The Clue in the Glue

  Mrs. Apple’s class went back to their room.

  “Everyone, it’s time for lunch,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “George, please come see me before you go to the cafeteria.”

  “I hope George isn’t in trouble,” Bess said as she and Nancy walked with the rest of the class to the cafeteria.

  George arrived at lunch ten minutes late. “Tell us what happened,” Nancy said as George put her tray down at their table.

  “When I went to put my award ribbon away inside my desk,” George explained, “I found a new smiley-face note. Mrs. Reynolds saw me reading it.”

  “Ooh,” Bess said. “Are you in trouble?”

  George nodded. “You’re not kidding. She thought I wrote it and was going to pass it to someone.”

  Nancy’s eyes grew wide. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “I tried to tell Mrs. Reynolds that I found it in my desk and I didn’t know where it came from.”

  “Why didn’t you just show her the note?” Nancy asked.

  “She didn’t give me a chance.” George paused. “Anyway,” she continued, “she didn’t believe me when I tried to explain. She said it was bad enough that I ignored her warning to stop passing notes during class. But to make up stories was even worse.”

  “But you weren’t making up stories,” Nancy said.

  “Mrs. Reynolds thinks I was,” George replied.

  “What’s she going to do?” Bess asked.

  “She says she won’t let me go on the field trip to the planetarium if she sees me with notes again,” George said unhappily.

  “Oh, no!” Nancy said. “You have to come!”

  “Who won’t let you go on the field trip?” Brenda Carlton walked up to the table.

  “Don’t be so nosy, Brenda,” Bess said.

  “Hmm, this sounds like something good for my newspaper,” Brenda said.

  Brenda had her own newspaper, called the Carlton News. She typed it herself, with help from her dad, on a computer at home.

  “Mrs. Reynolds hasn’t said for sure that George can’t go,” Nancy said. “You should only print the facts.”

  “We’ll see,” Brenda said as she walked away.

  “Great. Now Brenda is writing a stupid article about me in her paper.” George groaned. “Listen, you guys, I really want to see the new sky show at the planetarium. So, I can’t let Mrs. Reynolds see me with another note again,” George said to Nancy and Bess. “I have to figure out who’s leaving them and get whoever it is to stop.”

  “We’ll help you,” Nancy said. “Let’s start right now. First of all, what does the new note say?”

  George turned red. She pulled the note from her pocket but kept it in her hand. “The note’s right here.”

  Bess reached for it. “Let’s read it.” She grabbed the paper, but George grabbed it back.

  “George, why won’t you show us the note?” Nancy asked. “Bess and I are your best friends.”

  George slowly slid the note across the table. It was also on smiley-face paper. The two girls read: “George, I think you are pretty.” There was a wiggly line under the word “pretty.”

  Nancy and Bess looked at George, then down again at the note. Nancy’s eyes grew wide.

  “George, this is from . . . this is from a . . .” Bess couldn’t finish because she was laughing so hard. “EEEEeeee-wwww!” she shrieked, and doubled over.

  “A boy likes George!”

  4

  Invisible Ink Tricks

  Bess, stop it!” George looked around. “I don’t want the whole cafeteria to know.”

  “That you got a note from a boy!” Bess added, still giggling.

  “We’ll help you,” Nancy said. She pulled her detective notebook out of her pocket and opened it. Then she wrote: “Who is sending secret notes to George?”

  “Do you have the other two notes?” Nancy asked.

  “Yes.” George took them from her pocket and placed them on the table.

  “So, you got three notes on smiley-face notepaper,” Nancy said, writing in her blue notebook.

  “And someone fixed my model,” George reminded her. “We also have to find out who did that.”

  “I’m already working on that mystery,” Nancy said. She pulled out the empty glue tube she’d put in her blue notebook.

  “Where did you get that?” George asked.

  Nancy told Bess and George about finding it under the display table. “I think whoever glued your model left it there.”

  “That’s not Glue Boy glue like everyone else in class uses,” George said. “It’s Peacock’s Glue, that pasty stuff.”

  “Who uses that?” Bess asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nancy said, staring at the tube. “But we’ll find out.” Nancy wrote again in her notebook: “Who glued the model?” She looked up. “Hey, this is two mysteries rolled into one!”

  “Good.” Bess clapped her hands.

  “Two mysteries in one means we’ll solve them both at the same time.”

  Nancy looked back at the three notes. “The last note says you’re pretty.” She wrote that in her notebook. “So now we know it’s a boy who wrote the notes. Maybe whoever fixed your model was around yesterday after school. Or this morning. It could have been one of the boys.”

  “Jason was there,” Bess said, “and Andrew and David.”

  George frowned. “It couldn’t be David. He’s been acting so mean.”

  “Yeah,” Nancy agreed. “Whoever wrote the notes is someone who really likes you.”

  George’s face got red again.

  “Well, it’s true, George,” Nancy said. “Have Andrew or Jason been extra nice to you?”

  “No,” George said.

  “Yes, they have,” Bess said. “Remember when Andrew stopped David from waving that gross cockroach at you?”

  Nancy nodded. “He also told you he was sorry about your model getting broken. And Jason was, too.”

  “So, they’ve both been extra nice,” Bess said.

  Nancy wrote in her notebook:

  suspects

  Andrew

  Jason

  She looked at the notes again.

  “I think we should check out Jason’s and Andrew’s handwriting. We’ll compare it to the notes. Let’s look at the reports they had to write for their projects.”

  “Okay,” George said. “Come on.”

  The three girls finished eating and went back to the classroom. A few other kids were there, along with Mrs. Reynolds.

  Nancy spotted Jason. She wondered if he had glued George’s model but didn’t tell her because he didn’t want George to know he liked her. Nancy had an idea.

  “Jason, guess what?” she asked. “Somebody glued the broken piece on George’s model before we got to school this morning. Wasn’t that nice?” She watched his face.

  Jason squinted his eyes. “I guess,” he said. Then he shrugged and walked away.

  What was that funny look? Nancy wondered.

  Nancy joined Bess and George. They were at Kyle and Andrew’s magnet exhibit. She told the girls about questioning Jason.

  “If he gave you a funny look, I’ll bet he did fix George’s model,” Bess said.

  “It’s too soon to tell,” Nancy replied. “We need more clues to prove it’s Jason.”

  She looked at the printing on the report with Kyle and Andrew’s exhibit. Nancy had seen Andrew writing it the day before. She compared the writing to the notes. “Andrew’s printing looks kind of like the writing on the notes.”

  “A little,” George said. “Let’s look at Jason’s writing.”

  “Jason’s sign was made on a computer.” Nancy looked across the room at the sign over Jason’s display: Think Invisible Ink.

  “We’ll look at his report,” she said.

  At Jason’s table, they found that his report also had been made on a computer.

  “Too bad. I really wanted to compare his writing to the notes,” George said.

  “We’ll check out one of his s
chool papers,” Nancy said.

  The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. The students from both third-grade classes came into Mrs. Reynolds’s classroom. It was time for the presentations by the winners of the science fair.

  Amara Shane went first.

  “My project shows how the leaves of plants suck up water through the plant stems,” she said. “You can see this if you put celery in water with red food coloring in it. The stems turn red. Neat, huh?” Amara smiled proudly, and everyone applauded.

  George went next.

  “Our solar system has nine planets, and they circle around the sun,” George began. She jiggled her mobile to make the planets move around. “This planet is Mercury,” George said, pointing to the planet closest to the sun. She gave a little speech about each planet as she pointed it out on her model. When she was done, she also got a big round of applause.

  Finally, it was Jason’s turn. First he gave a quick talk about how juice from citrus fruits can work as invisible ink. He explained that grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and limes were all citrus fruits.

  “If you put citrus juice on a piece of paper, the juice will turn brown when the paper is held near something hot, like a lightbulb.”

  Jason took a Q-tip and dipped it in grapefruit juice. Then he wrote some words with the juice on a small piece of paper.

  He waved the paper. “The writing is invisible!”

  After a minute, Jason held the paper over the bare lightbulb of a desk lamp that Mrs. Reynolds had put on his display table.

  “Now the letters are turning brown,” Jason announced. He held up the paper to show everyone the words.

  Nancy strained to see from where she was sitting. The paper was small, and other students were in the way. She stood up to get a better look, and gasped. Nancy couldn’t believe what she saw.

  Jason’s paper had smiley faces on it!

  5

  Cheater! Cheater!

  Nancy stared at the smiley-face paper.

  “Nancy, Jason must be the note writer,” Bess whispered. “He has smiley-face paper!”

  The paper did make Jason look guilty. George turned and stared at Nancy. Nancy wondered if she was thinking the same thing.

  “Mrs. Reynolds, no one can see the paper. It’s too small,” Nancy called out.

  Mrs. Reynolds asked Jason to pick someone to make another test on a larger piece of paper. Jason chose David.

  David wrote his note, then waved it in the air to dry it fast. Then he held it over the lightbulb.

  When the message appeared, he held up the paper for everyone to see. On it he’d written: “Invisible ink is not stinky!” The words “is not” were underlined. David looked at Bess and smiled.

  “Ha! He’s making fun of what I said to Jason yesterday,” Bess said.

  Nancy started to move closer to Jason’s exhibit table so she could get a look at the smiley-face paper. But Jason stuffed it into his pants pocket. I’ll have to figure out a way to look at that piece of paper, Nancy thought.

  • • •

  As Nancy, Bess, and George left school that afternoon, Andrew came up behind them. “I thought your science project was the best,” he told George. “You should have won first prize without there being a tie.”

  “Wow! That was nice of him to say, don’t you think?” Nancy asked.

  George made a face. “I guess.”

  “That makes two times Andrew has said nice things to you, George,” Bess said.

  The three friends walked out to the parking lot. Hannah Gruen, the Drews’ housekeeper, was waiting to drive them to the ice rink.

  “Hello, girls. How was school?” Hannah asked. They told her about the science fair and George’s first prize.

  As they drove to the rink, Nancy said, “I was sure Jason was the one who wrote the notes. After what Andrew said to George, now I’m not so sure.”

  “Well, I am,” George said. “Jason has smiley-face paper.”

  “That’s a good clue, but we need more proof,” Nancy replied. “Yesterday I saw David Berger playing with the invisible ink at Jason’s display table. He could have been using smiley-face paper, too.”

  “If it was, then Andrew could have taken it from Jason’s table,” George said.

  “Right,” Nancy said. “We still need to see Jason’s writing and compare it to the notes.”

  Nancy asked George if she could keep the three notes. She tucked them into her blue detective’s notebook. As she did, she noticed the empty tube of glue.

  I bet if we find out whose glue this is, we’ll find out who fixed George’s model and who left the notes, Nancy thought.

  • • •

  At the ice-skating rink, Nancy, Bess, and George joined a group of girls that included Brenda and Alison. Nancy was glad to see Amara and Rebecca Ramirez. Rebecca lived near Nancy. They were friends.

  “Hi, you guys.” Nancy smiled. “This is going to be fun. There’re lots of kids from our class here.” Nancy looked at the other groups of skaters. She spotted Jason and a group of third-grade boys across the ice.

  Nancy, George, and Bess skated around a small area. Bess and Nancy showed George the new spin they’d learned at their last lesson.

  “Hey, not bad for girls,” Jason called as he and David skated over to them. A few boys followed. Jason circled the girls really fast before skidding to a stop in front of them.

  “Your skating’s not so hot,” George said. “I bet I could beat you in a race.”

  “You’re on!” Jason said excitedly.

  The other kids backed away, clearing a path for the race. George and Jason lined up.

  Nancy said, “Ready, set . . . GO!”

  Just as George was about to push off, David reached forward and yanked her red hat off her head. George turned for a second, and Jason got a head start.

  “Go, George, go!” Bess screamed.

  George took off across the ice. But she couldn’t catch up to Jason. He won easily.

  “Cheater!” George yelled at Jason. She skated back and grabbed her hat from David.

  “No fair!” Nancy called.

  “I’m going to get you, David!” George cried. She skated after him. A group of kids followed, and pretty soon the girls were chasing the boys.

  Nancy started after Jason. She skated faster and caught up to him. She spotted a piece of paper sticking out of his pants pocket. Maybe that’s the paper he used for the invisible ink test, Nancy thought.

  “Hey, Jason, what’s that in your pocket?” she asked.

  “It’s the ink test I did at school.” Jason waved the paper in the air.

  “Oh, your invisible ink was so cool. Can I see it?” Nancy asked sweetly.

  “Okay,” Jason said. He began to skate backward and held out the paper. “Come get it,” he said with a laugh.

  Nancy skated after Jason and managed to grab a corner of the paper. Just then Jason pulled his hand away.

  “Don’t!” Nancy called.

  But it was too late. Jason pulled his hand away. The paper ripped in half!

  6

  The Smell Will Tell

  Nancy was so surprised that she dropped the piece of paper she was holding. She scrambled to pick it up before it fell on the ice, but she wasn’t quick enough.

  “Oops! Sorry, Nancy,” Jason said, skating away.

  George and Bess skated up, and Nancy explained what happened. The girls tried to read the wet piece of paper, but the ink had run.

  Finally, Nancy sighed. “It’s no use. We’ll have to look at something else Jason wrote.”

  On the ride home, Nancy pulled her blue notebook out of her backpack and looked at the names of the two main suspects: Andrew, Jason. She thought about the empty glue tube again.

  “Do you guys remember seeing Andrew or Jason with glue yesterday?” Nancy asked.

  “Jason offered to glue George’s display,” Bess said.

  “Andrew also offered me glue, remember?” George said.

  “We should try t
o find out tomorrow if they still have their glue,” Nancy said.

  “If one of them is missing his glue,” George said, “that could be who glued my model and left the empty glue tube.”

  “That’s right,” Nancy said.

  • • •

  When Nancy arrived at school the next morning, Brenda was handing out the latest issue of the Carlton News.

  “It’s got a juicy article about George,” Brenda announced.

  “It’s a dumb story,” George said.

  “Is not,” Brenda said.

  Just then the bell rang for class.

  Mrs. Reynolds began class with a spelling lesson. She chose Jason to come to the blackboard to write some words. Good, Nancy thought. Now we can see his writing.

  Jason printed on the board.

  Bess leaned across the aisle and whispered, “I don’t think it looks like the notes, do you?”

  Nancy shook her head. Jason’s printing didn’t exactly match the notes.

  After spelling, Mrs. Reynolds announced they would have a special art period. The class was going to make fancy book covers for their reports on the field trip to the planetarium. They were going to glue colored paper cutouts onto the covers.

  “We can see what kind of glue Andrew and Jason use,” Nancy whispered to Bess.

  Nancy walked up to the front to get some colored paper from Mrs. Reynolds’s desk. As she passed George’s desk, George tugged on her sleeve.

  “Nancy!” George whispered. “I got another note.” George pointed to her lap. Nancy saw a small piece of folded paper and a Jelly Jet candy.

  “Did you get the Jelly Jet with it?” Nancy asked, looking up to make sure Mrs. Reynolds wasn’t watching them.

  “Yes,” George answered.

  Jelly Jets are Jason’s favorite candy, Nancy thought.

  “And, Nancy, this note has no writing on it,” George said.

  “George Fayne!” Mrs. Reynolds’s stern voice rang out.

  Nancy and George looked up.

  “Are you passing notes again?” Mrs. Reynolds said. “After what I said yesterday?”