Clocks and Robbers

by Dan Poblocki

  “I do.” Viola shrugged. “I can think of one company around here that might be able to pass unnoticed even while carrying a pine tree. Can you?”

  “The telephone company!” shouted Sylvester.

  Woodrow and Viola nodded together.

  “They’re using the trees as utility poles?” said Rosie. “How scandalous.”

  “That’s exactly who my mom and her coworkers approached next,” said Woodrow. “You know those roads the town is building out near the highway? The new area needed telephone poles, and the phone company hired a local firm to help set them up. When the park rangers approached the foreman, asking where the firm’s wood came from, he couldn’t provide invoices. My mom immediately thought they had their culprit in the bag.”

  “She thought so?” said Sylvester.

  “Like we always say, if you’re going to accuse someone, you need undeniable proof.”

  “So the firm got off the hook?” said Rosie, disappointed.

  “Hardly,” said Woodrow, with a smirk. “My mom told them that she would need to examine their supply of wood.”

  “And that worked?” said Rosie.

  “It sure did.”

  “Still … what was your mom’s proof?” asked Sylvester. “How was she sure the fresh-cut wood that she examined came from the trees in the park?”

  “I know,” said Rosie. “Tree rings!”

  “Yup,” said Woodrow. “My mom had taken snapshots of the tree stumps from the park. She was able to compare those pictures to the cross-section of inner rings from the phone poles on the firm’s lot. The rings matched up like fingerprints.”

  “So your mom actually caught these guys,” said Viola, a bit awestruck.

  “They’re going to be slapped with some hefty fines. I guess cutting down the park trees didn’t actually help them cut costs.”

  “That is so cool,” said Rosie.

  “Yeah,” said Woodrow. “I guess my mom can be pretty awesome when she feels like it.”

  9

  THE FIGURE AT THE FOUR CORNERS

  Later, after his friends went home, after his mother had come into his bedroom and said good night, Woodrow sat in bed feeling odd. He wondered if the feeling was from all the stories he and his friends had been sharing. Why did people treat one another this way? Did these bizarre things happen everywhere? Had the Question Marks raised so many questions about their town simply because they’d been looking for them? Or was there something wrong with Moon Hollow?

  Take Bill for instance—Woodrow’s constant question mark. Every time the man visited, he tried to one-up himself with kindness. Earlier that week, Bill had given Woodrow a pen that read One Cent Savings and Trust—the bank where he worked. What kind of person would want to save only one cent? Why would you trust someone like that? And what kind of a lame gift was a pen, anyway?

  A noise came from outside. Chck! Woodrow held still. It came again—a jarring, scraping sound in the backyard. Chck! Chck! He leaned toward his window and pulled back the curtain. To his surprise, he found someone standing on the lawn—right at the Four Corners.

  It was difficult to make out any details. In the darkness, Woodrow couldn’t tell if the figure was tall or short, fat or thin, but he noticed that he or she was holding what looked like a long stick.

  Chck! The sound came again, and Woodrow realized that what the person held was a shovel. The figure was digging up the Four Corners!

  Woodrow threw his covers off and leapt from his mattress. Dressed in flannel pajamas, he pulled open his door and raced down the hall. Knocking on his mother’s door, he called, “Mom! Quick! There’s an intruder!”

  From inside her bedroom, Mrs. Knox groggily answered, “What’s the matter?” Woodrow took that as his cue to enter. He found her struggling to rise from her bed, obviously woken from a deep sleep. She rubbed her eyes. Taking her hand, he led her to her bedroom window, which also looked out on the backyard.

  “Look,” he said, drawing up the shades. But now, a hard yellow light shone from the Harts’ back stoop, reaching nearly across the now empty yard. “Oh no,” Woodrow moaned. “Whoever was there must have triggered the Harts’ motion sensor.”

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” his mother asked.

  “There was someone out there.”

  “We do have neighbors.”

  “Someone was digging in the backyard!”

  Mrs. Knox groaned. “There are more important things to worry about in this world than someone who likes to garden by moonlight.” She took Woodrow’s hand and paraded him back to the hallway. “Good night,” she said. “Again.”

  But Woodrow couldn’t sleep. Instead, he went downstairs to the computer and sent out a very important e-mail.

  The group met at the Four Corners the next morning just as Woodrow had requested. And just as he had expected, they found a fresh hole in the ground yawning up at them. In his e-mail, he’d asked that everyone check with their families to rule them out as possible suspects. No one in any of the four houses admitted to being out there the night before.

  “You’re sure you don’t know what the person looked like?” Viola asked, holding her pen over a blank page in her notebook.

  “Other than having two arms and two legs, well … no.”

  Rosie knelt down to examine the hole. “Not very wide or deep. Whoever did this must have been interrupted fairly quickly.”

  “I told you,” said Woodrow, pointing at the Hart house’s back door. “The light.”

  “Are there any other clues worth noting?” Sylvester asked, peering at the frostbitten lawn. “Footprints?”

  “I don’t see anything,” said Viola, flipping her notebook shut and glancing around the yard.

  “What could the person possibly have been up to?” said Woodrow. “Why here?”

  The group watched one another in silence, afraid to say what they were all thinking. In the Herald interview, Viola had mentioned that their mystery club usually gathered behind their houses, where their yards met in an invisible X. And everyone knows that X always marks the spot. The hole in the ground was proof that someone was searching for something the group might have hidden. Two questions floated unspoken in the icy air a few feet above the Four Corners: What had the figure been looking for … and where would he or she find it?

  10

  THE CASE OF THE FOUR-LEAF CLOVER

  (A ??? MYSTERY)

  The next week, Thanksgiving came to Moon Hollow. That Thursday morning, Viola’s parents scrambled to pack the car with cookies, breads, and one still-warm pie to take to Viola’s uncle’s house outside of Philadelphia. Next door, Mr. and Mrs. Smithers extended the dining room table as far as possible in preparation for the coming swarm of relatives. In the house to their rear, Woodrow put on a shirt and tie and his mother wore a festive dress to meet Bill’s family. And Sylvester was stuck at home with his grandmother and baby sister, because his parents insisted on opening the diner in case anyone in town didn’t have family with whom to share the holiday.

  One day later, turkeys had been devoured, pie plates licked clean, dishes stacked in sinks, and leftovers packaged and frozen. That afternoon, Viola invited her friends over for pecan pie and hot mulled cider. They sat in the kitchen as Viola’s parents watched a movie in the den.

  “Who’s first?” Viola asked, before shoving a forkful of caramel and crust into her mouth.

  “I’ve got one,” said Sylvester. “It happened at school on Wednesday, before we got out early for the holiday. Do you guys know Wendy Nichols?”

  “How could we not?” said Woodrow. “She’s one of the weirdest girls in the sixth grade.” Receiving scowls from both Rosie and Viola, he tried to modify his tune. “I mean … she’s cool too. Really sweet.” But he failed. “Aw, c’mon, she’s just weird!”

  “I haven’t met her,” said Viola. “How’s she weird?”

  “Sometimes she wears her T-shirts backward during gym glass,” said Sylvester. “And she dyed her hair gra
y last year.”

  “I thought it was sort of cool looking,” said Rosie. “But my mom would never let me do something like that.”

  “My parents would kill me,” Viola agreed.

  “Well, I think she’s funny,” said Sylvester. “We’re friends. She always asks me to do coin tricks for her between classes. And this week, when we were standing in the hall after first period, she said she had a secret to share. In her bag, she said, was something magic.”

  “What was it?” the other three asked at the exact same time.

  “A four-leaf clover. She’d pressed it between two pieces of clear plastic tape. She said that according to this old legend, it’s good luck to give away a four-leaf clover. The legend says that she’ll always find another. Wendy told me she’s given away at least seven of them.”

  “Wow,” said Viola. “I’ve got to try it sometime.”

  “Yeah,” said Rosie, “but the trick is to find one in the first place. They’re really rare, right?”

  “That’s why they’re considered so lucky,” said Woodrow.

  “Wendy wasn’t so lucky when she showed the clover to me in the hall on Wednesday morning,” said Sylvester. “Our old friend, Mickey Molynew, was watching.”

  “That goon?” said Viola.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Rosie. “He stole it from her?”

  Sylvester shrugged. “Wendy mentioned to me after the next period that the lucky clover was missing from her backpack.”

  “She’d stored it in her locker?” Viola asked.

  “No, she’d taken the backpack with her to class,” said Sylvester. “When I asked if she thought she might have dropped the clover along the way, she said she was certain she’d tucked it into the front pocket of her bag like she always does. I asked if she noticed anyone suspicious poking around, and she told me who sits right behind her.”

  “Hmm … I wonder,” said Woodrow with a sarcastic smile.

  “We put two and two together and realized that Mickey must have overheard her telling me about the lucky clover. He must have wanted it for himself.”

  “If she lost the clover,” said Rosie, “how lucky can it really be?”

  Sylvester chuckled. “Funny you mention it, because right then Wendy said that we often have to make our own luck. She was determined to get the clover back from Mickey, and I was willing to help. But we couldn’t accuse him of stealing it. He would have denied taking it until the sun set. So we decided we’d have to trick Mickey into revealing where he was keeping it.”

  “But how?” asked Rosie.

  Viola leaned forward. “Can I guess?”

  “Go ahead,” said Sylvester.

  “Wendy needed to act as if she still had the clover,” said Viola. “Or had it back again. If she showed off another four-leaf clover while Mickey was nearby, he might think she’d stolen it back from him. He’d be tempted to double-check his own hiding place — and you could nab him.”

  Sylvester lit up. “That’s exactly the plan Wendy came up with to trick Mickey into giving himself away. But we had one very big problem.”

  “What was the problem?” asked Woodrow.

  “They had to find another four-leaf clover,” said Rosie.

  “Right,” Sylvester continued. “And we needed this to happen before the end of the day. If we were too late, Mickey might take the clover home with him, or even toss it away. And if that happened, we wouldn’t be able to catch him in the act of double-checking on it.”

  “But how did you expect to find another one so quickly?” Rosie asked.

  Sylvester shrugged. “We went outside during gym class and searched the field. Even though it’s late in the season, there was still plenty of clover. Unfortunately, we couldn’t uncover any with four leaves.”

  “So then Wendy’s plan didn’t work?” asked Viola.

  “I’m not saying that.” Sylvester smiled mysteriously. “We just had to be … let’s say … a little creative.”

  “Wait a second,” said Woodrow. “If you didn’t find what you were looking for, how did you pull off your plan?”

  “I have an idea,” said Rosie. “You didn’t find another four-leaf clover. You made one instead!”

  Sylvester nodded. “Wendy picked two perfectly shaped three-leaf clovers. She brought them back inside and asked our gym teacher for two pieces of clear tape. Pulling one leaf from one stem, she added the leaf to the other three-leafed stem. Then, she pressed the sticky sides of the tape together, trapping the fake four-leaf clover inside. It looked exactly like the one she’d lost.”

  “Voilà!” said Viola. “Brilliant.”

  “At the end of the day, we waited by Wendy’s locker for Mickey to come by. When he showed up, Wendy pulled out the fake clover. Speaking really loudly, we mentioned how lucky we were to have found the clover in the hallway. Mickey heard us. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him flinch in confusion. He immediately reached into his locker and pulled out a thick textbook. As he flipped through the pages, something fell out of the book. The stolen clover! We watched it flutter to the ground. Then Wendy placed her sneaker over it, bent down, and picked it up.

  “Mickey turned bright red, knowing he’d been caught. And Wendy ignored him completely. She simply handed me the real four-leaf clover and said, ‘Thanks for your help.’”

  “Really?” said Rosie. “She gave it to you?”

  Sylvester nodded slyly. “Of course,” he said. “I’m keeping it safe at my house. Wendy knew she’d find another one. She always does.”

  Woodrow leaned across the table and slapped Sylvester’s shoulder. “So you finally found yourself a girlfriend? Your luck has certainly changed.”

  Sylvester turned so red, he looked like he might explode. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he insisted. “She just wanted to bring me luck!”

  “And I’m telling you that it worked!” said Woodrow.

  “Okay, then,” said Rosie, raising her voice. “Speaking of girlfriends, my brother Stephen told us a story at Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. Wait until you hear this.”

  11

  THE SCHOOL DANCE DRAMA

  (A ?? MYSTERY)

  “Last Friday night was the Freshman-Sophomore Dance at Moon Hollow High,” said Rosie. “Stephen went with a friend of his, a girl named Audrey Heckler.”

  “Wait a second,” said Viola. “Isn’t Stephen dating Eva what’s-her-name?”

  “Eva Bentley,” said Rosie. “But Audrey asked Stephen to accompany her at the very beginning of the school year, before Stephen and Eva started going out. Audrey and Stephen have been friends forever. My brother didn’t think it was right to change his mind and cancel on his friend.”

  “Was Eva okay with that?” asked Woodrow.

  “She said that she didn’t have a problem with it,” said Rosie, “even though her best friends, Debbie and Olive, who were in charge of the dance decorations, gave her a hard time. They said Eva shouldn’t stand for it — that Stephen was being a bad boyfriend. In fact, they were mean to Audrey too, calling her all kinds of names in the locker room the week before the dance.”

  “Girls,” said Sylvester with a sigh.

  “Boys can be just as mean,” said Viola, offended.

  “Anyway,” Rosie continued, “Eva told Stephen not to worry about it, that she hated going to dances in the first place. She said she was going to stay home and catch up on some reading she had to do for English class, the one subject that’s been giving her trouble this year.

  “Audrey lives up in the hills outside of town, and on Friday night, my dad drove my brother to pick her up. He dropped them off at the high school. When they walked through the doors to the gym, there was a huge commotion. Someone had torn down all of Debbie and Olive’s decorations. There were crumpled streamers everywhere, and worst of all, the giant papier-mâché turkey they’d built was missing its head!”

  “That’s horrible!” said Viola.

  “While Debbie and Olive stood beside their project, cryin
g about how much time they’d spent putting it together, Stephen noticed that pieces of paper streamers were scattered on the floor. The streamers led out of the gym and down the hallway. He asked Audrey to come with him to see where they ended up. Debbie and Olive pulled it together enough to tag along. One of the chaperones, a math teacher named Mr. Swenk, joined them too. Together, they all followed the trail of destruction up into the sophomore hallway. The decorations stopped in front of one locker, which was open a crack. Audrey gasped. It was her locker. When she opened the door, the turkey head rolled out and landed at Debbie’s feet. Olive screamed.”

  “Just like in a horror movie,” Sylvester whispered.

  “Do you think someone set Audrey up?” said Woodrow.

  The group considered that for a moment. “Maybe not,” said Viola, biting the end of her pen. “I mean, Audrey certainly had a reason to want to get back at Debbie and Olive. Those girls were really terrible to her. Right? Did Stephen think Audrey was responsible?” Rosie shook her head. “Why not?”

  “Besides the fact that they’ve been close friends since kindergarten?” Rosie said. “If Audrey had wanted to get back at Debbie and Olive, would she really have been so obvious about it? Leaving a trail of streamers leading directly to her own locker?”

  Viola sighed, frustrated. “I don’t know.”

  “Also, Audrey lives really far away from the school,” Rosie added. “My dad had picked her up from her house and brought her and Stephen directly to the dance. Unless she had help, it would have been almost impossible for Audrey to destroy the decorations after classes ended, run home, and get ready for the dance. She wouldn’t have had time.”

  “Almost impossible isn’t the same as impossible,” said Woodrow.

  “Okay, then,” said Viola. “Let’s say Audrey wasn’t the one who ruined the decorations. Who else could have done it?”

  “I think the most obvious suspects are Debbie and Olive,” said Sylvester. “We already know that they had a problem with Audrey. They were mean to her in the locker room the week before the dance. Maybe they wanted to get her in trouble.”