Usually Tuesdays after school meant book club with Mrs. Howell until 3:45, followed by math-team practice in Ms. Zmuda’s room. Today, of course, extracurricular activities were canceled, so Bethesda biked straight home, pedaling hard despite the dull ache in her legs from Coach Vasouvian’s laps.
“Hey, Dad,” Bethesda shouted as she tossed her fall jacket on the sofa and opened the hall closet where she kept school supplies. She’d been thinking about it all day as she jotted random observations on spare scraps of paper and the backs of old assignment sheets: If she was going to solve this case, she needed a good notebook in which to get herself organized. She selected a weighty, three-subject orange spiral and settled at the dining-room table. Twisting the cap off a fat Sharpie, Bethesda carefully wrote across the top of the front cover in neat black letters, officially dubbing this the semi-official crime-solving notebook, or s.-o.c-s.no., or Sock-Snow for short.
“Love it,” Bethesda said, holding the notebook up and grinning. Now she could do some serious mystery solving.
“All right!” said Bethesda’s father, suddenly appearing at her elbow in an apron, bearing a spoon laden with burbling chili. “My taste tester is here!”
“Dad, I’m kind of—”
“Don’t even start,” he said. “One taste is not going to kill you. Or if it does, there is something seriously wrong with my recipe.”
Bethesda’s father had been making batches of chili every night for the last two weeks, all in preparation for a charity dinner in mid-October being hosted by the big fancy downtown law firm where Bethesda’s mother worked. Bethesda relented, slurping a small mouthful from the big wooden spoon. “It’s good, Dad.”
“How would you rank it, on a scale of one to ten—one being terrible, ten being the best chili anyone has ever eaten in the history of the universe?”
“It’s really, really good.”
Bethesda’s father frowned. “Would you mind using my scale?”
“Dad! I’m kind of working on a project here.”
“Oh?” he said, plopping down next to her and waggling his eyebrows. Bethesda immediately recognized her mistake—you never said the word “project” around Bethesda’s father, unless you wanted a helper. “What are we working on?”
“I’m trying to solve this mystery. And—”
“A mystery!”
“Dad. Don’t say it . . .”
“Sounds like a job for Wellington Wolf!”
She knew he was going to say it. Wellington Wolf, Jungle P.I., was the title character of this incredibly cheesy cartoon her dad had loved as a kid. Wellington was a gruff, tough-as-nails detective with a Sherlock Holmes cap, a magnifying glass, and a streak of silver in his bristly gray fur. For the last six months, whenever Bethesda mentioned her newfound obsession with mysteries and detectives, her father insisted that Wellington Wolf was the best of them all. Her dad loved the show primarily for the god-awful puns (“Stop badgering the witness!” “But, your honor, I’m a badger!”), and Bethesda occasionally, grudgingly enjoyed watching Wellington put his big, black sniffer to the ground and crack a case.
“This is serious business, Dad.”
“And what is so un-serious about Wellington Wolf?”
“Are you kidding? He’s a cartoon wolf! His partner is a moose named Sergeant Moose!”
Bethesda’s father waved his wooden spoon animatedly, and Bethesda laid a hand over her notebook to protect it from flying chili particles. “Say what you will about Wellington Wolf, he always gets his man. Or marmoset, or elephant, as the case may be.”
“Okay, Dad. I should really get to work.”
But it was too late. Her dad set down the chili spoon, leaned back in the dining-room chair, and began to recount every detail of his current favorite case, from Episode 49, “A Mole in the Hole!”
Bethesda only half listened, tapping her pen impatiently on the table. Until . . .
“Wait. Say that part again?”
“What, with the big cats? They’re puns, see? You’re lyin’, lion! You’re a cheater, chee—”
“No. The part about the man on the inside.”
So her dad repeated it—how Wellington had gotten help from a most unlikely source. Someone with special knowledge of the case. Someone with access to the crime scene.
Bethesda grinned and gave her dad an entirely unexpected kiss on the nose. That was just what Bethesda needed—she needed a man on the inside. She needed Jasper Ferrars.