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“All right, let’s start this again,” said Mr. Garvey, massaging the wrinkles in his forehead. “Pretend we just got here. Look! A whole bunch of pictures on that Ferris wheel! I’ll bet this is the puzzle we’re looking for!” He slapped both sides of his face in mock surprise.

Jake said, “Isn’t safehouse a word?”

“Sure it is. Why?”

“Well, there’s a safe,” Jake said, pointing, “and there’s a house. SAFEHOUSE.”

That made a lot of sense. Winston began looking for other compound words. “Maybe that’s not a trumpet or a bugle,” he said. “Maybe it’s a horn, and then you can make SHOEHORN.”

Mr. Garvey was nodding enthusiastically. “Okay! Now we’re getting somewhere. What else?”

The three of them kept staring. Winston glanced at Mal and saw him squeezing through the crowd, about to get on the ride. He wondered if they should call him back. Were they about to solve this?

Apparently not. “I hate to say this,” said Jake, “but I don’t see anything else. What are you supposed to do with the word rhinoceros?”

“RHINO HORN?” suggested Winston.

“We already used horn to make SHOEHORN.”

“Maybe it’s not a rhinoceros,” Mr. Garvey said.

“Then what is it?”

“It could be . . . it could be the word animal.” Mr. Garvey absorbed the doubtful looks from Winston and Jake. “All right, I’m just brain-storming here,” he said.

Winston mentally combined the pictures and continued to get nowhere. GARBAGE HATS? RHINOCEROS FACES? After that promising start, all he could find was nonsense.

Mal was being led onto the ride now. Winston could see him hopping in to one of the cars. Elvie stepped into the same car. They seemed to be hitting it off. The Sun Wheel lurched and began to spin, and the two of them were soon swinging their way toward the top.

“I think we have to try something else,” Mr. Garvey said, reluctantly.

“Me too,” Winston said. “Can I see the list of words?” Mr. Garvey handed it to him.

Maybe the pictures weren’t important, once you had named them all. Mr. Garvey had written the words down in a list. Winston wondered if he should write them out again, this time in a circle—maybe the pictures were in a particular order for a reason. He took the pencil from his back pocket, sat down with his back against a fence post, his knees up almost to his neck. He sketched out the words.

He looked at RHINOCEROS. Had he spelled it right? This was one of those words that always seemed to have a few extra letters in it, just for fun. “How do you spell rhinoceros?” he called to Mr. Garvey, but then instantly backtracked and said, “Never mind.” He scratched it out and wrote RHINO instead.

And that was all it took. “Ahh!” he yelled, and threw his head backward, and hit it against the fence he’d been leaning against. He tried to jump up, but he wasn’t in a position that allowed for jumping up. “Ahh!” he yelled again.

Jake asked, “Are you in pain, or do you have something?”

Winston stood up. He was nearly shaking with euphoria. “I have something.”

Mr. Garvey said urgently, “You solved it?”

“I think so. Look.” He held out the paper with the words written in a circle.

Winston said, “Each word is connected with the word directly opposite it.”

“Connected how?” asked Mr. Garvey. “TRASH HATS? What does that mean?”

Winston shook his head. “Figuring out the connection is part of the puzzle. But I’ve got it.”

(Continue reading to see the answer to this puzzle.)

CHAPTER EIGHT

ANOTHER TEAM WALKED past. Winston thought one of the girls was Krissy Huang, who had been trapped in the ladies’ room back at the farm. That would make this the New Easton team. They were staring up at the ride and trying to decide what to do next.

Winston took a few steps away to make sure they couldn’t hear him. “Look,” he said to his team in a low whisper, pointing at the paper. “Look at RHINO and HORN. All the letters in HORN are also in the word RHINO. If you remove all those letters, there’s only one left.”

“The letter I,” Mr. Garvey said.

Winston continued, “You can do that with every pair of words across from each other. FACES and SAFE. Take the letters from