Read Online The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin - Free Book Online Page B

Garvey. I’m the math teacher at Walter Fredericks Junior High in Glenville. These are my boys.”
    Miss Norris recovered. “Nice to meet you. I don’t suppose you know where the puzzle is?”
    “No, I’m afraid not. But this young lady suggested we all look together, which sounds like a fine idea.”
    So they started moving again. “Where have you looked already?” Miss Norris said.
    Jake said, “All over.”
    Mal said, “Those machines around the corner there . . . all that interactive stuff.”
    “Oh,” said Miss Norris. “It didn’t occur to me that the puzzle might be in there.”
    “That’s for the best,” said Mr. Garvey, “since it wasn’t.”
    “Well, we already looked around this part,” said Bethany, waving to the exhibits around them. They stood by a gigantic replica of a lunar exchange module. “Where else is there to go in this place?”
    “Bethany! Miss Norris!” A voice called out, and a girl came running toward them. She was wearing a floaty pale-blue dress and sandals that flapped loudly. “We found it!”
    “Giselle! Where?”
    Giselle came up short when she saw Winston and his team standing there. “Uh,” she said.
    Miss Norris understood why she had turned mute. “It’s okay, Giselle. We’re all looking together. Right?”
    Mr. Garvey and the boys nodded their heads and said “oh, yes” and “absolutely,” a bunch of earnest bobblehead dolls.
    “Okay. Come on!” Giselle shouted, gleeful. She waved at them to follow her, and they all ran a short distance to a small, black passageway. Winston could have walked by this a hundred times and not seen it—the hallway seemed to be for staff members only. There was another girl in there, looking anxious, like she was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.
    “This is it?” said Miss Norris.
    “This can’t be right,” Mr. Garvey declared.
    Giselle said, “But look!”
    Sure enough, the third girl—she was introduced as Elvie—was standing by a pair of signs, each attached to a metal post. They were ads for Simon’s Potato Squares. In each one, the smiling guy from the television commercial beamed out at them. Words by his mouth said, “Think square!”
    They all moved into the hallway. There was barely enough room for both teams. “So where’s the puzzle?” said Winston.
    “I don’t know,” said Elvie. “I’m guessing in here.” Elvie was the tiniest of the three girls—with long dark-blond hair framing her narrow face, she reminded Winston of a fairy from a fantasy movie. Elvie pointed to the wall, and Winston saw that it was really a door painted black. Like the hallway itself, it didn’t seem to be part of any exhibit. Elvie jiggled the handle. “But it’s locked,” she said.
    “This is nuts,” said Mal.
    “I agree,” said Mr. Garvey. “Can this be right? What are we supposed to do, pick the lock? That’s a fine thing to teach kids.”
    Jake knocked on the door. There was no answer.
    “I tried that already,” said Elvie.
    “Maybe the answer is HALLWAY,” said Giselle. She was fidgeting in the crowded space, her hands moving up and down her arms. Her brown eyes lit up as a new idea hit her. “Or SPACE! Because this is a space museum, and we’re all standing in a small space, so—”
    “So there’s no puzzle?” her teammate Bethany demanded. “You just have to find the sign? That doesn’t make sense.” Bethany, it seemed, didn’t tolerate suggestions she thought were foolish. Winston decided he liked her no-nonsense attitude.
    “Well, the puzzle should be here somewhere . . . ,” said Miss Norris, looking around the black-walled alcove.
    “Maybe you have to feel the walls!” Giselle said, doing just that.
    “So, what, the puzzle’s in Braille?” Jake said. But he started feeling the walls, too.
    Mal knocked on the door again. “It’s got to have something to do with this door. That’s the only thing here. ” He put his ear to it like a spy.
    They were getting nowhere, and it