Unfortunately, Sam discovered, that’s not what flipping meant when it came to houses. The show was actually about two guys who bought old places and fixed them up and sold them for a lot of money.
“You’re not going to tell anyone, right?” Sam asked. “I mean, about our secret club?”
“Exactly who would I tell, Sam? I’m in sixth grade. Sixth graders don’t care about second-grade clubs.”
“That’s too bad,” Sam said. “They’re missing out on a lot.”
Annabelle shrugged. “Maybe. A detective club does sound interesting. So what clues do you have so far?”
“Not a lot,” Sam said. “Rashid took home the metal box to see if he could figure out the combination to the lock. He likes doing puzzles and math. Once we get the box open, we’ll know a lot more.”
“So how about the red jacket?”
Sam shrugged. “It’s a red jacket. No name tag. No label. The only thing that makes it different is that it has a soccer ball patch on the front.”
“Is it a winter jacket?” Annabelle asked. “Or a rain jacket, or what?”
“Rain jacket,” Sam said. “I think it’s weird it doesn’t have a label.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird it doesn’t have a name tag, either?”
Sam thought about this. “None of the jackets in the lost and found have name tags. Otherwise they wouldn’t be lost. Also the jacket is pretty big, like it probably belongs to an older kid, maybe a fourth or fifth grader. Does Dad still write your name in your jackets?”
“Yeah, usually,” Annabelle said. “Jackets are expensive. But maybe this kid’s parents forgot. It happens. That still doesn’t explain the missing label.”
“It looks like somebody cut it out,” Sam said. “And that the scissors they used weren’t very good.”
“Like art-room scissors?” Annabelle asked.
“Exactly!” Sam said. “Those are the worst scissors ever.”
Annabelle nodded in agreement. “The art-room scissors in middle school are lots better. But if someone used art-room scissors to cut out the label, you have at least one clue.”
A clue? What kind of clue did they have? Sam tried to think this through. There was a lost jacket with a missing label. There were little ragged pieces of fabric left where the label had been. Whoever had cut it out didn’t have a pair of sharp scissors.
“A kid cut out the label,” Sam declared. “But was it the kid who the jacket belonged to, or a kid who was pulling a prank?”
“I don’t know, Sam,” Annabelle said. “But here’s a question for you: What if the jacket wasn’t lost?”
“But it was lost,” Sam said. “Otherwise why would it be in the lost and found?”
“Shhh!” Annabelle said, holding up her hand. “The show’s back on!”
How could a jacket be in the lost and found and not be lost? That didn’t make sense to Sam. Unless, he thought, whoever it belonged to had lost it on purpose. Sam popped off the couch and ran upstairs.
Sam had stuffed the jacket in his backpack at the end of school so he could study it for clues when he got home. Now he pulled it out and rubbed his finger under the spot where the label had been. When Sam’s dad put name tags in his jackets, he wrote Sam’s name on a piece of special tape and stuck the tape below the jacket label. If you pulled the tape off, there was always a little bit of stickiness left.
Yep! Sam found it! There was a sticky spot in this jacket too, right underneath where the label had been.
He had found a real, live clue. There had been a name tag inside the jacket, but someone had taken it off. He went back downstairs to tell Annabelle. “I think the jacket was lost on purpose. Whoever it belonged to cut the label out and pulled the name tag off.”
“But why didn’t he pull off that little soccer ball thingy?”
Sam tugged at the patch on the front of the jacket. It didn’t budge. “I think it would be hard to get it off. And maybe the person who was trying to lose the jacket forgot the patch was there.”
“Good sleuthing, Sam the Man,” Annabelle said. “Now the question is, why? Why did this kid lose his jacket on purpose?”
“I don’t know,” said Sam. “But I have a plan to find out.”
“What’s your plan, Sam?” Annabelle asked.
“I’m going to wear the jacket to school tomorrow,” Sam said. “And then I’m going to see what happens next.”
* * *
Chapter Eight
* * *
The Red Jacket Plan
“That jacket is too big for you, Sam,” Gavin said the next morning on the bus. “Does your mom think you’re going to grow a lot this year?”
“It’s not my jacket,” Sam whispered. “It’s the lost-and-found jacket. I’m trying to figure out why someone would try to lose it on purpose.”
“What makes you think someone tried to lose it on purpose?” Gavin whispered back.
“Because they cut out the label and tore off the name tag.”
“So no one would know it was theirs?” Gavin asked.
“Exactly,” Sam said. “But what we don’t know is why.”
“Maybe they hated the jacket,” Gavin said. “But their parents wouldn’t buy them a new one until they’d grown out of this one. So they lost it.”
“But why did they hate it?” Sam asked. “That’s what I’m going to try to figure out.”
Emily was waiting for Sam outside of Mr. Pell’s class when he and Gavin got to school. “Have you figured out any clues about the jacket yet?”
Sam told her about the missing name tag and label. “I’m trying to figure out why someone would lose this jacket on purpose. It seems like a perfectly good jacket to me.”
“It’s supposed to rain later,” Emily said. “Maybe you’ll find out that the jacket doesn’t do a good job of keeping you dry.”
“Or maybe the problem is that it doesn’t smell very good,” Gavin said, sniffing. “It didn’t stink when we were on the bus, but now it’s sort of starting to smell bad.”
Sam sniffed too. Gavin was right. The jacket smelled like the inside of a new plastic storage box when you first took off the lid. It smelled like chemicals and a little bit like wet chickens.
“But why are we just noticing that it smells bad now?” Sam asked Emily and Gavin. “Why didn’t we notice it on the bus?”
“It’s hotter in school than on the bus,” Gavin said.
“And you’ve been wearing it since you left your house this morning,” Emily said. “So your body heat is warming it up too.”
“But if I had a stinky jacket, I’d tell my parents I needed a new one,” Sam said. “I wouldn’t just toss it into the lost and found.”
“Parents don’t believe stuff like that though,” Gavin said. “They say, ‘Oh, you’re just imagining that it stinks. I paid a lot of money for that jacket!’ ”
It’s true, Sam thought. That was just the sort of thing his parents would say. “I think I’m going to take this jacket off now,” he told Gavin and Emily. “I don’t want to smell like a wet chicken in a plastic storage box for the rest of the day.”
Sam hung the jacket up on a peg in the hallway outside the classroom. When he went into the classroom, he found a note on his desk.
Important meeting of the Bird-Watchers Club today at recess! Emily had written. Don’t miss it!
Of course Sam wouldn’t miss it. He was co-president, wasn’t he? Besides, he wanted to know if anyone else had found any clues.
“Oh, here come my favorite bird-watchers!” Mrs. Haynie said when Sam and Emily and the rest of club walked into the library at recess. “What are you going to discuss today?”
“We are going to talk about vocabulary,” Emily informed her. “For instance, do you know that bird-watchers call themselves ‘twitchers’?”
“I did indeed!” Mrs. Haynie exclaimed. “Oh, I wish I could sit in on your meeting, but the kindergarteners are coming in for story time.”
“Maybe next time,
” Emily said. “We have lots more fascinating bird topics to discuss.”
Sam watched as Mrs. Haynie fluttered off toward the library’s story corner. Then he turned to Emily and said, “We probably shouldn’t make a big deal about inviting her to our club meetings.”
“It’s okay,” Emily replied as she led the group into the conference room. “Somebody’s always coming in for story time.”
“It’s true,” Gavin agreed, taking a seat. “We have it this afternoon at two o’clock. Chapter seven of The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles!”
“I love that book,” Marja said. She sat down next to Gavin. “Magical creatures are my favorite.”
“I like books about basketball better,” Will said. “Or football. Or soccer. Not so much baseball, though.”
“I like books about outer space,” Rashid said. “But magical creatures in outer space are good too.”
Emily cleared her throat. “Okay, maybe we should get started with our bird vocabulary in case anybody asks us later what we did at our club meeting. Today’s first word is ‘lifer.’ ”
“Like someone who goes to jail for their entire lives?” Gavin asked. “What does that have to do with birds?”
“No, that’s a different thing,” Emily said. “A lifer is a bird that you’ve seen for the first time in your life.”
“I don’t think that makes sense,” Marja said. “It sounds like a bird you see all of your life. Like those little brown birds that are everywhere? Those seem more like lifer birds to me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sam told Marja. “Just write it down, and then Emily can tell us another word, and then we can talk about detective stuff.”
“That’s right,” Emily said. “So you should write down ‘twitcher,’ and after that write ‘lifer.’ ”
“With an f or a ph?” Gavin asked.
“F,” Emily said. “And the third word today is ‘patch.’ A patch is a place you go to look for birds.”
“Like a pumpkin patch?” Rashid asked.
“I saw a crow at a pumpkin patch once,” Will said. “Only it wasn’t a real crow. It was made out of a black sock.”
Sam looked around the table. Everyone looked confused. “I think we should just write down the words and definitions that Emily tells us,” he said. “And then we can talk about my stinky jacket.”
“Okay,” Gavin said after he put down his pencil a minute later. “Let’s talk clues.”
Sam told the club about the cutout label and the sticky spot where a name tag probably had been and how the jacket started to smell weird when it got hot.
“I think the person who owns this jacket lost it on purpose,” Sam finished up. “Not only did he pull off the name tag, but he cut out the label that came with the jacket.”
“Which might have also had his name on it,” Emily pointed out. “Some parents like to write their kids’ names everywhere.”
“Hutch’s mom has started putting glow-in-the-dark letters that spell out Hutch on the back of his jackets,” Marja said. “But he still keeps losing them.”
Will raised his hand. “So how do you find the owner of a stinky red jacket that doesn’t have any name tags or labels on it, especially if he doesn’t want to be found?”
“Or she,” Rashid said. “You can’t even tell if that’s a girl jacket or a boy jacket.”
“I might be mad if someone gave me back a stinky jacket,” Gavin said. “Especially one I’d lost on purpose. I mean, what if his mom already got him a new jacket? And then he brings this one home and she’s all, I can’t believe I bought you a new jacket when this one was in the lost and found!”
Sam had to admit that Gavin had a point. “Maybe we could find out who the jacket belongs to and then decide whether or not to give it back,” he told the group. “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”
“Especially not over a jacket that smells bad,” Emily said. “But how are we going to find out who the jacket belongs to?”
“I guess we have to wait until it rains,” Sam said with a shrug. “And then we look around to see who’s not wearing a jacket.”
Marja pointed to the window. “It’s raining right now,” she said. “But everyone’s out on the playground anyway.”
Gavin jumped up from his seat. “Let’s go!”
Everyone followed him out of the room. Mrs. Haynie looked up from the book she was reading to the kindergarteners and called, “Are you done with your meeting already?”
“Seagulls!” Sam called back. He didn’t think that was a lie, since he didn’t actually say they’d seen a seagull or were looking for a seagull. He’d just said the word “seagulls.” Still, he felt a little weird. Sooner or later, they were going to have tell Mrs. Haynie what they were really up to at their club meetings.
But right now, it was time to find the wettest kid on the playground.
* * *
Chapter Nine
* * *
A Rainy-Day Soccer Game
At Sam’s school, the teachers liked to get kids outdoors as much as possible. They liked to remind students that unless there was pouring rain, thunder and lightning, or a blizzard, recess was always outdoors.
“Put on your hats and scarves!” they’d say if it was about to snow.
“Put on your raincoats!” they’d say if it was about to rain.
Which is why when the members of the World’s Greatest Detective Club reached the playground, almost everyone was wearing a jacket. It was only raining a little bit, but it was raining enough that the teachers would yell at you if you were outside without a raincoat on. Sam saw yellow jackets and blue jackets and red jackets and three camouflage jackets. He wondered if all the red jackets smelled as bad as the one from the lost and found, which he had grabbed from the peg outside of his classroom to see if it would catch anyone’s attention.
And he wondered if there was some kid on the playground who should be wearing a stinky red rain jacket but wasn’t because he’d lost it on purpose.
“Spread out, guys!” Gavin yelled. “And report back here in five minutes!”
Sam decided to check out the soccer field first, since the kid who the jacket belonged to probably liked soccer. Sam supposed it was possible he hated soccer and that’s why he (or she) tried to lose the jacket, but you’d have to hate soccer an awful lot to lose your jacket on purpose. Besides, if you hated soccer, why would someone buy you a jacket with a soccer ball patch on it in the first place?
On his way to the field, Sam thought about how being a detective made you think about stuff in a curious, question-y way. It was like PE class for your brain. For instance, his school had two playing fields, so which one should he go to? Well, he was looking for a kid big enough for this jacket to fit, so that meant he should go to the big field, the one where mostly fourth and fifth graders played. But as far as Sam could tell when he got to the sidelines, everybody on the big field was wearing a jacket, except for the goalie, who was wearing a hoodie.
“What smells?” a kid standing next to Sam asked. He looked at Sam. “Are you wearing your big brother’s raincoat? Because it’s about twelve sizes too big for you.”
“I don’t have a big brother,” said Sam, puffing out his chest so the jacket wouldn’t look so humongous on him.
“But you definitely have a stinky raincoat,” the kid said. He moved a few feet away. “You should wash that when you get home.”
Sam felt his cheeks grow hot. He wished he could explain that he was a detective on a case and that this was a lost-and-found jacket, not his own. But he didn’t want to blow his cover, so he didn’t say anything.
The rain was starting to come down harder. Pretty soon one of the teachers huddled by the door was going to blow a whistle and make everyone come in. The kids playing soccer kept running up and down the field, but now they were running faster, like they were trying to speed up the game so they could finish it before they had to go inside.
As the rain came down harder, Sam saw tha
t there was one boy who wasn’t wearing a jacket. He was running faster than everyone, like maybe he could run in between the raindrops. As he got closer to Sam, Sam wondered if the boy was going to run into him. If he did, Sam was pretty sure it would hurt a whole bunch. He hopped a few steps back, to be on the safe side.
“Where’d you get that jacket?” the boy yelled when he was only a few feet away. He kept running, but he kept his eyes on Sam as he went down the field.
“Do you want it?” Sam yelled back.
“No way!” The boy’s face was all squinched up like he was angry. “It stinks!”
Sam turned to the boy standing next to him. “Do you know who that is?”
“Chris Gutentag,” the kid answered him. “I’d watch out for him if I were you. He eats first graders for lunch.”
“That’s okay,” Sam said. “I’m in second grade.”
Still, he was happy when he heard the teacher’s whistle blow.
Gavin was waiting for Sam inside the school entrance. “So did you find out who the jacket belonged to?”
Sam nodded. “I think so,” he said. “This guy playing soccer gave me a funny look when he saw the jacket, and then he told me that it smelled bad. But he wasn’t really close enough to know how it smelled.”
“Sounds like he’s probably who we’re looking for,” Gavin agreed. “So are you going to give it back?”
Sam and Gavin started walking down the hall toward their classroom. “I don’t think he wants it back,” Sam said, shivering a little as he remembered the angry expression on Chris Gutentag’s face. “But I don’t want to turn it back in to the lost and found. Not when we know who it belongs to. I mean, it’s not really a lost jacket.”
“I guess what to do with the stinky jacket is just one more mystery to solve,” Gavin said. “It doesn’t seem right to throw it away.”
Sam the Man & the Secret Detective Club Plan Page 3
