The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen (3 page)

“A free dinner?” said Katie.

“I always try to be frugal when I travel,” said Jasper, “as well as clean and well mannered.” He pulled out a photocopied coupon for a free dinner. “I received this last week.”

The man at the desk looked at it. “Eh, nah,”
he said. “No. Nope.” He handed it back. “Not real.”

“What do you mean by ‘not real'?” asked Jasper.

“This isn't from us.”

“Then who is it from?”

“Why would I know?” asked the man at the desk.

Katie pressed, “Who would send us a fake coupon to your restaurant this weekend?”

“That's not something I know,” said the man at the desk. “But whoever they are, they sent out a bunch of them. Like to the Cutesy Dell Twins.” He pointed over Jasper's head.

“Oh, thrills,” grumbled Katie.

“Oh
look!”
came a little blond voice. “It's
Katie
and her friend … that friend who's
with
her. That
girl.
“

Lily frowned and went off to inspect some prints of hound dogs.

The voice was, of course, one of the Cutesy Dell Twins. One was blond and the other was brunette. They came up to Katie looking tan
and like their hair had just been dipped in movie popcorn butter.

“It's so
great
you're
here,”
said a Twin.

“And who's your
friend?”
said the other, blinking admiringly at Jasper.

He was a bit intimidated and said nothing.

“Does he have
issues?”
asked the first Twin, hopefully.

“Katie,” said the second one, conspiratorially. “Have you seen the
Manley Boys?”
She took Katie's arm. “They're around here somewhere. They're the well-built sons of ace detective Bark Manley. More than once a baffling crime that's had him stumped has been solved through the resourcefulness and ingenuity of his two boy heroes.”

“Most recently,” said the other Twin,
“The Clue of the Wiggling Rock. “

“The clue was solved by them,” explained the first Twin. “And the bad guy is totally in jail!”

“They are so handsome,” said the second
Twin, “that it makes me feel like there's a net over my brain.”

“Whoppa cute. “

“Whipple-triple-decka cute.”

“Cute that's
bona fiiiiiide.”

The Twins nodded in unison.

“Okay. Have fun!” One of them winked at Jasper. “Nice to meet ya!” she said. “Hope we'll see ya around!”

They walked away, giggling and looking back at the Boy Technonaut.

“What strange young women,” said Jasper.

“Just wait till they've got their fangs in you,” said Katie. She called over to Lily, “The coast is clear.”

Lily came back over. She mumbled, “I was looking at the menu.”

“I don't like the Twins, either,” said Katie. “They talk about people behind their backs.”

“Shall we go for a hike before it gets dark?” said Jasper. “I'll get a trail map.”

“We need some water,” said Katie.

“I've got a water bottle back in my room,” said Lily.

Jasper said, “Why don't you just pop up and—”

There was a commotion near the front door. A man ran in screaming.

“They've been kidnapped!” he yelled. “They're gone!”

“Who?” yelled someone convenient.

“The Hooper Quints! All five of them! They're all gone! Someone took them!”

The crowd of people in the lobby of the hotel was clamoring for more information. The hotel manager rushed over. “Slow down!” he said to the distraught man. “Tell us slowly what happened!”

“I'm a cabdriver, see? I was hired to bring them adorable mystery-solving Hooper Quints up to this swanky hotel here. I packed ‘em all into the car and started up the mountain. About two miles from here, there was some wise guy standing in the road. He held out his hand for me to stop. I stopped and rolled down the window and asked him what the matter was. He said I had something stuck to the front of my car. I asked him what. He said, A big … thing.'
I said could he be any more, you know, precise, and he went, ‘It's gray' I said, ‘What? Like smoke from a bonfire?' and he said I was on the right track, that it was gray
like
smoke from a bonfire, but, he had checked, and it was
not
smoke from a bonfire, and I better get out and look at it.

“I asked him could he maybe give me another clue. He tried doing this, you know, charade, but he wasn't very good at it, so it was just a kind of twisting motion with his waist and then this little hop, with his elbows out. I asked him whether that was an imitation, and he shook his head no and kind of tugged at his ear, meaning,
'Sounds like
the
name
of what's on your front bumper.' I asked him was it alive, and he said, ‘No. Um, yes. Yes. Yup, it's alive. You better get out.' So. Then I got out and went around the front of the cab and didn't see anything on my front bumper, and suddenly—
ka-powee
—he jacked me in the back of the head with something heavy. I fell down to the ground
and passed out. When I woke up, the Hooper Quints were all gone from the car.”

“Completely gone?” said the hotel manager.

“And here's the weirdest thing,” said the cabdriver.
“There wasn't really any living gray thing on my front bumper at all. “

“Yeah,” said the hotel manager sourly. “That's uncanny.”

A woman called out, “The Hooper Quints could be in great danger!”

“We'll get a search party of guests together,” said the hotel manager. “We'll scour the woods.” He looked at the crowd. “Who wants to volunteer?”

Almost everyone raised their hand. He began breaking them into groups so that they could go separate ways.

“I refuse,” said Katie, “to be a part of this right now. We're here on vacation from crime solving.”

Jasper had his hand up and was bobbing up and down on his tiptoes.

Lily's hand was raised halfheartedly. When she saw that Katie wasn't volunteering, she said, “Shouldn't we help?”

“I'm not getting sucked into this whole Quint thing,” said Katie.

Jasper said, “We may be their only hope.”

Katie crossed her arms. “Us and the other seventy-five people in the lobby.”

“Frankly, Katie,” said Jasper, “I'm a little disappointed.”

“You two go on the wild-goose chase,” said Katie. “I'm going to go sit on the veranda and read. It's a vacation. I'm relaxing.”

The hotel manager cupped his hands around his mouth and said, “Everyone who wants to help with the search, move outside!” The crowd moved to the door.

Katie, trying to seem nonchalant, said, “Okay. Really. You two have fun. I'm going to go read a magazine.”

“Are you sure?” asked Lily.

“Later,” said Katie.

Jasper shook his head, frowning in disapproval.

Katie forced herself to ignore his expression. He had no right, she thought, to look at her like that. She was just taking an afternoon off.

She smiled tightly and said, “Tell me all about it later!”

The lobby was almost empty. Waving, Jasper and Lily turned and followed the rest of the crowd outside.

Feeling a little empty herself, Katie watched them go.

Stop worrying,
she thought.
They'll find the Quints without me.

And, indeed, the search was on!

If you've ever solved a mystery at a luxurious resort before—you know, firing your pistol off the ski lift, recording the muttering of counterfeiters by the pool, climbing over the roof in a catsuit, discreetly picking poison blow darts out of your neck in the Krakatoa Lounge—if, for a moment, you think back to the last time you solved a mystery in a resort setting, you'll know that this is the point in the game when you really need to start looking for suspects. I will parade a bunch of highly suspicious freaks past you, and you will have to ask yourself:

1. Did they have a
motive
to commit the crime? In other words, do they have a reason for doing the deed?

2. Did they have the
opportunity
to commit the crime? Do they have an
alibi?

3. Did they have the
means
to commit the crime?

Also, keep your eyes open for things that might make people look suspicious. Sometimes a little subtle detail that might escape you at first turns out to be the thing that really matters most. For example, does a particular character carry a sword? Does a particular character wear a Halloween mask the whole time and breathe in a rasping sort of way? Does a character walk on all fours, bobbing his head up and down? Does a character suspend you over a pit of lava and say, “Soon it will all be mine! Mine! Mine, I tell you!”? In the difficult world of police detection, it's often little clues like this that give the game away.

Now, it has to be said, clues like this still would have been completely mystifying to the Manley Boys. Jank and Fud Manley could not have been stupider if they had been made out of margarine.

“We'll find those Quints,” said Jank, squinting into the sun. “It's a cinch.”

“I hope they're still in their box,” said his brother Fud, who had missed the explanation of what a “quint” was. He thought they were something like a wrench.

The search parties were gathered outside the hotel on the grass in the middle of the circular drive. Above them the flag flapped in the summer breeze. The crags of the mountain rose all around them.

The hotel manager called out, “Now, first. Identification. Does anybody know what the Quints look like?”

Nobody said anything.

All sorts of guests had turned out for the search. Some were in wet bathing suits and some were in fancy linen suits. Some wore tweed hiking gear. Some were in evening gowns or black tie. Lily was in jeans and a sweatshirt. Jasper, needless to say, was in shorts and kneesocks.

“Would somebody who has read the Quints'
books please give us a description?” the manager requested.

Nobody said anything.

“Who here,” he asked, “has read one of the Quints' books?”

The wind blew high above them all, ruffling a bored eagle's wings.

“The books came out a really long time ago,” said someone apologetically.

“Are the Quints the ones with all the weird machines?” someone else asked.

“No,” the first person answered. “That was … uh … What was that stupid kid's name? I read those books when I was a boy … Something like Hopalong Jack, Young Hypernaut, or, eh, Jack Sprint, Child Techno—”

Lily yelled out quickly, “Maybe you have one of the Quints' books in the hotel library!”

The manager nodded. He sent one of the bellhops back into the hotel to check the library for Hooper Quints books so the group could hear them described and get a positive ID.

“Lily,” whispered Jasper, “do you think that man might have been talking about me?”

“No,” said Lily. “No way.” She squeezed Jasper's shoulder, but she didn't look in his eyes, because she was lying.

“Do you think no one reads my books anymore?” Jasper asked.

“I read them,” said Lily. “I've read them all three times.”

“You're Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut?”

Lily and Jasper turned to see who had spoken. It was a boy in overalls.

“Indeed,” said Jasper.

The boy stuck out his hand. “I'm little Eddie Wax. Remember me?”

Lily and Jasper looked mystified at Eddie Wax. They had never met him before. He was red haired and wasn't wearing any shoes. He had filled the bib pocket of his overalls with trail mix.

“Yep,” said Eddie. “Picture me about five feet higher? With a horse's head? And the rest of the horse?”

Lily and Jasper still had no idea who he was.