The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (26 page)

His stomach rumbled. Didn’t Dmitri Simon say something about having a barbecue? Yes, Winston thought he did. Good—all Winston had eaten today were those cereal bars, a small bag of potato chips, and a few sips of water.

They filed through the lobby and back toward the conference room. The teams had blown out of there hours earlier like a stampede of bulls, but on the return trip, they were a much more subdued group—exhausted, muscles sore from all the walking and running, voices hoarse from yelling. It had been a great day, and even when you figured in the cheater and his own single-minded math teacher, Winston had to admit he’d had a fun time. Thank goodness his friends had been here.

All the teams automatically sat in the seats they had occupied this morning, as if doing otherwise would have violated some unwritten law. At each place was a small booklet. “WANT MORE PUZZLES?” it said. Winston flipped through it. It looked, indeed, like a bunch more puzzles by Dmitri Simon. Excellent. Winston put it in his back pocket for later.

Everyone could tell who had won—the West Meadow team was the only one wearing broad smiles. They accepted some congratulations from the team sitting next to them, and Carl Lester pumped the other teacher’s hand like he’d just been elected mayor.

With everyone back in their original seats, it was clear that some teams had not returned. The Demilla Academy was gone, as Mr. Garvey had said—they had taken their fancy clothes back home. The New Easton team was also gone. The girl on their team had been locked into the bathroom. That must have thrown a little scare into them, even before the cheater and his memo pad had been revealed. And the Kennedy team, their computer lost or stolen, had not come back to see how things turned out.

The missing teams stood out like gaps in a smile, and Winston felt a pang of shame that it was his teacher who had talked two of them into dropping out.

Dmitri Simon and his associates came in through the stage door, and there was a small round of applause—less wild and raucous than at the start of the event. Winston looked around and saw that some teams weren’t clapping at all. Mr. Regal, the coach of the Brookville Brains, had his arms crossed and a scowl on his face, and a few other people around the room wore similar expressions.

Simon seemed pleased, though, as he took his place behind the podium. “Welcome back, everybody! Well, almost everybody. You all look hot and tired, but I hope you had a good time. And I hope you’re hungry, because we have about a thousand pounds of food in the picnic area behind the factory.”

There were some cheers in response to this. Jake said to Mr. Garvey, “I don’t think you’re going to get a chance to speak to him before he awards the winner.”

Mr. Garvey rubbed his forehead. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” he said.

“We seem to have lost a couple of teams,” said Simon, looking around the room. “That’s too bad. More food for the rest of us, I guess!” He patted his protruding belly with a grin.

Mr. Regal, arms still crossed tightly, yelled out, “What are you going to do about the cheater who was running around? Huh?”

Dmitri Simon looked startled. He wasn’t even sure who had yelled that, or why. “The cheater? What do you mean?”

And then suddenly everybody was yelling. It was impossible to hear anybody’s individual words, but from the look on Simon’s face, he was getting the general gist: Something had gone wrong with his carefully planned event. He waved his hands, trying to get things under control. “All right,” he said loudly. “All right, settle down, everybody!” Quiet slowly descended over the room again. Simon let the silence drag on for a little bit while he thought of what he was going to say next. Winston glanced over to Carl Lester and the West Meadow team. Mr. Lester looked the smallest bit nervous—or maybe that was Winston’s imagination.

“This is the first I’m hearing about this,” said Dmitri Simon. “Someone cheated? Really?” He chuckled in disbelief. “I don’t see how. Did somebody steal the answers from another team? Did someone steal the answers from
me
?”

“He gave us a flat tire!” yelled the coach of the Brains.

“He broke the Ferris wheel!” yelled Rod Denham of Lincoln Junior High. Oh, right, they’d had a kid stuck on the ride, too—Winston had forgotten that part.

Dmitri Simon was astounded. “He broke the Ferris wheel?” he repeated. “How do you break a Ferris wheel?”

“He locked a girl in the bathroom back at the farm!” This was Bethany doing the yelling this time. Simon looked over at her, more and more disturbed.

There was some more shouting, and people were starting to overlap each other again. Simon once again called for quiet, and the yelling petered out. Simon looked to his associates, who looked neutral and calm. They shrugged back at their boss.

“All right,” said Simon. “Why didn’t someone call me? Tell me about this sooner?”

“Your phone system is like another puzzle,” the Brookville Brains coach yelled out. “A really hard one.”

Simon frowned. “Oh,” he said, thrown off balance. “Well. We’re going to look into this, I promise. We’re not going to have a whole discussion about it right now. If you have any information about this cheater, please come up to me or one of my partners here. If we determine that the event was compromised in any way, we will make amends. I swear to that. I’ll make a donation to every single school if I have to.” One of the partners looked alarmed, and Simon said, “Oh, calm down, Robert. I’ll do it from my personal account.” Robert, rebuked, took a step backward and regained his calm expression.

“For now, however, we’re going to proceed,” Simon continued. “We do have a winner, and I want to use this time to congratulate them. It was very exciting, sitting here at headquarters watching the answers come in. We thought for a while that nobody was going to solve that prison puzzle—you guys really had us nervous. But finally one team managed to break through and get all the way to the end. So let’s have a round of applause for the kids from West Meadow Junior High and their vice principal, Carl Lester!”

There was applause, dampened by the specter of the cheating scandal. Winston looked at Mr. Garvey, who was not applauding and was in fact frowning deeply. They had hoped to tell Simon what they knew before West Meadow had been officially declared the champs. This wasn’t working out very well at all.

Carl Lester led his boys down to the stage. One of Simon’s assistants floated off stage for a moment, and returned with a six-foot novelty check, with FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS written on it in huge type. The assistant wasn’t sure how to hold his giant thing and stumbled and fumbled it to center stage.

Winston found himself getting to his feet.

As the applause died down, and before Dmitri Simon could begin his congratulatory speech, Winston called out, “Brendan! Hey, Brendan!”

Everybody on the stage looked up to see who was shouting.

Mr. Garvey gave Winston an incredulous look. “What are you doing?” he said softly.

“I have an idea,” Winston said, and he called out to the group on the stage, “Brendan! Did your teacher tell you to call me?”

Brendan Root blinked rapidly. “What?” he said.

“You called me a few days ago. You tried disguising your voice, and you wouldn’t tell me your name, but I know it was you. Did your teacher tell you to do that, or did you do it on your own?”

Several dozen heads turned back and forth between Winston and Brendan. They were all aimed at Brendan now.

Dmitri Simon interrupted this long-range conversation. “Excuse me, my friend,” he called back to Winston, “I think this can wait, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid it can’t,” said Mr. Garvey, getting to his feet as well. “If you’ll just give my student the benefit of the doubt for a moment, I think you’ll see this question is very important.”

Throughout this, Winston kept his eyes on Brendan, who loved puzzles as much as him and maybe more. He thought Brendan was on the brink of solving one more puzzle . . . one he didn’t necessarily
want
to solve. Looking very small on the stage, Brendan turned to look at his teacher, who was watching him warily. Brendan then peered back up at Winston, disappointment and maybe even grief on his boyish, round face.

Yes, Brendan had figured it out. People from other teams were complaining about a cheater . . . but Brendan’s team hadn’t been affected in the least. And now here was Winston asking this very unusual question.

“Yes,” Brendan said. “My teacher asked us to find out who would be on other teams. That’s why I called you.”

One of Brendan’s teammates said, “Shut up!”

There was an explosion of muttering from the others in the room. Carl Lester, smiling, put a hand on Brendan’s shoulder as if to lead him offstage.

Winston called out again, “Mr. Lester! Do you know why I asked Brendan that question?”

Dmitri Simon was no longer trying to hush Winston. In fact, he looked pretty interested in what Winston was saying.

Mr. Lester didn’t know where to go or what to do. He looked up at Winston. “I’m not really sure what you’re talking about, young man,” he said.

“Well, we recovered some stuff from the man in the green jacket. That’s the cheater everyone’s so upset about. He had a list of license plate numbers, and he also had a bunch of our names. I was on that list, for instance. So how did the cheater know I was going to be here?”

“How . . . how would I know that?” Mr. Lester said.

“You told your students to ask around. You told them to find out who was going to be here. You and your friend made up a list of people to watch out for. Kids you had to knock out of the way if you were going to win.”

“I did no such thing!” Mr. Lester said. “How dare you!”

“Yes, you did,” said a new voice. It wasn’t Brendan. It was one of his teammates. One of the two brothers. The other brother turned and gasped at this betrayal, but the boy continued. “It’s just like he said. You told us to guess who might be at this event. I told you her name.” The boy was pointing at Bethany. “I remembered her from the science fair this year.”

“I was on that list, too,” said Bethany. “Bethany Seymour.”

“Who else was on this list?” Dmitri Simon asked.

Brendan’s teammate, continuing despite his brother’s outrage, said, “My brother learned that a kid named Michael Scott was going to be here. And my teacher told us he thought a particular teacher, Mr. Denham, would be here.”

“I
am
here,” said Rod Denham, looking somehow affronted that he wasn’t recognized.

“Where is this list now?” Simon asked.

Winston and his teammates looked at each other. Then Winston fished the memo pad out of the plastic bag. All eyes turned to him as the bag crinkled and crackled. Carl Lester’s eyes were filled with a growing panic; everyone else watched with fascination. Winston walked down the aisle to the stage and handed the memo pad to Dmitri Simon. “The last couple of pages,” Winston said.

Simon flipped to the right spot and stared. After a moment he said, “Breen. Seymour. Scott. Denham. It’s all right here.” He looked up and said to his men, “Escort this man to the small conference room and keep an eye on him. And call the police.”

“Wait!” said Carl Lester, putting up his hands to keep grasping arms away from him. “Wait! This is crazy! Get away from me!” Simon’s men were not security guards; they didn’t know how to restrain someone who didn’t want to be restrained. Carl Lester didn’t get away from them with the expertise of a secret agent—he fought back more like a child who doesn’t want to take a bath. But he escaped their grasp and made a break for the upstage door. One of the other men grabbed for him and missed. There was chaos up on the stage now. Winston and Brendan jumped away as the men ran around the stage. Lester stormed by them, out the door, and was gone.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Dmitri Simon. “Go get him! Can’t the three of you stop one guy from leaving a room? I don’t want that guy running around my building! You go that way and you go
that
way,” he yelled at his men as they stumbled their way out of every possible exit. “Watch the parking lot! Don’t let him get back to his car!”

Winston walked shakily back up to his team. Mal said to him, “It doesn’t matter. Even if he gets back to his car, he’s not going anywhere.”

“What?” Winston said. “Why not?”

“Maybe you’ll notice that last bottle is no longer in the plastic bag.”

Jake gasped. “You didn’t!”

“Oh, yes.” Mal grinned. “I gave him a back-tire wedgie.”

 

EVERYONE COULD TELL
Dmitri Simon was angry—not just at the people who screwed up his game by cheating, but at himself for allowing it to happen. He regained his smile just a little after Carl Lester was recovered in the parking lot, but he was no longer the boisterous Santa Claus they had all met at the start of the day.

He announced that everyone should go enjoy the picnic, but that he and his men would be speaking to each team in an effort to figure out what had happened . . . and who, if anybody, should be awarded the prize money.

The teams were led to a large field behind the factory. Winston accepted some congratulations and claps on the back from kids on other teams. Mal tried to get everyone to lift Winston up on their shoulders, as if he had just caught the winning pass in the Super Bowl, but there were no takers, least of all Winston.

The employees of Simon’s Snack Foods were already behind the factory, sitting at picnic tables and eating hamburgers. Music was playing, and several large barrels contained bags of potato chips and pretzels. Winston wondered if Simon’s workers were sick to death of eating salty snacks.

The boys and their teacher claimed a picnic table and sat.

“What’s going to happen now?” Jake asked.

“Now I am going to have about seventeen hamburgers,” said Mal. “I’ve had enough cereal bars to last a lifetime.”