The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [44]
He headed for the heart of Adventureland. Bethany was right behind him.
The paths in the park ambled this way and that; you could hardly walk in a straight line for more than twenty feet. Winston and Bethany rounded a corner and almost crashed into a crowd of teenagers. They skirted around them gingerly, avoiding their glares and their shouts of “Hey, kid!”
“Cut through the arcade!” Bethany yelled to him and veered diagonally over to a long, low-roofed building. Winston, panting, his heart kathudding in his chest, strained to catch up. They bounded up the stoop and into the building, running past the Skee-Ball bowlers and little kids playing Whac-a-Mole.
They burst out the other side of the arcade and found themselves at the entrance to the office. The business office was a small, white house that looked like it had been blown here from a nearby neighborhood. When he was a little kid, Winston thought that some lucky family lived in that house, right in the middle of the amusement park. They ran up the three steps of the porch and through the door.
Behind a counter, an overweight woman sat pecking at a typewriter, and a casually dressed man was chatting on the telephone, leaning way back in his swivel chair.
This was not the time for politeness. “I need the key to the Ferris wheel!” Winston shouted, leaning all his weight on the counter so as not to collapse onto the floor. Beside him, Bethany was also trying to get her breath back.
The woman turned to look at him, startled. She wore a little name tag on her wildly colored blouse that identified her as Rhonda Weeks. The man on the phone ignored them—he turned away and put a finger in the ear that wasn’t glued to the phone.
Winston only needed one person’s attention. “The Ferris wheel is stuck,” he told Rhonda Weeks. “The guy lost the key, and there are people stuck on the ride. You have an extra key, right? We need it!”
Rhonda squinted at him. “What do you mean, he lost the key?”
Waving her hands for emphasis, Bethany said, “Someone stole the key, and people are stuck on the ride.”
“Ride operators are supposed to keep the key on them at all times,” Rhonda said crossly.
Winston thought she was focusing on the wrong part of the problem. “Well, he lost it,” he said. “Do you have an extra?”
She considered them for several long moments, and then said, “Yeah, hang on. . . .” She opened up a desk drawer and began rooting through it. Winston put a closed fist to his mouth to prevent himself from yelling at her to hurry up. He had hoped he could retrieve the key and get back to the Ferris wheel before Mr. Garvey even knew he had left. Winston felt the seconds race by while she sorted through a decade’s worth of broken pencils and loose change.
“All right, here we go,” she said at last. Then, to Winston’s horror, she hoisted herself up from her sagging office chair. “Let’s go see,” she said.
Winston’s plan was to run back to the Sun Wheel as quickly as they had run here. He did not get the impression that Rhonda Weeks was planning to run with them. For one thing, she was oblivious to the urgency of the situation. Also, it was clear that Rhonda Weeks had not done any running in a long, long time.
“Uh, okay,” he said. He and Bethany shared a look of dismay.
Rhonda plodded to the office door, the key dangling casually in her hand. A plan materialized in Winston’s brain. He knew it was a bad idea—maybe even a very bad idea. But he didn’t see that he had a choice . . . not if he wanted to get back to the Ferris wheel during this century. There was still a chance he could get back without getting in trouble with Mr. Garvey.
Rhonda took her first slow step down the office’s small porch. Winston touched Bethany on the shoulder