Super Puzzletastic Mysteries

by Chris Grabenstein

  Milo watched the search, shaking his head. “But the Twiglets’ tube was in an inside pocket, zipped into Phero’s duffel. It couldn’t have rolled out. And ours was inside my shoe, under the bed. It couldn’t have rolled out, either. I don’t think the jars are lost.”

  The unspoken, terrible thought hung heavy over their heads. “Do we think we’ve been robbed?” Phero asked at last, instinctively dropping his voice to a whisper. “Is it possible somebody snuck in overnight?”

  “Oh my God, the other cabins’ jars, the ones that went missing—” Kip gasped. “I told you guys it wasn’t just a clever ruse. We’ve been hit by the Jar Thief.”

  Milo glanced at Meddy again. “Didn’t see anything,” she repeated. “I mean, there’s some very weird stuff out in the woods, but I didn’t see anything weird going on here.”

  “Is that even allowed, to take stuff from our cabins?” Rayhan asked. “I thought our cabins were, like, base. Safe.”

  “Who can keep all the rules straight?” Phero grumbled. “They add a new one like every day.”

  The boys checked every possible entrance to the cabin. Again, it didn’t take long: there were windows to either side of the single door and another two windows on the opposite wall. “All secure,” Rayhan reported.

  “All except for that one,” Josh said, pointing to the narrow rectangular window over the door. “We didn’t leave that open, did we?”

  “I don’t think it’s been open all week,” Milo muttered as they all looked at the aperture in question. It was the width of the door and only about a foot high, but it really was more vent than window, and Milo wasn’t sure any of them could’ve squeezed through it—assuming any of them could even get to it. “And none of us opened it?” The other campers shook their heads.

  But at his side, Meddy held up a finger. “It was open last night.”

  “You sure?” Milo asked, after making sure the question could reasonably be a response to his cabinmates’ head shakes as well as to Meddy’s statement.

  “Positive,” confirmed five humans and one ghost.

  Another moment to be sure his next question worked for both the living and the dead in the room, then: “And we don’t know when it got opened?”

  The boys glanced around at each other, then shook their heads. Meddy made an apologetic face. No luck there.

  “Well, if everything else is locked, that must be how someone got in,” Kip said decisively. “No one could’ve snuck in the front door anyway. It sticks and it creaks. No way to be sneaky about it.”

  Milo shook his head. “But nobody would fit through there. And even if they could, how would they have gotten up and down from it?”

  “Maybe if they stood on the shelf?” Phero pointed to the little ledge to the right of the door, where a spare flashlight, a lantern, and the cabin’s first aid kit stood ready in case of emergencies.

  Meddy and Milo made doubtful noises at the same time. “That thing’s not strong enough to hold a person,” Milo said. “And even if it was, nobody could’ve climbed on it without knocking that stuff down or moving it all first, in which case they also had to put it back when they left.”

  “I’d love to hear whatever alternative idea you’ve got,” Kip snapped. “But if you haven’t got one, quit wasting time. If we can figure out how whoever got in here did get in here, maybe we can find a clue that will lead us back to them, and we might just have time to get the jars back before breakfast. Everything else is locked and none of us opened that window, so that’s got to be the answer, even if it seems like a long shot.”

  “I really want to kick him,” Meddy said thoughtfully. “Or, like, keep untying his shoes over and over for like an hour, except maybe once every fifteen minutes or so, tie them together instead.”

  “Milo’s not wrong, though,” Rayhan put in. “The shelf doesn’t look sturdy enough and the window doesn’t look big enough. Let’s test it. I’m the smallest. I’ll give it a try, and if I can’t do it, I don’t think it can be done.”

  He passed Milo the big spare flashlight and handed the first aid kit in its plastic box to Kip. Then, as he lifted the lantern, he gave a yelp of surprise. “Look!”

  The Dapperlings gathered around and stared, disbelieving, at a vague and smudgy, dusty gray crescent that was unmistakably the toe end of a footprint made by some kind of sneaker.

  “Now,” Meddy said appreciatively, “that’s interesting.” She tilted her head. “And weird.” She rose effortlessly off the ground and proceeded to lever herself up and down from the shelf to the window and back. She took care to make sure one foot or the other always touched down, however briefly, on the crescent toe print. She managed it, but it seemed awkward from every angle, and it really didn’t look like she’d have been able to use the window if she’d actually had to maneuver the mass of a living kid.

  Milo shook his head. “That print’s more than weird, it’s not possible. And it makes no sense for it to have been under the lantern. It must be from some other time.”

  “Some other time when someone had a reason to climb up on that shelf?” Kip asked, rolling his eyes. “No.”

  “I don’t think it was under the lantern,” Rayhan said. “I think I just couldn’t see it until I moved the lantern. I think,” he repeated dubiously.

  “I’m convinced,” Kip announced with obnoxious finality. “Impossible as it sounds, somebody must’ve climbed through that window last night and taken the sample tubes. What we need to do now is find the person whose shoe matches this print.”

  “Ugh, Kip,” Meddy complained, sitting on the shelf and letting her feet dangle. “What’s he think, that all the other kids are just going to line up and show you the toes of their shoes?”

  Milo folded his arms and glowered at Kip. “It’s barely a print at all. There’s no tread visible. Without the tread pattern, how could we possibly match this to anyone’s shoe?” He glanced at the clock on the wall between his bed and Rayhan’s. “We have fifteen minutes, plus what, a half-hour for breakfast? There are fifty-four other kids here. Even if we could line them all up and make them show us their shoes one by one, which obviously we can’t—”

  Kip took a deep, frustrated breath and let it out, exhaling the words “WHAT IS YOUR SUGGESTION THEN, MILO, IF YOU KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT EVERYTHING” at the same time.

  Meddy reached down to whack Kip on the back of the head, a gesture he couldn’t possibly have seen or felt but that still somehow managed to make him flinch. But it was too late—suddenly the whole cabin was looking at Milo. His face began to burn.

  “Hey.” Meddy spotted the flare-up. She leaped down from the shelf and stood at his side. “You’re up against a blackjack, Milo. A trickster, just like in our role-playing games back home. Just like you, when you play. We know how to deal with blackjacks. Shake it off and focus.”

  “Whoa,” Phero said quickly at about the same time. “Let’s not fight with each other. There’s got to be a way—hey!” He snapped his fingers. “What about—what’s it called, trace evidence? In movies the forensic people are always using trace evidence to link the crime scene to the criminal. What about the dirt? Maybe we can match it to the area around someone’s cabin.”

  “Not unless they teleported from their cabin to ours, we can’t,” Milo said glumly.

  “Yeah,” Meddy agreed, looking over his shoulder at the crescent toe print again. “If they crossed the campground, their shoes’ll have dirt from all over.”

  The two of them looked down at the crescent toe print together. Then Milo frowned. Dirt from all over the campsite . . . yes, that’s what should be there: some unremarkable mix of dirt and grass and whatever else accumulated on the bottom of a shoe in the course of a day spent outdoors. But the print they were all looking at didn’t look like it was made of transferred dirt at all. The gray of the print had no brown or green to it. The particles . . .

  Milo took a breath and puffed out a quick breath of air, and tiny motes swirled up away from the print. “
It’s not dirt,” Meddy said softly. “It’s dust. Or maybe not even dust.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced sharply over his shoulder at the fireplace, then looked at his cabinmates. “I think it’s ash.”

  “Let me see.” Kip elbowed his way past Milo for a look. “I don’t see how you get ash from that,” he argued. “Probably he—whoever he was—just stepped in the dust already on the shelf.”

  But the rest of the Dapperlings loved the fireplace idea. “The one way in we didn’t think of!” Toby crowed, darting over to the stone hearth with Rayhan, Phero, and Josh in tow.

  “You really think someone climbed down the chimney?” Kip protested, following reluctantly. “That’s even more ridiculous than the window idea!”

  It was as if Kip hadn’t spoken at all. “Somebody see if the ash here matches the stuff on the shelf,” Phero suggested. “Who’s got a shoe handy?” He glanced over to Kip’s stuff, which was closest. “Kip, pass me one of yours.”

  Kip snorted. “Get your own shoes filthy. Are there even any footprints in there?”

  The Senior Dapperling was not enjoying getting dragged along with a theory he didn’t like. It was almost enough to lift Milo’s mood, especially now that Milo himself wasn’t the focus of everyone’s attention. “Here, use mine,” he said, tucking the flashlight he was still holding under one arm, grabbing one of his own shoes, and tossing it into Phero’s waiting hands.

  Phero rubbed the shoe into a blackish smudge in the corner of the fireplace, then carried it over to the shelf, stamped it next to the toe print, and examined the results. “Looks like the same stuff to me.”

  “The way this thing is falling apart, I bet there are toeholds all the way up,” Josh said, kneeling on the stones and peering up into the murk of the chimney. “It’s definitely wide enough for a kid. Somebody pass me a flashlight.”

  “I can look,” Meddy volunteered. She crossed to the fireplace, edged past Josh, and vanished up the chimney.

  Meanwhile, “Take my light,” Kip said quickly, heading for his bag.

  “Never mind. I’ve got the big one.” Milo still had the emergency flashlight from the shelf under his arm. Josh held out his hands, and Kip cringed as Milo tossed it just as he’d tossed his shoe a moment before.

  But Josh, thankfully, caught the flashlight flawlessly. He leaned back into the fireplace, aimed it up into the chimney, and flicked the switch. Nothing happened. “Huh.” He shook the flashlight, rattling the batteries inside, and tried again. Still nothing.

  Meddy popped back down the chimney and returned to Milo’s side. “He doesn’t have to worry about it. There’s nothing to see up there.”

  Kip made an impatient noise. “The batteries are probably dead. Here,” he said, offering his own pocket-sized flashlight. “Just use mine, do whatever, and let’s get out of here. If you think we need to be looking for soot on somebody, fine, but I’m telling you, if we’re going to find whoever did this, we need to get moving.”

  The boys swapped flashlights and Josh peered up. The others waited for his pronouncement. A little fall of ash and tiny bits of mortar fell as he reached up into the chimney stack to test some potential foothold.

  Milo watched it all with an irritated sort of itch beginning to scratch at the back of his mind. A thought was coming together, and he badly wanted to talk it out with Meddy, but there was nowhere in the single-room cabin where the two of them could converse unobserved.

  “So?” Kip said peevishly.

  Josh emerged from the chimney, his face and hair now lightly dusted with gray. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The stone’s plenty uneven, but it would be a pretty tough climb. And,” he said, looking down at the debris at his feet, “I feel like there would’ve been evidence.”

  “If whoever it was got in and out through the chimney,” Milo said slowly, “there’d be no reason for a footprint on the shelf.” The idea was solidifying. He didn’t much like it—in fact, the possibility made him furious—but it made a certain kind of sense. “And if whoever managed to get in and out through that window, what on earth reason would there be for them to go anywhere near the fireplace?”

  “I really do think it matches the ash, though,” Phero protested, looking down at the two prints: the one they’d found and the one he’d made. “Come see for yourself.”

  Milo shook his head. “I don’t need to see it. I believe you. But I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

  “What are you thinking?” Meddy asked.

  Now he had everyone’s attention, which was the opposite of how Milo preferred it. On the other hand, he suspected he had the answer and nobody else had worked it out yet.

  “This is a locked-door mystery,” Milo said thoughtfully, “and we’re up against a blackjack.”

  “A locked—” Meddy’s mouth opened in an O, and Milo permitted himself a short nod. She was no slouch. It was coming together in her mind now, too.

  “Excuse me?” Phero said. “A blackjack?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Milo looked around, past his cabinmates and his ghostly best friend to take in the single-room cabin that was Cat Dapperling. This is a locked-door problem. I’m sure of it. “I think there are only a handful of solutions to a locked-door mystery,” he said aloud. “But I’m pretty sure they’re all variations on the idea that if it doesn’t look like someone could get into or out of a room without a secret passage, then—unless there is a secret passage, and I don’t think these cabins are that fancy—nobody did get in or out.”

  Josh sat on the hearth and scratched his head, sending up a puff of soot. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the reason we can’t figure out how a person could’ve snuck in and out again undetected last night is that nobody did. But someone did a lot of work to make us think an outsider broke into the cabin and stole our jars.” Milo nodded at the shelf with the prints. “That’s why that nonsense footprint is there. Somebody had to make it look like an outsider had used that shelf to get up and down from the window, but he couldn’t actually go outside to get dirt for a fake footprint, because Kip’s right and the door creaks like crazy; one of us would’ve woken up. So he used the fireplace ash instead.” Milo looked around at the staring faces. “Nobody snuck in last night. Somebody definitely took the jars, though—but for the moment, they’re still here. And so is the thief.”

  “And it’s one of them,” Meddy pronounced, just as Rayhan said quietly, “So the thief is one of us.”

  Milo nodded. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Not possible,” Toby protested. “If we lose our jar, we lose the game. None of us would sabotage the cabin. Anyway, what would be the point?”

  “Well, we’re not going to lose the game, because I know where the jars are,” Milo said. “As to why—I’m not totally positive, but I have an idea.” He smiled sourly at Kip. “Do you want to explain it, or shall I?”

  The other four of the Dapperlings gasped. “Me?” Kip retorted. “Explain what? Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t take the jars. Search my stuff if you want. All it’s going to do is make us late for breakfast.”

  “I don’t have to search your stuff,” Milo snapped. “You could’ve swiped any of our shoes to make the fake print on the shelf, but you probably didn’t think you needed to be that sneaky since the idea was to make it look like someone outside the cabin did the thieving. You wouldn’t let Phero use your shoe to make a print with the ash because you knew even though you’d cleaned it off, the shape of the toe would match the print and give you away.” He nodded to Kip’s shoes, which were lined up under his bed. “Go ahead. Prove me wrong.”

  Five angry pairs of eyes turned on him. Kip said nothing for a long minute. Then, “I can’t,” he said quietly.

  “Why on earth would you do that?” Phero exploded. “We were already not going to win. Why’d you want us to actually lose?”

  Still Kip didn’t answer. Milo sighed. “Well, if you’re not going to say anything, I’ll make my guess. He didn’t
want us to lose,” he told the others. “But he was playing a parallel game with a different team, and he wanted that team to win. Right, Kip?”

  “What on earth game were you playing?” Josh demanded, grabbing at his own hair in frustration, which had the unfortunate effect of sending a bunch of ash sifting down right into his face.

  “Either him and Kent, or all ten of the returning campers,” Milo explained. “I suspect it was all of them. They were sort of playing the same Capture-the-Jar game we were, they just decided to form their own separate team and not tell anybody. That’s where the disappearing jars have been going—the ones that disappeared, but that no cabin took credit for taking.”

  “It was all ten of us,” Kip said dully, sitting at the edge of his bed. He looked up at the others mutinously. “I feel like I ought to say something here about how we would’ve gotten away with it all, if not for . . .” He sighed. “I’m sorry. It was a crummy thing to do.”

  “You were bored, so you made up your own rules,” Milo said. “I can sort of relate, right up to the point where you would have torpedoed your own cabin.” He glared at Kip. “And now you’re stuck between two teams and I bet that feels utterly crappy.”

  “Yeah,” Kip grumbled. “That is accurate.”

  Toby snorted. “Forgive me for not feeling sorry for you.”

  Josh shook his head. “Me either.”

  “If we didn’t have to bunk together for three more days,” Rayhan said coldly, “I would be planning some very humiliating revenge for you right now.”

  “I’m still planning humiliating revenge,” Phero muttered.

  The four aggrieved campers began to speak all at once, berating the traitor and promising a minimum punishment of a jug of orange juice down his pants as soon as they got to the mess hall. But Milo hesitated. All right, yes, they’d had a sleeper agent in their midst the whole week, but apart from that, the Dapperlings had made a pretty good team, and they’d had a pretty good time. Torn between the wish for retribution and the wish to have his cabin team back while they still had half a week of camp left, Milo thought fast.