Free Mystery of the Traveling Tomatoes by Gertrude Chandler Warner

CHAPTER 1
The Traveling Tomatoes
    “My tomatoes are moving!” Six-year old Benny Alden stood in the garden. He squinted one eye and looked down a row of tomato plants. Yesterday, the row was nice and neat. Today the rows looked zig-zagged.
    Benny’s brother and two sisters gardened nearby. The Alden children were helping grow vegetables behind The Applewood Café, one of their very favorite restaurants.
    “Plants don’t just get up and walk around,” said his sister Jessie.
    “These did,” said Benny.
    Fourteen-year-old Henry walked over and stood behind Benny. The two brothers peered down the row of tomatoes. “They do look cockeyed,” said Henry. “Have you measured them?”
    “Not yet,” said Benny. He opened the “Measuring Workbook” Henry had made to teach him how to measure things. Benny learned how to use a scale to measure how much things weighed. Here in the garden, he used a ruler to measure how far apart he planted the plants. “I planted the tomatoes two rulers, or twenty-four inches apart,” he said. “But look.” He moved the ruler this way and that between the plants. They measured ten inches apart, or thirty-six inches, all sorts of odd numbers.
    Jessie pulled weeds nearby. The twelve-year-old still did not believe plants could move around all by themselves. “Maybe animals dug around your plants,” she said. “It might have been raccoons, or dogs, or rabbits.”
    “Jessie’s … probably … right,” huffed ten-year-old Violet. She tugged and lugged a small wagon through the soft garden soil. The wagon was piled high with stacks of old newspapers. “Remember, last week your … turnips were all … jumbled up?” she said. “That’s why we made Spooky.”
    Spooky the Scarecrow smiled down at them. He wore the faded shirt and old pair of pants Grandfather had donated to the garden. The children had stuffed the clothing with straw. They made Spooky’s head out of a muddy green bag they’d found in the alley behind the Café. Benny used Violet’s markers to draw a smiley face. Jessie stuffed the bag with straw and Violet sewed the head to Spooky’s body. When the scarecrow was ready, Henry nailed Spooky to a large post in the middle of the garden. Spooky was supposed to keep critters from eating the food in their garden.
    Benny looked at Spooky, then looked at his messy tomato plants. “You’re not scaring anything,” he said. “I should have given you a scarier face.”
    Jessie and Violet lifted the newspapers off the wagon. They spread them on the ground around the plants. The newspapers would keep weeds from growing.
    After a little while, Violet noticed that her sister had stopped working. “Are you all right?” she asked.
    Jessie perched on her hands and knees, peering down at a page of the Greenfield Gazette. “Listen to this,” she said. “‘Baffling Bank Robbery. It’s been two months since a thief disguised as an armored car driver robbed the Greenfield Bank. The robber looked like—’”
    Applewood Café’s back door banged open. “Time for lunch,” called Laura Shea, the café’s owner. She balanced a chubby baby on each hip. She smiled at the young gardeners. “Anyone hungry?” The Aldens didn’t need to be called twice. They quickly ran inside to wash up.
    There were many things the children loved about the small café. Henry, who was very good at building things, liked the old saws, hammers, and other tools hanging everywhere around the room. Benny liked the café’s “Then and Now” photos. In one old “then” photo, Greenfield farmers drove horses and carts along Main Street to carry their vegetables to market. The “now” photo showed the same street filled with cars and shops. Benny especially liked the photos showing the café the day the Sheas bought it. Laura and David Shea stood smiling in front of a rickety old house. They smiled even though the porch was falling off and the roof was falling in. Prickly weeds grew all around, and