Free The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin Page A

right,” he said. “Finally, a stroke of luck.” The boys were heading down an aisle to sit in those big comfy seats, but Mr. Garvey whispered, “No! Come back here. We won’t be here long.”
    Winston kept glancing over at the door to the theater. He was waiting for it to open and for the girls to walk in. They had ditched them, plain and simple, after promising that they would team up. In the back of his mind, he had sort of hoped they might join forces with these girls throughout the event. Winston didn’t meet many girls who liked puzzles, and that seemed like a pretty good thing to find.
    He doubted Bethany or her friends would be too keen to work with them anymore.
    Winston’s eyes had adjusted to the dark now, and he could see silhouettes of other teams sitting in the chairs, but he couldn’t tell who they were. Mr. Garvey led them into an area behind the back row—he didn’t want to sit.
    “If all the puzzles are this easy,” whispered Mr. Garvey, “we’re never going to catch up. I hope there’s a real killer later on that only we can crack.”
    “You know the answer?” Jake said.
    “Of course I do! Look!” He pointed up at the words. “Just put the missing letters back in to get one of the zodiac signs. It couldn’t be simpler! Turn on that thing so we can submit the answer,” Mr. Garvey said.
    Jake had the computer, and he complied. Teedly-teedly-TEE. When Jake was ready, Mr. Garvey said, “Okay. It’s Water Carrier, Bull, Ram, Fish, Scales, Goat . . . so type in A-L-R-S-E-T.”
    “That’s not a word,” Mal said.
    “Just type it in.”
    Jake did. There was a moment’s pause, then he said, “That’s not the right answer.”
    “All right, all right,” Mr. Garvey said, waving his hands as if erasing the wrong answer out of the air. “Scramble the letters. It’s an anagram. How can you turn those letters into a word?” When nobody said anything, Mr. Garvey said, “Winston! This is your thing, isn’t it? Mix up those letters!”
    “ALTERS,” Winston said after a moment of thought.
    “Good! Try that,” Mr. Garvey said to Jake.
    Jake punched in the letters. “No.”
    “STALER,” Winston said.
    Jake pushed more buttons. “No, sorry.”
    “Try ALERTS,” said Mr. Garvey. “It has to be one of these.”
    Jake shook his head. “It’s not that one.”
    “Are you typing it in the right spot?”
    Even in the dark, Winston saw Jake’s eyes flash. “Of course I am.” All he had to do was push the first button—the only button the computer would let him push. Did Mr. Garvey think he couldn’t manage that?
    Apparently so. “Let me see,” Mr. Garvey said, and snatched the computer away. He glanced at the screen and then handed it back to Jake, who rolled his eyes at Winston in disbelief.
    “So there’s another trick to this,” Mal said, looking back up at the floating words.
    “A trick,” said Mr. Garvey. “Yes. A trick.”
    They were standing fairly close to the exit, and as they watched, another team left the theater. Before the door could close, a hand opened it back up. Miss Norris peeked in and looked around. With the light flooding in from the lobby, she could see Winston and his team easily enough. She turned her head and said something, and then the girls walked in, glaring. If the four of them could blast rays of solid ice out of their eyes, Winston and his team would have been frozen forever. Bethany looked like she was on the verge of developing that power spontaneously. Winston and his friends traded embarrassed glances—they all wanted to crawl under the carpeting.
    The girls and their teacher looked up at the floating words for a moment or two and then filed down into the seating area and out of sight.
    Mr. Garvey watched his boys watch the girls. “All right, guys,” he said. “This is a competition, let’s remember that. We’re in last place, and we’re not going to get very far if we help other teams. Let’s get back to the puzzle.”
    Winston may