By the time the video approached its conclusion, Chester and his team were all clapping and dancing happily around the den, while Mr. Schwartz chased them around with a DustBuster. Natasha, the choreographer, had outdone herself on the last part: a shot of nearly a hundred people in the basin of Tamarkin Reservoir, pretending to ride horses, leaning this way and then that way, all together and then individually, creating a cool rhythmic pattern with their bodies, even as Rory’s lyric reached its passionate peak:
“Please, please, please save our trip to outdoor ed! Let us stuff a bunch of nature facts into our heads! Let us go where the salmon swim and the bumblebees play! Make a donation and save the day! And we’ll be on our waaaaaaaaaaay!”
The kids in the den sang along with the kids on the screen, holding that big last note even longer than they’d held it in the video, which was for a full ten seconds. When it ended they clapped and hooted like lunatics, hugging and patting each other on the back. Shelly handed out plastic cups and Suzie poured celebratory glasses of sparkling cider. (“Coasters?” said Mr. Schwartz. “Has everyone got a coaster?”) Even Natasha and Todd slapped each other an exuberant five, forgetting momentarily that they weren’t getting along.
“All right, Suzie,” said Chester, when the revelry died down. “Let’s post this puppy.”
In another part of town, in an upstairs bathroom, someone stared deeply into the bathroom mirror, wondering whether to go through with this crazy stunt.
“I could leave this house right now and go do the worst thing I have ever done. Betray all I’ve ever believed in, and all I’ve been taught to believe. Or I can go downstairs, make some hot chocolate, and play Super DonkeyKong on the computer.”
For a long moment, the mind behind the face weighed these options—the brow bent with concentration, the eyes troubled and pensive, the mouth watering at the thought of creamy hot chocolate. Then the face disappeared from the mirror, and a moment later a lone, mysterious figure snuck out the bathroom door, tiptoed silently down the stairs, and crept out the front door.
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.
I MUST ASSERT MOST VOCIFEROUSLY THAT YOU DESIST FROM YOUR INVESTIGATORY EFFORTS WITH ALL DUE HASTE!
“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:
(I’M REALLY SORRY ABOUT YOUR BIKE.)
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.