The Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher

by Marty Chan

  Meanwhile, Samantha kept checking her watch. I looked at the floating magnet and the truth clicked into place like the two magnets from the earlier demonstration. I whispered in Trina’s ear. “I think I know how the thief broke into my locker.”

  She looked at me, puzzled. “How?”

  I held out the magnets.

  EIGHT

  Find the magnets, find the thief. But to be sure, I had to get more information about the thefts. Anyone could have grabbed Trina’s bike off the street, but the thief broke into Eric’s and my lockers. The search of my locker turned up no clues, which meant that we had to talk to Eric. If we helped him find his video game, I was sure that we’d find the other loot. At recess, I shared my theory with my detective partners.

  Trina shook her head. “Why should we help Eric?”

  Remi nodded. “You have to admit, Marty, the guy hasn’t been the nicest to you. Why bother?”

  All the times Eric gave me an atomic wedgie jumped to mind. Out of habit, I adjusted my underwear. But if my enemy held the key to finding the thief, I was willing to forget about the bunched-up underwear. “He might give us a clue about the thief.”

  “Samantha stole everything,” Trina said. “She’s got a grudge against me. And Eric didn’t invite her to his birthday party last year, so I think she doesn’t like him either.”

  Remi leaned closer to her. “She’s right, Marty.”

  “She’s got no proof.”

  “Neither do you,” she said.

  “I will after I talk to Eric.”

  “You can play silly games if you want. I’m watching Samantha.” Trina walked away.

  “It wasn’t that long ago she was sure Eric was the thief,” I said. “She’ll come around. Are you going to help?”

  “Sorry, Marty,” Remi said. He started after her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I gotta find out if she like-likes me or not. Maybe she’ll drop a hint when we’re talking about the case.”

  “Why don’t you just ask her?” I suggested.

  “Are you nuts?” Remi asked. “I want to know if she like-likes me, but I don’t want her to know that I like-like her until I know for sure that she like-likes me first.”

  He made sense. I’d never tell anyone my feelings until I knew how they felt, but it could take forever before she said anything.

  “Remi, why don’t you give her a note from a secret admirer, and then ask her who she hopes the note is from?”

  “Hey, not a bad idea. Gimme some paper.”

  I handed him a sheet of paper.

  “And a pencil.”

  I gave him a pencil.

  “Can you write the note? She might recognize my handwriting.”

  The things I did for my friend! I wrote:

  My heart beats faster

  When you’re around

  You’ve stolen my heart

  I’m your lovesick hound

  I promised Remi I’d help him, but I didn’t think that promise meant having to use my secret feelings to help him win Trina’s heart. I felt like I was the big-nosed hero in the DVD that my parents watched last year. Cyrano helped his best friend flirt with a beautiful woman, but Cyrano also loved her. His messages of love came straight from his heart, even though the words came out of his friend’s mouth.

  He scanned my love note.

  “Perfect,” he said. “You should be a writer. I’ll slip this in her backpack. You talk to Eric.”

  My friend jogged away, leaving me alone. The weird flutter in my stomach grew stronger. Maybe I should have joined them to keep him from planting the note. What would Cyrano do? In the movie, he helped his friend. I let Remi go.

  After school, I waited by Eric’s locker for him. As usual, he was in the detention room for one of his many bone-headed pranks. Today he’d stuffed paper towels in all the boys’ toilets so they overflowed. I only knew this because I had to go to the bathroom really badly right after he pulled the prank, and I ended up using the girls’ washroom.

  Finally, Eric came out of the detention room. He pushed me out of the way and started to dial the combination on his lock.

  “I want to help you find your game, Eric.”

  He opened his locker. “Why do you want to help me?”

  “Whoever took your game is probably the same person who stole Trina’s bike.”

  “Why do you care so much?”

  “Someone broke into my locker,” I said. “It might be the same person.”

  “No way. What did they take?”

  “My green scribbler.”

  Eric’s face twisted up like I’d told him I liked to wear pink slippers and a tutu.

  “It had a lot of important information inside,” I explained.

  “Ooo, how are you going to live without your notes on long division?”

  “Do you want your game back or not?” I asked.

  He reluctantly nodded and told me everything.

  Eric Johnson’s Witness Statement

  As Recorded by Detective Marty Chan

  – victim (Eric Johnson) was minding his own business trying to get a high score on Ridge Racer when Mr. E told him to put the game away.

  – victim reported Mr. E saying that people can have more fun making games than playing them. The victim is not sure what Mr. E said next because he was too busy playing the game.

  – Mr. E took the game away from the victim. Teacher was going to put the game in his desk drawer, victim promised he would put it in his locker. Victim thought his locker was safer, plus he thought he could play another game if he walked really slowly.

  – victim did not get high score by the time he reached the locker. No one was in the hallway when he put away the game.

  – victim swears that no one at school knows his combination. The victim also swears that whoever stole his game is going to be in for the mother of all atomic wedgies.

  – I asked victim for a list of people who might have a grudge against him.

  People who might have a problem with

  Eric Johnson

  – Trina

  – Principal Henday

  – Mr. E

  – Samantha

  – His mom

  – His dad

  – His big brother

  – Hannah

  – Zack

  – The chess club

  – Marty

  – The Hoppers

  – All the grade threes

  – All the grade fours . . .

  People who don’t have a problem with

  Eric Johnson

  – His grandma (the oldest driver in the world) and his grandpa

  After the interview, I had to inspect the crime scene. I pulled a freezer bag out of my backpack and donned a pair of mittens. Then I handed Eric a roll of masking tape to mark off the crime scene area.

  “You take things seriously,” he said.

  I removed Eric’s cracked magnifying glass from my backpack.

  “Is that my magnifying glass?” he asked.

  “The one you were using to burn ants?” I said.

  “Uh . . . never mind.”

  “Move back.”

  He stepped outside of the crime scene tape line as I approached the locker. A funky smell came from a paper bag at the top of a pile of books. Inside the bag were a mouldy sandwich and a peach that had gone bad. The smell punched up my nose and made me want to throw up. I closed the bag, took it out and placed it on the floor. Next, I removed Eric’s books. All the textbooks looked brand new, as if they’d never been opened. The scribblers were still wrapped in plastic. The pencil crayons were as blunt as chopsticks. This was the locker of a guy who did not care about school. Once the locker was empty, I started to examine the door and the combination lock for fingerprints.

  Taking a cue from the police shows I saw on TV, I pulled a thick brush and circular container out of my backpack. I cracked the lid, dipped the brush into the puck-shaped container and dusted the locker door with
flour. Most of the white stuff slid off the metal and landed on Eric’s books.

  “You’re making a mess,” he shouted.

  “I’m dusting for fingerprints.”

  I brushed flour on the sides of the combination lock. None of it stuck. My fingerprint plan was failing. Maybe not everything on TV worked in real life.

  “Are you punking me?”

  I ignored Eric and continued dusting, coating the entire locker with flour. I blew the flour off the metal, expecting to see fingerprint smudges. Instead, I got a nose full of flour.

  “Achoo!” I backed up and blew some more, but there were no fingerprints. A ridge of flour formed on the bottom lip of the locker. I swept it away and caught my mitten on something sharp.

  “You’re gonna clean this up, right?”

  “In a minute,” I said.

  Jutting out of the bottom lip of the locker was a broken hairpin. The zig-zag ridges were covered with flour, and one end looked like it had been filed down to be very thin. I showed Eric the hairpin.

  “Is this yours?”

  He squinted at the hairpin and shook his head. “Do I look like a girl?”

  I pulled a sandwich bag from my backpack, flapped it open, and placed the hairpin inside. Maybe in the rush to steal the game, the thief had dropped the hairpin. I stepped over the mountain of junk in front of the locker.

  “I’m done.” I walked away.

  Behind me, Eric yelled, “Whoa! You’re not done until you clean up this mess.”

  I tidied up everything but the funky lunch bag and headed back to my locker. I dialled my combination as I tried to piece together how a magnet, a hairpin, a bike, a video game player and my scribbler fit together. There had to be a connection between all these things, but what was it?

  I opened my locker: there sat Eric’s stolen video game.

  NINE

  The thief was trying to frame me for stealing Eric’s video game!

  What was I going to do with the stolen game? No way could I give it back to Eric. This was what the thief wanted. He needed a fall guy to take the blame. Remi would have called this clever move the Fart Finger. Whenever someone smelled a fart and asked who cut the cheese, fingers would point in all directions like exploding porcupine quills. Everyone avoided the guy who received the most finger points. I did not want to be that guy, so I had to keep the video game under wraps.

  I opened my backpack so I could slide the game inside, but just as I reached into my locker, I heard Mr. E clear his throat. He had sidled up beside me. I spun around and closed the locker.

  “Marty, what are you still doing here?” he asked.

  My stomach lurched as if I’d downed an entire bottle of foul-tasting cough syrup. I had to keep my teacher from looking inside the locker.

  “I forgot my homework,” I lied.

  “Why are you sweating?”

  “It’s hot in here.”

  “Are you sure? I was thinking it might be because you’re hiding something.”

  I froze. Had Mr. E seen the game? I shook my head.

  “Marty, do you know Erwin Schrödinger?”

  “Is he the new janitor?”

  He shook his head. “He was a very clever scientist who had this strange idea about a cat and a paradox. Do you know what a paradox is, Marty?”

  I fumbled with the word in my mind. “Para” could mean two of something, like a pair. But two of what? The last part of the word sounded like docks. Two docks? Two places to park boats? But only one boat. I took a stab at the answer. “It’s when you have two things, but you only need one.”

  He smiled. “Close. It’s when two opposite things are true, but they can’t be true at the same time. Erwin said that if he had a cat in a box with a radioactive element, the cat would die, but you’d never know when it died until you opened the box. He said the cat in the box was always going to be dead and alive at the same time, and the only time it would be one or the other was when you opened the box. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t, but I nodded. If I gave Mr. E what he wanted, he might walk away. No such luck.

  “You say your homework is in your locker, and it might be homework or it might be something else. The only way I’m going to know for sure what’s inside is to open the door and look.”

  I wished Remi was with me now so he could help me, but he was probably kissing Trina behind the shed. The only way I’d know for sure was if I looked behind the shed. Now I knew what paradox meant – things no one wanted to see.

  My teacher reached into his jacket pocket. “There are two kinds of people in this world, Marty. Troublemakers and trouble-takers. I’m sure you’re familiar with the first kind.”

  I shook my head.

  He cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure?”

  Out of his pocket he pulled the other half of the mangled hockey puck. My teacher, the maniac, knew I was spying on him. I looked down at my feet.

  “I thought so,” Mr. E said, grinning. “Personally, I like trouble-takers, because they take the troubles away from others.”

  He was building a strong case against me, and all the proof he needed sat inside my locker. Only one way out.

  “Someone stole my scribbler,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “They broke into my locker. I think the thief must have used magnets to mess up my lock.”

  My teacher shook his head. “Magnets don’t affect combination locks. The only way you can get into a lock is to use a pick. Something sharp and flat.”

  “You mean like what I found stuck in Eric’s locker?” I said, holding up the bag containing the hairpin. “Ask him. He’ll tell you I found it there.”

  He stiffened. “Why didn’t you report this earlier, Marty?”

  “I wanted to be sure I had some proof,” I said.

  “Hold on, that doesn’t explain what’s in your locker. What’s in there?”

  I had to give Mr. E a reason to look somewhere else. “Uh . . . my underwear. I kind of had an accident at lunch.”

  He stepped back. “What kind of accident?”

  “The kind that everyone laughs at,” I said.

  “Number one or number two?”

  “One,” I said. “I was waiting until everyone left so I could take the underwear home without anyone making fun of me. I was really thirsty in the morning and I had three juice boxes and I made at least ten trips to the water fountain. And then one of the grade six boys said if I had to pee, the best thing to do was squeeze my stomach and think about rain. It didn’t work.”

  “Nice try. Open the locker.”

  Suddenly, a voice shouted, “It’s time! Let’s get this over with.”

  Ida stood in the doorway to the classroom playing with her wristband. Mr. E turned around.

  “In a minute.”

  “I’ll get it next time if you’re busy,” she yelled.

  “No. We’ll do it now.” He waved at me. “Go home, Marty.”

  He walked briskly back to his classroom and ushered Ida through the doorway. “Ida, what did I tell you about the wristband?”

  “It’s not hurting anyone,” she said.

  He closed the door behind them, muting the rest of their conversation. Ida had saved me. I opened the locker and stuffed Eric’s game into my backpack.

  What power did Ida have over our teacher that she could say it was “time” and he’d go running? The list of mysteries to solve kept growing. As I closed my backpack, the pieces of the puzzle started to lock together like the zipper’s metal teeth.

  Trina’s bike had disappeared beside his house. Eric’s game disappeared after Mr. E had talked about it. And my teacher had conveniently shown up at my locker just as I found the stolen game. He showed me the other half of the mangled puck, which meant he knew Remi and I were staking out his house. We had dismissed him as a suspect earlier because he was a teacher, but what a perfect cover for a thief. Now Mr. E was pointing the fart finger right at me. Who better to blame for the thefts th
an the guy trying to catch the thief?

  The only way to save myself and to solve the crime was to find the bike, and the only place Mr. E could have hidden the bike was inside his house. One way or another, I had to see what was inside the Asylum House.

  TEN

  Getting into Mr. E’s house was impossible because when we were out of school, so was our teacher. Somehow, I had to get out of school and keep him in school. To do that, I needed help.

  The next morning, I told Trina and Remi about my run-in with Mr. E and my plan to get into his house to look for her bike. They didn’t believe me at first, but when I showed them the stolen video game and the hairpin lock pick, they changed their tune.

  “I’ll help you look,” Remi offered.

  “Thanks. We need someone to keep Mr. E at school.” I looked at Trina.

  “No way,” she said. “Why me?”

  He explained, “He’s not my teacher, so I can’t make him stay.”

  “Marty can do it.”

  He started to waffle. “Maybe Trina’s right. She can run faster than both of us. Plus, she knows what her bike looks like.”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t want to deal with another paradox, wondering if they were holding hands or not in Mr. E’s yard. I wanted the old detective duo back together again. Frank and Joe Hardy. Batman and Robin. Harry Potter and Ron Weasley.

  She crossed her arms. “Well, I’m not going to help unless I get to go.”

  She could be so stubborn. “Okay, you can go, but if the police catch you, I hope you have a good story,” I said.

  “The police . . . ” Trina bit her lower lip.

  Remi shot me a dirty look. I’d just figured out how to solve a paradox. Don’t put the cat in the box and don’t let Trina and Remi go alone.

  “I’m sure the cops won’t come.”

  “Remi’s probably right. You should be mostly safe.” I sensed she didn’t want to get in trouble.

  She fidgeted from one foot to the other. Remi smacked me on the back of the head. I refused to back off. I was going to try to keep my promise to help him impress Trina, but I wasn’t going to lose my best friend doing it.