Nightmare at the Book Fair (6 page)

She squirmed in her seat.

“I disliked it,” she admitted.

“DID YOU DISLIKE IT ENOUGH TO KILL HIM?”

I didn’t even give her the chance to answer. I swiveled my chair around until I was facing the school custodian, a guy named Herb Dunn.

“Mr. Dunn, you didn’t like Principal Miller very much, did you?”

“Lots of people hated him,” Dunn said in broken English.

“Just answer the question,” I said, sighing. “Yes or no?”

“No, I didn’t like him,” said Dunn.

“He didn’t give you enough time to mop the floor of the cafeteria and let it dry before the kids came in for afternoon assemblies, isn’t that right?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“Were there any other things he did that bothered you?” I asked.

“Sure, lots of things,” Mr. Dunn said.

“ENOUGH THINGS THAT YOU’D WANT TO KILL HIM?”

I turned my attention to the science teacher, Mr. Reggie Chan.

“Mr. Chan, where were you on the morning of April 18?” I asked.

“I was in the science room, as always,” Chan replied.

“What if I told you that surveillance video shows the science room was empty at the moment when Principal Miller was murdered?” I said.

“Perhaps I stepped out briefly,” Chan said.

“Yes, I guess you had a little time…TO KILL!”

They were sweating now, all of them. Nobody was saying anything about arresting the Dinkleman kid anymore. Any one of them could have zapped Principal Miller and stashed the stun gun in Dinkleman’s backpack. They all had motives and they all looked guilty. I turned to the school media specialist, Miss Rosemary Durkin.

“You have a difficult job, don’t you, Miss Durkin?”

“We all do,” she replied.

“But we all don’t have to be the librarian at two schools a mile apart,” I pointed out. “We all didn’t have Principal Miller take away our assistant due to budget cuts last year. We all don’t have to teach eight classes a day, every day. We all don’t have to shelve books by ourselves. We all don’t have to do story time with whining first graders. Isn’t it true that you barely have time to go to the bathroom during the day? Isn’t it true that nobody ever thanks you for all you do at school? Isn’t it true that when you get home at the end of the day, you’re so tired you eat frozen dinners without even heating them up?”

“Yes, it’s true!” she complained. “So what?”

“And isn’t it true that one day in the teacher’s lounge you said you wished Principal Miller would drop dead?” I asked.

“I was joking!” she protested.

“DO YOU THINK MURDER IS A JOKE, MISS DURKIN?”

She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed her eyes with it. Three or four of them were crying by now, including Mrs. Sylvia Miller, the widow of Principal Miller. And she just happened to be the next person I wanted to question.

“How long were you and Principal Miller married?” I asked her gently.

“Twenty years,” she said, sobbing.

“That’s a long time,” I said. “Was it a good marriage?”

“Yes. Are you suggesting that I murdered my husband?” asked Mrs. Miller.

“I didn’t say that,” I told her. “I’m just curious why, on the night of April 17, you were seen on surveillance video at the Acropolis Diner playing footsie under the table with…Officer Joseph Bolton!”

Everybody around the table gasped. All heads turned to look at Officer Bolton.

“Don’t drag
me
into this, Snark!” he shouted, pointing a finger at my face. “My relationship with Mrs. Miller is purely professional.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Tell me this, Officer Bolton. How did you know the stun gun was in Trip Dinkleman’s backpack? There was no metal detector at the school. The only way you could have known the stun gun was there was if you put it there yourself!”

“That’s a lie!” Officer Bolton hollered.

“Admit it,
you
put the stun gun in the backpack to frame Dinkleman!” I said, getting out of my seat to confront him. “Yes, and
you
made sure to pull it out of that backpack personally so there would be a reason for your fingerprints being on it! And
you
zapped Miller so you and his wife would be free to get married! Admit it!”

“It’s true! It’s true!” Sylvia Miller shouted, before breaking down in tears. “We killed Horace! I can’t take the guilt any longer!”

“Case closed,” I said.

Wow! Mr. Snark put on an awesome performance. When it was all over, he shook my hand and everybody came over to hug me. Well, everyone except for Mrs. Miller and Officer Joseph Bolton, who were taken away by the police.

“How can I ever thank you?” I asked James Snark.

“Don’t thank me, kid,” he said, handing me an envelope. “I’m just doing my job.”

I opened the envelope. It was Snark’s bill. I looked down at the bottom for the total. There was a zero. And another zero. And another zero. And another zero. I felt as if I was going to pass out.

Find the Secret Hidden Message!

A

ad-o-les-cent
Growing to adulthood, youthful. A person in the period of adolescence.

B

boy
A male child, from birth to full growth. A young man. A son. Sometimes found at a book fair.

C

cap-tive
A prisoner. A person who is enslaved or dominated. Made or held prisoner. Kept in confinement.

I may possibly be in a…

co-ma
A state of prolonged unconsciousness, including a lack of response to stimuli, from which it is impossible to rouse a person.

Or maybe I’m just having a…

D

dream
A succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep. An involuntary vision occurring to a person when awake.

I dreamed I was…

E

eat-ing
The act of taking food into the mouth and swallowing it for nourishment. Chewing and swallowing.

F

fun-nel cake
Deliciously sweet specialty food, originally associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch region, that is popular at ballparks, fairs, and festivals.

G

get
To go after, take hold of, and bring (something) for oneself or another. To cause or cause to become, to do, to move. To communicate or establish communication with over a distance.

H

help
To save, rescue. To relieve someone in need, sickness, pain, or distress. To give aid, to be of service or advantage. To assist, as during a time of need.

I

I
The nominative singular pronoun used by a speaker or writer in referring to himself or herself. Used to denote the narrator of a literary work written in the first person singular.

J

just
Exactly or precisely. Only or merely. Simply.

K

keep
To continue in a given position, state, course, or action. To maintain in condition or order.

L

liv-ing
Having life, being alive. Active or thriving, vigorous, strong. The act or condition of a person or a thing that lives.

M

my
The nominative singular possessive pronoun, used by a speaker in referring to himself or herself.

N

night-mare
A terrifying dream producing feelings of extreme fear and anxiety. A monster or evil spirit believed to oppress persons during sleep.

O

o-ver and o-ver
Many times, repeatedly.

P

please
Used as a polite addition to requests, commands, etc. If you would be so obliging, kindly. The magic word.

Q

quick-ly
With speed, rapidly, very soon.

R

res-cue
To free from confinement or danger.

S

sleep-ing
The suspension of voluntary bodily functions and the natural suspension, complete or partial, of consciousness. Unawake.

stu-dent
A person formally engaged in learning.

T

ter-ri-fied
Filled with terror or alarm, made greatly afraid.

trapped
Caught unaware by a mechanical device, stratagem, or trick. Forced into an unpleasant or confining situation from which it is difficult to escape.

By…

U

u-biq-ui-tous
Existing or being everywhere, especially at the same time.

ug-ly
Very unattractive or displeasing in appearance.

un-bal-anced
Mentally disordered, disturbed, or deranged.

un-bear-a-ble
Unendurable, intolerable.

un-friend-ly
Not kind, unsympathetic, aloof, hostile, antagonistic.

u-nique
Having no like or equal, incomparable, not typical, unusual.

un-pleas-ant
Displeasing, disagreeable, offensive.

un-pre-dict-a-ble
Variable, uncertain, erratic.

un-re-lent-ing
Not easing or slackening, as in intensity, speed, or vigor.

un-sta-ble
Liable to change or fluctuate quickly, marked by emotional instability.

un-u-su-al
Not usual or ordinary, uncommon.

V

vi-cious
Immoral or evil, depraved, spiteful, malicious, savage, ferocious, unruly, fierce.

vi-o-lent
Acting with uncontrolled destructive force.

W

weird-os
Odd, eccentric, or abnormal people.

X

XOXOXOXOX
Hugs and kisses.

Y

yours tru-ly
Closing of letter, term of endearment.

Z

ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz

Houston, We Have a Problem

ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz.

I opened my eyes. I was staring out a small triangular window. There was a planet out there. It looked like a big blue marble floating in the blackness of outer space. Hmmm, that was odd.

I turned around. There were three guys staring at me. Two of them had blond hair. I screamed.

“Who are you?!” I yelled.

“Who are
you
?” all three of them yelled right back. One of them rushed to grab a microphone.

“Houston, we have a problem!” the guy with dark hair shouted.

“My name is Trip Dinkleman,” I told them. “I was at this book fair, and I just wanted to get to lacrosse tryouts, and something fell on my head, and—”

“No time for that!” snapped the dark-haired one. It said
COLLINS
on the blue uniform he was wearing. “How did you get in here?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “A couple of minutes ago I was fighting crime with these strange superheroes. And then I was accused of murdering my principal. Weird things keep happening to me.”

“This is Mission Control in Houston,” said a voice from a speaker. “What is the problem, Columbia? Over.”

The three of them looked at each other. Collins turned off the microphone.

“Do you have any idea where you are, kid?” asked one of the two blond guys. It said
ALDRIN
on his uniform.

I looked around. It was a room about the size of a minivan with five very small windows and stuff all over the place. There was an instrument panel with hundreds of knobs and switches. I looked out the window at the planet again.

“On a spaceship?” I guessed.

“This is
Apollo 11
,” said the other blond guy. He had a patch on his uniform that said
ARMSTRONG
. “We’re on our way to the moon.”

“Repeat,” said the voice in the speaker. “What is the problem, Columbia? Over.”

“I’m sorry!” I told the three guys. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I just want to go home.”

“Kids don’t just appear out of nowhere,” Aldrin said.

“If Houston finds out about this, they’ll abort the mission,” Collins told the others.

“Aborting at this point would be just as risky as continuing the mission,” Aldrin said.

“We’ve trained our whole lives for this,” said Armstrong. “We’re not turning back now because some kid stowed away on our ship. We might as well make the best of it.”

All three agreed.

“Not one word of this to
anyone
,” Armstrong told me, locking eyes with mine. “You understand?”

“Anything you say,” I replied.

Collins turned the mic back on.

“No problem, Houston,” he said. “It was a false alarm.”

I knew the name Neil Armstrong. Everybody knows that Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon. It’s one of those things you just know, like the fact that George Washington was the first president and Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. But here I was, two feet away from the man.

The other two guys I didn’t know. But Aldrin told me to call him Buzz, Collins told me to call him Mike, and Armstrong told me to call him Neil. He seemed to be the one in charge. He looked like the kind of guy who couldn’t be rattled by anything.

Once we had gotten over the initial shock of seeing each other, they told me it was July 16, 1969. With the help of seven and a half million pounds of thrust, they had already lifted off from Cape Kennedy in Florida. Several stages of their Saturn 5 rocket had been burned off to get them into orbit around the earth.

In order to break away from the earth’s gravity, a spaceship has to be moving 24,000 miles an hour, Neil explained to me. They fired their engines to do that just before I showed up. From that point, it’s almost 240,000 miles to the moon.

Don’t ask me how I ended up in a spaceship going to the moon. Don’t ask me how I ended up in 1969. I have no idea. And I wasn’t about to tell them I was from the twenty-first century. They’d think I was crazy.

I looked at the earth through the triangular window again. It was slightly smaller than it was the first time. We were moving away from it. I could see the huge blue oceans. Swirling white clouds covered much of the planet, which made it hard to pick out specific countries or continents. I thought I could see the outline of Florida, but I wasn’t sure. It was a beautiful sight.

Out the window on the other side of the ship, I could see the the moon. It had never occurred to me how complicated it might be to send a spaceship there. But Buzz made it clearer.

“You ever play football, Trip?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, recalling my brief Super Bowl experience.

“Then you know what it’s like to complete a pass,” he said. “The quarterback doesn’t throw the ball to the receiver. He throws it to where the receiver is going to
be
at a certain point in time. That’s what we’re trying to do with the moon.”

Buzz explained that what they were trying to do was even harder than completing a pass. Because not only were they trying to hit a moving target, but the earth spins and revolves around the sun, and the moon spins and revolves around the earth. Plus, the moon is only about a quarter of the size of the earth. So the timing of everything has to be perfect.

An incomplete pass would mean three guys were going to die. Well, three guys and me, now.

As Buzz was talking, I felt a strange sensation. It was almost as if I was losing weight. And I was. The farther we got from the earth, the less we were affected by the earth’s gravity. And then, quite suddenly, I felt myself float off the floor.

We were weightless. The four of us lifted up simultaneously, and even though the three of them had all experienced weightlessness before, smiles spread across their faces. It was irresistible, like tasting ice cream for the first time.

There wasn’t a lot of room in there. I bumped into Neil and Neil bumped into Mike, sending him floating off to the other end of the ship. I pushed off the wall and tucked my legs in so I could spin around and do a somersault in the air. There was no up or down anymore. You just keep turning until you bump into something.

I could have fooled around like that for hours, but the others had work to do. They began to check all the equipment and systems, conduct scientific experiments, and they even made a short TV show so the people back home on earth could see what they were up to. They were careful to keep me out of it, of course. There would be a lot of explaining to do if some kid showed up in the pictures. It was cool watching them work while weightless, floating the tools and equipment back and forth.

Outside the little windows, space was getting darker and darker as we got farther from the earth’s atmosphere. It was blacker than any black I had ever seen.

“Commence barbecue roll,” Neil ordered.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Mike told me that the heat from the sun could fry the fuel tanks and cause a nasty explosion if we stayed in one position. So they did a barbecue roll—a slow roll that heated all sides of the ship evenly. It was kind of like a chicken roasting in a rotisserie oven.

“This is making me hungry,” Mike said. “What do you say we eat?”

Buzz opened up a door and pulled out some aluminum bags, which floated across the cabin. He grabbed one and also grabbed a scissors to cut the tip of the bag off. Then he took a thing off the wall that looked like a little water gun.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A water gun,” Mike said. It was a
hot
water gun, to be more specific. Mike pulled the trigger and squirted some water into the bag. A half an ounce for each squeeze. All the food had to be in a bag because if you just put it on a plate or in a cup, the food would float away. They told me that they carried just a little water on the ship, but they also had a fuel cell that took hydrogen and oxygen and combined them to produce water.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“Corn chowder,” Buzz said.

“Here,” he said, handing me the bag. “Try it.”

I put the tip of the bag to my lips and suddenly panicked.

“What if the food gets caught in my throat?” I asked. “Doesn’t it need gravity to push it down?”

They all laughed, so I figured there was nothing to worry about. I squeezed the bag and the corn chowder squirted into my mouth. Not bad! I swallowed it easily and passed the bag around to the others.

I read the labels on the other bags that were floating around the cabin. Chicken salad. Applesauce. Shrimp cocktail. Sugar cookies. Orange drink. We were going to have a feast!

“Slow down, cowboy!” Neil said. “This has got to last us six days.”

Oh. Well, it wasn’t exactly a feast, but it was just as good as most of my school lunches, I’ll say that much.

I had no idea what time it was, and you couldn’t tell by looking out the window, that was for sure. Outside, it was night
all
the time. Anyway, I was sleepy, and I wasn’t the only one. The others shaded the windows, dimmed the lights, and pulled out three sleeping bags. Neil was nice enough to let me use his, and he tied one end to a pole so I wouldn’t float all over the place and bump into things.

I was tired, but too excited to sleep, I guess. Even if this whole thing was a hallucination, I was hallucinating about going to the moon! It was way better than hallucinating that you’re in a haunted house or trapped in a dictionary.

While we lay there with the lights out, they told me a little bit about themselves. Neil and Buzz were Navy fighter pilots. Between the two of them, they had flown 144 combat missions in the Korean War. Mike was an air force test pilot. When the space program began, a bunch of those guys joined up. The three of them were the lucky ones who were chosen to go to the moon.

“I still remember President Kennedy’s exact words in May of 1961,” Neil said. “‘I believe this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.’”

“And here we are,” said Buzz, “five months early.”

Before the Apollo program, they told me, NASA had the Mercury and Gemini programs. In Mercury, astronauts orbited the earth and got the hang of living and working in space. In Gemini, they practiced docking two ships together. In Apollo, astronauts went all the way to the moon and orbited it. Finally, they were ready to attempt a landing.

The interesting thing is that the whole time, the Russians were racing to do the same thing. In fact, just two weeks before Neil, Buzz, and Mike lifted off, the Russians launched an unmanned ship they hoped to land on the moon and bring back some moon rocks before we did.

“Why is being first so important?” I asked. “Who cares who gets there first?”

“It’s symbolic,” Neil said. “Whoever gets to the moon first essentially wins the Cold War.”

I didn’t tell them what I had learned in social studies—that we
were
going to win The Cold War. The Soviet Union was going to collapse in 1991. Who knows? Maybe the fact that we got to the moon first was one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed.

Neil, Buzz, and Mike had stopped talking. Maybe they were asleep. I was afraid that if I went to sleep, it would all be over. I would wake up in some completely different place, a completely different strange situation. For a change, I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to go to the moon.

“Which one of you gets to step on the moon first?” I whispered, knowing the answer full well.

“Me,” Neil said.

“What are you going to say?” I asked. I also knew what he was going to say. Everybody knows what he said.

“I have no idea. I haven’t even thought about it.”

“You should say something significant,” I suggested. “The whole world will be watching.”

“You’re right.”

“Hey, I’ll bet if you said something like ‘eat at McDonald’s’ or ‘Drink Pepsi,’ they would pay you a million dollars.”

Neil chuckled quietly. Then I said good night, but he didn’t answer, and I heard snoring so I guess he had gone to sleep.

I don’t know how long I was out, but it must have been a while. When I opened my eyes and looked out the window, the earth was much smaller. Out the other window, the moon was
huge
. It was whitish gray, with millions of craters all over the place. Some looked like volcanoes, while others looked like meteors had crashed into them. We were getting close.

Neil, Buzz, and Mike were bustling about, doing chores and experiments. They helped me out of the sleeping bag and gave me some cream of chicken soup to eat.

“You guys don’t have any funnel cake, do you?” I asked.

“No, why?” Buzz replied.

“Just wondering. Say, what if you’re on the moon and a meteor hits you?” I asked Neil.

“I guess we would become a crater,” he replied.

Mostly, I kept out of their way. There wasn’t much for me to do, and the three of them were busy. I didn’t want to interfere. But I wondered what they had in mind for me once they got to the moon. I knew that Mike was going to stay in the command module orbiting the moon while Neil and Buzz went to the surface in a smaller part of the ship called the lunar excursion module or LEM. But what about me?