The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (20 page)

The signs, the signs, the signs. That had to be the important part of the puzzle. Did those crimes have something in common? Winston couldn’t see that they did.

There was a shout from his right. Winston looked and saw the team from Lincoln Junior High. Rod Denham, sweating profusely, held a piece of paper, and his three students stood close around him, studying it. Intensity radiated off them like sunlight. They had just come up with an idea. As Winston watched, one of the kids nodded excitedly to another, who took the small computer out of his backpack and turned it on. Winston could hear the
teedly-teedly-tee
start-up sound. The teammate began pushing buttons and, after a moment, gave a huge fist-pump in the air. The team traded high fives, and the kids from Team Lincoln ran off to the next puzzle. Rod Denham followed behind them a bit more slowly.

Mr. Denham glanced over at Mr. Garvey. That smug smile was back on his face. “You were ahead of us for a moment there, Garvey,” he said as he passed. “Good for you!” He chuckled as he walked away.

Mr. Garvey turned scarlet. He couldn’t find any way to respond—he just stood there looking furious. His competition with Mr. Denham was like a virus in his bloodstream.

Jake said, “He just says those things to throw you off your game.”

Mal added, “It’s psychology! He’s messing with your brain.” He twittered some fingers through his hair as if giving his own brains a stir.

Mr. Garvey whirled on them. “I know that. Obviously I know that.” He took a deep breath as his kids watched him. He pointed at the prisoners and barked, “Would the three of you focus more on the puzzle and less on me, please? I want to hear some ideas. Now!”

So they turned around and stared some more at the jail. After a while, Mal said, “Let’s move closer.” That was something to do, anyway, so they bobbed their way through the small crowd of onlookers—shoppers and restaurant-goers who had to stop and gaze at this spectacle.

Jake said, “Hey, look at that.”

They looked at the prisoners. They looked at the signs. “What am I looking at?” Mal said.

“The numbers. That’s probably important, isn’t it?”

Winston didn’t see any numbers, but then all of a sudden he did. Each of the uniforms bore a white patch embossed with a black number. The man who had supposedly Cheated Your Neighbors (and why “your” neighbors? why not “his” neighbors?) was prisoner #238.

“Might be a red herring,” Mr. Garvey said. “Might just be part of their costumes.”

“Can we write them down anyway?” Winston asked. So Mr. Garvey got out his pad and pen again. He made a little chart.

“Yes!” came a cry to their left. They all spun their heads. It was Bethany and her team. They had approached the cells, too, and now they were jumping up and down—all four of them, including Miss Norris. After this short celebration, they all ran back to the parking lot.

“Whoa,” said Jake.

“They came closer to the prison, just like we did,” said Winston. “Maybe these prisoner numbers are important after all. Maybe that’s the key.”

 

 

Mal saw it first. It was almost as if the answer had snuck up from behind and grabbed him. His arms flailed out in different directions and he yelled with astonishment: “Hey! HEY!”

“Hey, what?”

“Wait a second, wait a second,” Mal said. He seized the notebook out of Jake’s hands and stared at it with widening eyes. “Ah!” he yelled after a moment. “See! See? See!”

Winston was amused. “Either he has the answer,” he said, “or his brain has exploded.”

Mal finally calmed down enough to explain what he’d discovered. The prisoner number
was
important. The first number was #238. If you took the second, third, and eighth letter out of that prisoner’s crime, you got the word HEY. You needed to take the first, fifth, and ninth letter out of the second crime, which gave you the word SEE.

They quickly counted out the rest of the letters they needed. This gave them six three-letter words.

“That’s not a coincidence,” Winston said.

“It’s not an answer, either,” Mr. Garvey noted. “What are we supposed to type into the computer?”

“All six words?” Mal suggested.

“Yuck,” said Winston.

But they agreed it was worth a shot, so Winston turned on the computer and navigated his way to the proper place. He typed in the six words and, not surprisingly, was told, “That is not the right answer.”

“No dice,” he said.

“We’ve got it,” said Mr. Garvey. “We just don’t know it yet. How can we turn these words into the answer we need?”

 

 

Jake got it this time. Winston felt a pang of jealousy. He hadn’t contributed a single thing to this puzzle. Well, he’d solved other things today. You couldn’t solve them all.

It was so obvious Winston felt ashamed for not seeing it immediately. The six words all sounded like letters. HEY didn’t sound
exactly
like the letter A, but the other five words undoubtedly clued the letters C, Q, U, I, and T. Put them all together and they spelled ACQUIT. That had to be the answer, and it was. Winston, fingers shaking with excitement, typed it into the proper space, and received a congratulations in return.

“That was some fast solving, boys,” said Mr. Garvey. “That’s exactly the break we needed. Come on! We can do this!”

Back in the parking lot, Mr. Garvey fumbled with his keys as he tried unlocking his car. A couple of cars away stood another team, engaged in some sort of high drama. Winston recognized one of the boys: John Curran, the obnoxious kid who said he was going to kick everybody’s butt. So this was the team from Kennedy Junior High. John was yelling—screaming, really—at one of his teammates, a girl who was sitting on the tailgate of her teacher’s car, her hands up to cover her face. Winston heard John shout, “How could you do that? How could you be so stupid?” John’s teacher had a hand on his shoulder. She was trying to pull him away. The third teammate was just standing there, arms crossed, staring at the ground, a picture of defeat.

Winston knew what this was. He looked at the rest of his team, and they’d all figured it out, too. The smart money was that the cheater had pulled another stunt.

Mr. Garvey walked over. “What happened here? Are you okay?” he said.

The teacher looked up. “You’re part of the contest, right?” the Kennedy teacher asked. Mr. Garvey nodded. “Well, we’re having a little problem here. It seems this young lady lost the computer we were given.”

“I didn’t! I’m sorry!” the girl cried. “I think someone stole it. I think someone picked my pocket!”

“Ridiculous,” said John Curran. His arms were crossed indignantly. “Who would steal it?
How
would they steal it? You think one of these other kids is a professional pickpocket? You lost it! You ruined this whole contest!”

“Actually,” Mr. Garvey said sadly, “it might not be as ridiculous as you think.” He explained about the cheater and the other things he had done.

Beyond that, however, there was nothing they could do to help the Kennedy team. The girl, Nicole, had kept the mini computer in a pocket of her backpack. After they’d solved the prison puzzle, Nicole had reached for the computer so they could submit their answer . . . and discovered the pocket unzipped and empty. They had looked all around them and then they ran back to the car to see if maybe it had dropped out there. Nothing. It was gone, and the Kennedy team, which had been fighting for the lead, was ruined.

“This cheater stole something while standing in front of a police station,” Mr. Garvey said as they pulled out of the parking lot. “This guy doesn’t give up.”

 

IT WAS GOOD TO BE HOME.
The Glenville town green, a quick bicycle ride away from Winston’s house, was the site of the fifth puzzle. It was a large expanse of lawn with the town hall on one end and the library at the other. Park benches, the rich green grass, and a nearby row of small shops attracted people on every sunny day, and today was no exception.

Dmitri Simon had trained them by now to expect the unexpected—after the Ferris wheel and that crazy prison, Winston would not have been surprised to see a parade of camels and elephants on the town green. So they were brought up short when they didn’t immediately see anything that resembled a puzzle—no grand spectacle, no chaotic and strange element dropped onto the green for passersby to gawk at. There were a lot of people walking, enjoying the day, and that was it.

Mr. Garvey kept looking around. “Is this the right place?” he said. “Are you sure?”

“The computer said the town green in Glenville,” said Jake.

“This is Glenville,” Mal declared. “This is the town green.”

“Look,” Jake said. “There’s the Lincoln team.”

It was true. Lincoln Junior High was walking along the green as a group. Where were they going? As Winston watched, they approached a girl wearing a bright yellow T-shirt. They talked with her for a minute, and then the girl handed them something. The Lincoln kids looked at it and fell into an intense discussion while the girl wandered away.

“Hmm,” said Mr. Garvey.

Now that Winston looked around a little more closely, he saw a lot of people on the green wearing brightly colored T-shirts. There were a dozen or more of them, in a vibrant rainbow of colors. A young man wearing a loud purple shirt walked in their direction—and as he got closer, Winston saw the words “Simon’s Snack Foods.” Aha.

The young man, wandering aimlessly, pivoted on one heel and sauntered back in the other direction. On the back of his shirt was a picture. Winston strained his eyes to make it out. It was . . .

“An egg?” he said. “That guy has an egg on the back of his shirt.”

“You’d think it would be a potato,” said Mal.

“Why a potato?” Winston asked.

“He works for a potato chip company. Duh.”

“Look over there,” said Jake, pointing elsewhere. They watched as a girl in a green T-shirt walked by. On the back of her shirt was a picture of a pair of shoes.

They observed the scene for a few moments more, and then Mr. Garvey said. “All right, guys. Believe it or not, we’re going to split up.”

“We are?” Mal said.

“Look around,” their teacher said. “These kids in the shirts are everywhere. If we have to go up to every one of them, it’s going to take forever.” He began pointing around the green. “Jake, you take that area. Mal, you go over there. Winston, head in that direction. I’ll go over here. Approach these people, get whatever they’re giving out, and then we’ll meet back here in ten minutes. All right? Go!”

They went off in all directions.

Winston looked around as he walked and saw more teams—there was one sitting on a bench, there was another running to catch up to a guy in a red T-shirt. He glanced toward the street just as a car parked—all the doors opened and another team flew out, ready for anything. They stopped short when they discovered they didn’t know where to go or what to do. Well, they would discover the people in the T-shirts soon enough.

He wondered where Brendan Root was. How close were they to winning?

Winston also wondered if the cheater was around here somewhere. What was that guy planning to do next? And to whom? A cold shudder shook him—suddenly, being off by himself didn’t seem like such a hot idea. Ray Marietta had asked, “He’s after you specifically?” That was the typically blunt way Ray put things, but it was true. The man in the green jacket was after him, and a bunch of other kids, too. He was somewhere nearby—Winston was sure of it. He was watching, waiting to make his next move.

Stop it, he told himself. He was frightening himself like a little kid reading ghost stories. Winston was out in the open, in a familiar, public place, in full view of fifty or a hundred people. There wasn’t much the cheater could do here. Still, better to get the job done and rejoin his team.