The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [26]
Whatever else a quasar might be, it was definitely the answer to the puzzle. It had to be, but there was still a tense moment until Jake confirmed the answer with the mini computer. Then there were high fives all around, even with Mr. Garvey.
They rushed out to the parking lot. Jake glanced under each tire before getting into the car. Mr. Garvey barked at him to stop dawdling, but Winston knew he was looking for more signs of sabotage.
“What’s the next stop?” said Mr. Garvey when they were all settled in.
Jake studied the computer. “Sutherland Farms.”
“Sounds familiar. Where is it?”
“West Meadow. I have directions.”
“All right,” said Mr. Garvey. “We’re off.”
They drove along, and Jake read directions off the computer screen in a low and distant monotone. Winston suspected he was still upset about the trick they had played on the girls’ team. It was all Mr. Garvey’s doing, of course, but the girls wouldn’t know that. And even if they never saw the girls again after this was over, they would return home convinced that all of them—not just Mr. Garvey but all of them—were underhanded and scheming, full of smiles when needing a little help but also willing to stab a friend in the back for a few seconds’ worth of advantage. The girls would say to their friends, “Some of those people we met today were just awful,” and they would be referring in part to Jake.
And the fact was, Jake would never cheat. Never.
If Winston was playing Monopoly with his sister Katie and had to leave the room for some reason, he would take all his money with him. If he didn’t, his stack would be a little lighter when he returned. Katie was a good kid and a good sister, but the temptation to pinch a hundred dollars or slip an extra house onto Pennsylvania Avenue was, for her, too much to resist.
Jake would resist. Winston could stop the game, take a bicycle ride around the neighborhood, and come back to find the board and his bank account exactly as he’d left it. Jake was competitive—in fact, very competitive—but he was what Winston’s dad called “the right kind of competitive.” If he won, he wanted to know he had earned it from start to finish, fair and square.
And Mal? He might give himself five hotels on Boardwalk or rob the bank entirely so that Winston would return to see his friend sitting behind a huge pile of money and a big, fat grin. That wasn’t cheating. That was just being Mal.
Winston understood why Jake was upset, but Winston wasn’t entirely sure that their teacher had cheated. He had played a trick, certainly—offered to help another team and then snatched that help away. It was bad sportsmanship, but was it cheating? Winston couldn’t quite pin that label on it . . . not when somebody else out there had given them a flat tire with a broken bottle. That was cheating.
And now he realized something else, something so obvious he didn’t know how he’d missed it: Whoever had wedged that bottle under their tire had also moved the signs at the space museum. The signs were supposed to have been in front of the planetarium doors, guiding all the teams inside. But someone—the cheater, surely—had moved the signs to that small, dark hallway.
First the flat tire, then the disappearing signs. Someone was trying to knock them out of the race and doing a fine job of it. Was there a way to figure out who it was?
He could rule out the girls from Greater Oaks right off the bat. They wouldn’t move the signs and then pretend they couldn’t find the puzzle. The point of cheating is to slow down everybody else, not your own team.
That left eight other teams. Could he eliminate any others? Could he eliminate