September Sneakers

by Ron Roy

  Pal was barking wildly at the garage door.

  “Is this your pooch?” Ms. Tery asked Bradley. “What does he want in our garage?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think our hamster might be in there,” Brian said. “Pal can smell her, right, boy?”

  This made Pal bark even louder.

  “Do you mean the hamster that got stolen?” Ms. Tery asked. “Hunter, do you know anything about a hamster?”

  Hunter looked at his feet. “Um, yeah, I guess,” he said.

  “You guess?” his mother said. “Well, I guess I need an explanation.”

  Hunter sighed. Then he pulled open the garage door. “Come on in,” he said.

  “No way!” his mother said. “You know how I feel about spiders!”

  “There aren’t any spiders, Mom,” Hunter said. “The sign was to keep you out.”

  Ms. Tery walked into the garage. The four kids followed her inside. Hunter came last. He left the door open.

  Two other teenagers were sitting at a workbench. “Hi, Ms. Tery,” they both mumbled.

  “Hello, Will. Hello, Buddy,” Ms. Tery said. “What’re you fellas working on?”

  A laptop computer sat on the workbench. Each boy had a notebook in front of him.

  “It’s our invention project,” Hunter told his mother.

  “Oh, yes, the one that’s a big secret,” she said. “And does this project involve stealing a hamster?”

  Bradley noticed that Will and Buddy were wearing green-and-orange sneakers, like Hunter’s.

  “Not exactly, Mom,” Hunter said. He walked to the back of the garage. There was a sheet covering a lumpy mound on the floor. Hunter pulled the sheet off. Bradley saw the aquarium, a tennis racket, and a bunch of other stuff. Hunter came back with Goldi in his hands.

  “Goldi!” the four younger kids cried.

  Pal nearly went crazy barking.

  Hunter handed the hamster to Brian, who put him on the floor in front of Pal. Pal got flat on the floor, and Goldi climbed up on his nose. “All the other stuff we took is back there,” Hunter said.

  Ms. Tery gave her son a long look. “Have a seat and explain, please,” she said.

  Hunter folded his lanky body onto the bench next to Will and Buddy. “We belong to the Junior Inventors club at school,” he said. “We decided to invent a new kind of sneaker.”

  Will and Buddy held up their feet to show off theirs.

  Hunter pointed to his mother’s sneakers. “I got the green-and-orange idea from yours, Mom,” he said. “Our plan was to invent sneakers that didn’t smell, even after you wore them a lot. We call them Sweet Feet. Will is real good in science, and he came up with this formula for the soles. His dad helped us find a company that agreed to make them. But first they wanted us to try them out, so they sent a few sample pairs.”

  Hunter pointed down at his feet. “We were supposed to wear them to see if the formula worked,” he went on. “But I decided to hang my pair around town to get people curious. I hung them in trees where people would see them and want to buy them.”

  “What about the little ones?” Brian asked.

  “The company sent us a bunch,” he said. “We decided to leave them at people’s houses, to get them interested.”

  “But why take the hamster?” his mother asked. “And those other things?”

  “That was Buddy’s big idea,” Hunter said. “But we were going to give it all back, honest! Buddy figured people would notice the miniature sneakers even more if we took something and left a little sample sneaker in the same spot.”

  “It worked,” Bradley said. “We noticed!”

  No one said anything for a long minute. Bradley snuck a look at Ms. Tery. She was staring at Hunter. The kids watched Goldi walk along Pal’s back. Pal was the only one in the garage with a happy look on his face.

  “Okay, Hunter, while I’m trying to figure out your punishment, you can apologize to these kids,” Ms. Tery said. “Then you three can return everything you took and apologize to those other people. Okay?”

  “I’m real sorry,” Hunter told Bradley, Brian, Nate, and Lucy. “We were just trying to promote our sneakers. We didn’t mean to upset anybody.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, too,” Buddy said. “I guess it was a stupid idea to take things.”

  “Me too,” Will said. “I’ll get the company to send you kids some Sweet Feet sneakers, okay?”

  “Awesome!” Nate yelled.

  “Um, Pal should get sneakers, too,” Bradley said, patting his dog’s head. “Without his nose, we wouldn’t have been able to find Goldi.”

  Hunter opened a notebook and started writing. “Okay, four pairs of sneakers for four second graders.”

  Then he wrote something else. “And two more pairs for a dog named Pal!”

  Pal barked.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at

  Bradley, Brian, Nate, and Lucy’s

  next exciting mystery:

  Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Ron Roy. Published by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  “How do I look?” Bradley asked. He was wearing a cardboard box. His head stuck out through a hole in the top, and his feet came out the bottom. There were holes in the sides for his arms.

  Bradley had pasted pictures of Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson on the four sides.

  “You look like a box of cereal,” Nate said.

  Bradley grinned. “I’m Mount Rushmore,” he said.

  It was Halloween, and the kids were getting dressed at Nate’s house. They were going to the Shangri-la Hotel. For Halloween, the building had been changed into a haunted house. All the kids they knew were planning to be there.

  Bradley’s twin brother, Brian, was dressed as an astronaut. A clear plastic salad bowl covered his red hair. He pretended to breathe through a vacuum-cleaner hose taped to the bowl. His shirt and pants were covered with tinfoil.

  Lucy was dressed as Sacagawea. She wore a fake-leather dress and moccasins and had her hair in a braid.

  Nate had wound strips of rags around his face and body. “Guess what I am!” he said.

  “Raggedy Andy?” Brian joked.

  “No, I’m a mummy,” Nate said.

  The kids left Nate’s house and walked to Main Street. The sun was down, but it was not quite dark. They waited at the traffic light in front of Howard’s Barbershop.

  “Dink told me there’s an ogre’s cave inside the hotel,” Lucy said. “The ogre is guarding a basket of candy. If we steal candy without getting caught, we get a prize!”

  When the sign said walk, they crossed Main Street and walked to the Shangri-la Hotel. They stood behind some bushes and looked at the hotel.

  “It does look haunted,” Lucy said. Bats, witch faces, and skeletons peered out the windows. Thick cobwebs hung from the front door. Spooky music came through the open windows.

  A tall green ogre stood at the door. The monster had a lumpy green face and a fat belly. He held a club in his chubby fingers.