Super Puzzletastic Mysteries

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Why didn’t you submit sooner?” Tony asks.

  “I was having too much fun.” Catherine glances over at Kevin. “Plus, I was the one who said we needed to work together . . .”

  “—Instead of bolting like I did?” Kevin walks to the front of the room. “Catherine, you should never play poker. When we found the Newton book, you lit up like a Christmas tree. I looked Newton up in the encyclopedia while you all worked on the crossword. Thirty seconds flat and I figured out he was the rainbow-colors guy. I grabbed an answer envelope, but I didn’t know what to write down. The name Newton is only synonymous with fig cookies.

  “ROY G. BIV came to me in a flash when I jumped off that chair. I think best when I’m moving. I ran out here and submitted.”

  Catherine looks confused. “If you turned in the right answer first, how did I win?”

  “I put your name on the envelope,” Kevin admits. “I wouldn’t have found the answer without you telling us what to do. You deserved the Golden Answer Award. Time was running out, and I was afraid you weren’t going to submit.”

  Catherine opens her mouth to disagree, but Kevin cuts her off. “I didn’t show it before, but I am a team player.” He pantomimes shooting a basketball. “Maybe even a team captain if I remember to give credit to my teammates who deserve it.”

  “Well done,” says Mr. Michael. “Please bring that team spirit to my honors class next week.”

  Solution for Whiz Tanner and the Pilfered Cashbox

  Whiz looked around at the crowd that had gathered. He didn’t like crowds, but he could talk in front of a hundred people as easily as he could two. And while he wasn’t purposely trying to generate tension—he generated it.

  “Everyone who was near the cashbox in the moments before or after it disappeared is present. Chuck, Thorny, Megan, and Jennifer. I believe Tyrone’s alibi will hold up, so let us forget about him for now and see what plays out.”

  “I wasn’t anywhere near the table,” cried Jennifer. “You can’t believe I had anything to do with it.”

  “Then how did you see Chuck putting a box in the kitchen?” Bonnie asked.

  Officer Van Dyke was about to say something also, but Whiz raised his hand to stop him. It’s not every sixth grade kid who could stop an adult cold like that—but Whiz does it all the time.

  “Let us start with that, Jennifer. Please tell us where you were?”

  She looked at the policeman and he just nodded. That took the boldness out of her.

  “I had just come from fishing down by the Little Marsh River. I put my fishing pole in the kitchen to keep it out of the way. I didn’t want anybody playing with it.”

  “I didn’t see you in the kitchen,” Chuck said.

  “Well, I saw you.”

  “That is precisely what I thought after finding the dried river mud on the table,” said Whiz. “But that raises the question as to why Chuck did not see you in the kitchen.”

  “I don’t know, but I was never near the table.”

  “I believe you were not near the table, Jennifer. But you were not exactly in the kitchen, either,” countered Whiz.

  What happened next was quite unusual—especially since it was Whiz who did it. Whiz looked directly into Jennifer’s eyes and stared without blinking. I could tell she was trying not to blink or look away. Her boldness was coming back. She was several years older than us, and tried to look intimidating.

  Whiz then turned his eyes to the ceiling. Jennifer did likewise and then looked away. She turned around looking at the crowd that had gathered. She seemed to be looking for an opening to run through. But, while Whiz was doing his thing, Bonnie had moved behind Jennifer. Bonnie just shook her head and Jennifer seemed to lose her boldness again. Talk about squirming!

  Officer Van Dyke placed his hand on her shoulder. “Jennifer. Do you have anything you want to tell us?”

  Her menacing look seemed to change to a hint of fear and then quickly to determination. “No!”

  “Whiz.” Officer Van Dyke turned back to Whiz. “You haven’t told us anything new yet. Do you have more to say?”

  “Let us turn our attention to Megan. Will you tell us how you hurt your hand?”

  Megan instinctively pulled her hand to her chest and covered the bandage with the other hand.

  “After Thorny couldn’t find a purple shirt, I left to find Jennifer. We went to get her fishing pole from the kitchen, but I jabbed the hook into my hand as I lifted it. I’m not much of a fisherman.”

  “That’s right,” added Jennifer. “She was in the kitchen with me when it happened.”

  Whiz then rubbed his fingers over the red dots on the table. Megan seemed to do the same looking-for-an-escape move that Jennifer had done earlier. But Bonnie was right there, and I wasn’t too far away. That makes two squirmers.

  After seeing how Whiz rattled Megan and Jennifer so easily, I began to rethink my original suspect. Thorny wasn’t smart enough to pull off this heist in the middle of a crowded room—even with Chuck’s help. Now how was Whiz going to make Tyrone squirm?

  “Well, Whiz,” said Officer Van Dyke, “you seem to have upset Megan and Jennifer. But what’s the story?”

  “The story is quite simple. Megan and Jennifer are rattled because they are guilty, and they know I know it.”

  “How?” I asked. “You haven’t said anything yet. Jennifer was fishing before she came to the fund-raiser and Megan caught her hand on the hook back in the kitchen. And what about Tyrone?”

  “Tyrone’s alibi is too easy to check out. He could not have been involved in the actual theft.”

  “They all have alibis,” said Bonnie. “So where does that leave us?”

  “And none of this points to the stolen cashbox,” I added, wondering if Whiz had finally gone over the deep end.

  “But it does, Joey,” answered Whiz.

  “Please tell us,” Officer Van Dyke said. He flipped his little notebook to a clean page.

  Patrolman Bailey just stood there looking between Officer Van Dyke and Whiz. Officer Van Dyke outranked him, so he wasn’t going to interfere. Whiz continued.

  “Jennifer did go fishing this morning. She got mud on the bottoms of her sneakers as she fished off the bank of the Little Marsh River. Some of that mud found its way onto the top of the table.”

  “But how?” asked Thorny. “She’s right, she wasn’t near the table.”

  “Look beyond the obvious, Thorny,” said Whiz. “Why did Jennifer have a fishing pole with her in the first place?”

  “She was fishing,” I replied. “And then came here.”

  “Yes,” Bonnie agreed.

  Thorny just looked confused—and a little teary-eyed.

  “Granted,” replied Whiz. “But her house is nearby. Why not drop the fishing pole at home before coming here? That would be much more convenient than finding a place in the community center to keep it safe. Unless you needed it in the community center.”

  “Sounds interesting, Whiz,” Officer Van Dyke said. “Go on.”

  “When she arrived, she did go into the kitchen, but not to store her fishing pole. She climbed, with her fishing pole, up the ladder that leads to the catwalks above us. While she was above the table, some of the mud that was embedded in her shoe fell off.”

  Everybody looked up.

  “It was from there that she saw Chuck carry a box into the kitchen—which explains why Chuck did not see her. She waited until there was significant distraction down at the stage end of the room. The raffle drawing was a perfect chance. Everybody would have been looking toward the stage or down at their tickets. That was when Megan, her accomplice, made her move. Megan had two jobs. The first was to distract Thorny and Chuck. I think Chuck going to the restroom made her job a little easier. All she had to do was ask for a purple shirt.”

  Both Megan and Jennifer squirmed a little more, but they didn’t run—Bonnie and I were still close behind them.

  “When Thorny had his head bent over the shirt cartons an
d everybody else was concentrating on the stage, Jennifer lowered the fishing line with a hook on the end. Megan’s second job was to place the hook on the handle of the cashbox. However, being nervous about Thorny seeing her and the fishing line, she was probably not paying as much attention to the fishing hook as she should have. When she grabbed it, she jabbed herself with the hook. Some blood from her wound dripped onto the table and has since dried—or nearly so.”

  Everybody looked at the table. Whiz rubbed his fingers over the red dots as he continued.

  “When the handle of the box was hooked, Jennifer reeled it in. Megan held her hand to stop the flow of blood as best as she could and walked away . . . most likely, she headed to the restroom for some paper towels. We only have her word that she went to find Jennifer at that time.”

  “I saw her leaving the girls’ restroom,” said Tyrone. “We’d all started looking for the missing cashbox and she came out with a bunch of paper towels wrapped around her hand. Jennifer was looking for her, too. She looked concerned about Megan’s hand, but now that I think about it, she looked more mad than concerned. She tried to help with the bleeding and so did I.”

  “Shortly after that is when we came in,” Whiz continued. “We saw neither Jennifer nor Megan—nor Tyrone—walk out with the cashbox, so I think we can safely assume it remains inside the community center. Possibly hidden among the boxes on the catwalks where they store the unused lights.”

  Whiz was looking up at the catwalk as he spoke, but since he often looks around as he speaks, I didn’t follow his eyes, until he resumed talking.

  “I have not seen the cashbox in question, but I do see a corner of what could be a small metal box of the proper size wedged among the other boxes up there.”

  We all looked up. Thorny jumped up and ran to the back of the kitchen. He climbed up the ladder and, in a moment, shouted, “It’s here!”

  “I knew your stupid plan wouldn’t work!” Megan shouted at Jennifer.

  “If you didn’t grab the hook like an idiot, it would have!”

  “But you wore your muddy shoes! That gave us away.”

  “No! You did by not paying attention and jabbing your hand.”

  Then, they both looked at Whiz. Boy, did they have an icy stare!

  Even though I’m a full-fledged partner of the Tanner-Dent Detective Agency, I moved a little farther to the side so I wasn’t in their line of sight. I didn’t need a couple of high schoolers mad at me and was willing to let Whiz take all the blame—uh, credit—for this one.

  Solution for The Magic Day Mystery

  After the assembly, Madison Reilly led Principal Greeley, Jose, and me to her locker.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. I was just so frustrated that I couldn’t practice this morning. I didn’t mean to cause all this trouble.”

  She opened her locker, revealing the bounty of stolen items. Principal Greeley checked the items off Jose’s list. She pulled the blue cups out of the locker and handed them to Jose.

  “Thank goodness,” Jose said. “Dad would kill me if I lost these.”

  Principal Greeley put her hand on Madison’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go to my office,” she said. “You and I need to have a little chat before we call your parents.”

  Madison swallowed hard and nodded. She followed Principal Greeley down the hall. After a few steps, she stopped and turned around.

  “Marlon,” she asked. “How did you know it was me?”

  I gave her my usual answer.

  “Magic.”

  She shrugged and continued down the hall.

  “You’ll tell me how you figured it out, right?” Jose asked.

  “When we talked to Madison earlier,” I explained. “She said she hoped you found your cups.”

  “Yeah, was that to throw us off?”

  “Maybe, but you had already told me that you hadn’t told anyone what you brought, and we hadn’t told her you were missing your grandfather’s cups. The only way she could have known was if she was the one who took them.”

  Jose pumped his fist. “You’re a genius!” he said. “Wait till I tell everyone.”

  I put up a hand.

  “Let’s just keep this to ourselves,” I said.

  “But what do I say if someone asks me how you found all that other stolen stuff?”

  “Do what I do,” I said. “Tell them it’s magic.”

  Solution for Puzzling It Out

  Jeremy stared at the numbers, panic rising inside him. He’d done the one with the five in the middle. How different could this be? Nineteen was the middle. They knew that.

  What was next? He shut his eyes, trying to remember what they’d done that day in Puzzle Club. Find the magic constant.

  Chloe already had her phone out and the calculator app pulled up. She added the numbers from fifteen to twenty-three. “The magic constant is one hundred seventy-one,” she said.

  Jeremy pulled out his phone and divided one hundred seventy-one by the number of rows and got fifty-seven.

  “This will go faster if we work together, Jeremy,” Chloe said. “I’ll do the math and you write the numbers down.”

  Jeremy felt frustration rising up in his chest. It was like a ball of tightness that made it hard to breathe.

  Chloe glared at him. “There’s no time for you to go all solo cowboy on this.”

  Jeremy opened his mouth to protest and then shut it again. She was right. There was no time, and Chloe was better at these puzzles than he was anyway. “What do we need to add to nineteen to get to fifty-seven?”

  “Fifty-seven minus nineteen equals thirty-eight. So now we need all the pairs that add up to that.” Chloe fired off numbers and he wrote them down as fast as he could. “Fifteen and twenty-three. Twenty and eighteen. Twenty-two and sixteen. Twenty-one and seventeen.”

  He hesitated. “Should I put the 15 on the top row or the bottom?” he asked Chloe.

  “It won’t matter. The middle row will be the same no matter what.”

  He wrote fifteen in the middle square of the top line. That meant the middle of the bottom row would have to be twenty-three.

  “Twenty-three is the biggest number. We’re probably going to need smaller numbers around it,” Chloe said. “Put the eighteen and sixteen on either side of it.”

  What she said made sense. He could see how she made her decisions. He put the numbers where she directed. “So that would mean the other numbers that go with them in the other direction should be larger, right?”

  “Exactly!” Chloe said. “Put the twenty in the top left corner and the twenty-two in the top right.”

  There were only two numbers left. Seventeen and twenty-one. Jeremy scribbled them in. He looked up at Chloe. “But the 17 and 21 could switch places.”

  “We’ve only got two options, though.”

  She grabbed the combination lock, spun it to the right until she got to seventeen, then to the left past the seventeen and ending on the nineteen, then back to the right to twenty-two. She yanked down and the lock came open.

  A flash drive sat by itself on the shelf. Jeremy grabbed it. “How much time do we have left?”

  Chloe looked at her phone. “Fifteen minutes.”

  The courthouse was two miles away. If they managed a five-minute mile, they’d be there in ten minutes and still have a few minutes to spare to get the flash drive to Ms. Sullivan. “Let’s go!” They ran to their bikes. Chloe jammed her bike helmet on, curls sticking out in all directions. “Ride, Jeremy! Ride!”

  It was five minutes to nine when they skidded off the bike path into the street in front of the courthouse. They threw their bikes down, not stopping to lock them, and ran up the stairs to the entrance, dashing in, only to be stopped by a line heading to two big metal detectors.

  “Empty your pockets and put everything in the bin and walk through, please,” the security guard said in a tone that made it clear he said the same thing a hundred times a day. Then he yawned
. Jeremy looked at the flash drive in his hand. He didn’t want to let go of it for even a second. Plus, it was taking forever for people to go through the security line. Jeremy had never seen people empty their pockets of keys and change more slowly.

  He looked around and saw Ms. Sullivan. She was on the other side of the metal detectors behind a plant. He yelled her name and she stepped out.

  “Chloe!” Jeremy yelled and tossed the flash drive toward her.

  Without even thinking, she crouched down and did a perfect volleyball bump, sending the flash drive flying over the top of the metal detectors directly to Ms. Sullivan, who snatched it out of the air.

  The bored security guard looked at the other security guard and pointed toward the ceiling. “Did you see something up there?”

  “You’re seeing things, Frank. You need a vacation,” she said.

  Jeremy slumped against the wall, Chloe beside him.

  Two hours later, Ms. Sullivan was done with her testimony. Chloe and Jeremy had managed to get through security and into the courtroom to listen. She laid out exactly when Dynamic Recreational first learned that one of the chemicals in Origanisms was harmful to children and how they’d hidden that information. Her testimony was backed up by the documents from the flash drive Jeremy and Chloe had retrieved from the school basement.

  When Ms. Sullivan stepped down out of the witness box, she walked straight out of the courtroom, giving Jeremy and Chloe a little nod to follow her. When they got out into the hall, she grabbed them both into a big hug. “I knew you’d be able to figure out the square, Chloe.”

  Chloe wiggled out of the hug. “I didn’t. We did it together.”

  “You were right,” Jeremy said. “Doing it with Chloe helped it make more sense to me.”

  “So working together wasn’t so bad?” she asked.

  He smiled at Chloe. “Not bad at all.”

  Solution for The Mechanical Bank Job

  “I don’t know how to thank you!” said Mrs. Herzog, gazing teary-eyed at the five recovered banks, plus the firefighter, back on display on the project table. “My father loved his collection, and it reminds me of the fun we had playing with the banks together.”

  Mr. Diallo beamed at us. “Such clever children to figure out where the banks might be hidden and how to catch the thief!”