The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [10]
Would any of this help today? Winston didn’t know. But he doubted he and his friends would be handed a bunch of word searches and pencil puzzles. Dmitri Simon enjoyed stunts that were big and goofy. Winston would try to remember not to be surprised by anything: With this guy’s money and wacky ideas, anything was possible.
Winston looked at the clock again and sighed—6:05 A.M. He’d killed twenty minutes. He had another full hour before he even needed to get dressed.
He wandered the house a while more and then finally grabbed a puzzle magazine and stretched out on the sofa. It was going to be a long wait, but at least he had a puzzle to solve in the meanwhile.
You can take a three-letter puzzle piece from each of the three columns, and read across to make a series of nine-letter words. If you write these words in the order shown below, you’ll find an extra phrase reading down in two places.
(Answer, page 239.)
Jake and Mal were dropped off shortly after eight o’clock. Winston’s mother had already left for work. His dad worked at home in the summer—soon he would go edit magazine articles, but right now he was cleaning up breakfast. And Winston’s little sister, Katie, was sitting on the sofa, her arms crossed in an exaggerated mope. Her school wasn’t participating in the big contest. Perhaps her principal never figured out the code, or elementary schools weren’t sent the code in the first place. Either way, she was ticked.
She spent the morning trying to convince Winston to take her along. When that didn’t work, she tried getting her parents to make Winston take her along. That didn’t work, either. Now she wasn’t talking to him, and instead of being happy that it was the first day of summer vacation, she was acting like she was locked in a Siberian prison.
“Hi, Katie,” said Jake as he walked in.
“Hmmph,” Katie said back, crossing her arms tighter.
Seeing that she was angry about something, Mal instinctively had to make things worse. “Katie!” he shouted. “Give me a hug!” He advanced toward her, his arms outstretched.
Katie was shocked right out of her mood. “Gah!” she said, leaping onto the back of the sofa and jumping off the other side. “Get away from me! Gross!” She ran up the stairs to her room, slamming her door as hard as she could.
Winston’s father poked his head in. “What was that?” he said.
“Your daughter loves me,” said Mal.
“Oh.” Nathan Breen was used to Mal. He went back to whatever he was doing in the kitchen without further comment.
The wait continued, although at least now Winston had his friends with him. The three boys briefly considered playing their video game, but they were too restless. They paced around and tried to guess what might happen today. Winston told them about the oddball publicity stunts Dmitri Simon had pulled off in the past.
“So it’s impossible to say what we’ll be asked to do,” Winston said.
“We should bring a bunch of random stuff with us. Maybe some of it will come in handy,” said Jake.
“A box of paper clips,” said Mal. “A birthday cake. A scuba diving suit.”
Jake stared at Mal. “I meant random stuff that’s not completely crazy.”
“What’s crazy about a scuba diving suit?” Mal wanted to know. “You’ll apologize when we have to swim to the bottom of the river to get a clue.”
They bantered and bickered a while more. Winston wondered, not for the first time, if he should tell Mal and Jake how close they had come to getting kicked off the team. He’d gone back and forth on that over the last several days. Ultimately, he decided to keep his mouth shut. He only hoped that Mr. Garvey