The Mystery of the Missing Everything

by Ben H. Winters

  Bethesda continued to her locker in a daze, trying to rally, to recover her focus. But the nightmare wasn’t over yet. As soon as she touched the dial of the lock, before she even twisted the combination to the first number, the metal door of her locker began to creep slowly open on its own. Bethesda stumbled back and watched, astonished, as the door swung out.

  Bethesda brought her hands up to her mouth, stunned. Other kids gathered around, gaping. “Whoa!” she heard Rory mutter. “Oh my god,” Bessie whispered softly.

  Inside Bethesda’s locker was a taunting riot of color, like an overturned spaghetti bowl of blues and greens and reds, twisting and overlapping in a dense, squishy tangle. Silly String! Someone had broken into her locker and filled it with Silly String. Her magazine clippings, her heart-shaped mirror, her stack of school supplies cases, her little Benjamin Franklin action figure, all buried in yards and yards of Silly String.

  And there, folded into careful eighths and nested in the sticky web of Silly String, was a note.

  I FIRMLY REITERATE MY EARLIER INSISTENCE THAT YOU TERMINATE YOUR IMPERTINENT INQUIRIES!

  And then, lower down, in slightly smaller letters:

  (SORRY ABOUT YOUR LOCKER.)

  While her fellow eighth graders buzzed around her, slamming closed their lockers and racing off to first period, Bethesda let the note drop from her hand and flutter to the ground. Whoever this mysterious, fancy-word-slinging bandit was, whoever was so determined that she fail, they were in luck.

  Because Bethesda wasn’t even close.

  Chapter 34

  The Very Short Interrogation of Ida Finkleman

  Suspect #8: Ms. Finkleman

  As Bethesda’s conversation with Mr. Darlington unfolded, Tenny was over in Hallway C, conducting his own final suspect interrogation. It was a pretty fast interrogation.

  “Hey, so, Ms. Finkleman. Did you take the trophy?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  This was Ms. Finkleman we were talking about. She listened to Radiohead, and could play a halfway decent rhythm guitar—her word was good enough for Tenny. Besides, his heart wasn’t really in this whole detective thing today. Even though he really ought to hit his locker before first period, he lingered in the Band and Chorus room, wandering around while Ms. Finkleman sat at her desk, writing quiz questions and occasionally checking her laptop. In the tall instrument cabinet, Tenny discovered an old mandolin and began to experiment, teaching his fingers to find chords on the tiny little frets.

  Yesterday, after Social Studies, Tucker Wilson had asked him if it was true that he’d been tossed out of St. Francis Xavier because he drove the headmaster’s car into Lake Vaughn. He’d mumbled something about how stupid that was, but Tucker looked unconvinced. Whatever. It wasn’t any of that kid’s business. It wasn’t anyone’s business. Tenny eased back into a chair, playing a high-octave version of the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the mandolin.

  Then, with only a minute or two left until first period, Ms. Finkleman looked up from her desk and embarked very gently on a conversation—the same conversation they’d been having, once every few days, for the last two weeks.

  “So? Tenny? How are you doing?”

  “Um . . . all right. Good days and bad days, ya know?” He paused, coughed. “Today’s not so hot.”

  “Well.” She shrugged, smiled. “If you need any-thing . . .”

  He nodded, said, “See ya,” and was gone.

  This brief conversation didn’t feel like much to Ms. Finkleman. But if there was one thing she had learned from a lifetime in music—coaxing the right rush of notes from a violin, subtly working the pedals of a piano—sometimes a little bit is all you need.

  Chapter 35

  Things You’re Not Supposed to Know

  “So there is going to be seventh-grade stuff, plus everything we’ve done so far this year. Got it, people?”

  In first period, Ms. Fischler was handing out the testing schedule for next week. Monday, percentage/fraction conversion. Tuesday, algebraic inequalities. Wednesday, she promised, “will be kind of the easy day. We’ll just be mapping binomials, so bring your graphing calculators.”

  In second period, Dr. Capshaw announced that they’d be suspending their progress through Animal Farm until after the quiz week, since they’d have no time for class discussions, anyway.

  “But we want to know what happens,” said Ellis Walters.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dr. Capshaw. “But you are of course welcome to read ahead on your own.”

  “Like we’ll have time,” grumbled Ellis.

  It was like this all over school. Everybody had thought that, somehow, the Week of a Thousand Quizzes wouldn’t really happen. The trophy thief would confess, or be caught; Principal Van Vreeland would, miraculously, change her mind; a tornado would come out of nowhere, lift up the whole school in the middle of the night, and carry it out to sea. Alas, nothing of the sort had occurred, and now, with the dreaded week of testing four days away, Principal Van Vreeland had succeeded in her goal: everybody in the entire school was as miserable and angry as she was. (Except Mr. Melville, whose constant whistling wasn’t helping matters in the least.)

  Adding to the general funk was the fact that it was the second Thursday of the month, and that was fish-stick day. By the time the lunch bell rang, the queasy smell of deep-fried cod was drifting out of the cafeteria and suffusing the whole school. Just inside the cafeteria doors, in this thick fog of fish-stick smell, Bethesda was pacing, waiting for her sidekick.

  “Tenny! Finally!” she yelped as he slouched into the cafeteria.

  “Hey,” he said absently. “So, uh, I talked to Ms. Finkleman this morning. Yeah, I don’t think she did it.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bethesda said impatiently. She told Tenny about her dream, about the little piece of Boney Bones, about Mr. Darlington and the propped-open door.

  “Whoa,” he said mildly. Clearly the massiveness of the revelation had barely registered. Well, terrific, thought Bethesda. Their investigation was collapsing all around them, and he’d disappeared into one of his fogs of weirdness.

  “We can still do this, Tenny, if we focus. The suspect list can’t matter that much. We have tons of other clues.” Urgently, she ticked them off on her hand, trying to fake confidence she didn’t feel. “One. The mysterious singers in the Band room. Two, the scattered glass. Three, the red dots. Four . . . the . . . Tenny? Hello?”

  She couldn’t take it anymore. He was drumming his fingers on the table, puffing out his cheeks, staring off in random directions.

  “What’s up, Tenny? Are you listening? Not listening? Are you writing songs in your head or something?”

  “What? No.” He shook his head, made a face. “I’m just thinking.”

  “About what? Tenny!”

  Suddenly his spaced-out expression came into sharp focus. “Bethesda, did it ever occur to you there might be other things in the world beside your project?”

  “My project?” Bethesda stared back at him. “Our project!”

  “Okay, so the eighth grade doesn’t get to go to Taproot Valley. What’s the big deal?”

  “What’s the big deal?” she echoed, flabbergasted. “God! Tenny, we’re supposed to be solving a mystery together, and you’re, like, the biggest mystery of all. You suddenly show up from St. Francis Xavier, and you won’t even tell me why you got kicked out . . .”

  “I didn’t get kicked out!”

  His shout drew attention from all over the lunchroom. In the suddenly hushed, staring crowd, Tenny drew the hood of his sweatshirt up over his hair and shrank down in his seat.

  “Thanks a lot, Bethesda.”

  “It’s not my fault. How was I supposed to know?”

  “Did you ever think that there are things you’re not supposed to know?”

  Tenny sat with arms folded, his eyes blazing from the depths of his hood.

  The anger that had been simmering in Bethes
da since 8:20 that morning, when she emerged from Mr. Darlington’s room and had her gut-wrenching epiphany, now came to full boil. She threw up her arms and stomped past Tenny out of the cafeteria toward the front door of the school.

  “Bethesda?” said Tenny, close at her heels. “Where are you going?”

  “What do you care?”

  Bethesda heard the nastiness in her voice and knew instantly that she’d regret it. But it was too late now. She was a missile heading for its target.

  Find the thief? she thought furiously. Find her? I’ve known who it was from the very beginning!

  And there was the prime suspect, the real suspect, sitting blithely on a picnic bench, exactly where Bethesda had known she would be—in Bethesda’s seat, at Bethesda’s place, wedged between Shelly and Hayley, her glasses off and folded on the table beside her, her reddish-tannish hair clipped above her ears, a book balanced on her lap. Always reading, Bethesda thought disdainfully, always making sure everyone knows how smart you are.

  IOM. Irene Olivia Maslow.

  “I know it was you.”

  Reenie raised her head slowly and returned Bethesda’s stare unflinchingly.

  “You know what was me?”

  The picnic-tables crowd looked over at the confron-tation. Most of them were clustered around a laptop Suzie had checked out from Technologies, watching the “Save Taproot Valley” video for the zillionth time. Suzie hit a button, the movie paused on a shot of Braxton with paws outstretched, and everyone’s attention turned to the strange sight of Bethesda Fielding glowering at Reenie Maslow.

  “You’re the one who stole Pamela’s trophy.”

  In all the mystery books, in all the movies, when the hero swoops in to unmask her nefarious adversary, there’s always this dramatic confrontation, where the bad guy either makes a break for it, or begs for mercy. Bethesda took a big dramatic step backward, waiting for one of those things to happen. But Reenie neither sprinted toward Friedman Street nor fell pleadingly to her knees. Instead she carefully picked up her glasses off the picnic bench, unfolded the stems to put them on, and said, “No I didn’t.”

  Bethesda blinked.

  “Yes you did.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Yes you did!”

  Bethesda was feeling less like a world-class detec-tive unmasking her diabolical foe, and more like a kindergartner fighting in a sandbox.

  “All right, let’s all just calm down here,” said Chester Hu, rising from his place beside Suzie and stepping toward them, waving his hands for calm. “Bethesda, why do you think Reenie did it?”

  “Excellent question!” Bethesda replied, thrusting a finger into the air. In her most resonant, closing-argument voice, Bethesda revealed the powerful evidence she had kept hidden for so long. “In the Achievement Alcove, behind the trophy case, I found three little initials written on the base of the back wall. IOM! As in Irene Olivia Maslow!”

  Bethesda stepped backward and crossed her arms: Case closed.

  The problem was, no one looked all that convinced.

  “Wait—IOM?” asked Pamela, wrinkling her nose with confusion. “Wouldn’t she have signed it ROM? Everyone calls her Reenie.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” added Suzie, and Shelly nodded in agreement.

  “Actually,” Bessie Stringer threw in, “Why would she sign it at all?”

  “Good point,” said Ezra.

  “Well . . . I don’t know!” Bethesda sputtered. “Ask her!”

  But Reenie said nothing. She just sat there and looked at Bethesda, her face blank.

  “Also, IOM could stand for a lot of stuff,” put in Rory, smoothing his long black hair with one hand. “Like Ireland’s only mountain. Or interesting oily monkeys.”

  Bethesda sighed in frustration. “You guys, come on! Reenie did it! It’s so obvious.”

  Marisol Pierce looked at Bethesda. “I don’t know. It doesn’t really seem all that obvious.”

  “Yeah,” Pamela agreed. She made a sour, skeptical face. “Why would Reenie steal my trophy?”

  “Because . . . ,” Bethesda started, and then stopped and glanced quickly at Reenie, who sat still and cold as a statue.

  “Well, for a lot of reasons.”

  “Name one.”

  “Well . . . to . . . um . . .”

  “Iggy oinked merrily!” Rory shouted suddenly.

  “Good one,” said Ezra, and slapped him five.

  Suzie started the video again, and everyone turned back to Braxton’s classic pratfall, already in progress. Bethesda stood helplessly, her hands flapping at her sides. Just like that, her big dramatic moment had passed.

  Except that, suddenly, Reenie turned and addressed her with a voice coiled tightly as a striking snake. “Bethesda, I am very sorry that your little investigation didn’t work out as you planned it,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you should go around blaming people just because you happen to dislike them.”

  “Dislike you?” Bethesda was stunned. “I don’t dislike you! You dislike me!”

  “I don’t dislike you. I barely know you.” Reenie stepped carefully around Bethesda, chucked her empty lunch bag in the garbage, and walked toward the door of the school.

  “Wait!” Bethesda shouted. She knew she was right and she knew she could prove it. “Wait!”

  Suzie paused the movie again, this time on one of the innumerable Pamela Preston close-ups. Reenie stopped at the door, shaking her head sadly, like she was the mature one, tolerating Bethesda’s childish behavior out of sheer pity.

  “Pamela’s trophy was stolen from the Achievement Alcove at approximately five forty-five on Monday the twentieth,” Bethesda announced, then pointed dramatically at Reenie. “What were you doing at five forty-five that day?”

  “I . . . well . . . Mondays . . .” Reenie thought for a moment, and then her cool-as-a-cucumber attitude abruptly disappeared. Her face got red and she stared at Bethesda with open hostility. “That’s none of your business!”

  “Aha!” said Bethesda. All the eighth graders leaned in closer, except Pamela, who snuck a quick admiring glance at her freeze-framed face on the screen. “If Reenie wasn’t stealing the trophy, she’d tell us where she was!”

  “Bethesda, no offense, but I’m, like, totally sure you’re wrong,” said Natasha, speaking up for the first time. “Reenie, why don’t you just tell us what you were doing. Then Bethesda will know she made a mistake.”

  “Fine. I was . . . I . . . ,” Reenie began, and then stopped and cleared her throat. She looked caught and helpless, like a mouse in the jaws of a trap. Bethesda felt a fleeting rush of sympathy, quickly drowned in a wave of anticipation. Her moment of triumph was at hand! Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, would be the hero after all!

  “I was at home, with my tutor.”

  “Tutor? Why would you need a tutor?”

  Reenie looked straight up in the air, took a deep breath, and returned her gaze to Bethesda. “Because I’m way, way behind.”

  Bethesda scrunched up her face. “Behind? In what subject?”

  “All of them.”

  Bethesda’s heart lurched in her chest. Oh, no.

  “But . . . but you’re so smart. You’re always reading. Trying to get ahead.”

  Reenie let out a small, rueful laugh. “Get ahead? Hardly. I’m just trying to keep up.”

  “But why didn’t you just tell everyone that?”

  “Why didn’t I tell everyone?” Reenie laughed again, shaking her head. “If everyone thought you were some sort of genius, and actually they were completely wrong, would you tell them?”

  Bethesda opened her mouth and then shut it again. The crowd at the picnic tables was hushed and still. Suzie’s computer went dark and the school’s official screen saver came up, an image of Mary Todd Lincoln wearing a Bluetooth headset. Looking helplessly around the picnic benches, Bethesda’s eyes landed on Tenny, who wore an expression of total disgust—an expression, she knew, that had nothing to do with fis
h sticks.

  Chapter 36

  I Know What I’ve Got to Do

  “Hey, Bethesda? Someone named Old Filthy Beard called for you.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  School was over. Bethesda was sprawled lengthwise on the couch with her face squashed into the pillows, staring into the rumpled green fabric. Her dad was shuttling back and forth to the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on his chili, preparing to knock the socks off everyone at the law firm charity dinner that night. He paused, leaning into the living room from the kitchen door, his chef’s hat at a rakish angle.

  “He said . . . hold on, let me get this right.” Bethesda’s father put on a respectable pirate voice to deliver the message. “‘Aye, those fam’lies were here on that Monday evenin’, at six bells, and no doubtin’ it, matey. Every one of ’em, just as always, tho’ the wee lassie arrived late as usual.’”

  “Okay, Dad. Thanks.”

  So Natasha and Guy’s alibis held up. Big whoop. Bethesda wasn’t in the mood to think about the mystery. She wasn’t in the mood, in fact, to think about anything at all. She basically spent the next four hours on the couch, eating but not really tasting the pizza she ordered for dinner. She did a little studying for the upcoming blizzard of quizzes, flipping through her math notes, scanning a couple chapters of The Last Full Measure. She turned on music but turned it off right away. All the songs she liked reminded her of Tenny, and of all the things she didn’t feel like thinking about, she felt like thinking about Tenny least of all.

  When her parents got home, she was still on the sofa. “Well?” she said, muting the episode of You’re Going to Wear That? she was sort of watching. Her father didn’t answer, and her mother shook her head sadly as she plopped down next to Bethesda on the sofa. “What happened?”

  “Everybody went crazy for Marilyn Sokal’s spare ribs, is what happened,” said Bethesda’s father glumly. “They were the big hit of the night.”

  “Only because she’s a partner, honey,” said Bethesda’s mom.

  “Really?”

  “Of course, sweetheart. Yours was the best. No question.”