The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (24 page)

“I solved the sixth puzzle,” Winston said.

Mr. Garvey blinked at him. So did Mal and Jake. It was like Winston had reached into all of them and switched them off. Mr. Garvey’s mouth opened and closed a few times and then he said, “You did what?”

“I solved it. I solved the last puzzle.” He showed them what he had scribbled on the paper in his hand. “Think square. That was the only clue Simon gave us, and I finally realized what it meant.”

“You solved the puzzle?” Mr. Garvey was still catching up to this new development.

Winston said, “It’s a puzzle I’ve seen in one of my magazines. You guys know what a word square is?”

“It’s the same as a crossword puzzle, isn’t it?” Mal said.

“Sort of. Not really. It’s a square, and each word in the square is written twice—once reading across and once reading down.”

“So all of these words can fit into a word square?”

“These five words . . . and a sixth. And that final word is the answer we’re looking for.”

Mr. Garvey’s delight was short-lived. Without thinking, he pushed the On button again and was quickly reminded that the thing was broken, its screen now gray and lifeless. Winston had had the vague and silly notion that solving the sixth puzzle would cause the computer to magically heal itself. But no.

A lot of good having the final answer would do them when they had no way to send it to Dmitri Simon back at the potato chip factory. They just couldn’t win.

Mr. Garvey kept pushing the power button as if something different might happen. He mashed the other keys on the keyboard. He smacked it on the back like a father burping a baby. Finally, he gave up and sat on the park bench, his arms dangling at his sides, a man who has reached the end of the road. He wasn’t happy about finding the sixth answer, nor was he angry at the boys anymore. In a way, Mr. Garvey looked a bit broken himself.

“There must be something we can do,” said Winston.

“Drive to the factory?” Mal suggested. “Real, real fast?”

Mr. Garvey looked up, considering that. Winston envisioned him zigzagging through traffic like a madman, refusing to hit the brake for any reason. They might not even stop in the parking lot—they could crash through the front door of the building, bulldozing down the narrow hallway and into Dmitri Simon’s office.

But Mr. Garvey shook his head. “It’s half an hour away, maybe more,” he said in his new, defeated voice. “By the time we get there, someone else will have figured this out.”

“I have an idea,” Jake said softly. “We should go to the girls and tell them what happened. They can submit the answer for us.”

Mal was bewildered. “Why on earth would they do that?”

“Because we’ll split the prize money with them.”

If Jake had said that even five minutes ago, Winston guessed that Mr. Garvey’s head would have simply exploded. But now the math teacher looked thoughtful. Then he frowned and slumped back on his bench. “No. They wouldn’t help us after what we did at the space museum.”

“What
we
did?” Mal said, making
we
sound like the most unbelievable two-letter word in the English language.

Mr. Garvey sighed. “What I did. Okay? What I did. I double-crossed them, and there’s no way they’re going to help us now.”

“They might,” Jake said. “Yeah, you played that trick on them, and that wasn’t very nice. But Winston helped them back in the amusement park. They might not want to help
you,
but they might help
him.
”

“Winston helped them?” Mr. Garvey said. “How?”

Jake filled him in. Winston was astonished that Jake was telling Mr. Garvey this. He wanted to back slowly away, give himself a head start for when the math teacher lunged from the bench to try to kill him. A team had been about to quit . . . and Winston not only convinced them not to, but
helped them
on a puzzle? In Mr. Garvey’s world, such a thing was unthinkable.

But Jake had a funny look on this face while he laid this all out, and when he was done, there were a few seconds or a minute where Mr. Garvey didn’t react at all, as if he couldn’t figure out
how
to react.

He finally looked at Winston and said, “You gave them help on the amusement park thing?”

Winston nodded his head. He was still ready to leap backward if he had to.

But Mr. Garvey said, “Then Jake’s right. They might help us back. We need to ask them. Come on. We’re running out of time.” And then he was up and walking briskly across the width of the town green, heading for the girls sitting on their own park bench.

The boys trailed slightly behind. Winston said to Jake, “I can’t believe you told him that.”

Jake grinned. “What could he do?” he asked, talking low so that their teacher couldn’t hear. “Is he going to get angry? How dumb would that be? If you hadn’t helped the girls, there would be nobody we could turn to. Now we might be able to get some help of our own. He should get down on his knees and thank you.”

“I’d like to see that,” said Mal.

They were getting close to where the girls were sitting, and Winston could see Mr. Garvey slow down a tad. What was he going to say to them? Winston might have lent them some assistance, but Mr. Garvey was still the guy who left them standing stupidly in a dark hallway.

The frosty look on Miss Norris’s face as they approached the bench was further indication that this wasn’t going to be easy. Winston cast a glance over to Brendan Root’s team. Brendan was no longer pacing. The whole team was sitting on the park bench, huddled over the same piece of paper. Did that mean they were on the brink of solving the sixth puzzle? He fought the urge to run over there and ask.

Mr. Garvey cleared his throat. “Miss Norris,” he said. “We have a little problem and perhaps you could”—the words got stuck somewhere as he looked at the chilly expression on Miss Norris’s face. He backed up and tried again. “Perhaps you might find it in your heart to help us.”

“Help you,” Miss Norris repeated tonelessly.

Mr. Garvey held up the dead computer and explained what had happened. The boys sent embarrassed glances toward the girls—it made them all look stupid as dirt that they had allowed the computer to break—and Bethany and her friends sent smirky, amused glances right back.

“So what can we do?” said Miss Norris. “Even if I was inclined to help.”

That didn’t sound good, but Mr. Garvey pressed on. “You wouldn’t just be helping me,” he said. “You’d be helping yourself. How close are you to solving the sixth puzzle?”

Miss Norris looked at Mr. Garvey suspiciously, not sure she should answer. But she finally decided to see where this was going and said, “We’re still looking for a breakthrough.”

Giselle piped up. “We thought maybe there’s a message spelled out in these words.”

“But we can’t find it,” said Elvie.

Mr. Garvey clapped his hands together, a salesman looking to close the deal. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We have that last puzzle solved. We know the answer. Winston here came through in a big way.” Winston smiled sheepishly as Mr. Garvey slapped him on the shoulder. “But we can’t submit the answer with our dead computer. Meanwhile, that team over there”—he pointed to Brendan Root and company—“has been working on the final answer for a long time and are surely minutes away from getting it.” He took a deep breath and said it: “If you submit the sixth answer for us . . . we’ll split the prize money with you.”

There was a stunned pause. The first to recover was Bethany. “You want to tell us the last answer?” she said.

Mr. Garvey completely misread the tone of her voice. “Of course!” he said, a big smile emerging on his face.

“No!” she countered, and Mr. Garvey’s smile quickly disintegrated. Bethany jumped to her feet. “Sure I want to win,” she said, “but I don’t want someone to tell me the answer to the puzzles. I want to figure them out myself.” The other girls on the team nodded in agreement.

“It’s just one puzzle,” Mr. Garvey said. He kept glancing over to Brendan Root’s team. Winston understood his nervousness—it felt like there was a large digital countdown timer somewhere, and it was quickly approaching zero.

“I want to figure it out myself,” Bethany insisted.

“I guess that’s a no, Mr. Garvey,” said Miss Norris, not looking sorry in the least.

“What if I gave you a hint?” Winston said. “Got you on the right track. You guys can still figure it out. Then you’ll submit the answer, and we’ll split the prize.”

The girls and Miss Norris looked at each other. Mal said, “Come on. You’ll get a hint for the final puzzle. And you can take home twenty-five thousand dollars to your school.”

That was the right move. Hearing that large sum of money said out loud melted them all. Soon the girls were nodding at each other, and Bethany said to Winston, “All right. What’s the hint?”

Winston said, “Do you know what a word square is?”

“Yeah . . . ?” Bethany said, waiting for more, but Giselle’s eyes immediately lit up. “Think square!” she shouted.

“Of course!” said Elvie, and soon the three of them and their teacher were writing things on a piece of paper and whispering to each other. There was nothing Winston or his teammates could do but stand there and wait. Mr. Garvey couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands—he combed them through his hair, he put them on his hips, he massaged his wide forehead. He looked like he was trying not to scream at them to
solve faster.

The girls looked to be on the brink of success. Giselle said, “Ooh, so this goes here!” and Bethany said, “And that means this has to go here!” and then there was a final, eternal pause as the girls looked at what they had created. Then Elvie said, “That has to be it! We did it!”

They showed what they had written to Winston.

“So the last answer is CRUNCH?” Bethany said.

“Yes!” Mr. Garvey all but exploded. “Type it in! Put it in the computer!”

Miss Norris glared at Mr. Garvey but removed the mini computer from her small purse. It instantly began to
teedly-teedly-tee.
She gave it a confused look. “I didn’t turn it on yet!” she said.

“Is our computer broken, too?” Giselle said.

Winston had a terrible feeling. He turned toward Brendan Root’s team. They were no longer sitting on their park bench. He glanced all around the town green, but they were nowhere to be found. His stomach began to sink down to the middle of the earth.

Miss Norris hit a button on the computer. The screen plinked on, and even standing ten feet away, Winston could see that something was different. Instead of the usual start-up screen, there was some kind of message, written in big, black letters.

“Uh-oh,” said Miss Norris.