The Mystery of the Missing Everything

^{Chapter 31} The Big-Word Bandit

At the first quack of her Three Ducks Quacking alarm clock, Bethesda Fielding woke up, and she woke up singing.

“Set you free!” she sang as she got dressed. “Set you free!” as she tugged her reddish-tannish hair into barrettes and laced up her Chuck Taylors. “Sweet little thing I’m gonna set you free!”

Yes, the mystery solving was going a bit slower than she had anticipated.

Yes, everyone in school was still mad at her… madder than ever, actually, what with the looming Week of a Thousand Quizzes.

And yes, her dad was making chili at 7:45 in the morning, which was kind of gross. But the charity dinner at her mom’s law firm was in a couple nights, and her dad, being her dad, still wasn’t satisfied with his recipe. She obliged him with a quick taste test, told him it was the best batch yet, and went back to singing.

“You been locked up too long! And that’s wrong, so wrong!” Bethesda sang as she hefted her backpack and headed out the front door into the cool mid-October morning. “So turn to me! And I’ll set you free!”

She sang in a high, comical falsetto, just as Kevin had. Whoever wrote the song—whether it was a pair of mysterious strangers in the Band and Chorus room, or Kevin improvising it to fool her—it was one heck of a catchy tune.

The song died on Bethesda’s lips when she saw her bike.

Her beautiful blue Schwinn with the blue and silver piping was just where she had left it yesterday, chained to the mailbox outside the house, the long, plastic-sheathed handlebars angled toward the road, the chrome gleaming in the sun. But the tires had been deflated, and lay hanging from the scuffed rims, sad, deflated, and saggy.

The thief! Bethesda thought, breaking into a run. The thief!

She raced to the road, looked one way and then another, but saw nothing. No stranger booking it down Chesterton Street, no one diving furtively into the bushes. Just a couple of squirrels tussling over a nut on Mrs. Beverly’s neatly manicured lawn, looking very much incapable of tampering with a bicycle.

Bethesda returned to her sadly damaged bike and unfolded the note she found Scotch-taped to the handlebars.

BETHESDA! it said.

“Vociferously?” said Bethesda to the squirrels. “Inves-tigatory?”

Whoever this anonymous bike-vandal was, he or she definitely owned a thesaurus. But the gist of the note was perfectly clear. Somebody out there did not want her to solve this crime. There was no signature. Just the cryptic message, filled with what Ms. Petrides, the seventh-grade English Language Arts teacher, called twenty-five-cent words. And then, on the back in smaller print:

Bethesda stood for a long moment on her lawn. Then she carefully folded up the note, shoved it in her bag, and marched steadily down Chesterton Street, head held high, sneakers crunching on the asphalt. She was a detective on a case, by god, and she had work to do! Truths to ferret out! She was going to solve this mystery, and no cowardly, bike-mangling, thesaurus-hugging maniac was going to get in her way!

Bethesda rounded the corner onto Friedman Street and turned into the horseshoe driveway leading to school. And there was her next suspect, sitting at the picnic benches, all alone, as if for a prearranged meeting. Perfect, thought Bethesda, striding boldly across the horseshoe driveway.

“Natasha?” she said firmly. “We need to chat.”

“Oh.” Natasha yawned and smiled weakly. “Okay.”

Bethesda, in no mood to beat around the bush, rapidly dispensed with the preliminaries. She told Natasha she knew about the key she’d gotten from Assistant Principal Ferrars, and curtly informed her that she was on the list of potential suspects. Natasha just nodded.

“You went to the mall on the afternoon of Monday, September twentieth, to get your nails done, is that correct?”

“What?” Natasha looked down at her hands, then back up at Bethesda. “Oh. Yeah.”

“And then went to dinner with Guy Ficker and his family?”

“Yes. At Pirate Sam’s. We had the Arrrgh-Ti-Choke dip.” She pronounced the dish like it was written on the menu, with a deep, throaty pirate’s argh.

“Arrrgh-Ti-Choke,” echoed Bethesda. “Cute.”

“What is?”

“Never mind. What time was dinner?”

“Um…”

While Bethesda waited for the answer, she glanced at the open notebook in her lap, where she had the timeline carefully penciled in.

“We met at five thirty, I think,” said Natasha.

Well, that was that. The bang and the crash were at five forty-five, and the mall was at least a twenty-minute bike ride away. Except then Natasha looked up again, bit her lower lip, and shrugged. “You know, it might have been six thirty. Maybe six. It was kind of a while ago, you know?”

Hmm, thought Bethesda, and jotted a quick notation in the margin. C.P.S. Call Pirate Sam’s.

Natasha yawned and gave Bethesda a tired little smile, and Bethesda thought what a relief it was to have someone reacting to her questions without getting all offended and upset. Natasha didn’t look angry at all, in fact, she looked just kind of… worn out or something. She was usually the kind of person who spent an hour at the mirror in the morning, putting on lip gloss, trying different earrings, texting friends to find out what they were wearing. Today she was just the slightest bit of a mess: her shirt was rumpled, her skin a little pale, her eyes shadowed with dark circles. The dark red of her nails looked faded and chipped in spots.

“Hey, um, Natasha?” Bethesda asked softly. “Are you doing okay?”

Natasha shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know.”

A leaf drifted down from the oak tree and settled in Natasha’s hair, but she didn’t seem to notice. Bethesda reached over and brushed it away.

“Is this”—Bethesda leaned forward slightly—“about Todd?”

There was a pause before Natasha replied—and it’s a funny thing about that particular pause. If you had asked Bethesda Fielding if she was asking Natasha about Todd as part of her duties as a semi-official private investigator, or just to be a nice person, she would have selected option B. She was friends with Natasha (well, sort of friends), and she was just being a nice person. The girl was obviously a little out of sorts, and it had been pretty clear for the last couple days—couple weeks, now that Bethesda thought about it—that there was something weird going on between her and her old friend Todd.

So she was asking to be nice. But all the same, Bethesda’s foot—which often had better instincts than she did—was tapping a rapid, enthusiastic bippity-bop against the metal base of the picnic table. Her foot in its Chuck Taylor sneaker clearly thought that the innocent, friendly question she’d put to Natasha was relevant to her ongoing investigation.

It didn’t matter, because Natasha didn’t answer. She was distracted by a bird.

It was the blue-and-green swallow, hopping in a crook of the fat old oak tree that oversaw the outdoor seating area. As Bethesda watched, Natasha’s gaze drifted up to where the bird nestled in its branch, and her face glowed with tenderness. Then she waved at the bird, almost as if they were old friends.

“Hey, buddy,” said Natasha to the bird, in such a sweet and simple way that Bethesda said it too. “Hey, buddy.”

The bird tilted its tiny head and chittered politely to Natasha and Bethesda in reply. Then the five-minute bell rang, and all three of them went on their way.

There was, alas, no time left for mystery solving that day. Bethesda had been a total slacker on the weather-phenomenon project for Mr. Darlington’s class, and all of a sudden it was due tomorrow. Victor Glebe, sweetly, acted like he was the one who’d been a jerk—he told her he’d finish the diorama, and if she’d just come up with something for the in-class presentation, they’d be even steven. Bethesda thanked him copiously, and put aside her investigation that night to concentrate on a Flash Flood Fact Wheel of Fun (“Take a Turn! Spin the Wheel! Learn About Sudden and Rapid Torrents of Rain or River Water!”) And their presentation in Science the next day ended up totally great, with Mr. Darlington clapping vigorously for their efforts—as he did for Natasha, Pamela, and Reenie’s group, who gave an emotional description of how windstorms affect migrating falcons; and for Todd and Tucker, who performed a rap Todd had written about a baby eagle dying in a mudslide.

Man, Bethesda thought, what is it with birds around here lately?