Maybe Victor was right, thought Chester, brushing his teeth for bed. Maybe this was a stupid plan all along.
Bethesda lay in bed, clutching Ted-Wo and trying to sleep, watching dark shadows drift and blend on her ceiling. She’d had a frustrating couple of days, starting with the mysterious attack on her poor defenseless bike. She’d gotten no real information from Natasha. When she called Pirate Sam’s, the manager (whose name was Stanley but who asked to be addressed as “Squid Guts”) had no idea whether the Ficker and Belinsky families had eaten there that Monday, let alone what time. He’d taken down Bethesda’s number and said the waiter for that section, Old Filthy Beard, would call her back. Meanwhile, she’d heard nothing new from Tenny—in fact, she’d barely seen her right-hand man this week at all.
She kicked her legs out from under the blanket, then fluffed and refluffed her pillow. Nine suspects danced in the air above her head, popping up one by one like on the opening credits of a TV show. The clues circled and cycled in her mind: the shattered glass and the drops of blood… the tiny screw on the floor of the Alcove… a batch of copied keys… two mysterious singers and their mysterious song….
What about the suspects she hadn’t talked to yet? Could Mr. Ferrars have done it himself? Maybe he told her about the keys to keep suspicion from falling on himself?
So many questions and still no answers—the trophy was still missing. But Bethesda knew it was more than Pamela’s gymnastics trophy keeping her awake. Sometimes Tenny was around, totally helping, other times he was nowhere to be found, or so distracted and in his head that he might as well be. Then there was Reenie Maslow, and the case of the friendship that ought to be, but wasn’t.
It’s like… it’s like everything is missing. Everything…
…and then Bethesda was strolling through Pilverton Mall, past Pirate Sam’s, past the nail salon and the bracelet store, and out onto the beach. The beach?
There went Ms. Pinn-Darvish, her jet-black hair bundled under a swim cap, walking her potbellied pig on a leash, his trotters splashing in and out of the breakers. Bethesda waved and kept walking, following a little hopping bird, a bluish swallow. She nearly ran into Todd and Natasha, both dressed for scuba diving. Boney Bones was sunbathing, reading a magazine, with Mr. Darlington beside him. Bethesda’s foot traced a ladder of shells, and when she looked up, there was Tenny, his ripped jeans dampened by the spray, his head bobbing up and down to whatever was on his iPod.
“You gotta hear this!” he called, holding out the earbuds to her. “It’s in the bag!”
“Who’s that by?”
“No, no!” he said, laughing, pointing at the backpack slung over her right shoulder. (Why did she have her backpack at the beach?) “It’s in the bag! It’s in the bag.”
Bethesda’s eyes shot open. She sat up in her bed and stared at the clock: 2:45 a.m.
It’s in the bag.
She jumped out of bed, ran to her backpack, and tugged furiously at the zipper. She dumped the contents of the little front pocket on the floor of her room. She sifted through old Post-it notes, assignment sheets, and gum wrappers until she found what she was looking for.
“Of course!” she shouted, then clamped her hand over her mouth and whispered instead. “Of course!”
The dingy, off-white piece of plastic lay on the carpet of her room, and now Bethesda knew it for what it was—a clue. She opened her Sock-Snow notebook and wrote furiously, to be sure she didn’t forget any of this before going back to sleep—though she seriously doubted whether she’d be able to sleep at all.
Finally, she’d cracked a piece of the mystery!
Chapter 33
A Scrape, Then a Bang, and Then a Crash
Bethesda stopped at the intersection of Hallway A and the Front Hall, at the door of the science room, shifting the small piece of plastic back and forth in her hands.
“Watch out, mystery,” she said to herself, and pushed open the door without stopping to knock. “Here I come.”
Mr. Darlington was hunched over his desk with a handful of coffee-shop napkins, desperately mopping up a puddle of spilled paste. “Bethesda? Hi. Having a bit of a… oh, for heaven’s…”
The paste was oozing toward the edge of the desk, seeping down the far side, even as it began to dry in crusty ripples along the surface. “I’m constructing a scale model of the Great Barrier Reef… undersea tectonics… ugh…” A dribble of paste smudged his palm. “If you could hand me…”
Bethesda fetched Mr. Darlington an oversized roll of paper towels from the sink, and then stood with her hands clasped behind her back, waiting. As he unspooled great handfuls of paper towel and corralled the creeping pool of paste, she felt like a teacher, standing patiently with a grim expression until everyone was paying attention.
At last he finished and looked up at her. “Okay. There we are. Now, what can I do for you?”
Bethesda Fielding, Master Detective, cut right to the chase. “Mr. Darlington, why did you lie to me?”
Mr. Darlington’s eyes widened behind his thick glasses. “Go ahead and kick the door shut, will you, Bethesda?”
She did, and then dragged a student chair into place across the desk from him; Bethesda’s expression remained steely, but her heart was hammering in her chest. She balanced her notebook carefully on a non-paste-smeared corner of the desk, and listened to what Mr. Darlington now swore to be the truth.
“It is true that I was here that Monday after school. It is true that I was dismantling Mary Bot Lincoln, and for exactly the reason I told you. Principal Van Vreeland said that since Pamela won the big gymnastics trophy, there would no longer be space in the Achievement Alcove to show off the robot that my sixth graders and I had worked so hard on.
“But I wasn’t here from after school until four. My wife, Nancy, had dropped me off that morning. She needs the car on Mondays and Wednesdays because she goes to the gym those days. She used to go near our house, but they changed the time of the yoga class. So she found a class at a different gym, but that teacher does Bikram yoga, and Nancy prefers Ashtanga yoga. They’re similar in certain ways, although—”
“Mr. Darlington? Stay on target.”
“Right. So, the point is, I didn’t have the car at school that day, and I needed it to crate up Mary Bot Lincoln and carry her home. You can’t carry seventy-nine pieces of disassembled android on a city bus, Bethesda,” he said, nervously twisting a crusted piece of paper towel. “So I got a ride from Mr. Melville, then came back later with my car and let myself in.”
“With the key that Mr. Ferrars had given you.”
Mr. Darlington’s eyebrows shot up behind his glasses. “I can see I’m not the only one who has crumbled before your powers of interrogation.”
Bethesda beamed inwardly at the compliment, but managed to keep her serious mystery-solving expression in place. “So, how late were you really here that Monday afternoon?”
“I’d say from about five to… I don’t know. Maybe quarter to six.”
Quarter to six. Bingo.
“And during that time, did you see or hear anything unusual?”