The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (15 page)

There were other teams around the Sun Wheel, and a few of them noticed Mal getting on the ride. Rod Denham’s team, off to the left, went into an urgent conference, and after a few moments, sent its own representative to go on the ride. Other teams followed suit. Bethany’s team, on the other side of the Ferris wheel, must have noticed somehow, or perhaps they had the same idea on their own. In any event, here came Elvie, the smallest of the three girls. Winston wondered if she was even tall enough to go on the ride.

“All right, let’s start this again,” said Mr. Garvey, massaging the wrinkles in his forehead. “Pretend we just got here. Look! A whole bunch of pictures on that Ferris wheel! I’ll bet this is the puzzle we’re looking for!” He slapped both sides of his face in mock surprise.

Jake said, “Isn’t
safehouse
a word?”

“Sure it is. Why?”

“Well, there’s a safe,” Jake said, pointing, “and there’s a house. SAFEHOUSE.”

That made a lot of sense. Winston began looking for other compound words. “Maybe that’s not a trumpet or a bugle,” he said. “Maybe it’s a horn, and then you can make SHOEHORN.”

Mr. Garvey was nodding enthusiastically. “Okay! Now we’re getting somewhere. What else?”

The three of them kept staring. Winston glanced at Mal and saw him squeezing through the crowd, about to get on the ride. He wondered if they should call him back. Were they about to solve this?

Apparently not. “I hate to say this,” said Jake, “but I don’t see anything else. What are you supposed to do with the word
rhinoceros
?”

“RHINO HORN?” suggested Winston.

“We already used
horn
to make SHOEHORN.”

“Maybe it’s not a rhinoceros,” Mr. Garvey said.

“Then what is it?”

“It could be . . . it could be the word
animal
.” Mr. Garvey absorbed the doubtful looks from Winston and Jake. “All right, I’m just brain-storming here,” he said.

Winston mentally combined the pictures and continued to get nowhere. GARBAGE HATS? RHINOCEROS FACES? After that promising start, all he could find was nonsense.

Mal was being led onto the ride now. Winston could see him hopping in to one of the cars. Elvie stepped into the same car. They seemed to be hitting it off. The Sun Wheel lurched and began to spin, and the two of them were soon swinging their way toward the top.

“I think we have to try something else,” Mr. Garvey said, reluctantly.

“Me too,” Winston said. “Can I see the list of words?” Mr. Garvey handed it to him.

Maybe the pictures weren’t important, once you had named them all. Mr. Garvey had written the words down in a list. Winston wondered if he should write them out again, this time in a circle—maybe the pictures were in a particular order for a reason. He took the pencil from his back pocket, sat down with his back against a fence post, his knees up almost to his neck. He sketched out the words.

He looked at RHINOCEROS. Had he spelled it right? This was one of those words that always seemed to have a few extra letters in it, just for fun. “How do you spell
rhinoceros
?” he called to Mr. Garvey, but then instantly backtracked and said, “Never mind.” He scratched it out and wrote RHINO instead.

And that was all it took. “Ahh!” he yelled, and threw his head backward, and hit it against the fence he’d been leaning against. He tried to jump up, but he wasn’t in a position that allowed for jumping up. “Ahh!” he yelled again.

Jake asked, “Are you in pain, or do you have something?”

Winston stood up. He was nearly shaking with euphoria. “I have something.”

Mr. Garvey said urgently, “You solved it?”

“I think so. Look.” He held out the paper with the words written in a circle.

Winston said, “Each word is connected with the word directly opposite it.”

“Connected how?” asked Mr. Garvey. “TRASH HATS? What does that mean?”

Winston shook his head. “Figuring out the connection is part of the puzzle. But I’ve got it.”

 

ANOTHER TEAM WALKED
past. Winston thought one of the girls was Krissy Huang, who had been trapped in the ladies’ room back at the farm. That would make this the New Easton team. They were staring up at the ride and trying to decide what to do next.

Winston took a few steps away to make sure they couldn’t hear him. “Look,” he said to his team in a low whisper, pointing at the paper. “Look at RHINO and HORN. All the letters in HORN are also in the word RHINO. If you remove all those letters, there’s only one left.”

“The letter I,” Mr. Garvey said.

Winston continued, “You can do that with every pair of words across from each other. FACES and SAFE. Take the letters from SAFE out of the word FACES—”

“You get the letter C,” said Jake. “Winston, you did it!”

Mr. Garvey said, “What word do you get when you solve every pair?”

Winston said, “ICARUS. Isn’t that a word? Something out of Greek mythology, right?”

Mr. Garvey nodded in agreement. “Right, I know this one. He was the son of Daedalus. The two of them made wings out of feathers and wax so they could fly. Daedalus warned Icarus not to get too close to the sun, because the heat would melt the wax and his wings would be destroyed. But Icarus forgot what his father told him, and he flew higher and higher. And of course the sun melted his wings, and he fell into the sea.”

Jake turned on the computer and began pushing buttons. “This has to be right,” he said, typing in the answer. He stared tensely at the screen for a moment, and then beamed with happiness. “That’s the answer.”

There were high fives all around.

Mr. Garvey actually took two steps for the exit before he stopped and smacked his forehead. “Ugh! Mal is still on the Ferris wheel.”

“Let’s just leave him,” Jake said.

“Don’t tempt me.” Mr. Garvey shielded his eyes, trying to find Mal on the ride. “I can’t believe this. Here’s our chance to pull ahead of a few more teams, and we’re stuck here. Where is he?”

“Other teams have kids on the ride, too,” Winston said. “If they solve the puzzle, they’ll be just as stuck.”

“Small consolation.” He scowled at the ride, shaking his head. “Nothing to do but wait.” He kept scanning the Ferris wheel, as if maybe he could climb up the outside of it and carry Mal back down.

They stood there a few moments, and then Winston said, “Can we go look at the games?” He pointed to the carnival booths a few feet away—kids lining up to throw darts at balloons and squirt water guns into the gaping mouths of clowns.

“Just stay where I can see you,” Mr. Garvey said. “The second Mal steps off that ride, we are running for the gate. We are going to leave Lincoln Junior High in the dust.” He kept glancing over at Rod Denham and his kids. Any minute now they might discover the solution and start cheering. Of course, Lincoln had a kid on the Ferris wheel, too—even if they solved the puzzle, they couldn’t go anywhere.

Jake and Winston promised they wouldn’t stray far and walked over to watch a couple of little kids try to catch plastic fish with a long pole. “Do you think we might win this?” Jake asked.

Winston shrugged. “If I was going to bet money, I’d have to put it on Brendan Root’s team. They’re way out in front.”

“Only one puzzle ahead.”

“There’s only six puzzles. Being one puzzle ahead is pretty good.”

A little girl caught a fat purple fish and claimed a tiny stuffed animal as her prize. She jumped with delight, and then she and her mother walked away.

“I used to love these games,” said Jake. “Now they’re just boring.”

“My puzzle is still here, though,” said Winston, gesturing to one of the other booths.

“Your puzzle? What?”

“I spotted it years ago. Come on.” Winston led Jake down to a different game. A couple of teenagers were using long-barreled rifles to shoot at targets. The booth was done up like a sheriff’s office in an old Western; posters on the back wall showed a bunch of villains and the reward you would theoretically get for capturing them.

Winston said, “Which three bad guys have rewards that total up to exactly a hundred dollars?”

 

 

Jake was still staring at the posters when from behind them came a series of loud popping sounds. The two boys wrenched around, trying to find the source. The panicky, overdramatic part of Winston’s brain insisted these were gunshots, but the rational side, less than a second later, placed the sound as mere firecrackers.

But the firecrackers had been lit among the crowd of people waiting to get on the Ferris wheel, and the result was the same as gunfire—several moments of yelling and chaos as the mob scattered like a flock of panicky birds. Winston spotted Mr. Garvey, pressed up against the fence to avoid getting trampled. The guy running the Sun Wheel had been helping people into one of the empty cars, and now he came running back to see what was happening.

Winston and Jake fought the crowd and made their way to their teacher. The staccato pops and bangs ended as suddenly as they had begun, the final explosions lingering in the summer air, along with several blossoms of gray smoke.

Winston looked around. Who had set off the firecrackers? He couldn’t tell. He expected to see a couple of teenage boys, standing off to the side, laughing at the panic they had caused. But there was nobody.

People started coming back to the ride, and Mr. Garvey dismissed the event. “All right,” he said. “Is Mal back yet? I’d like to get out of here already.” He craned his neck, trying to figure out which car Mal was in while the ride was temporarily stopped.

At that moment, the guy running the ride said loudly, “Where’s my key?” He was standing at the ride’s mechanism, looking around, a bewildered expression on his face. He was in his early twenties or maybe not even that old, and had a scruff of beard and a pierced lip. “Hey!” he said. He turned to the people coming back to the ride. “Did you take my key? That’s not cool, man. I need that.”

Winston and Jake and Mr. Garvey watched the fellow pat his pockets and scan the ground for the missing key. Mr. Garvey’s face reflected terrible understanding. He elbowed his way in and said, “What key? What did you lose?”

“The key to the ride! What do you think? The key to the Ferris wheel, man!”

Winston looked up at the ride and finally saw Mal. He was still in his car, fifty feet in the air.

The cheater. The cheater had set off the firecrackers, distracted everybody, and then snatched the key to the ride. A whole bunch of teams had people on that ride, and the cheater had bamboozled all of them in one go.

Mal, trapped on the Sun Wheel, was yelling something and pointing urgently. Winston tried to focus on what he was saying. It sounded like . . . “There! There!”

Winston and Jake whirled around, and they saw him, just for a fraction of a second: A man in a green jacket, a backpack over his shoulder, elbowing his way through the crowd, trying to get away.