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“No, they don’t,” Winston said. “I know you didn’t. It was your teacher.”

“He asked us to guess who might be on other teams. ‘It’s always good to be prepared,’ he said. I didn’t know what he meant by that. Anyway, I knew you were going to be here—I mean, it’s a giant puzzle event!—but I called you just to make sure. I told my teacher your name, and he wrote it down.”

“It’s okay,” Winston said.

“The next day I saw a picture of you on his desk,” Brendan continued.

“A picture?” Now this was a surprise.

“The one from the newspaper,” Brendan said. “After you found that last treasure.”

“Oh. That,” Winston said. That made sense. The local newspaper wrote a story about the previous treasure hunt and included a picture of Winston and his friends. Carl Lester must have tracked that down and given it to the cheater so he would know what they looked like. How very creepy.

“Even when I saw your picture on his desk,” Brendan said, “I never guessed what he was going to do. Why did he do it?”

Winston could only shake his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess he really wanted to win.”

“So did I,” Brendan said sadly.

Winston didn’t know how to make Brendan feel any better. He wasn’t sure if that was even possible right now, so soon after the grand prize had slipped away. At least Brendan took a bite of his hot dog. Winston looked around for Brendan’s teammates, but they were nowhere in sight. Then he started looking at the picnic tables. His eyes jumped from table to table, his mind calculating. Brendan was temporarily forgotten.

“What are you looking at?” Brendan asked.

Winston laughed. “I think I found a puzzle.”

Brendan looked around. “You did? Where?”

“The picnic tables. Look! Starting from where we’re sitting, we can walk in a straight line to another table, and from there to another table. You can trace a path that hits every picnic table by walking in a straight line horizontally or vertically. When you hit a table, you can turn or keep going straight. If you do it right, you’ll hit each table exactly once.”

(Answer, page 244.)

Brendan looked a little better after solving the puzzle, so Winston invited him back over to his picnic table. Brendan thought about it and shook his head. “Everyone probably thinks I’m as much a cheater as my teacher.” He looked startled for a moment and said, “Hey, those two words are anagrams of each other!”

“What?”

“Teacher and cheater. You can scramble the letters of one to get the other.”

Winston was amused when Brendan laughed his old happy laugh. He’d been trying to think how to make Brendan feel better, and all it took was some scrambled letters. When Winston again invited him to sit with Mal and Jake, Brendan came along, carrying his plate of food.

His friends instinctively understood that Brendan needed a lot of cheering up. They greeted him like a long-lost relative. “Hey, Brendan!” Mal said with an over-the-top happiness. Jake stood up and clapped Brendan on the shoulder, welcoming him to their picnic table like it was a secret society for only the very coolest people. Brendan soon looked more like his old self.

“Where’s Mr. Garvey?” Winston asked.

Jake gestured with his chin, and Winston turned around. Mr. Garvey was talking with Dmitri Simon and three of Simon’s men.

“They called him over?” Winston said. “I thought they were going to speak to all of us.”

“No,” Mal said. “He went over by himself. He said they had to be told that another team had solved the final puzzle.”

They watched Mr. Garvey, who was talking as much with his hands as with his mouth, passionately trying to convince Dmitri Simon that there was another winning team ready to claim the grand prize. Simon’s expression was unreadable from this distance.

“Your team solved the final puzzle, too?” Brendan said.

“Yeah,” Winston said. “Took us a while. Think square . . . I had no idea what that meant.”

“Well, if somebody else wins, I hope it’s you guys,” Brendan said seriously.

“We might,” Mal said. “Maybe they’ll let us have it just to stop Mr. Garvey from talking to them anymore.” He imitated a