Smashie McPerter and the Mystery of Room 11

  Chapter 1: The Archenemy

  Chapter 2: The Substitute

  Chapter 3: The Prank

  Chapter 4: On Punishment

  Chapter 5: Thwarted

  Chapter 6: Anguish on the Blacktop

  Chapter 7: A Terrible Discovery

  Chapter 8: Missing!

  Chapter 9: Uproar in Room 11

  Chapter 10: Stolen!

  Chapter 11: Planning an Investigation Suit

  Chapter 12: A Dire Prediction

  Chapter 13: Investigating

  Chapter 14: A New Suspect

  Chapter 15: An Awful Realization

  Chapter 16: Unpleasant Self-Reflection

  Chapter 17: Back to Normal?

  Chapter 18: Alibis

  Chapter 19: Clues and Confiscation

  Chapter 20: Deducing!

  Chapter 21: The Perp?

  Chapter 22: Taxing Someone with the Crime

  Chapter 23: Ouch!

  Chapter 24: Solved?

  Chapter 25: Smashie Wants a Trial

  Chapter 26: Another Crime

  Chapter 27: Miscreant Apprehended!

  Chapter 28: Confession

  The day Patches was stolen from Smashie McPerter’s class started out like any other day. Well, except for the fact that her teacher was out sick and Smashie’s class was stuck with the worst substitute in the world. And except for the mysterious business with the glue. And except for the fact that Patches himself had become Smashie’s new archenemy.

  “I do not want to go back to Room 11,” said Smashie to her best friend, Dontel Marquise. Art was just ending, and the two of them were cleaning up their materials in the art room alongside the rest of their third-grade class. “I do not want to go back at all.”

  It wasn’t just because art was over, though Smashie had enjoyed working on her Prehistoric Diorama (frightened prehistoric people fleeing from animals with pointy teeth). It wasn’t even that the substitute, Mr. Carper, was lying in wait for them back in the classroom. Smashie’s reason for not wanting to return was both smaller and larger than either of those things.

  “Don’t worry, Smash,” said Dontel, putting away his own diorama (thoughtful prehistoric people working out how to invent tools). “It’ll get easier. You’ll get used to it.”

  Smashie shook her head. “No,” she said. “I will never get used to it.”

  Feet dragging, she attached herself to the end of the line of her classmates gathered at the art room door.

  “What if you make one of your suits?” Dontel asked, coming up beside her. “You could make a Brave Suit to wear in Room 11.”

  “I do not need a Brave Suit!” Smashie cried. “I am not unbrave about what’s in our room! I just think it is awful.”

  “Hrrm,” said Dontel.

  Perhaps Dontel was right, though, Smashie thought. Perhaps a suit would help. She was only just wearing regular overalls today, but she often wore suits of her own devising. When she and Dontel had participated in the second-grade Mathathon last year, for example, she had made a Math Suit by painting numbers on an old opera cape of her grandma’s and pasting equations to the toes of her rain boots. And when she had rashly signed up to man the present-wrapping table at the Mother’s Day fair last spring, her Present-Wrapping Suit had been the only thing that had gotten her through the day. (Smashie was not at her best with a pair of scissors. Cutting things always led to Band-Aids and a trip to the school nurse, and the present wrapping had been no exception. Nonetheless, in her suit, she had persevered.)

  At various other times, Smashie had created Writing Suits, Cooking Suits, and Distracting-Adults-from-Messes Suits. Being in a suit always helped Smashie get into the right frame of mind to solve hard problems.

  “I can’t think of a suit that could help me with this problem,” Smashie said now as she and Dontel and the rest of their class arrived at Room 11. “Room 11 is wrecked forever.”

  “Smashie,” said Dontel, “it is only a hamster.”

  Patches.

  It was his feet that got her. The rest of the hamster’s body was all right, Smashie supposed: round with tan fur and nervous black eyes. But his feet!

  “A little soft creature should have little soft feet!” Smashie had cried to Dontel when the rest of the class decided that a hamster would be the perfect class pet after a series of strenuous discussions the previous week. “But Patches has claws! Terrible, scrabbly claws!”

  “Now, Smashie,” Dontel had said soothingly, “I think you just don’t really understand about hamsters. There are reasons they have that kind of feet. Hamsters are —”

  “They are two kinds of creature, smonched together; that’s what they are. It’s like somebody stuck a chicken’s feet onto a mouse’s body! What kind of creature is two kinds of creature?”

  Dontel thought for a moment. “What about the sphinx?” he’d offered at last. “You liked learning about the sphinx during our ancient Egypt unit. And Asten, the dog-headed, ape-bodied servant of the god Thoth — you loved him, too.”

  “Hamsters are nothing like dog-headed, ape-bodied Asten! Asten is wonderful.” Smashie shuddered and raked her hands through her hair. “Hamsters look like a crazy biologist bashed different animals together to make a monster!”

  “Smashie . . .”

  “Like that guy Dr. Frankenstein made! Our class is getting a Frankenstein rodent monster!” Dontel patted her shoulder, but Smashie shook his hand off. She was very worked up. Even Dontel could not calm her.

  Smashie herself had argued for a lizard. “It would be like having a miniature dinosaur! It would fit perfectly with our unit on prehistoric times, Ms. Early!”

  “We are not studying pre-human times, Smashie,” Ms. Early had said. “Just prehistoric.”

  But Smashie pressed on. “At least lizards are uniform. And most lizards are vegetarians, too!”

  She thought the last point would go over well with the children who had been opposed to Billy Kamarski’s suggestion of a mouse-eating snake.

  But no. The rest of the class was firm. They wanted a hamster. So Patches had been selected and purchased and brought to their room just yesterday. And because his cage was right next to the children’s cubbies, there had been plenty of opportunities for Smashie to confront the reality of his feet.

  Like right now, for example. Caught in the throng of students heading to the back of the room, Smashie was forced to stop in front of Patches’s cage as the children came to a halt to admire him.

  “Look how sweet he is,” said Jacinda Morales.

  “I know,” moaned Charlene Stott. “He is the cutest darling boy!”

  Smashie gulped.

  “Come on, Smash,” whispered Dontel encouragingly. “Don’t you think he is at least a little bit cute?”

  Patches trembled on his bed of wooden shavings.

  “No,” said Smashie, and gulped again.

  What if Patches manages somehow to open the door to his cage and escape? she thought hectically. What if he made his way to her seat and crawled on her with those awful feet?

  “Do you think Patches would ever be able to open that cage?” she asked Dontel, her brow creased with worry.

  Dontel sighed. “No,” he said. “I don’t. He would need thumbs to work the latch.”

  “Phew,” said Smashie.

  In front of them, Willette Williams poked her forefinger through the bars of the cage to stroke Patches’s head. “I hate that he had to spend his first night here in the classroom all alone,” she mourned.

  “He was fine,” said Billy Kamarski gruffly. “Patches is tough.”

  Smashie and Dontel exchanged surprised glances. It was not like Bi
lly to have a soft spot for a hamster. Mostly what Billy liked was playing jokes on his classmates. Last week, for example, he had telephoned Smashie.

  “Is your refrigerator running?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Smashie answered.

  “Then you’d better go catch it!” he yelled, and hung up, laughing insanely.

  “That joke is as old as Methuselah,” Smashie’s grandmother had said. Both Smashie and Dontel had grandmothers who lived with them and kept an eye on them after school. The two grandmothers were close friends and saw eye to eye on the subject of Smashie and Dontel.

  Jokes like Billy’s refrigerator joke were irritating, but some of his jokes were downright unkind. He was always giving people wedgies, for example. And once he put a plastic tarantula in Siggie Higgins’s cubby, when everybody knew that Siggie was truly frightened of spiders. Smashie had kindly fished it out of the cubbie for him while Dontel calmed Siggie down and reassured him that it wasn’t real. Billy, on the other hand, had collapsed on the floor and drummed his heels with mirth.

  Getting in trouble never seemed to deter Billy from his pranks, either. He got into plenty for the wedgies and the tarantula in Siggie’s cubby, but that didn’t stop him from laughing like a loon at the very mention of a spider.

  But now even Billy was being extra nice to the hamster.

  Patches squirmed and wriggled and widdled on his shavings. Then he grasped Willette’s finger tightly in his forepaws.

  “Oh!” Willette cried, and swooned with joy.

  Smashie swooned with horror. She rounded on Dontel, who shook his head warningly.

  “Don’t say you think hamsters look like a zoological experiment gone wrong,” he whispered. “Don’t, Smashie. The kids got awfully mad when you said that last week.”

  Smashie subsided.

  “You are right,” she said. “And a lot of them are still mad at me, too.”

  This was the other part of Smashie’s problem. Although she was generally well liked in Room 11, the pet debate had gotten rather sticky in the end. And Smashie had not made things any better yesterday when they had voted on the hamster’s name.

  “He doesn’t even have patches!” she’d complained.

  But none of the other children would consent to name him, as Smashie had suggested, Uggles de Blucky. And they had not been shy about expressing their feelings about her suggestion.

  “You are being mean, Smashie McPerter!” Joyce Costa had cried.

  “How can you say such awful things about the animal we love?” Willette had agreed with accusing eyes.

  Standing amid her happy classmates now, Smashie had to admit it was lonely being the only member of Room 11 who did not love Patches. Even Dontel liked him. He liked him a lot. It was one of the few times that Smashie’s and Dontel’s minds were not as one.

  Mostly, Smashie and Dontel had so much in common that they were practically twins. Besides having grandmas at home, they both enjoyed cartoons with a lot of action and milk shakes with extra ice cream. They were cochampions of last year’s Mathathon, and they’d won the lower-school spelling bee as well. And both of them loved to think about complicated things. As with the hamster, Smashie’s thoughts tended to be hectic and shouty, while Dontel’s were calm and well constructed. But when they put their two kinds of thinking together, Smashie and Dontel were an unstoppable team.

  So the fact that Dontel did not mind the purchase of Patches — was even happy about it — threw Smashie for a loop.

  Maybe I am wrong, Smashie thought now. Maybe Patches is secretly cool.

  She stared at the little rodent. If he was secretly cool, it was a very big secret.

  Maybe if I think of him as Patches as in eye patches, she thought. Like a pirate. She imagined a little circle of black fabric cocked rakishly over one of Patches’s eyes and pictured him striding fearlessly about in his cage, as if on the deck of a ship.

  But the real Patches did not swashbuckle. He quivered. And widdled again.

  Smashie sighed.

  Maybe if I imagine him with a cutlass and peg leg, too, she thought. And a less trembly personality.

  But Smashie was interrupted in her thinking by an irritated voice barking at them from the front of the room.

  “Kids!” the voice boomed. “Stop mooning over that animal and sit down.”

  It was Mr. Carper. The substitute.

  The children slumped and turned.

  Smashie felt bad for Ms. Early because she was out with the stomach flu, but she felt worse for Room 11. Ms. Early, at least, did not have to spend the day under the care of Mr. Carper.

  Mr. Carper was convinced that his discovery as a fashion model was imminent. “Mother always says I’m the handsomest man in any room,” he was wont to say. “And it’s my aim to share that with the world.” Indeed, a close-up of his teeth had once been featured in an ad for the town dentist, and ever since he had refused to take a full-time job, working only as a substitute at the Rebecca Lee Crumpler Elementary School so that he would be available when his big moment came.

  “Children,” Mr. Carper said now, his eyes following his every move in his reflection in the classroom door, “sit down. And zip your lips.” He adjusted his collar, tossed his head in a manner suggestive of more hair than was currently attached to his head, and tugged down his sweater a careful quarter inch.

  Normally Smashie would have been very happy to be taught by someone who put so much thought into what he was wearing. But Mr. Carper’s outfits did not seem to help him concentrate the way Smashie’s suits did. Instead, they seemed to take his attention quite away from things he should be paying attention to. Like teaching.

  Smashie and Dontel exchanged a speaking look and headed to their seats with the rest of the class.

  “Not a word from anyone until I’ve read the morning announcements,” said Mr. Carper. “And not even then, unless I say so.”

  Usually Ms. Early read out the announcements first thing, but the children had barely hung up their jackets this morning before Mr. Carper had hustled them out of the classroom for art. He took up the paper now, but, eyes still fixed on his reflection in the door, turned his head briefly from side to side before settling on a view of himself from the right. He leaned back on Ms. Early’s desk and began to read:

  “The Rebecca Lee Crumpler Elementary School

  PENELOPE ARMSTRONG, PRINCIPAL

  MORNING ANNOUNCEMENTS

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3

  Good morning, Rebecca Lee Crumpler students.

  ANNOUNCEMENT 1: An exciting day for RLC fifth-graders today! Mr. Bloom, head of custodial services, will give a guest lecture in their class at noon on the topic ‘Astronomy — Now and for the Future.’”

  “I’d like to hear that,” whispered Dontel, who planned to be an astronomer when he grew up. One of his most cherished possessions was an autographed copy of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist.

  “Me too,” said Smashie. “We could find out how to fire a rocket.”

  Mr. Carper continued reading:

  “ANNOUNCEMENT 2: Miss Dismont’s class is away for the day at the Natural History Museum. We hope they enjoy their work in the exhibit of rare minerals and gems. ANNOUNCEMENT 3: Tomorrow, all students will attend a special assembly about the importance of good nutrition, sponsored by Mrs. True, owner of the TrueYum Grocery Mart.”

  “The TrueYum, eh? How about that.” Mr. Carper lowered the paper and looked meaningfully at the students. “I’m sure you kids have heard about The Search.”

  “What search?” asked Cyrus Hull.

  “‘What search?’ Boy with Glasses, do you live under a rock?”

  “No,” said Cyrus.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you,” said Mr. Carper. “But who cares? You’re a homely bunch, so you’re no real competition.” He leaned back and smirked at the class. “I have it on good authority,” he said, “that Mrs. True is looking for someone to model for the TrueYum’s upco
ming grocery circular. And you know I don’t like to mention this, because I don’t want to be treated differently from any other substitute, but I do have modeling experience.”

  “We know,” said Charlene wearily.

  “The dentist ad,” said John Singletary.

  “You’ve told us,” said Jacinda. “More than once.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed, Long-Haired Girl,” Mr. Carper said with a laugh. “Lots of people recognize me.”

  “From substituting?” asked Willette.

  “No, Girl in Plaid,” snapped Mr. Carper, his laughter switched off like a faucet. “From these.” And he flashed his teeth at the class.

  “Mr. Carper,” said Dontel, “it’s nine forty-five. We’re supposed to do science now.”

  But Mr. Carper wasn’t listening. He picked up a plastic apple from Ms. Early’s desk and held it against his cheek, gazing coyly at them. They regarded him silently. Mr. Carper put the apple back down.

  “No,” he muttered. “I need to practice with the big stuff. A watermelon, maybe. Some kind of meat.” He drew himself to his feet. “There’s something else in my favor,” he said. “I have reason to believe — and you’ll all understand this — that Mrs. True . . . admires me.”

  “Uck,” whispered Jacinda.

  “She’s a widow, you know. And just the other week, I was in the produce section at the TrueYum, squeezing cantaloupes, when she sailed up beside me. ‘With that jawline, Marlon,’ she said —”

  “Bleh,” muttered Alonso Day.

  “So one might say,” said Mr. Carper, “that I am something of a front-runner to land the modeling job for that circular.” His eyes narrowed as he glanced again at the page of announcements and continued to read:

  “The assembly will start promptly at one o’clock tomorrow in the auditorium.”

  Mr. Carper tapped his teeth with a pen. “Will Mrs. True be there, I wonder?”

  “Sure,” said Siggie. “She comes every year.”

  “What, Boy with the Weird Trousers? Did you say yes, she’ll be there?” Mr. Carper began a slow, measured walk around the room.

  Siggie hesitated, and glanced at his pants. “Um, I think so?” he said.