The Case of the Mystery Meat Loaf

by David Lewman

  Finally, when it was almost time for the first bell to ring, Ricky slowly came walking up the sidewalk. He was all by himself, wearing a hooded sweatshirt—and a knitted hat! Pulled way down! Over his hair!

  How was Corey supposed to pluck one of Rickey’s hairs if he was wearing a hat?

  Then Corey remembered Hannah saying a hair sample didn’t have to come from a suspect’s head. It could come from a brush, a comb, a jacket . . . or a hat. Maybe Corey could get a hair off of Ricky’s black wool hat. That’d actually be better than yanking it out of his head.

  But how was he supposed to get his hands on Ricky’s hat? Should he run up, snatch the hat, and sprint away? How could he search the hat for hairs if he was being chased by a big, angry dude?

  Just as Corey had made up his mind to snatch the hat off Ricky’s head, Ricky pulled his hood over his hat. Great.

  Corey followed Ricky into the school, keeping his distance, following him as he made his way to his locker.

  Lucky for Corey, the school was kept nice and warm this time of year. In fact, it was a little too warm. As Corey watched him, Ricky pulled his hood off. But he left his hat on. It was now or never.

  Corey took a deep breath and then took off like a sprinter from the track team.

  “HEY!” Ricky yelled as Corey snatched the wool cap from his head. “Gimme back my hat, geek!”

  Corey ran down the hallway with Ricky close behind. He zigged and zagged as Ricky tried to grab him. He tried waiting until the last possible second and then turned corners into different hallways, but Ricky stayed right with him.

  As he ran, Corey turned the hat inside out.

  Then he got lucky. As Corey zipped past one of the boys’ bathrooms, a kid came out—at the perfect moment for Ricky to slam right into him.

  “OOF!”

  As Ricky untangled himself from the kid, Corey had just enough time to pull three hairs off Ricky’s hat! He turned the hat right-side out and tossed it back to Ricky.

  “Sorry!” Corey yelled. “I thought you were someone else! The, uh, guy who stole my hat!” Then he ran off.

  Ricky was breathing hard. He stopped, picked up his hat, and gasped, “Not funny, dude! NOT FUNNY!”

  Once he was sure Ricky wasn’t chasing him anymore, Corey stopped. He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket, putting the three hairs into the bag. Mission accomplished.

  Toward the end of lunch period, Ben led Hannah and Corey into the science lab. “Are you sure this is okay?” Hannah asked.

  “I got permission from Miss Hodges to use one of the microscopes,” Ben explained. “It’s fine.”

  Ben fished the plastic bag with the original hair from the kitchen out of his backpack. Corey pulled the bag with Ricky’s hairs from his pocket.

  Hannah and Ben put the hairs on slides, being very careful to keep track of which was which. Then Ben examined them under the microscope.

  “Well?” Corey asked. “Do they match?”

  “For an exact match I’d have to do a DNA test,” Ben said. “But take a look for yourself.” He gestured toward the microscope.

  Corey looked at the hair from the kitchen through the microscope. Magnified, the hair looked as though it had scales, kind of like a lizard. Then he looked at one of the hairs from Ricky’s hat. Same scales, same thickness, same color—same everything!

  “It’s a match!” Corey said. “Ricky must have done it!”

  “Done what, exactly?” Hannah asked.

  “Put something in the meat loaf!” Corey said, excited. “This proves he was in the kitchen!”

  “Not proves,” Ben said slowly, thinking. “Strongly suggests, maybe. But that’s all it suggests. All we really know is, Ricky was probably in the kitchen. And because his mom works there, he could have been there for a lot of reasons.”

  “Okay,” Corey said, a little disappointed that the other two club members weren’t excited by this new piece of evidence. After all, he’d practically gotten killed gathering the hairs.

  “But what was Ricky doing in the kitchen?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben replied.

  “I guess we’d have to ask Ricky that,” Hannah said.

  “Ask me what?” Ricky asked, standing in the door to the lab. He pointed at Corey. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  The three investigators spun around, startled. Corey piped up. “What were you doing in the cafeteria’s kitchen?”

  “What?” Ricky asked, seemingly thrown for a loop. “When?”

  “Last Monday. The day of the meat loaf attack,” Corey said.

  Ricky slowly walked toward them, shaking his head. “This is unbelievable. First you come to my house and bother my mom. Then you steal my hat. And now you’re grilling me like I’m some kind of criminal.”

  “Well, aren’t you?” Corey asked.

  “No!”

  “You threatened to knock my teeth out,” Ben said.

  Ricky snorted. “I was kidding!”

  “How is that funny?” Hannah asked.

  “Look,” Ricky said. “We’re not talking about some stupid joke I pulled. We’re talking about why you’re harassing me and my mom! I’m really getting sick of this!”

  Corey was impressed. “Harassing” was probably the biggest word he’d ever heard Ricky say. “We didn’t mean to harass you,” he said. “We’re just trying to find out the truth about what happened.”

  “People are saying my mom might get fired. You know that?” Ricky demanded. For once Ricky didn’t just look mean. He looked upset.

  Hannah was touched. As tough as he acted, Ricky really cared about his mom. “If you help us figure out what happened, maybe we’ll come up with the information that’ll keep your mom from getting fired.”

  Ricky thought about this. “What do you wanna ask me?”

  “What were you doing in the kitchen that day?” she asked.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Later on, when your mom served the second batch of meatless meat loaf to the swim team, the principal, and Dirk Brown,” Ben said.

  “I don’t know who Dirk Brown is,” Ricky said. “But yeah, I was there. So what?”

  “So what were you doing there?” Corey asked.

  Ricky looked away. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Really?” Hannah asked.

  “All right, I was helping my mom clean up! Okay?” he barked. “She works really hard. She’s there early every morning and has to work hard all day. And so a lot of days, after lunch, I help her clean up the kitchen. Big deal.”

  He looked down at the floor, embarrassed. It had taken a lot for Ricky to admit he helped his mom with the cleaning. It didn’t exactly fit his image as a tough bully.

  Corey was confused. He had been sure Ricky did it. “So,” he said slowly, “you didn’t put anything in the meat loaf?”

  “No!” Ricky insisted. “I didn’t do anything to that stupid meat loaf. And if people got sick, well, I’m sure it’s not my mom’s fault. She didn’t do anything wrong. She’s really good at her job. She’s a good cook!”

  He headed for the door and then shifted back into bully mode. “Just leave me and my mom alone. Or else. Got it?”

  At the end of the school day, Club CSI met at their old spot in the hallway by the trophy cases. Since Ricky had already barged in on them in the science lab, it seemed best to meet somewhere else to talk about him. Corey plopped down on the floor and leaned back against the wall.

  “I gotta admit, Ricky seemed as though he was telling the truth.” He sighed. “It’s too bad. I was really looking forward to him getting in trouble.”

  “He seems pretty sure that his mom didn’t do it, either,” Hannah said, fiddling with a zipper on her backpack.

  “That leaves Miss Hodges,” Ben said. The other two shot him a look. “Of the original suspects people talked about, I mean.”

  “I really don’t think Miss Hodges would purposefully make a bunch of people horribly sick,” Hannah argued.

&nbs
p; Corey considered the situation. “I agree. But she might have the know-how, though. Probably knows the best way to stick bacteria on food, so no one would notice.”

  “Until they got horribly sick,” Ben said. “Well, this is all just speculation. We have to go back to the hard evidence.”

  Corey tossed a ball in the air and then caught it. He often had a tennis ball or even a basketball in his backpack. Tossing a ball and catching it actually helped him think.

  “What hard evidence?” he asked. “We’ve compared the hairs we found, and that basically led us nowhere.”

  “Well,” Ben said, “there are the different ingredients that went into the meatless meat loaf. One of them could have been mishandled.”

  Hannah consulted her notes. “We said the two most likely ingredients to carry Salmonella were the eggs and the tofu.”

  “Did Mrs. Collins buy the eggs that day?” Ben asked.

  Hannah searched through the pictures on her phone. She found the photo of the grocery store receipt and then zoomed in on it. “Doesn’t look like it. I don’t see any eggs listed on the receipt.”

  “Then she must have already had them. Eggs are a common ingredient people have in their fridges, and I bet she uses them all the time. Did Mrs. Collins serve anything with eggs in it the Friday before?”

  “I have no idea,” Hannah said.

  “Does cake have eggs in it?” Corey asked.

  “Usually, yeah,” Hannah said.

  “Then, yes, Mrs. Collins did serve something with eggs in it the Friday before—yellow cake with white frosting,” Corey said confidently.

  “You remember that?” Hannah said, amazed.

  “I have an excellent memory, remember?” Corey reminded her.

  “And nobody got sick from that cake,” Ben said. “So we can conclude that the eggs must have been okay.”

  “It all comes back to the tofu,” Corey said dramatically.

  “It could be,” Hannah said, pondering this possibility.

  “I have just one question,” Corey said.

  “What’s that?” Ben asked.

  “What exactly is tofu?” Corey asked. “It sounds like something you find between your toes. No wonder people got sick.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t know what tofu is,” Hannah said.

  “I couldn’t believe you didn’t know what a pick-and-roll was, either,” Corey countered. “But you didn’t. Until I showed you. Now every time you watch a basketball game, you’re like, ‘Nice pick-and-roll.’”

  Hannah smiled. “Okay, fine. Tofu is fermented bean curd.”

  “Mmm, nothing says good eatin’ like curd,” Corey said, rubbing his stomach. “What kind of beans?”

  “Soybeans,” Ben said. Even though Hannah was explaining tofu to Corey, it was very difficult for Ben not to answer a question when he knew the answer. That was something he was working on—letting other people give the answers to questions. He wasn’t doing all that well.

  “So you take some delicious soybeans, and then you let them curdle until you have some yummy, yummy tofu,” Corey said. “What does it taste like? I thought the meat loaf just tasted like meat loaf. It didn’t taste like beans. . . .”

  Ben started to answer but then let Hannah speak. “It doesn’t have much flavor of its own,” she said. “But it’s good at picking up other flavors. And it’s full of protein.”

  “But doesn’t Salmonella usually come from animals?” Ben asked. “Tofu is completely vegetarian.”

  “Yes,” Hannah confirmed. “But tofu can have Salmonella. Sometimes it’s stored in water, and the water can easily be contaminated.”

  Corey made a face. “So tofu isn’t just curdled soybeans. It’s wet curdled soybeans? Why hasn’t it been banned?”

  “You should probably try it again before you make up your mind about tofu,” Hannah said. “It’s actually pretty good. I’ve had it in Chinese food. The place at the mall makes a really yummy tofu in brown sauce dish that I bet you’d love.”

  Ben had gotten out his notepad and was taking notes. “So you were saying that sometimes tofu is packed in water, and the water could be contaminated?”

  Hannah nodded. “Right. You can buy tofu different ways—in a sealed dry package, in a sealed package in water, or even in bulk, floating in water.” She recited the details from memory. Corey wasn’t the only one with a good memory!

  “Somehow, the more you describe it, the worse it sounds,” Corey said.

  “It also comes in four different textures—silken, soft, firm, and extra firm,” Hannah said, this time checking her notes to make sure she was remembering all the details.

  “Which texture is the most prone to contamination?” Ben asked. He thought they might really be on to something with this tofu.

  “I’m not sure,” Hannah said. “But from what I’ve read, it seems as though you’d probably use firmer tofu in a meatless meat loaf. To make it more, you know, meat loaf-y.”

  “Are there lots of different kinds of tofu?” Ben asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Hannah said. “All kinds of flavorings are added to tofu, at least in Asia. There’s sweet almond tofu, red pickled tofu, and—you’ll like this one, Corey—stinky tofu, which is fermented in fish brine. It’s supposed to smell terrible.”

  “Yeeech,” Corey said. “Disgusting.”

  “But Mrs. Collins probably just used regular plain tofu, right?” Ben asked.

  “I think that’s what Miss Hodges’s recipe calls for,” Hannah said. “Just plain old regular tofu.”

  Corey tossed his ball so high, it almost hit the ceiling. “Okay, as much as I’m enjoying this discussion of the wonderful world of tofu,” he said, “what are we going to do next?”

  Hannah and Ben thought for a minute. That was a good question. They weren’t really sure how to proceed at this point. It’d be nice to ask Miss Hodges for her advice, but they’d decided not to include her in this investigation, since some people considered her a suspect.

  “I guess I could take another look at the meat loaf sample under the microscope,” Ben suggested, even though he didn’t have much faith that he would find anything new in the sample. “Or try to run some kind of test on it.”

  “Like what?” Hannah asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben admitted.

  “Where did the tofu come from?” Corey interrupted.

  Now that was a good question. Hannah looked through her photos from the cafeteria’s kitchen and found the one of the receipt. “Mrs. Collins bought it that morning,” she said. “At Stan’s.”

  They all knew Stan’s. It was a small family-run grocery store not too far from Woodlands Junior High. Stan’s had been around as long as any of them could remember. It was pretty close to their grade school, too, and they’d gone there sometimes after school to buy candy. In fact, Corey still stopped in there sometimes to grab a snack.

  “They have tofu at Stan’s?” Corey said. “Now I’m not sure I can go there anymore.”

  Hannah held up her phone. “According to the receipt, they do.”

  Ben was encouraged. This seemed like a much better lead to investigate than going back to the meat loaf sample. “We should go there. Maybe they accidentally sold Mrs. Collins some bad tofu. In a grocery store, there are probably plenty of opportunities for cross-contamination, if you aren’t careful.”

  Hannah stood up. “Let’s go right now.”

  Corey shook his head. “Can’t. Basketball practice.”

  “Oh,” Hannah said, disappointed. She was eager to follow up on the tofu right away.

  “You could go ahead without me,” Corey said. But something in Corey’s voice, and his face, told Ben and Hannah that he didn’t really mean that. They exchanged a quick look.

  “No,” Ben said. “We work as a team. We can wait to go till tomorrow morning.”

  “And if we went without you,” Hannah said, “we might miss out on you asking a good question.”

  Corey perked up. “I ask good questi
ons?”

  Hannah smiled. “Sure, when you’re not asking bad ones,” Hannah joked. She saw Corey’s face fall a little, and she quickly added, “You’re the one who thought to ask where the tofu came from, remember? We need you there!”

  “All right!” Corey said, heading off to basketball practice. Then he turned back. “Here’s a good question for you.”

  “Yes?” Ben said.

  “How early tomorrow morning?”

  Club CSI got together very early the next morning, since they had to check out Stan’s before school. Luckily the little grocery store opened up at six. To compete with the big chain stores, Stan’s had to do everything they could to keep their customers happy.

  As they walked through the cool morning air, Hannah asked Corey how basketball practice went. “Did you guys work on your pick-and-roll?” she asked, smiling.

  “As a matter of fact, we did,” Corey answered, yawning so wide that he thought his mouth might split. “But it wasn’t my greatest practice ever. Coach yelled at me for not staying focused.”

  “What were you thinking about?” Ben asked.

  “Believe it or not,” Corey said, yawning again, “tofu.”

  Ben and Hannah laughed.

  “Somehow I couldn’t get it out of my head,” Corey said. “Especially the stinky tofu made in fish brine. I actually had a dream about it last night.”

  “Dream . . . or nightmare?” Ben asked, chuckling.

  “You’re right, it was a nightmare,” Corey said. “A tofu nightmare. I dreamed I was playing basketball. I set a pick and then signaled the guy with the ball that I was open. He threw me the ball, but when I caught it, it was a big, wet, smelly ball of tofu. I looked at the player who passed it to me, and he was a fish. In a basketball uniform.”

  Hannah and Ben were laughing pretty hard at this, but Corey went on describing his dream.

  “The fish looked right at me and said, ‘Go ahead. Stuff it in.’ I said, ‘The basket?’ And he said, ‘No, your mouth.’ I was about to eat the ball of tofu when I woke up with my pillow in my mouth.”

  This made Hannah and Ben laugh even harder.

  “It wasn’t funny,” Corey insisted. “It was scary.”