The Mystery of the Missing Everything

by Ben H. Winters

  So she was asking to be nice. But all the same, Bethesda’s foot—which often had better instincts than she did—was tapping a rapid, enthusiastic bippity-bop against the metal base of the picnic table. Her foot in its Chuck Taylor sneaker clearly thought that the innocent, friendly question she’d put to Natasha was relevant to her ongoing investigation.

  It didn’t matter, because Natasha didn’t answer. She was distracted by a bird.

  It was the blue-and-green swallow, hopping in a crook of the fat old oak tree that oversaw the outdoor seating area. As Bethesda watched, Natasha’s gaze drifted up to where the bird nestled in its branch, and her face glowed with tenderness. Then she waved at the bird, almost as if they were old friends.

  “Hey, buddy,” said Natasha to the bird, in such a sweet and simple way that Bethesda said it too. “Hey, buddy.”

  The bird tilted its tiny head and chittered politely to Natasha and Bethesda in reply. Then the five-minute bell rang, and all three of them went on their way.

  There was, alas, no time left for mystery solving that day. Bethesda had been a total slacker on the weather-phenomenon project for Mr. Darlington’s class, and all of a sudden it was due tomorrow. Victor Glebe, sweetly, acted like he was the one who’d been a jerk—he told her he’d finish the diorama, and if she’d just come up with something for the in-class presentation, they’d be even steven. Bethesda thanked him copiously, and put aside her investigation that night to concentrate on a Flash Flood Fact Wheel of Fun (“Take a Turn! Spin the Wheel! Learn About Sudden and Rapid Torrents of Rain or River Water!”) And their presentation in Science the next day ended up totally great, with Mr. Darlington clapping vigorously for their efforts—as he did for Natasha, Pamela, and Reenie’s group, who gave an emotional description of how windstorms affect migrating falcons; and for Todd and Tucker, who performed a rap Todd had written about a baby eagle dying in a mudslide.

  Man, Bethesda thought, what is it with birds around here lately?

  Chapter 32

  It’s in the Bag

  That night, in her unglamorous high-rise condomin-ium apartment, clad in her favorite fuzzy slippers and sipping tea from her favorite mug, Ida Finkleman was having trouble getting her work done. Staring at her from her dining-room table was the score of the West Side Story overture, which her sixth graders would somehow need to master in time for the winter concert. And those quiz questions—there remained a mountain of quiz questions to write.

  But instead of doing any of this, Ms. Finkleman booted up her laptop and checked her email. Impatiently she scanned her inbox: an email from her mother about her plans for Thanksgiving; one from her sister Clementine recommending a Tom Waits album, and asking if there was something by Brahms she could recommend in turn.

  Nothing from Mr. Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky of St. Louis, Missouri.

  She quickly answered her emails (“still not sure” to her mother, “violin concerto in D” to her sister), stirred a half teaspoonful of sugar into her mug of tea, and picked up her pen to write some quiz questions.

  She teased herself for being so disappointed. It had only been a week, after all.

  On the other hand, time was running out fast. It was now Wednesday night, and the children were meant to leave for their trip bright and early on Monday morning. Ms. Finkleman turned back to her laptop and typed in the website where she knew she would find the “Save Taproot Valley” video. She watched it and found it to be completely delightful, just as she had the last six times she’d watched it. She sang along with the chorus, clapped for the big dance sections, and chortled merrily when the bear fell down the stairs.

  As she was watching, Ms. Finkleman scrolled down to see how the video was doing.

  “Two hundred and twelve page views? That’s it?!”

  It was beyond Ms. Finkleman’s understanding how Chester’s comic masterpiece could be faring so poorly in the great viewing marketplace of the internet, especially when compared with all the clichéd videos of gurgling babies and kittens behaving in an un-kittenlike manner. “Okay, so the cat can drive a riding lawnmower,” Ms. Finkleman protested to the empty room. “That deserves 450,000 page views?”

  The video ended. She really ought to get to work preparing those quizzes. Instead she clicked back over to her email and hit Compose. Surely it couldn’t hurt to follow up.

  “Two-hundred and thirteen page views? That’s it?”

  Chester was devastated. He clicked Refresh and groaned. After being online for forty-five and a half hours (not that he was counting or anything), “Save Taproot Valley” had been viewed 213 times, and raised a grand total of $316, twenty bucks of which Chester had contributed himself.

  “It’s so good, though!” Chester wailed, holding his head between his hands. “It’s so funny!”

  Didn’t the universe recognize a brilliant piece of video art when it saw one? If an eighth-grade boy in a bear costume tumbling down a flight of stairs doesn’t deserve overnight-internet-sensation status, what does?

  “Chester! Dinner!”

  Chester was at his mom’s that week, and normally he liked to listen to her stories about her workday, because his mom was a trauma surgeon, and a lot of her stories were really gross. But today he only pretended to listen, feigning interest in the gory details of a tibia repair while he did math in his head: 316 dollars, divided by 45.5 hours, is right around 7 dollars an hour. Okay, so 7 an hour, times 24 hours in a day . . .

  Oh crud, thought Chester, coughing on a mouthful of beef. Crud!

  “Chester? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “Are you sure?” His mom looked a little disappointed, as if she had really been hoping to perform the Heimlich maneuver.

  At this rate it would take them about seven hundred hours to raise the money. That was like a month—and they had five days until Monday morning, when the buses were supposed to pull up in the horseshoe driveway and take them to Taproot Valley. After dinner, Chester retreated back to his room and hit Refresh. Two more people had watched the movie, and neither had donated anything. One was his Cousin Ilene, who wrote “Great job!” in the comments section; whoever the other person was, they commented that a chicken costume would have been funnier.

  Maybe Victor was right, thought Chester, brushing his teeth for bed. Maybe this was a stupid plan all along.

  Bethesda lay in bed, clutching Ted-Wo and trying to sleep, watching dark shadows drift and blend on her ceiling. She’d had a frustrating couple of days, starting with the mysterious attack on her poor defenseless bike. She’d gotten no real information from Natasha. When she called Pirate Sam’s, the manager (whose name was Stanley but who asked to be addressed as “Squid Guts”) had no idea whether the Ficker and Belinsky families had eaten there that Monday, let alone what time. He’d taken down Bethesda’s number and said the waiter for that section, Old Filthy Beard, would call her back. Meanwhile, she’d heard nothing new from Tenny—in fact, she’d barely seen her right-hand man this week at all.

  She kicked her legs out from under the blanket, then fluffed and refluffed her pillow. Nine suspects danced in the air above her head, popping up one by one like on the opening credits of a TV show. The clues circled and cycled in her mind: the shattered glass and the drops of blood . . . the tiny screw on the floor of the Alcove . . . a batch of copied keys . . . two mysterious singers and their mysterious song. . . .

  What about the suspects she hadn’t talked to yet? Could Mr. Ferrars have done it himself? Maybe he told her about the keys to keep suspicion from falling on himself?

  So many questions and still no answers—the trophy was still missing. But Bethesda knew it was more than Pamela’s gymnastics trophy keeping her awake. Sometimes Tenny was around, totally helping, other times he was nowhere to be found, or so distracted and in his head that he might as well be. Then there was Reenie Maslow, and the case of the friendship that ought to be, but wasn’t.

  It’s like . . . it’s like everything is missing. Everythi
ng . . .

  . . . and then Bethesda was strolling through Pilverton Mall, past Pirate Sam’s, past the nail salon and the bracelet store, and out onto the beach. The beach?

  There went Ms. Pinn-Darvish, her jet-black hair bundled under a swim cap, walking her potbellied pig on a leash, his trotters splashing in and out of the breakers. Bethesda waved and kept walking, following a little hopping bird, a bluish swallow. She nearly ran into Todd and Natasha, both dressed for scuba diving. Boney Bones was sunbathing, reading a magazine, with Mr. Darlington beside him. Bethesda’s foot traced a ladder of shells, and when she looked up, there was Tenny, his ripped jeans dampened by the spray, his head bobbing up and down to whatever was on his iPod.

  “You gotta hear this!” he called, holding out the earbuds to her. “It’s in the bag!”

  “Who’s that by?”

  “No, no!” he said, laughing, pointing at the backpack slung over her right shoulder. (Why did she have her backpack at the beach?) “It’s in the bag! It’s in the bag.”

  Bethesda’s eyes shot open. She sat up in her bed and stared at the clock: 2:45 a.m.

  It’s in the bag.

  She jumped out of bed, ran to her backpack, and tugged furiously at the zipper. She dumped the contents of the little front pocket on the floor of her room. She sifted through old Post-it notes, assignment sheets, and gum wrappers until she found what she was looking for.

  “Of course!” she shouted, then clamped her hand over her mouth and whispered instead. “Of course!”

  The dingy, off-white piece of plastic lay on the carpet of her room, and now Bethesda knew it for what it was—a clue. She opened her Sock-Snow notebook and wrote furiously, to be sure she didn’t forget any of this before going back to sleep—though she seriously doubted whether she’d be able to sleep at all.

  Finally, she’d cracked a piece of the mystery!

  Chapter 33

  A Scrape, Then a Bang, and Then a Crash

  Suspect #8: Mr. Darlington

  Bethesda stopped at the intersection of Hallway A and the Front Hall, at the door of the science room, shifting the small piece of plastic back and forth in her hands.

  “Watch out, mystery,” she said to herself, and pushed open the door without stopping to knock. “Here I come.”

  Mr. Darlington was hunched over his desk with a handful of coffee-shop napkins, desperately mopping up a puddle of spilled paste. “Bethesda? Hi. Having a bit of a . . . oh, for heaven’s . . .”

  The paste was oozing toward the edge of the desk, seeping down the far side, even as it began to dry in crusty ripples along the surface. “I’m constructing a scale model of the Great Barrier Reef . . . undersea tectonics . . . ugh . . .” A dribble of paste smudged his palm. “If you could hand me . . .”

  Bethesda fetched Mr. Darlington an oversized roll of paper towels from the sink, and then stood with her hands clasped behind her back, waiting. As he unspooled great handfuls of paper towel and corralled the creeping pool of paste, she felt like a teacher, standing patiently with a grim expression until everyone was paying attention.

  At last he finished and looked up at her. “Okay. There we are. Now, what can I do for you?”

  Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, cut right to the chase. “Mr. Darlington, why did you lie to me?”

  Mr. Darlington’s eyes widened behind his thick glasses. “Go ahead and kick the door shut, will you, Bethesda?”

  She did, and then dragged a student chair into place across the desk from him; Bethesda’s expression remained steely, but her heart was hammering in her chest. She balanced her notebook carefully on a non-paste-smeared corner of the desk, and listened to what Mr. Darlington now swore to be the truth.

  “It is true that I was here that Monday after school. It is true that I was dismantling Mary Bot Lincoln, and for exactly the reason I told you. Principal Van Vreeland said that since Pamela won the big gymnastics trophy, there would no longer be space in the Achievement Alcove to show off the robot that my sixth graders and I had worked so hard on.

  “But I wasn’t here from after school until four. My wife, Nancy, had dropped me off that morning. She needs the car on Mondays and Wednesdays because she goes to the gym those days. She used to go near our house, but they changed the time of the yoga class. So she found a class at a different gym, but that teacher does Bikram yoga, and Nancy prefers Ashtanga yoga. They’re similar in certain ways, although—”

  “Mr. Darlington? Stay on target.”

  “Right. So, the point is, I didn’t have the car at school that day, and I needed it to crate up Mary Bot Lincoln and carry her home. You can’t carry seventy-nine pieces of disassembled android on a city bus, Bethesda,” he said, nervously twisting a crusted piece of paper towel. “So I got a ride from Mr. Melville, then came back later with my car and let myself in.”

  “With the key that Mr. Ferrars had given you.”

  Mr. Darlington’s eyebrows shot up behind his glasses. “I can see I’m not the only one who has crumbled before your powers of interrogation.”

  Bethesda beamed inwardly at the compliment, but managed to keep her serious mystery-solving expression in place. “So, how late were you really here that Monday afternoon?”

  “I’d say from about five to . . . I don’t know. Maybe quarter to six.”

  Quarter to six. Bingo.

  “And during that time, did you see or hear anything unusual?”

  “Well . . .” Mr. Darlington made a puzzled face. “I might have. I might have heard like a, like a scraping noise in the hall.”

  A scrape? Ms. Pinn-Darvish had heard a bang, and then a crash. But a scrape?

  “When, Mr. Darlington?”

  “What?”

  “You said you left at about quarter to six. Did you hear the scrape right around then, or was it earlier? Try to remember. It’s important.”

  He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

  “No. No, the scrape was earlier. Around five fifteen or so?” As he put his glasses back on, Bethesda noticed little specks of paste he’d ground into his eyebrows.

  “Bethesda, I promise you I did not steal that trophy. I only fudged the truth a bit because . . . well . . .”

  “Because you left the door propped open.”

  Mr. Darlington sighed. “Exactly. I had to make so many trips, getting all those robot parts to my car, that for about a half hour I left the front door jammed open. And I feel terrible about it. I do. I even went to Principal Van Vreeland to try to tell her. But before I could, she started wailing about how she’s always wanted a trophy, how sad this is for her . . . and then something about hating Christmas. I’m not sure how that was related. But how could I tell her that this whole thing may have been my fault?”

  Bethesda reflected, just as she had when Mr. Ferrars first told her about the keys, how Principal Van Vreeland’s fury over the missing trophy was foiling her own desire to get it back. Instead of pressuring the truth out of people, she was terrifying everyone into silence.

  “Well, thanks for telling me the truth, Mr. Darlington.”

  “Better late than never, I suppose.” He sighed ruefully and reached for his ocean floor. “Now can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “How did you know about the door?”

  Bethesda smiled and handed over the small off-white piece of plastic, the random little artifact she’d stuffed in the front pocket of her backpack almost a month earlier—before the assembly, before the stolen trophy, before this whole thing began.

  “Well, I’ll be darned,” Mr. Darlington marveled.

  He took back the little broken-off piece of Boney Bones’s left shin, which he had used to prop open the door, and began pasting it back in place.

  Bethesda zoomed down Hallway A toward the back stairwell, walking as fast as she could to the eighth-grade lockers. She was dying to find Tenny before school started so she could fill him in on what she’d learned. Galloping up the stairs, two at a time, she went ov
er the timeline in her head:

  1.After school, two people are in the music room, singing . . .

  2.Sometime around 5:15, there’s a mysterious scraping noise . . .

  3.At 5:45, Mr. Darlington kicks shut the front door, causing a loud bang . . .

  4.A moment later there’s a crashing sound, presumably from the smashing of the trophy case . . .

  5.And then the crook does . . . something that scatters around the loose pieces of glass, leaving behind a. red dots that might or might not be blood, b. a tiny screw that might or might not be a clue, and c. no trophy!

  But why? Bethesda asked herself for the millionth time.

  And how?

  And, most important, who? Of the suspects on Jasper’s key list, only . . .

  Bethesda gasped and stopped so suddenly at the top of the stairs that she almost tumbled backward. The list? The list didn’t matter anymore! If Mr. Darlington had propped open the door, the trophy thief didn’t need a key!

  All of Bethesda’s and Tenny’s work—all the carefully annotated index cards, all their ingenious feats of detection, all their bravery and determination—it was all moot. The thief could have been anyone!

  Bethesda staggered the last twenty feet to the eighth-grade lockers in a state of shock, her eyes traveling at random to different people, every single one of them a suspect.

  Maybe it was Anju, the really tall seventh-grade girl who Violet hung out with!

  Maybe it was Mr. Muhammed, the technologies teacher with the rumpled sweaters and the BlackBerry clipped to his belt!

  Maybe it was Suzie! Or Shelly! Or both of them together!