The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (9 page)

Mr. Garvey and the boys nodded their heads and said “oh, yes” and “absolutely,” a bunch of earnest bobblehead dolls.

“Okay. Come on!” Giselle shouted, gleeful. She waved at them to follow her, and they all ran a short distance to a small, black passageway. Winston could have walked by this a hundred times and not seen it—the hallway seemed to be for staff members only. There was another girl in there, looking anxious, like she was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.

“This is it?” said Miss Norris.

“This can’t be right,” Mr. Garvey declared.

Giselle said, “But look!”

Sure enough, the third girl—she was introduced as Elvie—was standing by a pair of signs, each attached to a metal post. They were ads for Simon’s Potato Squares. In each one, the smiling guy from the television commercial beamed out at them. Words by his mouth said, “Think square!”

They all moved into the hallway. There was barely enough room for both teams. “So where’s the puzzle?” said Winston.

“I don’t know,” said Elvie. “I’m guessing in here.” Elvie was the tiniest of the three girls—with long dark-blond hair framing her narrow face, she reminded Winston of a fairy from a fantasy movie. Elvie pointed to the wall, and Winston saw that it was really a door painted black. Like the hallway itself, it didn’t seem to be part of any exhibit. Elvie jiggled the handle. “But it’s locked,” she said.

“This is nuts,” said Mal.

“I agree,” said Mr. Garvey. “Can this be right? What are we supposed to do, pick the lock? That’s a fine thing to teach kids.”

Jake knocked on the door. There was no answer.

“I tried that already,” said Elvie.

“Maybe the answer is HALLWAY,” said Giselle. She was fidgeting in the crowded space, her hands moving up and down her arms. Her brown eyes lit up as a new idea hit her. “Or SPACE! Because this is a space museum, and we’re all standing in a small space, so—”

“So there’s no puzzle?” her teammate Bethany demanded. “You just have to find the sign? That doesn’t make sense.” Bethany, it seemed, didn’t tolerate suggestions she thought were foolish. Winston decided he liked her no-nonsense attitude.

“Well, the puzzle should be here somewhere . . . ,” said Miss Norris, looking around the black-walled alcove.

“Maybe you have to feel the walls!” Giselle said, doing just that.

“So, what, the puzzle’s in Braille?” Jake said. But he started feeling the walls, too.

Mal knocked on the door again. “It’s got to have something to do with this door. That’s the only thing
here.
” He put his ear to it like a spy.

They were getting nowhere, and it was impossible to think in this crowded space, packed in elbow to elbow. Winston slipped back out of the hallway while the others discussed what they should do next. Mr. Garvey came out after him, and they glanced at each other, frowning.

“I don’t like this,” Mr. Garvey said.

Winston nodded. Would Simon send dozens of people into a tiny little hallway where the only notable feature was a locked door? Winston had created a few puzzle hunts himself, for his friends and his sister, and he understood that you couldn’t leave the solvers hanging, with no idea what they were supposed to do next. Simon was either very bad at creating puzzles or something was wrong.

They saw a staff member walk by. He was wearing a lime-green T-shirt and a name badge that said VOLUNTEER. Winston rushed to catch him.

“Hey,” said Winston, “can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You know about this potato chip contest that’s happening here today?”

The guy put on a sly look. “Ah, I can’t answer any questions about that. Sorry. You’ll have to solve the puzzle on your own.”

“But how do we unlock the door to where the puzzle is?”

The volunteer looked taken aback. “The doors are locked? To the theater?”

Mr. Garvey said, “What theater?” Winston didn’t even realize Mr. Garvey had come up behind him.

The volunteer looked confused. “The planetarium. The only theater we’ve
got.
Are the doors locked, or aren’t they?”

Mr. Garvey smiled. “I’m sure they’re fine. We must have gotten ourselves all confused. Thank you very much for your help.” As the volunteer strolled off, Mr. Garvey put a hand on Winston’s shoulder and pulled him close. “Go to the planetarium. It’s up toward the front—we passed it when we came in. I’ll be along with the others in a moment.”

He said that in such a conspiratorial tone, like a prisoner sharing an escape plan, that for a moment Winston only stared at him, expecting further instructions—“Start digging through the wall and watch out for guards.” But instead Mr. Garvey said “Go!” again and gave him a little push to get him started.

So Winston walked back toward the entrance to the museum. He glanced behind him to see Mr. Garvey heading back to the little black hallway, and Winston heard him say, “Jake, Mal, can I speak to you for a moment?”

Winston couldn’t remember seeing a movie theater in here, but as soon as he saw the doors, he realized what the volunteer was talking about. It wasn’t a traditional theater, of course, but rather a planetarium where they projected an animated solar system onto a domed ceiling. You sat in a big cushy chair and felt like an astronaut looking out a rocketship’s window.
A Tour of the Universe,
it was called.

He glanced back the way he had come and saw Mr. Garvey ushering Jake and Mal, a hand on each of their backs pushing them along. “Where are we going?” he heard Mal say.

“Just walk,” Mr. Garvey replied.

“Where are the girls?” Winston asked when they had caught up.

“Well,” Mr. Garvey said, “I imagine they’re still in the hallway.” He gestured to the planetarium door. “Let’s go. The puzzle’s right in there.”

Jake was openmouthed. “Aren’t we going to tell the other team?”

Winston said, “We’re all looking together, remember?”

Mr. Garvey nodded and gestured into the theater once again. “We were, and now we’re not. Go in! Let’s go!”

Reluctantly, Winston and his friends filed in to the pitch-black planetarium, Mr. Garvey practically stepping on their heels as they did so. They reached the center, and all eyes instinctively looked up. Projected on the theater’s curved ceiling was a night sky more spectacular than any Winston had seen in real life. There were so many stars, they threatened to paint the ceiling white. There was also a series of words floating out there in the artificial universe.

Mr. Garvey laughed when he saw the words. “All right,” he said. “Finally, a stroke of luck.” The boys were heading down an aisle to sit in those big comfy seats, but Mr. Garvey whispered, “No! Come back here. We won’t be here long.”

Winston kept glancing over at the door to the theater. He was waiting for it to open and for the girls to walk in. They had ditched them, plain and simple, after promising that they would team up. In the back of his mind, he had sort of hoped they might join forces with these girls throughout the event. Winston didn’t meet many girls who liked puzzles, and that seemed like a pretty good thing to find.

He doubted Bethany or her friends would be too keen to work with them anymore.

Winston’s eyes had adjusted to the dark now, and he could see silhouettes of other teams sitting in the chairs, but he couldn’t tell who they were. Mr. Garvey led them into an area behind the back row—he didn’t want to sit.

“If all the puzzles are this easy,” whispered Mr. Garvey, “we’re never going to catch up. I hope there’s a real killer later on that only we can crack.”

“You know the answer?” Jake said.

“Of course I do! Look!” He pointed up at the words. “Just put the missing letters back in to get one of the zodiac signs. It couldn’t be simpler! Turn on that thing so we can submit the answer,” Mr. Garvey said.

Jake had the computer, and he complied.
Teedly-teedly-TEE.
When Jake was ready, Mr. Garvey said, “Okay. It’s Water Carrier, Bull, Ram, Fish, Scales, Goat . . . so type in A-L-R-S-E-T.”

“That’s not a word,” Mal said.

“Just type it in.”

Jake did. There was a moment’s pause, then he said, “That’s not the right answer.”

“All right, all right,” Mr. Garvey said, waving his hands as if erasing the wrong answer out of the air. “Scramble the letters. It’s an anagram. How can you turn those letters into a word?” When nobody said anything, Mr. Garvey said, “Winston! This is your thing, isn’t it? Mix up those letters!”

“ALTERS,” Winston said after a moment of thought.

“Good! Try that,” Mr. Garvey said to Jake.

Jake punched in the letters. “No.”

“STALER,” Winston said.

Jake pushed more buttons. “No, sorry.”

“Try ALERTS,” said Mr. Garvey. “It has to be one of these.”

Jake shook his head. “It’s not that one.”

“Are you typing it in the right spot?”

Even in the dark, Winston saw Jake’s eyes flash. “Of course I am.” All he had to do was push the first button—the only button the computer would let him push. Did Mr. Garvey think he couldn’t manage that?

Apparently so. “Let me see,” Mr. Garvey said, and snatched the computer away. He glanced at the screen and then handed it back to Jake, who rolled his eyes at Winston in disbelief.

“So there’s another trick to this,” Mal said, looking back up at the floating words.

“A trick,” said Mr. Garvey. “Yes. A trick.”

They were standing fairly close to the exit, and as they watched, another team left the theater. Before the door could close, a hand opened it back up. Miss Norris peeked in and looked around. With the light flooding in from the lobby, she could see Winston and his team easily enough. She turned her head and said something, and then the girls walked in, glaring. If the four of them could blast rays of solid ice out of their eyes, Winston and his team would have been frozen forever. Bethany looked like she was on the verge of developing that power spontaneously. Winston and his friends traded embarrassed glances—they all wanted to crawl under the carpeting.

The girls and their teacher looked up at the floating words for a moment or two and then filed down into the seating area and out of sight.

Mr. Garvey watched his boys watch the girls. “All right, guys,” he said. “This is a competition, let’s remember that. We’re in last place, and we’re not going to get very far if we help other teams. Let’s get back to the puzzle.”

Winston may have been embarrassed at his teacher’s actions, but he wasn’t about to walk away from a day of puzzles. Neither were his friends. Jake looked up at the floating words. They were shimmering and golden. “I understand bull and ram and fish,” said Jake, “but what is a water carrier? What’s that supposed to be?”

“These are all constellations,” Winston said. “Symbols of the zodiac. Water carrier is . . . um.”

“Aquarius,” said Mal. “That’s what I am.”

“Right,” said Mr. Garvey. “The bull is Taurus, the ram is Aries, the fish is Pisces, the scales is Libra, and the goat is Capricorn. They’re all constellations.”

Winston gazed up at the floating words. The missing letters didn’t spell anything—at least not anything important. Those letters had to be missing for a reason, though.

All at once he saw it. It was almost as if some unseen force had whispered the answer into his ear. “I need a pencil and paper,” he said urgently. “And I need to see.”

Mr. Garvey said, “You have it?”

“I might. I need to see. It’s too dark in here.” He marched toward the exit without even making sure the others were behind him.

When they got back out to the main exhibit hall, Winston grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote hastily:

“Okay,” said Mal. “Those are the signs of the zodiac.”

Winston nodded. “And that’s the key to the whole thing.”

 

 

 

WINSTON EXPLAINED THE ANSWER
to his friends: One of the phrases floating up there on the theater ceiling had been WATER CARRIER. The sign of the water carrier is AQUARIUS. WATER CARRIER was missing its second letter; if you took the second letter out of the word AQUARIUS, that gave you the letter Q.

You had to do that for each word. BULL was missing its third letter, so Winston took the third letter—U—from the word TAURUS. And so on, until Winston had spelled the word QUASAR.