“Brilliant!” said Mr. Henry. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Unless you’ve already taken care of that, John?”
Now it was Officer Tanglewood’s turn to redden. “I was just about to.”
“Crowdsourcing!” blurted Lucas. We all turned and stared at him, and not just because his voice had cracked.
“Crowd what?” asked Jasmine.
“Sourcing,” said Mr. Henry, who was a walking dictionary. Most librarians are. “Also brilliant. It means tapping the collective wisdom of the public—asking for their help, often through social media.”
“Plenty of people besides Janet took pictures,” Lucas continued. “I saw them. We can put the word out online to send us anything that looks suspicious.”
Mr. Henry turned to Officer Tanglewood. “I’m sure you’ve thought of that, too.”
“Of course,” the policeman blustered, making it perfectly obvious that he hadn’t.
“Well, it certainly can’t hurt to have these intrepid young people here duplicate your efforts,” Mr. Henry said smoothly. “The more the merrier when it comes to solving a mystery, right? Especially one involving such an important symbol of our town’s heritage.”
Officer Tanglewood looked like he was wishing we’d all just disappear, Mr. Henry included. My friends and I headed upstairs, only too happy to oblige.
“I love this place!” said Mackenzie happily.
I did too. I’d been coming to the children’s room at the Pumpkin Falls Library since I was a little kid, and despite the fact that it was definitely in need of renovation—the paint was faded and peeling, for starters, and the chairs and sofas were nearly threadbare, and I suspected that the weird blotch on the ceiling meant there was a leak in the roof—it was one of the coziest places in town.
We headed automatically for the floor pillows under the big bronze sculpture in the corner that depicted a scene from Charlotte’s Web. Everyone in the room except Calhoun, who had only moved here a couple of years ago, and Mackenzie, who had visited for the first time over Spring Break, had grown up sitting in the doorway of Zuckerman’s barn for story hour, beneath the bronze cobweb that contained Charlotte. At least now, at our age, we didn’t fight over who got to sit next to Wilbur and who got stuck next to Templeton.
“What do we have so far?” I asked, pen poised over my notepad to start making a list. We almost always began our meetings by making a list. I jotted down two headings: What We Know and What We Don’t Know.
“We know the trophy is missing,” said Lucas.
Scooter shot him a look. “Duh!”
“Scooter!” Mackenzie chided, which earned her a worshipful glance from Lucas.
“Sorry,” mumbled Scooter. If anyone could make him behave, it was my cousin.
“Maybe add a column for ‘Suspects,’ and one for ‘Action Items,’ ” suggested Calhoun. “I like Lucas’s idea for crowdsourcing—and yours, Truly, for looking at Janet’s photos.”
He smiled at me, and I smiled back, then wrote down his suggestions.
“We should find out what time Belinda picked up the trophy from Mahoney’s,” said Jasmine.
I wrote that down under What We Don’t Know.
“And when it was last seen,” added Cha Cha.
I wrote that down too. “How about suspects? Do we have any?”
In the end, we came up with the marathon runner, an older man whom Lucas claimed to have seen lurking outside Lou’s Diner and, after some discussion, Ella Bellow. I stared at the list glumly. There was discouragingly little to go on. We brainstormed for a while, not making much progress. When I finally looked up at the clock, I realized with a start that Mackenzie and I had less than half an hour before Lobster Bob was due to arrive for the clambake.
“To be continued,” I told my friends, leaping to my feet. “Our parents will have our heads on a platter if we aren’t home in time to change for dinner.”
As we were leaving, Mackenzie paused by a rack of brochures advertising all the tourist attractions in the area. Gramps and Lola had taken us to a lot of them over the years. We’d been to Story Land when we were little (kind of like a smaller, lamer version of Disneyland) and hunted for souvenirs at Clark’s Trading Post. We’d climbed Mount Monadnock when we were older and gone swimming and boating at Lake Winnipesaukee and ridden the Mount Washington Cog Railway to the highest spot in the northern Appalachians. Other places I hadn’t been to and had no interest in visiting included the World’s Second-Largest Chainsaw (the largest was in Michigan, apparently) and New Hampshire’s Favorite Dairy Museum. I knew that some people called our state “Cow Hampshire,” but who would want to visit a museum about cows? And did “favorite” mean that there was more than one?
“Hey, check this out!” Mackenzie plucked a brochure from the bottom row.
“Check what out?”
“This.” She thrust it into my hands.
A woman wearing a bikini top and a fish tail floated on the brochure’s aquamarine cover, smiling broadly and waving. I read the words in her thought bubble aloud: “ ‘Do you dream of being a mermaid?’ ”
Can’t say that I do, I thought, and handed it back.
“Sounds like fun, right?” said my cousin.
“For Lauren and Pippa, maybe,” I replied.
For me? Not in a million years.
CHAPTER 7
By the time we got home, the school bus filled with my relatives had returned from the lake, and the house was awash in Giffords getting ready for the clambake. Mackenzie and I took quick showers and changed out of our sneakers and smelly race clothes into sandals and sundresses—Grandma G liked us all to dress up for our annual “farewell banquet,” as she called it.
“Obadiah, Abigail, Jeremiah, Ruth,” Mackenzie singsonged as the two of us headed back downstairs from my bedroom. I’d made up the rhyme when I was younger, to help me remember the names of all my Lovejoy ancestors in the portraits that lined the staircase.
“Matthew, Truly, Charity, and Booth!” I finished, pausing momentarily to blow
