The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen Page 2

  “Hello,” he said. “We’re Jasper Dash, Lily Gefelty, and Katie Mulligan. We’ve just taken those rooms in that new tower addition, rooms 23A-E, off the bathroom of 46B.”

  “Oh, Mr…. Mr. Dash? The Jasper Dash? Boy Technonaut?”

  Jasper looked humbly at the inkwell. “Yes. Yes, that’s me, sir.”

  “It’s great to meet you!” said the man at the desk. “We just cleared a whole bunch of your books out of the lounge library! Burned a whole stack of them!”

  “Ah,” said Jasper, looking at his toes.

  “Hey, you aren’t the only child hero at the hotel this weekend. We got the Cutesy Dell Twins, the Manley Boys, and those adorable mystery-solving Hooper Quints! You know, the Quintuplets!”

  “Ah,” said Jasper. “The Manley Boys used to babysit me.”

  “The Manley Boys?” said Katie, standing behind him. “You know them? They look really cute in their books.”

  “They are not so cute,” said Jasper miserably, “when they have covered you with lye and buried you in the victory garden.”

  “Oh,” said Katie. “Sorry. If it means anything, I’m not crazy about the Cutesy Dell Twins being here.”

  Lily explained to Jasper, “They go to our school.”

  “They’re like two little love-struck pythons,” said Katie. “With, you know,” she stuck out two fingers near her mouth like fangs. “Mean and bitey,” she said.

  Jasper explained to the man at the desk, “We have come to redeem our coupon for a free dinner.”

  “A free dinner?” said Katie.

  “I always try to be frugal when I travel,” said Jasper, “as well as clean and well mannered.” He pulled out a photocopied coupon for a free dinner. “I received this last week.”

  The man at the desk looked at it. “Eh, nah,” he said. “No. Nope.” He handed it back. “Not real.”

  “What do you mean by ‘not real’?” asked Jasper.

  “This isn’t from us.”

  “Then who is it from?”

  “Why would I know?” asked the man at the desk.

  Katie pressed, “Who would send us a fake coupon to your restaurant this weekend?”

  “That’s not something I know,” said the man at the desk. “But whoever they are, they sent out a bunch of them. Like to the Cutesy Dell Twins.” He pointed over Jasper’s head.

  “Oh, thrills,” grumbled Katie.

  “Oh look!” came a little blond voice. “It’s Katie and her friend … that friend who’s with her. That girl. “

  Lily frowned and went off to inspect some prints of hound dogs.

  The voice was, of course, one of the Cutesy Dell Twins. One was blond and the other was brunette. They came up to Katie looking tan and like their hair had just been dipped in movie popcorn butter.

  “It’s so great you’re here,” said a Twin.

  “And who’s your friend?” said the other, blinking admiringly at Jasper.

  He was a bit intimidated and said nothing.

  “Does he have issues?” asked the first Twin, hopefully.

  “Katie,” said the second one, conspiratorially. “Have you seen the Manley Boys?” She took Katie’s arm. “They’re around here somewhere. They’re the well-built sons of ace detective Bark Manley. More than once a baffling crime that’s had him stumped has been solved through the resourcefulness and ingenuity of his two boy heroes.”

  “Most recently,” said the other Twin, “The Clue of the Wiggling Rock. “

  “The clue was solved by them,” explained the first Twin. “And the bad guy is totally in jail!”

  “They are so handsome,” said the second Twin, “that it makes me feel like there’s a net over my brain.”

  “Whoppa cute. “

  “Whipple-triple-decka cute.”

  “Cute that’s bona fiiiiiide.”

  The Twins nodded in unison.

  “Okay. Have fun!” One of them winked at Jasper. “Nice to meet ya!” she said. “Hope we’ll see ya around!”

  They walked away, giggling and looking back at the Boy Technonaut.

  “What strange young women,” said Jasper.

  “Just wait till they’ve got their fangs in you,” said Katie. She called over to Lily, “The coast is clear.”

  Lily came back over. She mumbled, “I was looking at the menu.”

  “I don’t like the Twins, either,” said Katie. “They talk about people behind their backs.”

  “Shall we go for a hike before it gets dark?” said Jasper. “I’ll get a trail map.”

  “We need some water,” said Katie.

  “I’ve got a water bottle back in my room,” said Lily.

  Jasper said, “Why don’t you just pop up and—”

  There was a commotion near the front door. A man ran in screaming.

  “They’ve been kidnapped!” he yelled. “They’re gone!”

  “Who?” yelled someone convenient.

  “The Hooper Quints! All five of them! They’re all gone! Someone took them!”

  The crowd of people in the lobby of the hotel was clamoring for more information. The hotel manager rushed over. “Slow down!” he said to the distraught man. “Tell us slowly what happened!”

  “I’m a cabdriver, see? I was hired to bring them adorable mystery-solving Hooper Quints up to this swanky hotel here. I packed ‘em all into the car and started up the mountain. About two miles from here, there was some wise guy standing in the road. He held out his hand for me to stop. I stopped and rolled down the window and asked him what the matter was. He said I had something stuck to the front of my car. I asked him what. He said, A big … thing.’ I said could he be any more, you know, precise, and he went, ‘It’s gray’ I said, ‘What? Like smoke from a bonfire?’ and he said I was on the right track, that it was gray like smoke from a bonfire, but, he had checked, and it was not smoke from a bonfire, and I better get out and look at it.

  “I asked him could he maybe give me another clue. He tried doing this, you know, charade, but he wasn’t very good at it, so it was just a kind of twisting motion with his waist and then this little hop, with his elbows out. I asked him whether that was an imitation, and he shook his head no and kind of tugged at his ear, meaning, ’Sounds like the name of what’s on your front bumper.’ I asked him was it alive, and he said, ‘No. Um, yes. Yes. Yup, it’s alive. You better get out.’ So. Then I got out and went around the front of the cab and didn’t see anything on my front bumper, and suddenly— ka-powee—he jacked me in the back of the head with something heavy. I fell down to the ground and passed out. When I woke up, the Hooper Quints were all gone from the car.”

  “Completely gone?” said the hotel manager.

  “And here’s the weirdest thing,” said the cabdriver. “There wasn’t really any living gray thing on my front bumper at all. “

  “Yeah,” said the hotel manager sourly. “That’s uncanny.”

  A woman called out, “The Hooper Quints could be in great danger!”

  “We’ll get a search party of guests together,” said the hotel manager. “We’ll scour the woods.” He looked at the crowd. “Who wants to volunteer?”

  Almost everyone raised their hand. He began breaking them into groups so that they could go separate ways.

  “I refuse,” said Katie, “to be a part of this right now. We’re here on vacation from crime solving.”

  Jasper had his hand up and was bobbing up and down on his tiptoes.

  Lily’s hand was raised halfheartedly. When she saw that Katie wasn’t volunteering, she said, “Shouldn’t we help?”

  “I’m not getting sucked into this whole Quint thing,” said Katie.

  Jasper said, “We may be their only hope.”

  Katie crossed her arms. “Us and the other seventy-five people in the lobby.”

  “Frankly, Katie,” said Jasper, “I’m a little disappointed.”

  “You two go on the wild-goose chase,” said Katie. “I’m going to go sit on the veranda and read. It�
�s a vacation. I’m relaxing.”

  The hotel manager cupped his hands around his mouth and said, “Everyone who wants to help with the search, move outside!” The crowd moved to the door.

  Katie, trying to seem nonchalant, said, “Okay. Really. You two have fun. I’m going to go read a magazine.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Lily.

  “Later,” said Katie.

  Jasper shook his head, frowning in disapproval.

  Katie forced herself to ignore his expression. He had no right, she thought, to look at her like that. She was just taking an afternoon off.

  She smiled tightly and said, “Tell me all about it later!”

  The lobby was almost empty. Waving, Jasper and Lily turned and followed the rest of the crowd outside.

  Feeling a little empty herself, Katie watched them go.

  Stop worrying, she thought. They’ll find the Quints without me.

  And, indeed, the search was on!

  If you’ve ever solved a mystery at a luxurious resort before—you know, firing your pistol off the ski lift, recording the muttering of counterfeiters by the pool, climbing over the roof in a catsuit, discreetly picking poison blow darts out of your neck in the Krakatoa Lounge—if, for a moment, you think back to the last time you solved a mystery in a resort setting, you’ll know that this is the point in the game when you really need to start looking for suspects. I will parade a bunch of highly suspicious freaks past you, and you will have to ask yourself:

  1. Did they have a motive to commit the crime? In other words, do they have a reason for doing the deed?

  2. Did they have the opportunity to commit the crime? Do they have an alibi?

  3. Did they have the means to commit the crime?

  Also, keep your eyes open for things that might make people look suspicious. Sometimes a little subtle detail that might escape you at first turns out to be the thing that really matters most. For example, does a particular character carry a sword? Does a particular character wear a Halloween mask the whole time and breathe in a rasping sort of way? Does a character walk on all fours, bobbing his head up and down? Does a character suspend you over a pit of lava and say, “Soon it will all be mine! Mine! Mine, I tell you!”? In the difficult world of police detection, it’s often little clues like this that give the game away.

  Now, it has to be said, clues like this still would have been completely mystifying to the Manley Boys. Jank and Fud Manley could not have been stupider if they had been made out of margarine.

  “We’ll find those Quints,” said Jank, squinting into the sun. “It’s a cinch.”

  “I hope they’re still in their box,” said his brother Fud, who had missed the explanation of what a “quint” was. He thought they were something like a wrench.

  The search parties were gathered outside the hotel on the grass in the middle of the circular drive. Above them the flag flapped in the summer breeze. The crags of the mountain rose all around them.

  The hotel manager called out, “Now, first. Identification. Does anybody know what the Quints look like?”

  Nobody said anything.

  All sorts of guests had turned out for the search. Some were in wet bathing suits and some were in fancy linen suits. Some wore tweed hiking gear. Some were in evening gowns or black tie. Lily was in jeans and a sweatshirt. Jasper, needless to say, was in shorts and kneesocks.

  “Would somebody who has read the Quints’ books please give us a description?” the manager requested.

  Nobody said anything.

  “Who here,” he asked, “has read one of the Quints’ books?”

  The wind blew high above them all, ruffling a bored eagle’s wings.

  “The books came out a really long time ago,” said someone apologetically.

  “Are the Quints the ones with all the weird machines?” someone else asked.

  “No,” the first person answered. “That was … uh … What was that stupid kid’s name? I read those books when I was a boy … Something like Hopalong Jack, Young Hypernaut, or, eh, Jack Sprint, Child Techno—”

  Lily yelled out quickly, “Maybe you have one of the Quints’ books in the hotel library!”

  The manager nodded. He sent one of the bellhops back into the hotel to check the library for Hooper Quints books so the group could hear them described and get a positive ID.

  “Lily,” whispered Jasper, “do you think that man might have been talking about me?”

  “No,” said Lily. “No way.” She squeezed Jasper’s shoulder, but she didn’t look in his eyes, because she was lying.

  “Do you think no one reads my books anymore?” Jasper asked.

  “I read them,” said Lily. “I’ve read them all three times.”

  “You’re Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut?”

  Lily and Jasper turned to see who had spoken. It was a boy in overalls.

  “Indeed,” said Jasper.

  The boy stuck out his hand. “I’m little Eddie Wax. Remember me?”

  Lily and Jasper looked mystified at Eddie Wax. They had never met him before. He was red haired and wasn’t wearing any shoes. He had filled the bib pocket of his overalls with trail mix.

  “Yep,” said Eddie. “Picture me about five feet higher? With a horse’s head? And the rest of the horse?”

  Lily and Jasper still had no idea who he was.

  “You know, from the horse books. Eddie Wax! I rided Stumpy. In Stumpy Rides to Glory.”

  Lily nodded, smiling. “Oh, sure. I did a book report on Stumpy Rides to Glory!”

  “Yep. I’m Stumpy’s rider. Stumpy is my series.”

  Lily looked confused. “I, um, I only remember the first book.”

  “Yep, I’m Stumpy’s rider.” Eddie nodded and waved his hand in the air, saying, “For that whole series, I was. Yep, she’s a good horse. Good, sweet horse.”

  “Are you sure there was—”

  “Gentle as a luna moth and brave as a grizzly in the Coldstream Guards.” Eddie looked upset, and his voice had that weird, embarrassing gluey quality that voices get when we’re trying to pretend we’re not about to cry. “She’s a good horse, Stumpy. Best horse anyone could ask for.”

  “Attention!” cried the hotel manager. “We found one of the Quints’ books under the player piano in the hotel library.”

  “Read it to us!” an older woman in pearls and a broad straw hat beseeched him. “I do so love a story!”

  “Okay, okay. If you’ll all sit down for a second, I’ll read you the description of the Quints from the beginning of the book. Will that work?”

  They all sat down, and waiters walked between them, handing out sandwiches and bottled lemonade.

  The hotel manager opened to the first page of The Hooper Quints on an Oil Derrick; or, The Danger Gang! and he began to read.

  DERRICK!” said Ray Hooper. “Jeepers-to-crow, an oil derrick is the perfectest place to spend our holiday!”

  “Yes,” said La Hooper, “I’ve always wanted to gad about on an oil derrick! If I couldn’t have come, I would have broken my fingers! Come, let’s run and play dress-up near the extraction pipes!”

  “Such larks!” exclaimed Doe Hooper, swaying by one arm from the scaffolding. “I can almost see slag from here! This will be the best holi—”

  “Sid, duckie,” said the woman in the wide straw hat to the hotel manager. “Maybe skip to the next page?”

  “Ah yes. Thank you, Mrs. Mandrake.” The manager flipped to the next page. He scanned it, looking for clues of the Hoopers’ appearance. “Aha,” he said. “Here’s where the Hooper Quints are first described.” He looked around the crowd. “Pay close attention,” he said.

  The Hoopers were all quintuplets. They had been born all together! That’s why they got along so well. They did everything together! They went on picnics and solved mysteries together. Recently, they had solved a mystery of a big hard old cake in The Loud Ratcheting Noise (Hooper Quints No. 42). They also solved mysteries on farms.

  They had a n
anny! She was a musical nun. She was always there to give them sandwiches and ginger beer when they were hungry. She was a fun nun! Once, when they were very poor, she made them little matching suits out of the living-room curtains. That was great fun! When the curtain pants wore out and the shirts got torn, she cut the linoleum on the kitchen floor into lederhosen.

  She also taught them how to sing. She gave each one of them the name of a note. That’s where their nicknames came from! Doe! Ray! Mi! And so on all in a row! Would you like to hear them sing?

  No, you wouldn’t. They were awful! It was kind of a joke that the nun played on them. She told them they had beautiful voices, but they sounded really bad. They—

  Sid stopped reading, shut the book, and shook his head. “I can’t go on,” he said. “I just can’t. Anyway, you get the idea.”

  Everyone agreed he shouldn’t go on.

  “Wow, that was … um …,” Lily commented quietly to Jasper. “That explains why no one has read the Hooper Quints’ books. I feel really bad for them.”

  “Oh, the book wasn’t so terrible,” said Jasper. “I liked the plucky high spirits of the narrator. I always enjoy exclamation points.”

  The hotel manager passed out paper place mats with a map of the mountain and advertisements for local businesses. He divided everyone up into search parties. Lily and Jasper, unfortunately, were split up. Jasper looked sad; he had been put in a group with the Manley Boys, who had always made fun of him when babysitting. Lily, meanwhile, ended up in a group with Eddie Wax and a man in a green poplin jumpsuit. She would have felt much better with Jasper around. She was always nervous with new people.

  “We could ask to be switched into each other’s group,” said Lily.

  “No,” said Jasper unhappily. “A good citizen does not ask for special treatment.”

  “I bet the hotel manager wouldn’t mind.”

  Jasper shook his head. “I don’t want to be one of those people.” He pointed over at the pearled and hatted Mrs. Mandrake, who was following the hotel manager around and asking him questions loudly.

  “Sid? Will there be bears? One can’t stand the shagginess of their muzzles.”