Sam the Man & the Secret Detective Club Plan

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Sam thought about this. He didn’t think you should throw clothes away just because they smelled bad. Was there a way to make the jacket smell better?

  “Maybe we could spray perfume on it,” he told Gavin. “That might help.”

  “Maybe,” Gavin said. “But what happens when the perfume loses its smell? Or what if perfume makes it smell even worse?”

  “I guess I’ll take the jacket home until we come up with a plan,” Sam said. “I’ll put in the garage so I don’t have to smell it.”

  “You know what’s mysterious to me?” Gavin asked as they reached their classroom. When Sam shook his head, he continued, “Besides the stinky jacket, the stuff we took from the lost and found doesn’t seem like stuff that would stay lost. I mean, if I lost a six-foot-long snake, the first place I’d look for it would be the lost and found. And if I lost a box I’d put a lock on? An important box? Same thing—I’d go right to the lost and found.”

  Sam thought Gavin had a good point. He could see how if you lost a book or a hoodie, you might sort of forget about it, even if your parents kept reminding you to check the lost and found. But a stuffed snake? If you liked your stuffed snake enough to bring it to school, you’d go look for it the minute you realized you’d lost it.

  You wouldn’t lose a snake on purpose, would you?

  Sam didn’t think so.

  “Maybe someone stole the snake from somebody’s house,” Sam said. “And they were hiding it in the lost and found until . . . until . . . I don’t know. Until they moved or something.”

  “Maybe,” Gavin said as they sat down at their desks. “Anyway, congratulations on solving our club’s first mystery!”

  “Thanks,” Sam said. “I just hope our other two cases will be this easy to solve.”

  “I don’t think they will be,” Gavin said. He opened his math book. “I think this case was like two plus three, and the next two cases will be like twenty-nine minus seventeen.”

  Sam had a feeling Gavin was right.

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  The Mystery of the Six-Foot Snake

  “Now why would anybody own a stuffed snake in the first place, much less bring it to school?”

  Mr. Stockfish shook his head like he couldn’t believe the silly things the kids at Sam’s school did. “Believe you me, back in my day you didn’t bring anything to school besides your books, your pencil, and your milk money. You’d get sent home if you walked through the doors carrying a snake.”

  Sam was pouring feed into the chicken’s feeder, but he turned to look at Mr. Stockfish. “Even a stuffed snake?”

  “Especially a stuffed snake!” Mr. Stockfish huffed. “At least a real snake has scientific value. But a stuffed snake? What are you supposed to do with that?”

  “You could pretend it was a real snake,” Sam suggested.

  Mr. Stockfish shook his head. “Didn’t you just tell me this snake has pink and purple and blue stripes? Does that sound like a real snake to you? Besides, if you wanted to pretend you had a real snake, you could get a rubber snake. I could understand a rubber snake.”

  Sam guessed Mr. Stockfish was right. But he could also understand why you might want a six-foot-long stuffed snake with pink and purple and blue stripes, even if it wasn’t practical or scientific.

  “What I don’t get is how do you lose a snake like that?” Sam asked as he put the lid back on the feed bin. “It’s not like a button or even a basketball. It’s not something you could drop without noticing that you dropped it. It couldn’t roll away on its own.”

  “Well, if you didn’t lose it, then somebody had to take it,” Mr. Stockfish said. “Only it would be a hard thing to steal if anyone else was around. You can’t just slip a six-foot snake under your notebook.”

  “You’d have to take it when no one was looking,” Sam agreed. “But if the snake was stolen, how did it end up in the lost and found? And why didn’t its owner go look for it there?”

  Mr. Stockfish picked up his chicken, Leroy, and patted her on the head. “That’s your mystery right there, Sam. Why has no one claimed that snake?”

  “But how do I solve the mystery?” Sam asked.

  “That’s why you have a club, isn’t it?” Mr. Stockfish asked. “You all need to put your brains together. But let me make one suggestion: if you want to know what’s really going on in a school, there’s one person you should ask.”

  “The principal?”

  “The janitor,” Mr. Stockfish said. “My uncle Roy in Chicago was a janitor, and he knew everything that happened in the school where he worked. He knew things nobody else knew.”

  The janitor at Sam’s school was named Mr. Truman. Sometimes Sam saw him in Miss Fran’s art classroom when she wasn’t teaching anyone. Mr. Truman was famous at their school for his paintings of trees.

  Was it possible he had information about the stuffed snake? Why not, Sam thought? Mr. Truman was in and out of classrooms all day, cleaning up spills, replacing lightbulbs, and emptying out trash cans. Sam bet a six-foot-long snake would have caught his attention.

  “Talking to the janitor sounds like a good plan,” he told Mr. Stockfish. “I’ll look for him when I get to school tomorrow.”

  “Take the members of your club with you,” Mr. Stockfish advised Sam. “Six heads are better than one.”

  The members of the World’s Best Detective Club met outside Mr. Truman’s office as soon as their buses dropped them off at school the next morning. Sam had called Gavin the night before to tell him about Mr. Stockfish’s idea, and then Gavin called everyone else to tell them to meet.

  “I think that officially makes me the club’s communications director,” Gavin said. “That’s what my mom told me. She said I could put it on my résumé.”

  “What’s a résumé?” Marja asked.

  “It’s a piece of paper where you make a list of all the good stuff you’ve done so you can get a job,” Gavin told her. “I started writing mine last night. So far I’ve got ‘cleaned my room the day before school started’ and ‘remembered to put my used Kleenex in the trash two weeks ago.’ Oh, and I put that I’m communications director for our club, which means I’m the person who calls everyone.”

  “I got a kitten out of a tree once,” Rashid said. “Could I put that on my résumé?”

  “I think so,” Gavin said. “It would be especially good if you wanted a job as a tree climber.”

  “Or a cat saver,” Will said.

  “I like dogs better than cats,” Marja said.

  “So you would have just left that cat up the tree?” Gavin asked.

  Marja thought about this. “I guess not,” she said after a moment. “But if there was a dog up the same tree, I’d save it first.”

  Mr. Truman poked his head out of his door. “I thought I heard somebody out here. Do you guys need something, or is this just where you decided to hang out this morning?”

  “Do you have time to answer a few questions about a snake?” Sam asked.

  “A snake?” Mr. Truman looked alarmed.

  “Not a real snake!” Sam added quickly. “A stuffed snake.”

  “About six feet long?” Gavin added.

  “With purple and pink and blue stripes?” Emily said.

  “Come in,” Mr. Truman said, waving the children into his office. “The snake you’re describing sounds familiar.”

  “Did you know it was in the lost and found?” Sam asked as he followed Mr. Truman inside. “It was buried under a ton of jackets.”

  “I think this school has set the record for lost jackets,” Mr. Truman said. “I find at least six in the cafeteria every day. Most of them have name tags inside, but there’s always one that doesn’t. So the snake was in the lost and found?”

  “Mrs. Mason said it’s been in there since the second week of school,” Emily informed him.

  “That’s a clue!” Gavin said, sounding like he’d just realized this.

  “Shhh!” Marja sa
id.

  Mr. Truman took a seat behind his desk. “Here’s what I can tell you about that snake,” he said, leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head. “It showed up in Mrs. Ybarra’s classroom on the first day of school. I noticed it when I was emptying trash cans at the end of the day. It was pushed against the wall, but it was near a row of desks, like it belonged to somebody, but that student had been asked to put it a little bit out of the way. Sometimes when I went in during the school day, the snake wasn’t there, and once I went in during lunch and the snake was curled up over in the reading nook. But at the end of the day, it was always back in the same place, against the wall, near the desks.”

  “When did you notice it was wasn’t there anymore?” Rashid asked.

  “The following Monday,” Mr. Truman said. “I went in to empty the trash cans after school was over, and the snake was gone. I thought that its owner must have finally taken it home.”

  “What grade does Mrs. Ybarra teach?” Emily asked.

  “Fourth grade. She’s in room 125, near the gym.” Mr. Truman smiled. “I like Mrs. Ybarra. She keeps a very neat classroom. You go in the room at the end of the day and all the desks are in straight lines, no trash on the floor. She makes my life easy.”

  “So it sounds like the lost-and-found snake belongs to someone in Mrs. Ybarra’s class,” Sam said to the other club members. “All we have to do is bring it back to her classroom and see who wants it.”

  “I’ll bring it to school tomorrow,” Emily said. “We can take it at recess.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” said Sam. He turned to Mr. Truman. “By the way, you don’t know anything about how to make a rain jacket less stinky, do you?”

  “Try washing it with a solution of vinegar and baking soda, and then air it out to dry,” Mr. Truman said.

  Sam didn’t know you could wash rain jackets, but he guessed it made sense. After all, they were made to get wet. “Thanks,” he told Mr. Truman. “And thanks for telling us where the snake came from.”

  “Be sure to let me know if you find its owner,” Mr. Truman said as he stood up. “You don’t see a snake like that every day.”

  “You really don’t,” Sam agreed. Which was probably a good thing, he thought. Who could get any work done with a striped snake by your desk? A chicken, maybe, but a snake?

  Maybe that’s why the snake had been put in the lost and found—no one could learn anything while it was around.

  Sam hoped they were about to find out.

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  The Disappearing Fake Snake

  It was sort of weird to walk down the hall carrying a six-foot-long snake, Sam thought the next day at recess, even one that was in a big plastic trash bag. A lot of kids stared, and a few yelled out guesses about what was in the bag. One person guessed it was a teacher’s dirty laundry, and another person guessed it was the world’s biggest bag of popcorn.

  “It’s a snake!” Gavin said when someone guessed that they were lugging a misbehaving kindergartner to the principal’s office. “Can’t anyone recognize a snake in a bag when they see one?”

  That made a bunch of people yell and start running.

  Gavin shook his head. “I mean, it’s perfectly obvious that’s what it is, right?”

  Sam hoped they would reach Mrs. Ybarra’s room before they got arrested for bringing snakes to school.

  “Did you try washing the jacket last night?” Emily asked Sam as they neared room 125.

  “Yeah, I poured a bunch of vinegar on a sponge and scrubbed the jacket as hard as I could,” Sam told her. “Now it smells worse than it did before.”

  “That’s too bad,” Emily said. “So what are you going to try now?”

  Sam shrugged. “I hung the jacket on a hook in the garage to let it air out. Maybe it will smell better after a few days.”

  Even though it was recess, there were a bunch of kids inside Mrs. Ybarra’s classroom. One of them was working on a computer in the back, and four more were watching the computer boy. A few other people were sitting at their desks. Mrs. Ybarra was there too, and when she saw the members of the World’s Greatest Detective Club standing at her doorway, she waved them inside.

  “Are you guys collecting recycling for Mr. Truman?” she called from her desk. “He told me he had some student volunteers today.”

  Sam stepped forward. “No, we’ve come to ask you a question about a snake.”

  “This snake in particular,” Gavin said, coming up next to Sam and dumping the snake out in front of Mrs. Ybarra’s chair. “Do you know anything about it?”

  When Mrs. Ybarra saw the snake, she stood up. “Please take that snake out of my classroom right now. I can’t have it in here.”

  One of the students who had been reading a book at her desk looked up. “Slimey! Look, everybody! They brought Slimey back!”

  A few of the other kids yelled, “Slimey! You found Slimey!”

  And two of them screamed. “No! Not Slimey!”

  The first girl got up from her desk and walked to the front of the room. “Nobody knew what happened to him,” she said, leaning down to pet the snake on the head. “He just disappeared one day.”

  “He was sort of like our class mascot,” the kid sitting at the computer said. “Only some people didn’t like him very much.” He pointed over to the screaming kids. “Like Charlotte and Daniel. Jackson didn’t like him, either, but he’s not here.”

  “Why was the snake—Slimey—in your class in the first place?” Rashid asked. “Were you studying reptiles? Was he supposed to be educational?”

  “Kervin Mack’s mom sent Slimey to school the very first day,” the girl petting Slimey said. “She thought maybe Mrs. Ybarra would like a snake for the reading corner—you know, for a pillow.”

  “A snake pillow,” Gavin said. “Interesting idea.”

  “It was a terrible idea,” the girl named Charlotte said. “Snakes give me nightmares.”

  “They give me the creeps too,” the boy named Daniel said. “Even stuffed snakes with pink and purple and blue stripes. What if there’s an actual, real snake that looks like that? It makes me want to live on Mars.”

  “There could be snakes on Mars too,” Will pointed out.

  “Mars doesn’t have the ecosystem for snakes,” Daniel said. “It’s a totally safe space, snake-wise.”

  Mrs. Ybarra walked over and took Slimey from the girl who was petting him. “I’m afraid this snake is no longer welcome here. If you would be so kind to take him back to the—I mean, just take him back. To wherever you found him.”

  “Were you about to say the lost and found?” Marja asked, taking notes on a small notepad.

  “If that’s where you found him,” Mrs. Ybarra said with a shrug.

  The members of the World’s Best Detective Club looked at one another.

  “I’m just curious,” Emily said to Mrs. Ybarra. “If there were kids in your class who didn’t like snakes, why didn’t Kervin just take Slimey back home?”

  “Kervin’s mom hates that snake,” the computer boy said. “She wouldn’t let Kervin bring Slimey home.”

  “We had a lot of fights about it,” Charlotte added. “It’s like all we did the first week of school was fight about whether Kervin should take Slimey back home, even if his mom didn’t like it. And then Slimey disappeared.”

  “Who’s fault is that?” the computer boy asked. “A lot of people blame you, Charlotte.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Charlotte said. “But I’m glad it happened.”

  Mrs. Ybarra put Slimey back in the bag and handed the bag to Gavin. “Okay, kids, recess is almost over. Why don’t you take Slimey back to the lost and found?”

  “But we never actually said for sure that we found Slimey at the lost—”

  Mrs. Ybarra cut Gavin off. “Go on now! You’re going to be late!”

  The members of the World’s Best Detective Club walked out of the
classroom and into the hallway.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Marja asked as they started back to Mr. Pell’s classroom.

  “That Mrs. Ybarra put Slimey in the lost and found?” Emily asked.

  “That’s what I think,” said Will.

  “Having three people in her class who hate snakes meant that keeping a snake—even a fake snake—caused a lot of problems,” Rashid said. “I can see why she wouldn’t want him there.”

  “And if Kervin Mack’s mom wouldn’t take Slimey back, Mrs. Ybarra was sort of stuck,” Sam said. “She couldn’t just throw Slimey away. I mean, he’s a pretty cool snake.”

  “So what are we supposed to do with Slimey now?” Emily asked. “Put him back in the lost and found? That’s no fun, even if I’m pretty sure we solved the case.”

  Sam sighed. “Hand me the bag, Gavin. I’ll store Slimey in the garage along with Chris Gutentag’s rain jacket.”

  “Pretty soon the whole lost and found is going to be in your garage,” Gavin said. “I don’t think your parents are going to be too happy about that.”

  Sam knew that Gavin was right, but he didn’t want to just give up and take everything back.

  Besides, if they never made any money solving cases, he could always have a garage sale.

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  * * *

  T. rex Chickens

  “So what are you learning in your bird-watching club?” Mr. Stockfish asked on Sunday as they walked to Mrs. Kerner’s house to feed their chickens.

  “At the meeting the other day, Emily told us that birds have hollow bones,” Sam said. “And that chickens used to be dinosaurs.”

  “I wonder if she meant that chickens were descended from dinosaurs,” Mr. Stockfish said.