“So let me get this straight,” Annabelle said after dinner that night. “You have a jacket, a box, and a snake, and you don’t know who they belong to.”
Sam and Annabelle were sitting on the couch watching a TV show. When Annabelle told Sam that the show was about flipping houses, he couldn’t wait to see someone throw a house up into the air and make it turn upside down.
Unfortunately, Sam discovered, that’s not what flipping meant when it came to houses. The show was actually about two guys who bought old places and fixed them up and sold them for a lot of money.
“You’re not going to tell anyone, right?” Sam asked. “I mean, about our secret club?”
“Exactly who would I tell, Sam? I’m in sixth grade. Sixth graders don’t care about second-grade clubs.”
“That’s too bad,” Sam said. “They’re missing out on a lot.”
Annabelle shrugged. “Maybe. A detective club does sound interesting. So what clues do you have so far?”
“Not a lot,” Sam said. “Rashid took home the metal box to see if he could figure out the combination to the lock. He likes doing puzzles and math. Once we get the box open, we’ll know a lot more.”
“So how about the red jacket?”
Sam shrugged. “It’s a red jacket. No name tag. No label. The only thing that makes it different is that it has a soccer ball patch on the front.”
“Is it a winter jacket?” Annabelle asked. “Or a rain jacket, or what?”
“Rain jacket,” Sam said. “I think it’s weird it doesn’t have a label.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird it doesn’t have a name tag, either?”
Sam thought about this. “None of the jackets in the lost and found have name tags. Otherwise they wouldn’t be lost. Also the jacket is pretty big, like it probably belongs to an older kid, maybe a fourth or fifth grader. Does Dad still write your name in your jackets?”
“Yeah, usually,” Annabelle said. “Jackets are expensive. But maybe this kid’s parents forgot. It happens. That still doesn’t explain the missing label.”
“It looks like somebody cut it out,” Sam said. “And that the scissors they used weren’t very good.”
“Like art-room scissors?” Annabelle asked.
“Exactly!” Sam said. “Those are the worst scissors ever.”
Annabelle nodded in agreement. “The art-room scissors in middle school are lots better. But if someone used art-room scissors to cut out the label, you have at least one clue.”
A clue? What kind of clue did they have? Sam tried to think this through. There was a lost jacket with a missing label. There were little ragged pieces of fabric left where the label had been. Whoever had cut it out didn’t have a pair of sharp scissors.
“A kid cut out the label,” Sam declared. “But was it the kid who the jacket belonged to, or a kid who was pulling a prank?”
“I don’t know, Sam,” Annabelle said. “But here’s a question for you: What if the jacket wasn’t lost?”
“But it was lost,” Sam said. “Otherwise why would it be in the lost and found?”
“Shhh!” Annabelle said, holding up her hand. “The show’s back on!”
How could a jacket be in the lost and found and not be lost? That didn’t make sense to Sam. Unless, he thought, whoever it belonged to had lost it on purpose. Sam popped off the couch and ran upstairs.
Sam had stuffed the jacket in his backpack at the end of school so he could study it for clues when he got home. Now he pulled it out and rubbed his finger under the spot where the label had been. When Sam’s dad put name tags in his jackets, he wrote Sam’s name on a piece of special tape and stuck the tape below the jacket label. If you pulled the tape off, there was always a little bit of stickiness left.
Yep! Sam found it! There was a sticky spot in this jacket too, right underneath where the label had been.
He had found a real, live clue. There had been a name tag inside the jacket, but someone had taken it off. He went back downstairs to tell Annabelle. “I think the jacket was lost on purpose. Whoever it belonged to cut the label out and pulled the name tag off.”
“But why didn’t he pull off that little soccer ball thingy?”
Sam tugged at the patch on the front of the jacket. It didn’t budge. “I think it would be hard to get it off. And maybe the person who was trying to lose the jacket forgot the patch was there.”
“Good sleuthing, Sam the Man,” Annabelle said. “Now the question is, why? Why did this kid lose his jacket on purpose?”
“I don’t know,” said Sam. “But I have a plan to find out.”
“What’s your plan, Sam?” Annabelle asked.
“I’m going to wear the jacket to school tomorrow,” Sam said. “And then I’m going to see what happens next.”
