picked up her phone. There was another girl in the eighth grade whose artwork she had admired, but Marisol barely knew her. The idea of calling a person she barely knew, out of the blue, made Marisol so nervous that the roof of her mouth got all dry, like it was coated with the dust from the bottom of a jar of peanuts.

  But this was important. This was Taproot Valley.

  Lisa Deckter was out walking her dog when her phone started vibrating her in pocket.

  She froze. Henry tugged at the leash.

  The phone vibrated again.

  It’s her, thought Lisa, feeling the chill of a cool autumn breeze as it snuck under the collar of her jean jacket. It’s Pamela. She knows.

  The phone vibrated. Lisa remained still. I should just answer it. Just get this over with. Admit the whole thing.

  Henry barked, straining toward an inviting pile of red and orange leaves at the other end of the park. The phone vibrated again, and finally Lisa dipped her hand into her pocket, took a deep breath, and looked at the display.

  Oh. Phew.

  It was a number she didn’t recognize. She flipped the phone open, allowed Henry to lead her to the leaves. “Oh, hey, it’s Marisol Pierce,” said the voice on the other end. “Um, can I ask you—are you good at drawing people?”

  A few weeks earlier, Braxton Lashey had been simultaneously doing the dishes and buying movie tickets over the phone when the cell phone slipped out from under his ear and fell in the garbage disposal.

  He fished it out, but now some of the buttons didn’t work anymore, and the autofill function was kind of out of control. So when Braxton texted his buddy Ellis Walters, at about four thirty on Saturday afternoon—right as Marisol Pierce was hanging up with Lisa Deckter—to say can you help me find a place to rent a bear suit, Ellis got a text that said can your hemispheric placebo bear fruit?

  Ellis texted back that makes no sense.

  Braxton started to type a reply, then opted to just call. “Yo. Chester’s making this video to save Taproot Valley, and I need to dress in a bear suit and fall down a flight of stairs.”

  “Oh,” said Ellis. “That still makes no sense.”

  Nevertheless, half an hour later, in a costume shop owned by a friend of Ellis’s mom from church, the two boys were intently debating which kind of bear would be funniest.

  “I’m thinking grizzly,” said Braxton.

  “No, man, panda,” countered Ellis. “You gotta go panda.”

  It was the same all over town. Everyone on the Save Taproot Valley team, everyone Chester had gathered at the picnic benches on Wednesday afternoon, was way too psyched to keep it to themselves.

  “Hey, Tucker, you’ve got a digital video camera, right?” said Todd.

  “Ezra? It’s Rory. What rhymes with fire ants?”

  “Shelly! Can you come to my room for a second?” yelled Suzie. “I have a question about site hosting.”

  “Um, Reenie? It’s Natasha. I need someone really smart to help me figure out these dances. You’re, like, a genius, right?”

  Only one person, of all the many people invited that day to help out, declined the invitation.

  “Victor? Hey! It’s Carmine. Dude, so, Lindsey heard from Lisa, who got a call from Marisol Pierce, about this crazy video project that Chester is organizing. The Save Taproot Valley project? Have you heard about this?”

  “Yes. I have,” Victor replied coolly. He was in his room, working on the flood plain he and Bethesda were building for Mr. Darlington’s class, carefully placing doomed LEGO people in their rickety wooden seaside huts.

  “Well, so, we’re all gonna meet after school this week to make the movie. Are you in?”

  “No. I’m busy.”

  “But I didn’t even tell you what day yet.”

  Victor Glebe hung up the phone and got back to work on his diorama.


  Chapter 23

  Week of a Thousand Quizzes

  Cruising down Hallway C on Monday morning, Ida Finkleman hummed brightly to herself from the overture to the 1786 opera The Marriage of Figaro, her hands conducting an invisible orchestra. For all her newfound love of rock and roll, Mozart would always be her heart’s darling, and the Figaro overture her favorite melody to hum when she found herself in a cheery mood.

  It was a new week, and Ms. Finkleman had a feeling that everything at Mary Todd Lincoln was returning, ever so slowly, to normal. She looked forward to a nice, calm week, during which she would focus entirely on her educational responsibilities, with no special projects or awkward student conversations to distract her. She pushed open the door of the Band and Chorus room, singing a snatch of Figaro’s delightful opening duet, expecting to find her classroom as she had left it on Friday afternoon: blinds drawn, instruments in their cases, three rows of music stands arranged on the risers.

  What she saw instead was this: Todd Spolin in the back of the room, making a heavy metal face and straddling an electric guitar like a witch on a broomstick; Natasha Belinsky guiding Marisol Pierce and Pamela Preston through some sort of complicated three-step dance; Kevin McKelvey at the piano and Rory Daas on the piano, scribbling in a notebook; and Chester Hu circulating among them all with a clipboard, making notes and grinning. Oh, and there was Braxton Lashey, standing on the top riser, balancing precariously on one foot, wearing the body, but not the head, of a bear costume.

  A nice, calm week, Ms. Finkleman thought, shaking her head. Everything back to normal. Right.

  “Excuse me?” she said, cupping her hands together and speaking loudly over Kevin’s piano playing. “Anyone?”

  Kevin stopped and pushed back the bench. “Oh, hi. Good morning. Hello. We’re using your room to work on this sort of project-type thing.” Ms. Finkleman crossed her arms and cocked an eyebrow, and Kevin hastily added, “It was Chester’s idea.”

  Chester Hu approached sheepishly. “We’re just working out a few details. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Don’t ask, said the little voice in Ms. Finkleman’s head as the other kids filed out, Braxton lugging his bear head awkwardly under one arm. For the love of mike, don’t ask.