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By Root 767 0

was yelling. It was impossible to hear anybody’s individual words, but from the look on Simon’s face, he was getting the general gist: Something had gone wrong with his carefully planned event. He waved his hands, trying to get things under control. “All right,” he said loudly. “All right, settle down, everybody!” Quiet slowly descended over the room again. Simon let the silence drag on for a little bit while he thought of what he was going to say next. Winston glanced over to Carl Lester and the West Meadow team. Mr. Lester looked the smallest bit nervous—or maybe that was Winston’s imagination.

“This is the first I’m hearing about this,” said Dmitri Simon. “Someone cheated? Really?” He chuckled in disbelief. “I don’t see how. Did somebody steal the answers from another team? Did someone steal the answers from me?”

“He gave us a flat tire!” yelled the coach of the Brains.

“He broke the Ferris wheel!” yelled Rod Denham of Lincoln Junior High. Oh, right, they’d had a kid stuck on the ride, too—Winston had forgotten that part.

Dmitri Simon was astounded. “He broke the Ferris wheel?” he repeated. “How do you break a Ferris wheel?”

“He locked a girl in the bathroom back at the farm!” This was Bethany doing the yelling this time. Simon looked over at her, more and more disturbed.

There was some more shouting, and people were starting to overlap each other again. Simon once again called for quiet, and the yelling petered out. Simon looked to his associates, who looked neutral and calm. They shrugged back at their boss.

“All right,” said Simon. “Why didn’t someone call me? Tell me about this sooner?”

“Your phone system is like another puzzle,” the Brookville Brains coach yelled out. “A really hard one.”

Simon frowned. “Oh,” he said, thrown off balance. “Well. We’re going to look into this, I promise. We’re not going to have a whole discussion about it right now. If you have any information about this cheater, please come up to me or one of my partners here. If we determine that the event was compromised in any way, we will make amends. I swear to that. I’ll make a donation to every single school if I have to.” One of the partners looked alarmed, and Simon said, “Oh, calm down, Robert. I’ll do it from my personal account.” Robert, rebuked, took a step backward and regained his calm expression.

“For now, however, we’re going to proceed,” Simon continued. “We do have a winner, and I want to use this time to congratulate them. It was very exciting, sitting here at headquarters watching the answers come in. We thought for a while that nobody was going to solve that prison puzzle—you guys really had us nervous. But finally one team managed to break through and get all the way to the end. So let’s have a round of applause for the kids from West Meadow Junior High and their vice principal, Carl Lester!”

There was applause, dampened by the specter of the cheating scandal. Winston looked at Mr. Garvey, who was not applauding and was in fact frowning deeply. They had hoped to tell Simon what they knew before West Meadow had been officially declared the champs. This wasn’t working out very well at all.

Carl Lester led his boys down to the stage. One of Simon’s assistants floated off stage for a moment, and returned with a six-foot novelty check, with FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS written on it in huge type. The assistant wasn’t sure how to hold his giant thing and stumbled and fumbled it to center stage.

Winston found himself getting to his feet.

As the applause died down, and before Dmitri Simon could begin his congratulatory speech, Winston called out, “Brendan! Hey, Brendan!”

Everybody on the stage looked up to see who was shouting.

Mr. Garvey gave Winston an incredulous look. “What are you doing?” he said softly.

“I have an idea,” Winston said, and he called out to the group on the stage, “Brendan! Did your teacher tell you to call me?”

Brendan Root blinked rapidly. “What?” he said.

“You called me a few days ago. You tried disguising your voice, and you wouldn’t tell me your name, but I know it was you. Did your teacher tell