The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [2]
“All right. All right. Good,” he said. “I want you to look at this. Here.” Mr. Unger thrust the paper into Winston’s hands.
It was quite fancy—stiff and crackly, and the color of rich cream. On it were a bunch of letters and numbers, written in ink:
(Continue reading to see the answer to this puzzle.)
This was not at all what he had expected from a visit to the principal’s office. “What is this?” asked Winston.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“It looks like a code of some kind. Where did it come from?”
Unger shook his head. “Don’t know. It was in my mailbox this morning, but there was no return address.”
“Was there a postmark?”
Mr. Unger stopped pacing. “The postmark! I didn’t think of that. I knew you were the right person to call on this.” He sat down in his chair, leaned over, and dug through his garbage pail, looking for the right envelope. “Aha, here we go,” he said. The envelope was fancy, too. Mr. Unger brushed it off and looked at it, frowning.
“What does it say?” said Winston.
Mr. Unger didn’t respond. He just handed the envelope over.
Winston looked at the front. There was no postmark. There was no stamp. “Oh,” he said. He decided to sit in one of the two chairs in front of the principal’s desk.
“Someone must have come in and slipped it into my mailbox,” said Mr. Unger.
“I guess that means it’s from someone nearby,” said Winston.
Unger nodded his head. “I guess so. I guess so. I’ll ask if any of the secretaries saw anything. But the main office is busy all morning. Anybody could have come in and put something in my mailbox. Can you figure out what it is?”
“I don’t know,” said Winston. “It could mean anything. Maybe it has something to do with a map.”
“A map,” the principal repeated, not understanding.
“You know how maps have letters across the top and numbers down the side? So you can find locations on them?”
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Unger, sitting back in his chair. “Coordinates. So we need a map . . . a map of what? The town?”
“I don’t know,” Winston said again. “Maybe.”
“I can have Mrs. Lembo bring one in.”
Winston shook his head. “The problem is, which map? The map in the phone book, the map in the road atlas? They’re all different.”
“Hmm,” said Mr. Unger, frowning.
Winston added, “And do we need a map of the town or the state or the country? We could be staring at maps the rest of our life.”
“All right,” said the principal. “Then what do you suggest? Maybe it’s not a code. Maybe it’s something else.”
“What?”
“Another kind of puzzle, maybe. A connect the dots.”
Winston blinked. “What?”
The principal leaned forward. “Can you connect these letters and numbers in some way? Draw lines between them? Start at A1 then go to A2 . . . ?”
Winston thought about it. It didn’t sound right, but it was more than he’d come up with. But then he noticed something. “There is no A1,” he said. “Or A2. The first pair alphabetically is”—he scanned the paper—“A4. And then there’s no A5.”
“Hmm,” said Mr. Unger.
Winston said, “I still think it’s a code.” He stood up and started pacing, just as the principal had been when he arrived. “Each letter and number pair is going to stand for a letter. Or a bunch of letters. Or . . .” He drifted off, staring at the paper. A wisp of an idea had breezed through his mind, fluttering just out of reach. “There’s no A5,” he said again.
Mr. Unger said, “Do you think that’s important?”
“Maybe,” said Winston, rubbing his forehead. The first pair was C3. If that represented some other letter, what letter could it be? Maybe it was three letters past C . . . which meant F.
Winston’s eyes widened.
Mr. Unger saw that. “You have an idea, don’t you? Did you just solve it?”
“I think so,” Winston said, and told him his