The Case of the July 4th Jinx

by Lewis B. Montgomery

  Jazz caught hold of a small boy. “What happened?”

  “There’s a snake in there! I saw it!” Pulling free, the boy ran to his mother.

  Milo scanned the crowd. The ball pit was empty now. The kids were jumping around in their socks, chattering excitedly. All but one.

  To the side, a girl about Ethan’s age sat calmly strapping on her sandals. She had chocolate smears on her face, and she was . . . smiling?

  Milo and Jazz exchanged a glance.

  Striding up to the girl, Milo demanded, “How come you’re the only one who isn’t scared?”

  The girl looked up. Her smile faded.

  “You did it, didn’t you?” he accused.

  “It was just a joke,” she said.

  “A joke?” Jazz said from behind Milo. “Letting a snake loose?”

  The girl’s lower lip trembled. “Only a rubber snake. He said it would be funny.”

  Milo and Jazz looked at each other.

  “Who?” Milo asked.

  “The boy,” she said. “The big boy.” Then her eyes widened. “Uh-oh.”

  A woman wearing a fair badge climbed out of the ball pit with a long, lifelike rubber snake. She did not look happy.

  Nearby, Milo spotted the Zoo Crew watching and laughing. Crash towered in the center of the group. The big boy.

  Eagerly, Milo turned back to the girl. “Was that the—”

  But she was gone.

  “Where did that girl go?” he asked Jazz, who was watching the woman with the snake.

  “Huh?” Jazz turned. “Oh, no! She was here a second ago!”

  “Look who is here, though.” Milo pointed to the Zoo Crew.

  Jazz’s eyes narrowed. “Weren’t they at the stage watching Viola’s Violets, too?”

  He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Carlos said they’re always making trouble. . . .”

  “And this fair has had a lot of trouble.”

  Before Jazz could say anything more, Crash elbowed one of the boys next to him and jerked his head toward the exit. The Zoo Crew moved off.

  “Let’s follow them!” Jazz said.

  “But I want to go in the ball pit,” Ethan protested.

  “Later,” Milo said, hauling him along.

  With Ethan hanging back and digging in his heels, they quickly lost ground. Soon the Zoo Crew vanished in the crowd, as Milo fumed.

  Then, coming straight toward them, Milo saw the most beautiful sight ever: his mom and dad.

  He shoved his little brother at them, babbling a quick excuse. Then he and Jazz set off.

  “There they are!” Jazz pointed toward the exit gate.

  “Let’s go!” Milo said.

  He and Jazz trailed the Zoo Crew out of the fairgrounds. They tried to stay close enough not to lose them again, but far enough back not to be noticed.

  Suddenly the Zoo Crew ducked down an alley. Milo and Jazz broke into a run. But by the time they reached the turn, the boys had disappeared.

  “Look!” Jazz nudged Milo.

  Halfway down the alley, a garage door was just rolling shut.

  They crept toward the garage.

  Milo peeked in. “I can’t see anything. It’s just black.”

  “I think they taped garbage bags over the windows,” Jazz whispered.

  Around the back they found another window, also covered. But it was open a crack. They could hear noises coming from inside.

  Jazz put a finger to her lips.

  First Milo heard a scraping sound, then a few thumps. Somebody said, “Looks like we’re good to go.”

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said another voice. “If anyone finds out it’s us . . .”

  “Life as we know it will be over,” someone else finished.

  “You guys worry too much,” the first voice said. “Nobody will know it’s us. Anyway, it’s too late to back out now. Tomorrow is the Fourth.”

  “We still haven’t got a shrimpy kid,” one of the boys grumbled.

  “How about your brother?”

  “No way, Crash. The kid’s a snitch. Besides, he’s small for a sixth grader, but not that small. I don’t think he’d fit.”

  Crash sighed. “Maybe we’ll just have to do it without the kid.”

  A door slammed nearby. Milo jumped.

  Jazz whispered, “We’d better go.”

  They tiptoed away from the garage. Once they reached the alley they ran, not slowing down until a stitch in Milo’s side forced him to stop. Collapsing on the sidewalk, he gasped, “Holy cow.”

  “They’re definitely up to something,” Jazz agreed. “Did you hear what they said about the Fourth of July?”

  Milo nodded. “They must be the ones behind the jinx. And tomorrow they’re going to pull something big—”

  “But what?” Jazz asked. “And why do they need a small kid?”

  Small enough to fit.

  Milo jumped to his feet. “Listen. Once I read a story in Whodunnit magazine about a gang of robbers and a little kid—”

  “I read that one too!” Jazz broke in. “The robbers pushed the kid in through a window because they were all too big to fit . . .” She paused. “You think the Zoo Crew is planning a break-in at the fair?”

  Milo shrugged. “Tomorrow everyone will be at the prize-judging tent and then watching the parade. The rest of the fair will be practically empty.”

  “If only we had some kind of proof that they’re behind the pranks,” Jazz said. “I wish we knew what they’re hiding in that garage.”

  “We could sneak in after dark.”

  Jazz shook her head. “If we got caught, we’d be in real trouble.”

  Feeling stuck, the two detectives split up and headed home for dinner.

  Milo carried in the mail and dropped it on the table. An envelope with DM in the corner slipped out of the stack.

  A detective lesson from Dash Marlowe!

  A mild-mannered bank clerk stays past closing time—and blows the safe.

  A Boy Scout helps you cross a busy street—and picks your pocket on the way.

  At the post office, you see your friendly next-door neighbor—on a WANTED poster!

  Many people are not what they seem. As a detective, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire—by pretending to be someone you’re not. In other words: go undercover.

  Going undercover means convincing your suspects you are one of them. To do this, you need to play a role. The way you act, the way you speak, the way you look—it’s all part of your disguise.

  If you play your role well and get your suspects to trust you, they may let clues slip. And if you play it really well, you may even learn to think like your suspects—and that can help you solve the crime.

  Just don’t forget who you really are, or you may find yourself in hot water. That happened to me once, when I was investigating dirty deeds at a Laundromat. But that’s another story. . . .

  Milo folded up the lesson, stuck it in his pocket, and smiled.

  He knew exactly what to do.

  Just after breakfast, the doorbell rang. It was Jazz.

  “Yo,” Milo said. “What’s poppin’, dawg?”

  She stared at him. “Where did you get that giant shirt?”

  “My dad. I tried to wear his pants, too, but they fell all the way down.”

  “Wow,” she said. “You look really . . .”

  “Cool?” Milo asked.

  Jazz reached over and turned his baseball cap around so it pointed forward. “No—ridiculous. What’s it for?”

  “I’m going undercover with the Zoo Crew,” he said. “We need to find out what they’ve got planned—and stop them before it’s too late.”

  He handed her the lesson from Dash.

  She read it, then shook her head. “I don’t know, Milo. It seems risky. What if they figure out what you’re up to?”

  “How could they? My disguise is perfect. Those Zoo Crew guys will think I’m off the chain.”

  “They’ll think you’re
off your rocker,” Jazz said. “Besides, I didn’t hear them talking the way you’re talking.”

  “The Zoo Crew kids are tough,” Milo explained. “This is how tough guys talk. I saw it on TV!”

  Jazz gave him a look. “This is just so . . . not you.”

  “It’s the new me,” he told her. “Rough. Tough. Fearless—”

  BAM!

  He screamed and jumped.

  Jazz stared up at the ceiling. “What was that?”

  “ETHAN!” he yelled.

  His brother leaned over the stair rail. “Yeah?”

  “What was that noise?”

  “I dropped a book.”

  Milo just looked at him.

  “Well, it was the big fat dictionary,” Ethan said. “And I was standing on a chair.”

  “And holding it up over your head?” Jazz asked.

  Ethan grinned. “I wasn’t scared at all! I think I’m almost ready for the fireworks tonight.”

  He vanished. A moment later, another crash shook the ceiling.

  “He’s driving me nuts,” Milo said. “Slamming doors. Dropping heavy stuff. Popping balloons . . .”

  Jazz wasn’t listening.

  “Milo,” she said, “I was thinking. That girl at the ball pit is an eyewitness. She’s the only one we know who’s actually seen the boy who’s pulling all those pranks. She can tell us if Crash got her to put that rubber snake in the ball pit. We need to find her again.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “You look for her, and I’ll go undercover. Let’s meet at the fair at noon.”

  She gave his disguise one last doubtful look. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “For shizzle, dawg.”

  Jazz winced. “Milo, please quit saying ‘dawg.’ And pull your pants up.”

  “But showing underwear makes you look tough,” Milo protested. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Not when the underwear has happy penguins on it.”

  He looked down. Oops.

  Hitching up his jeans, he saw her out and then took off for the Zoo Crew’s hideout. When he got there, it was still and silent. Had they already left for the fair?

  He circled around to the back. The window near the ground was closed tight. But then he spotted an open window high up on the garage wall.

  A metal trash can sat nearby. He tugged it over and climbed up on the lid—

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The lid flew out from under Milo. With a bang and a clatter, he tumbled off. The trash can fell on top of him.

  Sprawled in the dirt, he looked up at the unsmiling faces of the Zoo Crew.

  Uh-oh.

  Weakly, Milo stuck out his hand for a fist bump. “Um . . . yo?”

  They stared down at him in silence.

  He tried to look tough. “Word on the street is that you’re looking for a kid who’s small enough to fit.”

  Crash folded his huge arms and glanced around. “Okay, who blabbed?”

  “Not me, Crash!” one of the boys said.

  “Me neither.”

  “I kept my mouth shut.”

  Milo pushed himself to his feet. “Anyway, what’s the difference? You can use me, right?”

  Crash eyed him for a long moment. “How do we know you won’t blab?”

  “Why would I blab? I’ll be in on it too.”Realizing what he’d just said, Milo gulped. If it all went wrong, would he end up in jail?

  Crash looked around at the others. “He is about the right size. And we’re out of time.”

  “We don’t need him,” a boy said.

  “Yeah, we do,” Crash told him. “No way am I going to be the only fruit.”

  The only . . . what?

  “I’m a tomato,” another boy said. “That’s a fruit.”

  “No, that’s a vegetable.”

  “Oh, yeah? My mother said—”

  Vegetables? Fruits? Milo broke in. “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you think?” Crash said. “Our costumes.”

  “Costumes? For what?”

  “For this.”

  Crash gave the garage door a powerful heave. The door rolled up.

  Sunlight flooded into the dark space. And at last, Milo saw what the Zoo Crew had been hiding.

  It was a basket. A basket with handles, the kind people might use for a picnic or to carry home their vegetables. But this basket was the size of a truck. And it had wheels.

  “Wh-what is that?” Milo stammered.

  “Our float,” Crash said. “For the parade.”

  A float? The Zoo Crew’s big secret was a float?

  Misreading the stunned look on Milo’s face, Crash said, “It looks a lot better with us in it, in our costumes.”

  “Oh . . .” Milo said faintly.

  Crash dug in a box and began flinging costumes to the waiting boys—tomato, carrot, eggplant, ear of corn. He tossed one to Milo, too. “You’re the strawberry.”

  Milo held it up. “It’s . . . it’s pink.”

  “It was supposed to be a beet,” the tomato explained, fluffing up his stuffing. “But it shrank in the wash. So Crash said we could add a stem and paint on seeds and have it be a strawberry.”

  The eggplant put in, “We just needed to find a kid small enough—”

  “To fit in the costume,” Milo finished. Oh, boy. And here he had been thinking that the Zoo Crew was planning a break-in!

  “But why the big secret?” he asked.

  Zipping himself up, the carrot snorted. “Are you kidding? If anyone finds out we dressed up like a bunch of vegetables, we’ll never live it down.”

  Milo’s head was spinning. “Then why are you doing it?”

  Slowly, the other vegetables turned and stared hard at Crash.

  “Come on,” Crash protested. “I didn’t knock over the farm stand all by myself. You guys ran right into it, too.”

  “Yeah,” the eggplant said. “But we wouldn’t have been running if that mama goose hadn’t been chasing us.”

  The ear of corn added, “And she was only chasing us because you ran off with her baby.”

  “I guess I should have put it down,” Crash admitted, climbing into a gigantic watermelon costume. “But it’s hard to think straight when a big, mean, hissing goose is after you.”

  “That mama goose was pretty mad,” the corn agreed.

  Gloomily, the carrot said, “Not half as mad as the farm lady when her eggs and vegetables went flying.”

  “We offered to pay her back by working on the farm,” Crash told Milo. “But for some reason she didn’t want us there. That’s why we have to wear the veggie costumes. She said if we did a Goose Egg Farm float for the parade, she wouldn’t call our parents.”

  “So . . . you didn’t knock over the farm stand on purpose?” Milo asked.

  “Of course not,” the watermelon said. “Why would we do a thing like that?”

  “Well . . . I mean . . .” Milo hesitated. “What about all that other stuff you did? Like setting fire to the school?”

  “There wasn’t any fire,” the corn said. “Just lots of smoke. Crash had this bright idea about using the Bunsen burners in the science lab to make s’mores.”

  Milo asked, “And the boys’ room flood . . . ?”

  “No time to talk about that now,” Crash cut in hastily. “The farmer will be here soon. And you’re still not dressed.”

  Milo looked at the strawberry costume in his hand. It was so . . . pink. He sighed. When he’d decided to go undercover, this was not exactly what he’d had in mind.

  As Milo zipped himself into the costume, the farmer arrived in her tractor to hook up the float. She joked with the Zoo Crew cheerfully. Now that they were paying her back, she seemed to have forgiven them for the farm-stand disaster.

  The boys piled on the float, and the tractor moved off slowly down the alley.

  As they rode toward the fairgrounds, Milo puzzled over what he had learned. The Zoo Crew was not at all what he’d expected. C
ould they be behind the trouble at the fair? It didn’t seem likely. But if they weren’t the culprits, who was?

  The tractor rolled into the fairgrounds. The prize judging seemed to have started. Near the tent, at the edge of the crowd, Milo spotted Jazz. Then he saw who was standing beside her.

  It was the rubber-snake girl.

  Milo hurtled off the float and charged toward the two girls, shouting, “Jazz!”

  They glanced up. Jazz looked startled. The smaller girl screamed and hid behind her. “It’s a monster strawberry!”

  “Milo? Is that you?” Jazz asked. “What are you doing in that costume?”

  “Helping out the Zoo Crew,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

  Jazz shot a glance over his shoulder. “That’s the Zoo Crew?” she asked.

  Milo turned and saw a herd of produce stampeding toward them. The girl peeped out from behind Jazz, squeaked in terror, and hid again.

  As the Zoo Crew screeched to a halt, Jazz hauled the girl back out. She pointed to the watermelon, towering over all the others. “The big one! Crash! Did he give you the snake?”

  The girl stared wide-eyed at the giant fruit.

  The watermelon turned to Milo. “What’s she talking about?”

  Milo said, “Jazz, I don’t think—”

  “THIEVES!” a familiar voice shrieked. “BANDITS! HIGHWAY ROBBERY!”

  Mrs. Smalley stood at the front of the tent stabbing her finger at an empty spot on the table.

  “MY PIE IS GONE!”

  Jazz whirled on the Zoo Crew. “You! What did you do with that pie?”

  “Huh? Us? We didn’t do anything!”

  “They couldn’t have,” Milo said. “They’ve been with me all morning.”

  Suddenly the girl piped up. “That’s him!”

  Everyone turned. The girl pointed. “There! Way up front! Next to the yelling lady! He gave me the snake!”

  Milo looked. “Chief Smalley?”