The Mystery of the Missing Everything

Chapter 7 Chester Did It!

On Friday morning her trophy had been gone for four days, and Isabel Van Vreeland decided it was time to get serious. It was time, in other words, for some classroom visits. All morning she prowled the hallways, selecting classrooms at random, throwing open their doors and sweeping inside.

“Who stole my trophy?” she hollered, pointing an angry finger at whatever student she found suspicious. “Did you steal it? Did you?” Principal Van Vreeland’s criteria for suspiciousness were somewhat nontraditional: for some reason she seemed to distrust really tall children, left-handed children, and those with purple backpacks.

“Was it you?” she demanded, bursting into Ms. Aarndini’s Home Ec. room midway through fourth period, violently emptying the purple backpack of a sixth-grade girl named Heather Long.

“Oh dear,” said Ms. Aarndini helplessly. “Oh dear.”

But the result was the same in Ms. Aarndini’s room as it had been in every other room, all morning long. All the children denied it, and Principal Van Vreeland hissed and huffed and finally slammed the door, leaving behind a mightily flustered Ms. Aarndini and a room full of rattled, restless students, their hands trembling too much to safely use craft scissors.

“Why can’t I simply seize these children and shake them by the lapels until they confess!” she demanded of poor Jasper, who raced down the hall at her heels, barely keeping up as she stomped toward another classroom.

“Well—that is—” he stammered. “I don’t think children really wear lapels….”

Principal Van Vreeland wasn’t listening. She’d already flung open the door to the next room and charged inside, hands cupped around her mouth like a megaphone. “Who stole my trophy?!”

As it happened, this next room was Mr. Darlington’s. When the door slammed open, with a loud BAM!, it so rattled the mild-mannered science teacher that he dropped his sample weather-system diorama, a flood-plain ecosystem, requiring fifteen minutes and a significant deployment of paper towels before class could resume.

By the time the floor was dry and the principal was gone, the period was almost over, and Mr. Darlington was struggling to regain his students’ attention. “Children? I know there’s a lot going on around here this week. But there’s also a lot going on in the swirling eddies of a sandstorm. Like, for example—”

BAM! The door swung open and cracked against the wall again. Mr. Darlington jumped and brought a hand up to his chest, while all eyes turned to the doorway.

There stood Suzie Schwartz, Shelly’s identical twin sister, clutching a bathroom pass. Suzie’s eyes were wide with excitement behind the neon pink, non-prescription glasses she had recently started wearing to distinguish herself from Shelly. “It was Chester! Chester Hu stole the trophy! He’s going to the principal to confess right now! Can you believe it? I can’t even believe it. Hey, Shelly! Got to go. ’Bye!”

She slammed the door shut behind her.

“Chester?” said Rory.

“Chester Hu?” said Carmine Lopez.

The ensuing chaos was far too much for Mr. Darlington to even try to control. A confession! The punishment was over! Taproot Valley was back!

Only Bethesda remained quiet, her brow furrowed pensively behind her glasses. Something wasn’t right. Chester? Really? An idea began to flash in her mind, blinking on and off like a neon exclamation point. For a long minute she tuned out the babble of the room, nodding her head rhythmically, connecting dots, tapping her sneaker on the floor beneath her desk.

“Right,” Bethesda said to herself. “That’s right.”

Then she raised her hand and, speaking loudly to cut through the noise, asked Mr. Darlington if she could go to the bathroom.

“That’s fine, Bethesda,” he answered as she pushed back her chair and jumped out of her seat. “Although, you know, class is—”

BAM! The door slammed against the wall again, and Bethesda raced out. Mr. Darlington exhaled weakly.

“Class is nearly over anyway.”