The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [58]
They observed the scene for a few moments more, and then Mr. Garvey said. “All right, guys. Believe it or not, we’re going to split up.”
“We are?” Mal said.
“Look around,” their teacher said. “These kids in the shirts are everywhere. If we have to go up to every one of them, it’s going to take forever.” He began pointing around the green. “Jake, you take that area. Mal, you go over there. Winston, head in that direction. I’ll go over here. Approach these people, get whatever they’re giving out, and then we’ll meet back here in ten minutes. All right? Go!”
They went off in all directions.
Winston looked around as he walked and saw more teams—there was one sitting on a bench, there was another running to catch up to a guy in a red T-shirt. He glanced toward the street just as a car parked—all the doors opened and another team flew out, ready for anything. They stopped short when they discovered they didn’t know where to go or what to do. Well, they would discover the people in the T-shirts soon enough.
He wondered where Brendan Root was. How close were they to winning?
Winston also wondered if the cheater was around here somewhere. What was that guy planning to do next? And to whom? A cold shudder shook him—suddenly, being off by himself didn’t seem like such a hot idea. Ray Marietta had asked, “He’s after you specifically?” That was the typically blunt way Ray put things, but it was true. The man in the green jacket was after him, and a bunch of other kids, too. He was somewhere nearby—Winston was sure of it. He was watching, waiting to make his next move.
Stop it, he told himself. He was frightening himself like a little kid reading ghost stories. Winston was out in the open, in a familiar, public place, in full view of fifty or a hundred people. There wasn’t much the cheater could do here. Still, better to get the job done and rejoin his team.
Up ahead was a girl in a green T-shirt with a picture of a snail on the back. How strange. Winston ran up to her.
“Uh, hi!” he said to her. “You’re . . . you’re giving away something?”
“Do you have an answer for me?” she said.
Winston didn’t know what that meant. “An answer? To what?”
“To my riddle: If you beat me, I will yell. What am I?” She looked at him expectantly.
“That’s a riddle?” Winston asked.
“It is. Do you know the answer?”
He didn’t. The girl saw the blankness on his face and nodded with sympathy. She said, “You can come back and tell me the answer whenever you have it. Bye, now.” She wandered off.
Could the answer be a snail—the picture on the back of her shirt? No, that didn’t make much sense, funny as it might be to imagine hitting a snail and having it yell at you, angrily waving its slimy little antennae.
All at once he had a blast of realization—the right answer was going to be on one of these shirts. He just had to find the right person. And one of these other people had a riddle, the answer to which would be a snail.
Winston was suddenly whipping his head around, trying to see everywhere at once. The town green never seemed larger, and the college kids in the colored T-shirts were all over the place. He ran to the next closest person and looked at his back. This guy’s picture was a can of paint. That wasn’t the answer to the girl’s riddle, either.
The guy noticed Winston and turned to face him. He was frowning and spread his arms out like he was about to sing opera. “I have a riddle for you,” he intoned gravely. “Tell me the answer if you can.” This guy was definitely taking his role seriously. Maybe too seriously.
“Okay,” Winston said.
The guy cleared his throat theatrically and said, “I get shorter the longer I stand. What am I?”
Winston sighed. He didn’t know the answer to this one, either.
The guy saw that Winston didn’t know and shook his head, clucking with pity. “If you cannot answer, I cannot help you. Good day to you.” He swept himself around as if he thought he was wearing a great royal robe