The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (17 page)

“Are you okay?” Winston said, appalled at himself for not noticing his friend sooner.

“I’ll live,” Jake said in a low voice. “I just want to get back to the car.”

“That’s exactly where we’re going,” said Mr. Garvey, steering Winston away with that hand clamped on his shoulder. Winston looked back at Bethany and her teammates. If Winston was going to shout out the answer, he’d better do it in the next five seconds.

But he couldn’t. If he shouted out the word, he’d be giving it not just to Bethany’s team but to four or five other teams besides. Mr. Garvey would kill him, and Jake and Mal would help. No, he couldn’t just yell the answer. Bethany would have to work something out on her own. There was nothing Winston could do. He let Mr. Garvey steer them away from the Ferris wheel and the angry glare of the guard.

“So what happened?” Winston asked Jake as they walked. “That was the cheater, wasn’t it?”

“Did you put him under citizen’s arrest?” Mal asked.

“Citizen’s arrest, yeah,” Jake said, rolling his eyes. “Now I’m an honorary police officer.”

“So what happened?” Winston asked again.

“It’s a lucky thing we’re not all driving to the hospital right now,” Mr. Garvey said.

Jake put a hand up to his swollen eye. “I wanted to keep him from getting out of the park,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Did he know you were chasing him?” Winston asked.

Jake laughed, a brief and bewildered sound. “I guess he did! The guy was like an animal that escaped from the zoo. If he couldn’t go around a group of people, he’d crash right through them. The guy was
scary.
”

Mal shook his head in amazement. “I would have just stopped and waved good-bye to him.” He demonstrated this, waving his arm vigorously. “Good-bye, crazy, scary, cheating person! Don’t come back!”

“That would have been a very good idea,” Mr. Garvey said.

“Maybe I should have,” Jake said. “I really thought we had to stop him. I knew I wasn’t going to beat him up or anything like that, but I was hoping I could knock him down or something.”

“What would that have accomplished, Jake?” Mr. Garvey asked, shaking his head.

“If I stopped him, even for thirty seconds, I thought maybe a security guard would step in and grab him.”

“He was so much bigger than you,” Winston said.

Jake told them his idea was to slam his body into the guy, so that they both fell to the ground. “When I caught up to him, though, I tried this football-style tackle. I got my arms around him.” He demonstrated, extending his arms out wide as if to deliver a bear hug to an actual bear. Winston was amazed at Jake’s nonchalant bravery. There was no way Winston could have done any of this. He would have done exactly what Mal suggested: wave good-bye.

“That’s when the guy smacked me,” Jake said. “I thought I was going to fall—I
did
fall, but not before our legs all got tangled up together. I tripped and hit the sidewalk. But the cheater went
flying.
” Jake smiled at the memory. “His whole body was up in the air for a moment. It’s too bad he was facing away from me—I would have loved to have seen his face. He landed on the ground, and he lost the bag he was carrying.”

“Is this it?” Winston asked, pointing to the white plastic bag Jake was carrying. “You stole his bag?”

“No. I mean, I
wanted
to steal his bag. He had a shoulder bag, and he dropped it when he fell. I tried to grab it, but he got there first and smacked me again.” He added in a low voice, “That really hurt.” He put a hand up to his face. “Then he ran off,” he concluded.

Mal said, “Man, if we see this guy again, I am totally going to . . . stick my tongue out at him. And then run away.”

Jake told them that for a moment he could only lie there, sick with pain. “Then Mr. Garvey showed up. He helped me get on my feet.”

“How long did you strangle him?” Mal asked Mr. Garvey.

Jake said, “You know, I didn’t even get yelled at, now that I think about it.”

“You were lying in a heap on the ground,” Mr. Garvey said, a bit defensively. “Ebenezer Scrooge wouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“That must be the secret,” Mal said. “Next time I forget to do my science homework, I’ll throw myself down the stairs before I go to class. That way I won’t get in trouble.”

“Good plan,” Winston said.

“Anyway,” Jake said. “We didn’t get the cheater’s bag, but some stuff spilled out of it.”

Winston said, “You got some of the cheater’s things? Really? What did you get?”

Jake handed the plastic bag to Winston. “Take a look,” he said.

They stopped walking for a moment. Winston opened the bag, and he and Mal peered in.

Winston pulled out a glass bottle. He thought at first the cheater had filled it with beads or rocks. Then he realized what he was looking at: The bottle had been filled to the neck with glass shards from other broken bottles. The world’s most terrible soft drink. This was how the cheater delivered flat tires with such ease.

Mal dug around some more in the bag. He removed a small coil of twine and another string of firecrackers. Most oddly, he took out a set of mousetraps, still shrink-wrapped in their original packaging. “What was this guy going to do with a bunch of
mousetraps
?” Mal said, dumbstruck.

“There’s more,” Jake said. “Look at the memo pad.”

“Memo pad?” Mal asked. “What was he going to do, give us all paper cuts?”

“Just look,” Jake said.

Something in Jake’s tone made Winston dimly alarmed. He reached into the plastic bag and found a perfectly ordinary memo pad. He flipped through the pages, many of which were crumpled and mussed. He didn’t find anything exciting. “Carburetor from Mack” read one note. One page had strings of meaningless numbers, and there were doodles all over. Winston looked up at Jake questioningly.

“The last couple of pages,” Jake said.

Winston turned to the last page of writing, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. At first all he saw was a bunch of letters and numbers. Then his glance settled on something he couldn’t quite believe. Written in the cheater’s memo pad was his own name: BREEN.

“What . . . ?” he said.

“That’s your name!” Mal said.

“What’s my name doing in here?” Winston said. “This guy
knows
me?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What are all these letters and numbers?” Mal asked.

“License plates,” said Mr. Garvey. “Your name is written next to my license plate number.”

Mal said, “How does he know your license plate number?”

“I guess he saw it and he wrote it down,” Mr. Garvey said. “He gave us that flat tire, after all.”

There were a couple of other names in the book. Next to one license plate number was the name SEYMOUR. Next to another was SCOTT. Next to a third was DENHAM.

“Who are these other people?” Mal asked.

Jake said, “Denham is Rod Denham—that math teacher Mr. Garvey likes so much.”

“Scott . . . that might be Michael Scott,” said Winston, “the kid from the private school we met in the maze.”

“Who’s Seymour, then? A kid from another team?” Mal said. “Poor guy. Who names their kid Seymour?”

“That’s Bethany’s last name,” Winston said. “Whoever this cheater is, he knows Bethany . . . and he knows me.”

The three friends stared at each other with astonishment.

Mr. Garvey spoke up. “Okay, boys. This is what we’re going to do. You guys meet me at the car. I need to go back to the Ferris wheel for a moment.”

“You do?” Winston said. “Why?”

“Never mind why,” Mr. Garvey said. “Just meet me by the car.”

“I thought we were in a huge rush,” Mal added.

“We are,” said Mr. Garvey, “but there’s something I have to do first. I’ll be along in five minutes.” He took the memo pad out of Winston’s hands and the plastic bag from Jake. As he gave Jake his car keys, he looked down on the three of them and said, “Listen to me. If I get back to the car and even one of you is missing, I am going to do everything in my power to see you all get left back a grade. I’ll break into the school’s computer network if I have to. Maybe move all of you back to kindergarten. Do you understand?” The boys all nodded. “Then go.” Mr. Garvey turned on his heel and headed back into the park.

The boys watched him go. Winston had been sure that Mr. Garvey would want to run like mad back to the car—why did he need to stay behind? Well, they had their orders. The three boys turned and trudged through the parking lot. It felt like every car in the state was parked here. They finally tracked down Mr. Garvey’s car, but when they got there, nobody wanted to wait inside. Opening the doors released a hateful puff of sun-broiled air. They all said no thanks to that.

They opened the hatchback instead, and Jake dug out an ice-pack. It wasn’t particularly cold anymore, but it was better than nothing, so he wrapped it in some paper towels and held it against his swollen lip.

“What do you think Mr. Garvey’s doing?” Mal said.

“Telling the other teams what happened,” Winston guessed. “Warning them about the cheater.”

“That makes sense,” Jake said. “I wonder why he didn’t just say that.”

Winston kept thinking about that bottle filled with broken glass. What an ugly trick. He imagined the cheater breaking a bunch of glasses and jars, then carefully pouring the shards into empty bottles to make his booby traps. Who would think of doing something like that? And why was he doing it at all?

“Who is this guy?” he said out loud.

“The cheater?” Mal said. “He has to be working for somebody.”

“Who?” said Jake. “A rival potato chip company?”

Mal said, “I was thinking more like one of the other teams.” He stood up from where he’d been sitting on the car’s tailgate. “We all thought the cheater was somebody playing in the puzzle hunt. That’s still true. But instead of doing all the cheating himself, he’s working with somebody else. The kid on the team solves the puzzles, while his . . .”

“Older brother?” Winston suggested.

“Maybe,” said Mal. “While his older brother—or whoever—runs around tripping everybody up.”

They thought about that.

“Jeez,” said Winston. “Someone really wants to win this thing. And it doesn’t make sense. All the prize money goes to the school. It’s not like the kid gets anything.”

“He gets to say he won,” said Jake.

“That’s still a lot of trouble to go through,” Winston said.

They fell into silence, the three of them now sitting in the grass beside the hot car. They were too hot and tired and confused to try to figure out the mystery of the cheater and how Winston’s name wound up in his memo pad. Mal dug out some food, and Jake took a bottle of water. Winston found himself staring up at the big ADVENTURELAND sign in the distance, and within a few minutes he was jotting down an idea for a puzzle.