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“Three teams solved it already,” Jake said. “How hard could it be?”

Winston didn’t reply. Every puzzle was hard when you didn’t know the answer. Every puzzle was easy when you knew what to do. “Come on, let’s circle back,” he finally said.

They walked slowly, not saying anything. Winston stared at the pavement, the twelve pictures from the Sun Wheel spinning around in his mind. He felt like he was stumbling his way through a dark room, looking for a light switch that might not even be there. He thought of Brendan Root, who had solved this thing easily enough. “This puzzle was fun, wasn’t it?” he’d said in the parking lot. What had Brendan seen in these twelve pictures that Winston was missing?

He was startled when Jake stopped his progress with a hand to his chest. “Look,” he said. Winston looked up.

Twenty yards ahead was the girl’s team: Bethany and her teammates, all in that same state of hypnosis, staring up at the Ferris wheel.

The three boys looked at each other, having a silent conversation about whether to continue forward or turn around like scared kittens.

“C’mon,” Jake said, deciding for the lot of them.

They were only a few steps closer when Bethany glanced over and saw them. She nudged Giselle, who in turn nudged Elvie. Winston looked at his friends as if to ask, “Should we keep going?” Bethany had an expression on her face like she couldn’t wait for the confrontation they were all about to have. But Jake never paused.

“The cheaters are here,” announced Bethany. “Hide your belongings.”

Winston flushed. He didn’t know what to say. He knew the girls would feel tricked, but it felt awful to be accused of outright cheating.

Jake didn’t like it, either. “We didn’t cheat,” he said.

“You left us standing in that hallway,” said Giselle. “We were working together, remember? We were all looking for the puzzle together.” Her pretty face was dark with disappointment.

“Our teacher did that,” Jake replied in a calm voice. Winston was more than happy to let him speak for all of them. “He decided not to tell you when we found the puzzle. He’s very . . . competitive. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have left you waiting there.”

The girls looked at him, weighing the sincerity of this apology. The smallest girl on their team, Elvie, then said, “And what about the bathroom?” She crossed her arms while asking this, like a lawyer who knows she’s about to make a defendant confess.

Winston didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. Neither did Mal or Jake. The boys looked at one another, each hoping somebody else knew what that question meant. Mal finally said, “I admit it. Sometimes I have to go to the bathroom.”

Elvie grimaced. “The bathroom back at the farm,” she said. “That was you, wasn’t it?” She looked at them. “That was a mean trick.”

Winston was starting to experience the detached and dizzy feeling that comes when you have no idea what is going on. “Whatever you’re talking about,” he said, “we had nothing to do with it.”

“We’re not cheaters,” Jake said, a bit more adamantly. “Somebody else is cheating. They gave us a flat tire, and they moved the signs at the planetarium so that we couldn’t find the puzzle. Whatever you’re talking about, the cheater probably did that, too.”

“I believe them,” Bethany said, sounding surprised with herself.

“You do?” Giselle was shocked.

“Yeah. He’s right. Someone moved those signs in the planetarium, but it wasn’t these guys. They got stuck by that, same as us. They should have played fair and told us when they found the puzzle”—Bethany glanced at the boys one by one, as if daring them to argue this point—“but they didn’t move the signs in the first place. Somebody’s cheating, but it’s not them.”

“Who is it, then?” Elvie asked. Nobody could answer.

Winston asked them about this incident in a bathroom, and the girls finally told the story: Someone on the New Easton team, a girl named Krissy Huang, had gone into the ladies’ restroom at Sutherland Farms. When she tried coming back out again, the door wouldn’t open. The doorknob turned,