He nodded.
I thought about Brian’s dinner. “Want to eat with us tonight? We’re having chicken and rice.”
“Okay.”
So I asked Mrs. Olsen and she agreed.
It was my job to make the rice. I’m good at it. I let Brian help me measure. “Two cups,” I said. “That’s plenty.”
Brian looked in the pot with dismay. “That’s nothing. We’re going to be hungry.”
“No we won’t. We’ll add water and boil it, and it will fill the pot.”
“Really?”
“Sure, water makes it swell.”
“Good,” said Brian.
Hired
The phone rang early Sunday morning. It was for me.
“Sly, this is Mrs. Olsen.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Olsen.”
“I want to hire you—as Sly the Sleuth.”
“Is it about Brian? About how strange he’s acting?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Olsen.
Taxi loved Brian. Brian was good to her. He had made her a picnic cooler to sleep in. So Taxi would care about this case. Probably any cat would.
Plus, I loved Brian too. “I accept the job,” I said.
“How much money do you charge for being a sleuth?”
No adult had ever asked me that before. All my past clients had been kids. They paid me with objects, not money. I felt silly to name a price. And I had no idea what the price should be. “For you, nothing,” I said, wondering if I should have asked for ten dollars.
“Then I’ll pay you in cookies,” said Mrs. Olsen.
I should have asked for ten dollars. “That’s not necessary,” I said.
“Oh, I love to bake, don’t worry about that.”
“Let’s count yesterday’s cookies as payment,” I said.
She laughed. “That’s only the first installment.”
I gave up. “We might as well get started. Has Brian done anything else strange?”
“That’s why I’m calling so early. He’s in the bathtub.”
I’d given Brian a bath before. He made his rubber shark eat his rubber ducklings. Then he made his rubber ducklings gang up against the shark and eat it. He loved baths. “Taking a bath isn’t strange,” I said.
“He’s been in there for an hour. He says he’s not getting out till it works.”
That’s what Brian had talked about Saturday—something working. “Till what works?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” said Mrs. Olsen. “He won’t give me a straight answer. But he’s really sad. That’s why I hired you.”
The Blues
I knocked on the bathroom door. “Want to get out of the tub, Brian?”
“Not till it works.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
I went in and closed the toilet seat cover and sat on it. Brian was underwater except for the oval of his eyes and nose and mouth.
“What’s supposed to work?”
“The water.”
I made a show of examining him. “It’s working,” I said.
“Really?” Brian sat up. He inspected his arms and legs. “No it’s not.”
“You look pretty clean to me,” I said.
Brian plopped back under the water. “It better work,” he said. “Nothing else did.”
“Okay, Brian, let’s figure this out. The rolling pin didn’t work,” I said slowly.
“Nope.”
“Did you try duct tape again?”
“We had a roll too.”
“And it didn’t work?”
“Nope.”
“And the water isn’t working.”
“You forgot the magnet,” said Brian.
“Oh, yeah, the magnet didn’t work?”
“Nope,” said Brian.
What did a rolling pin and duct tape and a magnet and water all have in common?
“You better get out, Brian,” I said. “Your hands are wrinkling from the water.”
“Oh, no,” said Brian. “It’s working just the opposite.” He cried.
“You sure have the blues, Brian. What do you mean, it’s working the opposite.”
“I’m shrinking, not swelling.”
And it suddenly made sense.“Rice,” I said.
Fun
I helped Brian towel off.
“First, you’re not shrinking.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now let me get this straight. You wanted the water to make you bigger. To swell you, like rice.”
“It didn’t work.”
“And you wanted the rolling pin to make you bigger like cookie dough.”
“It didn’t work either,” said Brian. “And it hurt. Like the duct tape.”
“Right,” I said. “The duct tape was heavy. I get it. It was supposed to stretch you. And the magnet . . . I don’t get the magnet.”
“Two magnets,” said Brian.
Right. There was a second one on the ground under where Brian had been hanging the other day. “Of course.”
Mrs. Olsen stood in the doorway. “How can you possibly say ‘Of course,’ Sly? Of course what?”
“Magnets attract each other,” I said. “Brian wanted the magnet on his ankle to pull his body toward the magnet on the ground. To stretch him.”
“Goodness, Brian. I didn’t know you knew so much science,” said Mrs. Olsen.
“Nothing worked,” said Brian. “I can’t have fun.”
“You don’t need to be bigger to have fun,” said Mrs. Olsen.
“Yes I do,” said Brian. “I can’t even hit a branch.”
Mrs. Olsen looked at me with pleading eyes.
“He needs to be taller to play basketball,” I said.
“Playing is the most fun,” said Brian. “Sly said so. Shouting and kicking are fun too. But Kate won’t let me do that either.”
Mrs. Olsen looked at me again.
“He needs to be bigger to be a cheerleader,” I said.
“A cheerleader?” Mrs. Olsen asked weakly.
“I don’t even have pom-poms,” said Brian.
If you can hit two birds with one stone, you should do it. That’s what my father says. Brian wanted those pom-poms and I didn’t want to be a cheerleader. “You can have my pom-poms. I don’t even like them,” I lied. “And you can have the best job for cheering the basketball team on.”
“Really?” said Brian. “What’s that?”
“Mascot.”
The Mascot
So Brian became the cheerleading squad’s mascot. Melody was okay with that. Her mother didn’t want Pong going to the games anyway.
Kate was nice about the whole thing. She wrote MASCOT in Magic Marker on a white T-shirt and gave it to Brian. He wears it almost every day.
We had our first basketball game this week. Brian ran around with one pom-pom between his teeth, waving the other one. The crowds loved him.
I didn’t get out of being a cheerleader after all. Kate’s mother bought me a new set of pom-poms. It’s okay, though. I really do like those pom-poms.
Mrs. Olsen paid me with another dozen cookies. I didn’t know what to do with them.Then Jack came over and asked if he could have them. He has a shuffleboard game in his basement and he wanted them for pucks.
So my second set of three cases all worked out fine. The cases of the Soccer Switch and the Kick Craze and the Basketball Blues. The pairs of words didn’t all start with the same letter, but they started with the same sound: ss, kk, bb. When two words begin with the same sound, that’s called alliteration. Poets use lots of alliteration. We learned that in school just this year.
This was neat. My first set of three cases all rhymed. And this set all alliterated. There is definitely something poetic about sleuthing.
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Sly the Sleuth and the Sports Mysteries Page 5
