“I don’t know,” said Jake. “Probably.”
“What are we going to do with them?”
“Scramble the letters into an answer,” Mr. Garvey said. “Why are we talking about this? Let’s go!”
“Wait!” Winston said. The firefly was growing. “There are eighteen riddles. If that means we’re going to wind up with eighteen different letters, that’s going to be a problem.”
“Why?”
“Because scrambling that many letters into an answer is really, really hard. That’s a
lot
of letters.”
They dwelled on that for a moment. Even Mr. Garvey could see that Winston was right. It was easy to envision sitting on the ground, shifting around letter tiles until the sun went down.
“So what are we supposed to do?” said Mal.
Winston said, “I think there’s something more to this puzzle. I think the pictures on the back of these shirts are important.”
“Well, yeah,” Jake said. “I wouldn’t have gotten half these riddles if I didn’t have the answers in front of me.”
Winston shook his head. “The answer to this guy’s riddle was ice. I think we need to find the volunteer who has the picture of an ice cube on the back of his shirt.”
“Yes!” said Mal, seeing the whole thing now. “That has to be it. It’s a connect the dots!”
“It is?” Mr. Garvey said doubtfully. “A connect the dots?”
“Well, no,” said Mal, correcting himself. “It’s a connect the riddles! Where’s the guy with the ice cube?”
They looked around. Were there really only eighteen college kids? The way their bright T-shirts blended in with the innocent bystanders walking around, it looked like there were a hundred of them. How were they supposed to find a particular T-shirt in all this?
They spread out, walking slowly away from each other, four pairs of eyes scanning the green, trying to find a single moving detail in all this chaos. Winston saw other teams running around. There was Bethany and her team, chasing after a girl in a red shirt. There were the Brookville Brains, making things more confusing with their own bright blue T-shirts. The Brains had suffered through their own flat tire, but it looked like they had caught up again. And there was Brendan Root’s team, sitting on a park bench, studying something on a piece of paper. So they were still hard at work, trying to figure out that sixth answer. Was anybody nearly as close to winning as they were? Surely not. Winston almost felt like giving up—they could just go to the nearby pizza parlor for an Italian ice while they waited for Brendan Root and his team to win. It could happen at any moment.
“There!” Jake shouted. He pointed to a purple shirt and began running. Winston and the others tried to keep up, but that was impossible when Jake was going full tilt, as he was now.
By the time the rest of them had caught up, Jake had already been asked the riddle, answered it, and been handed another letter tile:
E.
Mr. Garvey was the last to arrive at this second checkpoint. He put his hands on his knees and bent over, trying to catch his breath. He looked like he wanted to lie down on the ground for a while.
“Should we not run?” Jake asked him, a little too sweetly.
“No, no,” Mr. Garvey gasped, waving a hand. “It’s fine. I’m just . . . I’m just”—he took a deep breath and tried straightening up—“I’m just old. And it’s been a long day.”
Mal said, “So where are we going now? What riddle did we just answer?”
Jake said, “If you turn me around, I can no longer see. The answer was a mirror.”
“Oh! We just passed that one!” Winston said, spinning around, trying to find it again. “I saw it! I know I did.”
“If I have to run to sixteen more places,” said Mr. Garvey, “the one after that is going to be a hospital. You guys go ahead and finish this. I’m going back to our bench. Go fast! Maybe there’s still time.” He glanced over to where Brendan Root’s team sat. He was keeping an eye on them, too, waiting for the moment when they would all start leaping around in victory.
So as Mr. Garvey walked slowly back to their bench, Winston and his friends ran, arms swinging and legs pumping, for the next colored T-shirt.
This was a tall, rail-thin guy in a yellow shirt. “You must break me before you can use me. What am I?” he asked.
They had to consult their notes before answering, “An egg!”
The thin guy was pleased. “Yes!” he said to them. He dug into this pocket. Winston expected another letter tile, and he was not disappointed. This time it was a
U.
“R-E-U?” Mal said as they ducked into the shade provided by a tree.
“Is that going to spell anything?” Jake asked.
“Reunion?” Winston suggested. “But the thing is,” he added, “if we’re spelling something, we might not have started with the first letter. We could have started somewhere in the middle of the message. Let’s just keep going and see what happens.”
This turned out to be good advice. They went to the next three people in order and collected an N, an S, and another U. The last riddle sent them in search of a picture of a belt.
They searched all over and for a few minutes thought maybe this guy had wandered away from the town green entirely. They finally spotted him off in a corner. As they ran up to him, Winston frowned. He looked familiar. Hadn’t they already spoken to him?
Yes, they had, as they discovered when he asked his riddle: I will not burn in a fire, and I will not drown in the water.
“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “We already answered that, didn’t we?”
“Hey, yeah,” Mal said. “Ice. This was first person we spoke to. He’s steering us back to the guy with the ice cube on his shirt, and then we can keep going around and around in a little circle. Fun!”
Winston groaned. “You’re right. I must have made a mistake. Mr. Garvey’s going to kill me.”
“What letters do we have now?” Jake asked.
Mal had been collecting them. He opened up his palm to reveal a half dozen sweat-damp letter tiles. “R-E-U-N-S-U,” he read out loud. “Roonsoo!”
“That’s not a word,” Jake said.
“All right,” Winston said, “but look.” He plucked the first two letters out of Mal’s hand and placed them at the end. “If we start with the first U, we get the word UNSURE.”
“Do you think that’s the answer?” Jake said anxiously.
“I think it’s worth trying.”
Jake didn’t need to be told twice. Mr. Garvey had given him the mini computer, and now he turned it on. There was the initial
teedly-teedly-tee
that Winston was going to hear in his dreams tonight and then Jake got busy pushing buttons.
“Three teams have solved this puzzle,” Jake said.
“Did anybody solve the sixth puzzle?” Mal asked.
Jake shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Plug in our answer already,” Winston told him.
“All right . . . hold on . . . ” Jake pushed more buttons. He looked up, startled. “
Four
teams have solved this puzzle!”
Mal said, “Who’s the fourth?”
“We are, dummy! That was it! UNSURE is the answer.” Jake danced around, pumping his arms in the air.
Winston felt like he’d been whapped over the head with a huge, soft pillow. “Are you sure?” he said.
“No, I’m
unsure
!” Jake said happily. “Come on!” He started running back to Mr. Garvey.
Winston worked out the rest of it while he ran. It was simple enough, when he thought it through: He’d been right all along that each riddle led to a picture on a different shirt. Winston assumed that they’d have to follow a trail made up of all eighteen people, running from one to the next. But they had the answer after solving only six riddles. Winston guessed that this puzzle consisted of three different riddle trails, each made up of six riddles. You didn’t have to solve every single riddle to get the answer, and part of the puzzle was simply realizing that. Tricky stuff.
Mr. Garvey was happily stunned when they told him they’d figured out the answer and already plugged it in. He stood up and looked around, as if expecting someone to hand them an award. “We did it,” he said. “We really did it.”
“Not yet,” Mal said. “One more puzzle to go.”
“Right,” said the teacher. He looked sharply over to Brendan Root’s team. They were still on their park bench on the other side of the green. Winston smiled in recognition when he saw that Brendan was pacing, staring at the ground. He was deep in thought, waiting for a lightning bolt of inspiration to strike. Brendan’s teammates were slumped on either end of the bench like broken bookends. Winston recognized that, too: They were out of ideas and giving in to hopelessness. Brendan’s teacher was sitting on the bench, waving his arms with emotion. All in all, they looked pretty stuck. Winston felt a small blossoming of hope.
“All right,” said Mr. Garvey. “We can do it. I know we can. We can come from behind and win it all, cheater or no cheater.” He took out a fresh piece of paper and wrote down all the answer words.
QUASAR
THRESH
ICARUS
ACQUIT
UNSURE
“That’s it,” said Mr. Garvey. “That’s all we get.”
“There was a clue in the computer,” said Winston. “Wasn’t there?”
“Oh, yeah!” Mal said. “What does it say?”
Jake pressed more buttons on the computer. Then he groaned. “Oh, no,” he said. “That’s the clue?”
“What? What is it?” Winston peeked over Jake’s shoulder, saw the computer screen, and smacked himself in the forehead.
The clue to the sixth puzzle was the same sign they’d seen all day long—the guy with the shiny teeth, holding up a bag of square potato chips. “Think square!” the man was eternally saying.
“That’s all we get?” Mal said. “Think square? What does that mean?”
Silence descended on the team. Winston didn’t know how to “think square,” and nobody else had any ideas, either.
Mr. Garvey’s phone rang, a shrill jangling tweet. He answered it, listened for a moment, and then handed it to Winston. “It’s for you,” he said.
“For me?” Winston said, and then he remembered: Ray Marietta! Could the ex-cop really have figured something out? He took the phone from his teacher. “Ray?” he said.
“All right,” Ray said brusquely. “I had someone look into your little problem.”
Winston was puzzled. “Really? Who?”
“I do a little private detective work once in a while,” Ray said. “It’s brought me in touch with some colorful characters. I know a guy, he knows everything there is to know about the phone system. If anyone on earth could get the phone number of somebody who called you, this is the guy.”
“You hired a computer hacker?” Winston was astounded.
There was a small silence on the line, and then Ray said, “Well, that would be illegal. So, no, I’m not going to say he’s a hacker. He’s more like a magician. A telephone magician.”
“Okay,” said Winston, but he thought, He’s a hacker. Winston was amused and a little amazed at the idea of Ray Marietta, big and no-nonsense, calling up a computer hacker on his behalf. “What did this magician say?” Winston asked.
Ray said, “I gave him a brief rundown on everything you told me. I gave him your phone number, and he just called me back. He was able to get a list of the people who called your house that day. You say this guy, the cheater, called you in the afternoon? Somewhere around four o’clock?”
“Yes.” Winston held his breath. Was he really about to learn the identity of the cheater?
“You got one phone call at that time,” Ray said. “It came from a residence in West Meadow. Someone with the last name of Root. Do you know anyone with that name?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
WINSTON HAD HOPED
Ray Marietta could help them out, providing answers to a few mysterious questions. Now, hanging up the phone, he found that the questions had only multiplied.
Jake and Mal were staring at him. “What did he say?” Jake asked.
“Brendan Root called me,” Winston said quietly. He looked up at his friends. “That mysterious phone call a few days back? It was Brendan Root.”
“That kid?” Mal said. They all looked over to where Brendan was still pacing.
Winston couldn’t wrap his head around it. “But he can’t be the cheater,” he said. “And he can’t be working with the cheater. That makes no sense!”
“Why not?” said Mr. Garvey. He was also gazing over at Brendan Root and his team. “They haven’t been hit by the cheater. Isn’t that what you told me? No flat tires. No sabotage of any kind. Isn’t that suspicious? The man in the green jacket is working with one of these teams. Why not them?”
“But,” Winston said, wondering what he was about to say.
“And your name was in the cheater’s papers,” Mr. Garvey reminded him. “How did the cheater know you would be here? Simple.” He pointed across the town green at Brendan. “That young man called you and asked you directly.”
Winston stared at the trees and the sky. Mr. Garvey was right—he had to be. Brendan called him hoping to find out if Winston would be at the puzzle event. Told the answer was yes, Brendan had spread the news—he’d told the man in the green jacket, who put Winston on the list of kids to watch out for. How else could Winston’s name have found its way onto the cheater’s list?
But it still felt wrong, somehow. Winston thought back to the conversations he’d had with Brendan Root. That first meeting back at the potato chip factory—Brendan seemed
thrilled
to meet Winston and acted like someone who couldn’t wait to start a one-on-one, do-or-die puzzle competition. Heck, Brendan didn’t have to come over to introduce himself at all, but he did.
And then, in the parking lot of the amusement park, Brendan wanted to cheat to
help
Winston. Brendan would have given Winston the answer to the Ferris wheel puzzle if Winston had agreed. He was sure of it.
“So what do you want to do?” Mal said. “Walk over there and accuse him?”