The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [72]
“Do we still have the cheater’s things?” Winston asked.
“They’re in the back,” Mr. Garvey said. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just want to see them.” Winston reached behind him, difficult with the seat belt on, and grabbed the plastic bag with the cheater’s stuff in it. A coil of strong twine. A string of firecrackers. A set of mousetraps.
And here was the bottle filled with broken glass, its neck stuffed with aluminum foil to keep the shards in. Winston thought of the man in the green jacket, sitting in his garage, smashing glass with a hammer and carefully pouring the broken bits into a bottle, a satisfied smile on his face. Who was he? Could he really be Brendan’s older brother or some other relative? Who else would do something so extreme for a kid Winston’s age?
Looking at the bottle, Winston found his thoughts moving in a new direction. If it wasn’t Brendan Root who started all this, then who had? If the man in the green jacket was working with someone, who could it be? Winston had a hard time believing it was any kid, not just Brendan. So was it one of the grown-ups? One of the teachers? Would a teacher go so far as to hire someone to sabotage all the other teams?
Winston glanced at the back of Mr. Garvey’s head. It didn’t seem so outrageous at all, did it? All it took was a desire to win, multiplied by a billion. Mr. Garvey was halfway there himself, and a few of the other teachers were right there with him. Mr. Garvey wanted to show up his rival teacher from another school. Maybe another teacher needed that prize money for a special project. Maybe a third teacher simply never wanted to lose.
He was holding the bottle up to the sunlight, revolving it slowly back and forth, watching the rays bounce off the shards. Something was nibbling away at the back of his mind. Something to do with this bottle.
“Would you get a flat tire just because you drove over some broken glass?” he asked. “Not a booby trap like this, but just some broken glass lying on the road?”
“Maybe,” said Mr. Garvey. “I guess it’s possible.”
“That’s happened on my bicycle a few times,” Jake said.
“Yeah,” Winston said. He was thinking of Brendan Root’s teacher, who had dismissed the notion of a cheater so readily. Anybody could get a flat tire, he said. He’d recently had one himself. At that point, Winston didn’t know how to argue with him.
And just like that, all the puzzle pieces slammed together in his mind. If Winston had been standing, he would have fallen down. He put his hands up to his head, to keep it from popping off his neck entirely.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jake asked.
“Brendan isn’t the cheater!”
“He’s not?”
Winston shook his head. “It’s his teacher!”
“What?” Mr. Garvey said. “How can you know that?”
“It’s the broken glass,” Winston explained. “Brendan’s teacher refused to believe that someone was cheating. I told him about the flat tires, and he still didn’t believe me. Do you know what he said?”
“What?” Mal asked.
“He said, ‘I ran over some broken glass myself a couple of months ago. I had to wait two hours for a tow truck.’”
“All right,” said Mr. Garvey. “So what?”
Winston sat forward. “I never told him the flat tires had been caused by broken glass.”
They all thought about that for a few moments. Mr. Garvey said slowly, “Did he say, ‘I ran over some broken glass also’?”
“He said it in such a way,” Winston insisted, “that he knew the flat tires had been caused by broken glass. How could he have known that?”
Mr. Garvey was shaking his head. “Even if you’re right, Winston, that is not a lot to hang your hat on. It’s certainly not proof.”
“We might be able to prove it,” Winston said. “Maybe.”
“How?”
“First of all, what was that teacher’s name? Does anybody remember?”
“I do,” said Mr. Garvey. “I’ve seen him around before. He’s not a teacher, he’s an administrator or a vice principal or something. . . . Lester something. No, wait. Lester is his last name. Carl Lester.”
“Good,