“Yeah,” Bethesda said, and then again: “Yeah!” As she wrote tenny observation #2 under the first one, her right foot was squeaking against the linoleum of the kitchen floor. “Of course!”
“Now you’re cooking!” interjected Bethesda’s father from the stove.
“There might be a little glass on the ground, right here around the base,” Tenny continued. As if the kitchen cabinet were the trophy case, he traced a tight arc with the toe of his sneaker on the floor. “But not, not…” He plucked Bethesda’s notebook off the table and flipped back to the interview page. “Not ‘all over the floor.’”
“Right! So the question is, what does this mean?”
“Uh, yeah…” Tenny shrugged, and slumped back in his chair. “I have no idea.”
“But I do!” Bethesda got up and began pacing back and forth across the kitchen. “Our crook smashes the glass and grabs the trophy. But then, for some reason, he pushes all the bits of glass onto the floor.” She approached the microwave, pretending to be the thief, acting the whole thing out. “I think he was trying to clean the glass from the case.”
“But why?”
“To… to…” She gasped, and stared intensely at Tenny. “To put something else in there!”
“Whoa.”
“Whoa,” echoed her father.
Tenny scratched his head. “But, uh, then he didn’t? Put something else in there?”
“Right.”
“I don’t know, Bethesda,” Tenny said. “What kind of crook would do that?”
Bethesda grinned and lifted her eyebrows. “Excellent question, Watson. Let’s talk suspects.”
Returning to her seat at the kitchen table, Bethesda unveiled a slim stack of nine index cards, each one bearing a carefully printed name: one card for each person with a key to the building on the Monday when the trophy was stolen, according to Jasper’s top-secret list. Each card was a different color, with the suspect’s name written in blue ink at the upper-left-hand corner, and Bethesda had three more colored pens at the ready—a red pen for alibi, a green pen for motive, and a purple pen for any additional, miscellaneous information.
“Sweet system,” said Tenny, flipping through the cards, and Bethesda grinned. Let Sherlock Holmes have his magnifying glass, she thought, arranging the nine cards into a neat three-by-three square. Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, has her office supplies.
“So who’s first?” said Tenny.
Bethesda flipped over a card: pamela preston, it said.
“Okay, so we can cross her off the list,” said Tenny. “It was, like, her trophy, right?”
“Right.” But Bethesda hesitated, running the tip of her finger along the edge of the card. She had a theory about Pamela. The theory was probably preposterous, and she definitely wasn’t ready to share it. But she wasn’t ready to eliminate Pamela as a suspect, either.
“I’m going to keep her in the pile.”
“Whatever,” said Tenny.
Bethesda and Tenny worked their way through their suspect cards, debating possible motives, passing the Sock-Snow notebook back and forth, laughing at Bethesda’s father’s occasional Wellington Wolf–related interjections, bouncing wadded-up paper napkins off each other’s heads. “Oh! Wait,” Tenny said suddenly at one point, and attached his iPod to the stereo with a little cord. He cued up a playlist he’d made of classic crime-solving-related rock and pop songs, from “Watching the Detectives” by Elvis Costello to the ridiculous “Private Eyes” by Hall and Oates.
Some cards they annotated with green for motive, like Mr. Darlington’s (“revenge for not being able to display Mary Bot Lincoln”) or Guy Ficker’s (“mad that Pamela was allowed to use the gym instead of him”). Lisa Deckter’s motive was triple-green-underlined: as Bethesda explained to Tenny, Lisa came in second in the gymnastics tournament. Not a bad showing, unless the other competitor from your own team places first. Some had purple for alibi: Mr. Ferrars’s card, for example, said “was at play practice”; Natasha’s said “at Pilverton Mall?,” since Bethesda had heard her say she was heading over there to get her nails done after school that day—and Natasha rarely went to the mall for less than three hours at a time.
Finally, at about 12:30, as Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” segued into Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” Bethesda leaned back and stretched, as Tenny flipped over the last of the suspect cards. It was labeled kevin mckelvey, but the Piano Kid’s card otherwise remained blank. They didn’t know if he had an alibi, and neither of them could imagine any motive for mild-mannered Kevin McKelvey to steal a trophy.
“Whoa, I gotta jet,” Tenny said suddenly. “Chester Hu asked me to record a guitar solo for some sort of video project he’s doing.”
Bethesda walked Tenny out to his bike, sprawled haphazardly on the lawn. “Oh, hey, so you never told me what happened,” Bethesda said, as Tenny corralled his hair under his silver-black bike helmet decorated with AC/DC stickers.
“What happened with what?”
“At St. Francis Xavier. Why are you back?”
“Oh.”
Tenny looked away. But in the split second before he did, Bethesda thought she detected a look of distress glinting in her friend’s eyes, a look suggestive of some deep and mysterious truth buried like pirate’s treasure. Then he shrugged, climbed onto his bike, and pointed it down Chesterton Street.
“It’s a long story,” he said. “I’ll tell you another time.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, see you soon.”
He was already in motion. Bethesda waited as her co-detective pedaled unevenly away, then retreated into the house. Her father was shuffling around in the kitchen, opening and shutting cupboards. “Tabasco… Tabasco… where art thou, Tabasco?”
Bethesda told herself it was no big deal, that Tenny was entitled to his privacy. But his weird silence (“It was weird, right?” she asked herself, replaying the moment and categorizing it definitively as weird) stung a little. Master Detective Bethesda Fielding returned to the kitchen and served herself a bowl of chili and a big hunk of cornbread, feeling increasingly like she had two mysteries on her hands, instead of one.
Chapter 22
Can Your Hemispheric Placebo Bear Fruit?
While Bethesda Fielding and Tenny Boyer were working their way through their list of suspects, Marisol Pierce was in her bedroom, the windows thrown open to let in the cool autumn breeze, painting trees. She had unrolled a long piece of butcher paper from the roll she’d bought at the art supply store, and taped it up so it covered one whole wall of the room. Slowly but surely, her brush dipping deftly in and out of golds and greens and browns, she filled the paper with a long, lovely line of pines and firs.
Outside her door her little cousins, visiting from Puerto Rico, cavorted noisily in the hall, shooting each other with water pistols. “Got you!” “No you didn’t!” “You’re all wet!” “No I’m not!”
It was rude not to be playing with them, but Marisol tuned out the noise and focused on her trees, carefully adding a cluster of russet leaves to a copse of young oaks. Marisol was, as her grandmother always said, “rather a solitary soul.” In the two years since they’d moved to this area, she still hadn’t become terribly close with many kids at Mary Todd Lincoln; frankly, she had no idea why Chester Hu had invited her to be part of this video project. But he had, and she was secretly delighted. Marisol was happy for any excuse to do some painting. She loved making art, loved the intense focus it required.