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So they turned around and stared some more at the jail. After a while, Mal said, “Let’s move closer.” That was something to do, anyway, so they bobbed their way through the small crowd of onlookers—shoppers and restaurant-goers who had to stop and gaze at this spectacle.

Jake said, “Hey, look at that.”

They looked at the prisoners. They looked at the signs. “What am I looking at?” Mal said.

“The numbers. That’s probably important, isn’t it?”

Winston didn’t see any numbers, but then all of a sudden he did. Each of the uniforms bore a white patch embossed with a black number. The man who had supposedly Cheated Your Neighbors (and why “your” neighbors? why not “his” neighbors?) was prisoner #238.

“Might be a red herring,” Mr. Garvey said. “Might just be part of their costumes.”

“Can we write them down anyway?” Winston asked. So Mr. Garvey got out his pad and pen again. He made a little chart.

“Yes!” came a cry to their left. They all spun their heads. It was Bethany and her team. They had approached the cells, too, and now they were jumping up and down—all four of them, including Miss Norris. After this short celebration, they all ran back to the parking lot.

“Whoa,” said Jake.

“They came closer to the prison, just like we did,” said Winston. “Maybe these prisoner numbers are important after all. Maybe that’s the key.”

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

Mal saw it first. It was almost as if the answer had snuck up from behind and grabbed him. His arms flailed out in different directions and he yelled with astonishment: “Hey! HEY!”

“Hey, what?”

“Wait a second, wait a second,” Mal said. He seized the notebook out of Jake’s hands and stared at it with widening eyes. “Ah!” he yelled after a moment. “See! See? See!”

Winston was amused. “Either he has the answer,” he said, “or his brain has exploded.”

Mal finally calmed down enough to explain what he’d discovered. The prisoner number was important. The first number was #238. If you took the second, third, and eighth letter out of that prisoner’s crime, you got the word HEY. You needed to take the first, fifth, and ninth letter out of the second crime, which gave you the word SEE.

They quickly counted out the rest of the letters they needed. This gave them six three-letter words.

“That’s not a coincidence,” Winston said.

“It’s not an answer, either,” Mr. Garvey noted. “What are we supposed to type into the computer?”

“All six words?” Mal suggested.

“Yuck,” said Winston.

But they agreed it was worth a shot, so Winston turned on the computer and navigated his way to the proper place. He typed in the six words and, not surprisingly, was told, “That is not the right answer.”

“No dice,” he said.

“We’ve got it,” said Mr. Garvey. “We just don’t know it yet. How can we turn these words into the answer we need?”

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

Jake got it this time. Winston felt a pang of jealousy. He hadn’t contributed a single thing to this puzzle. Well, he’d solved other things today. You couldn’t solve them all.

It was so obvious Winston felt ashamed for not seeing it immediately. The six words all sounded like letters. HEY didn’t sound exactly like the letter A, but the other five words undoubtedly clued the letters C, Q, U, I, and T. Put them all together and they spelled ACQUIT. That had to be the answer, and it was. Winston, fingers shaking with excitement, typed it into the proper space, and received a congratulations in return.

“That was some fast solving, boys,” said Mr. Garvey. “That’s exactly the break we needed. Come on! We can do this!”

Back in the parking lot, Mr. Garvey fumbled with his keys as he tried unlocking his car. A couple of cars away stood another team, engaged in some sort of high drama. Winston recognized one of the boys: John Curran, the obnoxious kid who said he was going to kick everybody’s butt. So this was the team from Kennedy Junior High. John was yelling—screaming, really—at one of his teammates, a girl who was sitting on the tailgate of her teacher’s car, her