Sixty-Second Solutions 12

The moving truck backed up to Samantha Spade’s garage, its tires spinning in the freshly fallen December snow.

Samantha lifted the garage door. She had a book bag slung over one shoulder; inside were her copies of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and her two-volume Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Her father, Kent, jumped out of the driver’s side of the truck and almost slipped. He had left earlier two hours earlier to pick up the truck and cancel various utilities around town, including the electricity and telephone service.

“How you doing, sport?” he asked Samantha, adjusting the knot of his tie. “Did you get all that stuff stacked?”

She nodded her head. Behind her, on the concrete garage floor, were boxes filled with all their material possessions. Kent, a computer systems installer for CompuStall, had finished his work for the Sallami School System two weeks earlier

By this time next week, they would be in sunny New Mexico, where his next CompuStall job, wiring a security system for a Fortune 500 Company, was waiting. Kent had made Samantha stack all the boxes in the garage according to size, instructing her not to go inside the house until she had finished. The job had taken the better part of two hours.

The prospect of moving didn’t thrill Samantha. She and her dad had moved many times in the past few years, following Kent’s work across the country. He had been in the city of Sallami for longer than any past jobs, and Samantha had made quite a few friends.

She was going to miss Billy Archer, Flo Mason, Andy D’Brillo and the rest of her pals. Heck, she was even going to miss Vinnie Furnier, the teenager who lived across the street. He had given her some grief during her first few months in Sallami but had turned into a pretty decent sort after Samantha solved a mystery that allowed him to keep his job.

Solving mysteries was what Samantha did best. She was Sallami’s number one amateur detective, a title she relished. Now, she would have to start all over again, building a reputation in Newbury, New Mexico.

“What came in the mail?” Kent asked.

“The usual,” she answered glumly. Her steel-trap mind could have rattled off each envelope: A farewell card from Billy, two pieces of junk mail, an envelope from CompuStall, and a yellow envelope from a local company called TechSec.

“I’m cold, Dad,” Samantha said. “I’m heading inside.”

Her father opened the yellow envelope. “Sure, whatever,” he said.

Samantha had just stepped inside the back doorway and flipped on the light switch, brightening the kitchen, when her father sprinted after her.

“Hey, Sam, hold up for a minute, huh?” he gasped. “I forgot, there’s a box on the front porch that I need your help carrying.”

“Whatever,” she groused. “I’ll just go out the front door.”

“Better not,” said Kent. “You’ll just track the place up for the next owners. Come around this way.”

Together, they walked back down the sidewalk and around the side of the house, the wind gusting snow in all directions. Samantha noticed several sets of footprints leading to the front door.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Kent looked down at the footprints and said, “Must be from me carrying all those boxes out to the garage earlier this morning. Come on.”

Kent trudged up the front porch steps, still gripping the yellow envelope in his gloved hands. Samantha followed but continued to stare at the footprints, even as she walked over them.

Suddenly, she stopped and smiled.

Kent turned, saw her grin, and said, “Hey, Sam, we don’t have all day.”

“When were you going to tell me, Dad?”

“Tell you what?”

Sam ran to him and hugged him tight. “About your new job at TechSec, where you went for a final interview today, and how we don’t need to move after all. And how all my friends are waiting inside to surprise me with the news.”

WHAT SIX CLUES GAVE SAMANTHA’S FATHER AWAY? SEE BELOW FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION TO OUR SERIES.


Samantha picked up on six clues.

First, her father was wearing a tie when he came back with the moving van, slightly overdressed for that kind of work. Secondly, he was supposed to have all the utilities turned off, but when Samantha flipped on the light switch in the kitchen, it still worked. Third, Kent opened the yellow envelope from TechSec before he opened the letter from CompuStall, his employer. Fourth, all the tracks in the front lawn went toward the front door; none came back the other way. Fifth, her father had been gone for two hours, more than enough time for the three inches of new snow to cover the old tracks. Finally, Kent had not wanted her to walk through the house to get to the front porch; she would have seen her friends waiting there and spoiled the surprise.

Kent had been secretly interviewing for a new job to keep him and Samantha in Sallami. He didn’t want to get her hopes up, so he didn’t tell her about the interviews earlier. Meanwhile, he and Samantha packed for his next assignment.

When Kent went to his final interview, he learned TechSec had mailed a copy of his contract in a yellow envelope the day before. On the way home, he dropped off a key to the front door to Billy Archer and told him to call all Samantha’s friends for a surprise “Welcome Home” party while Samantha stacked boxes in the garage. He still picked up the moving van to keep Sam off guard until the very end.

But there’s yet to be a mystery that Samantha Spade, the Sixty-Second Solution, has been unable to crack, even when it involves her directly!

The End

So, this is the last installment of Sixty-Second Solutions. I enjoyed revisiting these, and I hope you—whoever you are—enjoyed reading them. 

I still have one more serial, Dog Daze, to share here. I'll put it on my radar for 2024. 

Bradbury's 'Zero Hour'

Above: My beat-to-shit copy of The Illustrated Man, purchased at a garage sale sometime in the 1980s. 

Readers who don’t like science fiction often complain the genre is unrelatable. Robots, ray guns, little green guys in spaceships—what does any of it have to do with the so-called real world? It’s a fair question, but a misguided one. Like horror, another unappreciated genre, science fiction deals in metaphor, dressing up contemporary issues until they are almost unrecognizable, especially if the reader is blinded by the strangeness of it all. But beneath the odd names, alien landscapes, and cryptic languages are bedrock truths that speak to the issues of each writer’s time—and that sometimes speak to future times in ways the author may have never imagined.

Ray Bradbury is a case in point. Known today primarily for Fahrenheit 451, a novel about a dystopian society where firefighters burn books in a totalitarian government, Bradbury began his career as a short-story writer, grinding out pieces for popular men’s magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. One such story, “Zero Hour,” published in 1947 in Planet Stories and collected in 1951 in The Illustrated Man, forecasts many of today’s concerns, even if the author himself couldn’t have known it at the time.

“Zero Hour” is the story of a future society—the audience knows this because “rockets hovered like darning needles in the blue sky” and “arm in arm, men all over earth were a united front” (Bradbury, 1951, p. 170)— where children are the entry point for an invasion from another world. The story is told from the perspective of the Morris family, whose youngest member, Mink, and her neighborhood playmates borrow innocuous tools from kitchens and garages at the behest of a mysterious invisible friend. This friend, Drill, whispers plans from beneath rose bushes because no adult would think to look for him there.

As the story progresses, Mrs. Morris realizes that similar scenarios are playing out across the country, with multiple children listening to their own versions of Drill, all of them playing a game called “Invasion,” set to culminate at 5 p.m. Then, the seemingly random collection of tools and kitchen implements, along with byzantine math formulae, is used to open a gateway from the fearsome invaders’ dimension into our own. The story ends with Mink’s parents cowering in fear in the attic. It is strongly suggested that Mink and all the other Earth children are willing to sacrifice their parents’ lives for their new friend, Drill.

Bradbury’s story predates the expression “generation gap” by at least twelve years, yet the author was likely aware that “kids these days” were acting in ways that alarmed their parents. At the time of the story’s writing, the very concept of teenagers as society knows them today was a relatively new phenomenon, created by marketers who realized the ’tween-12-and-20 set was an under-exploited consumer demographic. So, for a writer looking for a scary sci-fi premise, why not tap into the primal fear that children could and were being manipulated to dress differently, talk differently, and behave differently from their parents?

Bradbury’s story also anticipates modern social media, which makes the fears in the story more acute for today’s readers than for those in the author’s own time. The mechanism by which Drill and his invading buddies pierce the sanctity and security of the home reads a lot like today’s internet. When Mrs. Morris talks to her friend, Helen, via “audio visor,” they realize their kids are playing the same Invasion game, despite one family living in New York and the other in New Jersey. They speculate that Drill “must be a new password” and talk about how the game is “sweeping the country” (Bradbury, 1951, p. 174). Still, they laugh off any serious implications.

Viewing “Zero Hour” through a twenty-first-century lens, it’s easy to see Drill as a social media influencer akin to Mr. Beast or Logan Paul, grooming children with messages that run afoul of their parents’ teaching. Like Mrs. Morris, today’s parents may sometimes shrug their shoulders over the ubiquity of TikTok and Snapchat in their children’s lives, believing they can’t keep their children away from these platforms even if they tried. Drill is an invisible force in the lives of Mink and her friends, just as parents often can’t see the scrolling TikTok screens or hear the messages their children are ingesting, over and over, as algorithms lead them down rabbit holes to new, exciting, and often spurious information.

And, like Drill, TikTok influencers—and the teen’s own peers—can lead them to actions that are antisocial, dangerous, or even criminal. Readers may remember the various TikTok challenges of the past school year, where teens were enticed to vandalize restrooms and punch teachers, all while filming their antics for later uploading. In “Zero Hour,” Drill cajoled kids to essentially become Fifth Columnists, traitors to their own people. TikTok hasn’t gone that far—yet.

Noted fantasy writer Neil Gaiman once observed, “Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future” (Gaiman, 1996, p. vii). This is evidenced by some of Bradbury’s naming conventions in “Zero Hour,” comical by today’s standards: the aforementioned “audio visor,” “electro-duster” magnets, and “beetle cars,” which appear to be self-driving electric vehicles. But while Bradbury’s names may be less than gripping, he was eerily accurate when we compare those concepts to today’s Zoom and Facetime, Roombas that clean while homeowners are away, and all-electric and hybrid cars.

More telling, however, are the interpersonal dynamics and societal fears that Bradbury cloaks in the garb of an alien invasion, that hoariest of science fiction plots. Mr. and Mrs. Miller represent all parents who fear their children are growing up to be far different than they were at the same age, Mink and her friends are all kids who resent adult authority and await the day when they can rule the world, and Drill is every new technology that threatens to upend the social order.

Unrelatable? Science fiction is just the opposite. It spices up the truth to make it more palatable, and creates a mirror to reflect the audience’s and author’s own loves and hates and prejudices. It’s about the future, yes, but it’s also about the present. And sometimes, if it was written long enough ago, it’s about today in ways even the authors themselves, with all their imaginative faculties, could never have dreamed.

References

Bradbury, R. (1951). Zero hour. In The illustrated man (pp. 169-177). 

Bantam.

 Gaiman, N. (1996). Of time, and Gully Foyle. In Bester, A. The stars

 my destination. Vintage.

I wrote the above essay earlier this fall as an example of an analysis paper for a composition class I teach. Citations are in APA format, which specifies sentence case instead of title case for book and article titles on the References page. 

 

Sixty-Second Solutions 11

Sgt. Frank McDaniel’s turkey was AWOL.

The sergeant and his wife had opened the refrigerator on Thanksgiving morning, ready to put the pop the plump bird into the oven, but found an empty space on the bottom shelf where the turkey should have been.

After rousing their two children, Tom and Mary, who had no idea what happened to the bird, he called his neighbor, Samantha Spade.

Spade was in seventh grade, two years older than Tom and three years older than Mary, but her reputation as an excellent amateur detective had spread to people and students of all ages in the city of Sallami.

Samantha came right over, her hair still dripping wet from the shower. The McDaniel’s dog, Ginger, met her at the front door. She jumped on Samantha and licked her face while Samantha struggled to remove her coat.

“At ease, Ginger,” Samantha giggled, pushing the dog down. For a recruiting sergeant who prized discipline, Sgt. McDaniel had one of the worst-behaved dogs ever.

Mary grabbed the dog by its collar and pulled it off Samantha. “Get down, you dumb mutt!” she yelled. Mary had dark circles under her eyes, and Samantha had never heard her speak to Ginger so sharply.

“Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed,” Samantha said.

“Don’t mind her,” said Mrs. McDaniel. “We went out to dinner and to see a movie last night and didn’t get home until late. She usually sacks out in the backseat on the way home, but couldn’t because of all the noise from the muffler.”

Sergeant McDaniel explained that their car’s exhaust system was going bad again, only one month after they had it replaced. The whole family had heard it rumbling last night.

“Dear, I think she’d rather hear about the turkey?” asked Mrs. McDaniel.

The sergeant ran his fingers through his crew cut as he led her to the kitchen.

“It’s like this,” he said. “Yesterday, at seventeen hundred hours…”

“Or five o’clock,” Mrs. McDaniel interjected, translating military time.

“Correct,” McDaniel said. “At five o’clock, I closed the recruiting office, turned off the lights, and exited through the back door to my vehicle. I drove to the Shopper’s Corner and picked out a turkey for today’s dinner, along with other items on a list that my wife had given me.”

Samantha liked the way Sgt. McDaniel talked as if he were testifying at a military tribunal instead of explaining how he had shopped for groceries the night before.

“The list had ten items,” said Mrs. McDaniel. She started to tick them off on one hand: A loaf of bread, a box of stuffing, a pound of flour …

“Actually, it’s all right here,” said Tom, pointing to the kitchen floor.

There, Samantha saw two brown bags filled with groceries. Sheepishly, Frank lifted the two bags to the cupboard, grunting at their weight. He began to put the groceries into the cupboards.

“Frank’s not much for putting things away once he’s bought them,” Mrs. McDaniel confided.

The sergeant told Samantha that while he did forget to put away the groceries, he distinctly remembered opening the refrigerator door and clearing a spot for the turkey.

“After I took the groceries from the trunk and carried them inside, I took the family out for dinner and a movie,” he said.

“Dad’s so absent-minded he even forgot to close the trunk, snickered Tom. “I did it for him when we left.”

“What time did you get home from the movies?” Samantha asked, eyeing Ginger suspiciously. If Sgt. McDaniel had absentmindedly left the bird out of the refrigerator, Ginger may have feasted on turkey while the family went to the movies.

“The movie ended at approximately twenty-two hundred…I mean, about 10 p.m.,” the sergeant said. “We got home soon after, maybe around 10:45.”

“It was 10:39,” said Mary McDaniel. “I saw it on the clock in the car when I should have been sleeping. Dumb muffler.”

“And was the turkey in the refrigerator when you got home?” Samantha asked.

“I don’t honestly know,” said Sgt. McDaniel. “We went straight to bed.”

“And where was Ginger?” Samantha asked.

“She was sleeping upstairs on my bed like she always does when we’re not home,” said Tom.

“Well, that clinches it,” said Samantha, petting Ginger’s head. “I know exactly what happened to your turkey.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TURKEY, AND WHAT CLUES DID SAMANTHA USE TO SOLVE THE CASE? SEE BELOW FOR THE SOLUTION. 




The turkey was still in the trunk.

After Samantha heard Sgt. McDaniel grunt when he picked up the two bags of groceries, she knew he couldn’t have carried them and the turkey into the house at the same time.

Instead, she realized that Sgt. McDaniel had put the two grocery bags on the floor, opened the refrigerator and cleared a space for the turkey. He intended to go back to the car and bring the bird on a second trip. Samantha realized this when Tom said he had closed the trunk of the car, an indicator that his father had something else to carry inside.

But the clinching clue was the rumbling of the car’s exhaust, even though Sgt. McDaniel said that the muffler had been replaced last month. The “rumbling” was actually the turkey, rolling back and forth in the trunk.

Luckily for the McDaniels, the weather was cold enough to preserve the turkey in the trunk overnight. They popped it in the oven and enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving meal that afternoon, courtesy of Samantha Spade’s sleuthing skills.

Sixty-Second Solutions 10

Samantha Spade was dressed as a banana.

Her face, arms and legs were the only body parts poking out of the furry, yellow costume. Samantha’s friend, Flo Mason, giggled as Samantha waddled up the sidewalk to Flo’s front porch.

“That’s an ap-peel-ing get-up,” Flo said.

“Very funny,” replied Samantha, “especially coming from a giant cell phone. Happy Halloween!”

“Same to you,” said Flo, touching the pound-sign button on her wireless telephone costume. A computerized version of “Monster Mash” played for ten seconds. “Pretty cool, huh? Having a mother who works for Sprint sure pays off for trick or treat.”

Flo opened the door and yelled inside to her parents, telling them that she and Samantha were going trick or treating. Her mother shouted back the usual precautions – stay together and only visit homes of people you know – and then the two girls, plastic bags in hand, were on their way.

As they went door to door, Samantha thought how lucky she was to spend Halloween in the city of Sallami. She had been afraid that her dad’s temporary computer installation job would end months ago, but so far he was still happily buried in line after line of binary code at the city school.

This was the longest she’d ever remained at one school; consequently, her reputation for solving mysteries – usually in one minute or less – had grown to an all-time high. She was now regularly known as the Sixty-Second Solution throughout Sallami.

But tonight she wasn’t thinking about mysteries. She was thinking, instead, about candy: M&M’s, Clark bars, Smarties and many others that filled her bag as she and Flo trekked along Watson Lane. But mysteries had a way of finding Samantha, even when she wasn’t looking for them!

At the intersection of Watson and Holmes Avenue, Samantha and Flo heard a child scream, “My pummin! My pummin!”

Flo said, “Hey, that’s Miranda!. Come on!”

She ran toward a small ranch house located on a wooded, corner lot. Samantha followed, doing her best to navigate in her Chiquita banana costume. The entire yard was filled with a six-inch carpet of fallen leaves, and they crunched loudly beneath her feet as she ran.

When Samantha caught up to her friend, Flo was already hugging a little girl dressed in bunny ears and a cotton tail. The child was sobbing uncontrollably, pointing at a shattered jack-o-lantern on the sidewalk.

“My pummin! My pummin!” she cried. “Somemody smashed my pummin!”

Flo wiped away the little girl’s tears. “Sam, this is Miranda, the little girl I babysit after school. She’s three years old. Somebody’s smashed her pumpkin.”

“They certainly did,” Sam said. Pumpkin pieces were everywhere.

“Just then, the front door opened, and Miranda’s parents, whom Flo introduced as Jack and Debbie Wright, came outside. Debbie lifted Miranda and hugged her tightly.

“This was her favorite jack-o-lantern,” Mr. Wright said, as he swept up the pulpy mess with a broom and dustpan. “We’d just carved it this afternoon.”

“Did you see who did it?” asked Samantha.

“Not really,” Mrs. Wright answered. “Since we’re on a corner lot, we give out candy at the front and back doors. The doorbell rang out back, and Jack and I gave treats to a ghost and a witch. That’s when I heard Miranda start to cry.”

“Ghost an’ witch,” repeated Miranda. “Ghost an’ witch broked my pummin.”

“No, honey,” said Mr. Wright. “The ghost and the witch were out back with us. There’s no way they could have broken your pumpkin in the front yard.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Sam, pointing toward the sidewalk on Holmes Avenue. Four kids, two dressed as ghosts and two dressed as witches, were walking there.

“Hey, you kids,” called Mr. Wright. “Come over here!”

They did. Jack asked them who was responsible for breaking the pumpkin.

“Not me,” said one witch, pulling off her mask. Underneath, she was Lora Dublin, a high school girl who lived in the neighborhood.

The other three Trick-or-Treaters also unmasked. Flo knew them all and introduced Samantha to them: Susan Taylor, Mark McMasters and Brett Sloane. Samantha noted that the two boys were the same height, as were the two girls. Their costumes were also similar: Standard issue sheets and pointy hats. The girls’ masks were identical.

“Look, if you’re trying to pin this thing on us, you’re …well, bananas,” said Mark. When his friends started to snicker, he looked at Samantha’s costume and smirked. “Uh, no offense.”

Miranda, hidden behind her parents, popped her head from around her mother’s legs and screamed, “Bad witch an’ ghost! Broked my pummin!”

Samantha asked Mrs. Wright what kind of candy she was distributing that evening. She answered Tootsie Rolls, a very popular Halloween giveaway.

“Mind if I take a look into your bags?” she asked.

The teens looked at one another, shrugged their shoulders and opened their treat sacks, grinning. Samantha saw Tootsie Rolls among the candy that all four had collected. Samantha sighed.


“Mr. and Mrs. Wright,” she said, “are you sure that only one ghost and one witch came to your door a few minutes ago?”

“Absolutely,” said Mr. Wright.

“Look, I’ll make this easier,” said Brett. “Mark and Lora were the two who came to your door. I had enough candy for one night, so I decided to wait around the corner of the house for Mark and Lora, while Susie went to the front door for candy, but …”

“So you broke the jack-o-lantern?” interrupted Mrs. Wright, turning toward Susie.

“Hey, let me finish,” Brett said. “She didn’t make it to the front of the house, because she doubled back through the yard to sneak up behind me and me half to death.”

“That’s right,” said Susie. “He was just standing there with his back to me, looking bored. It was too good to pass up.”

“She was just as quiet as could be,” sniggered Brett. “Got right up behind me, then – Boo! I jumped right out of my skin, believe me!”

“I wish I could,” said Samantha, shaking her head. “I wish I could…”


HOW DOES SAMANTHA KNOW THAT BRETT IS LYING? SEE BELOW FOR THE SOLUTION.


Brett said that Susan had been able to surprise him from behind while he waited in the Wright’s yard, but that would be impossible in a yard filled with a six-inch layer of leaves. Remember, when Samantha ran through the yard earlier, she made plenty of noise.

When Brett started to tell his lie, Susie went along with it, right up to the point where their alibi was spoiled by a seventh-grade-sized banana named Samantha Spade!

Once they realized they were exposed, Brett and Susie admitted they had smashed Miranda’s pumpkin, and Mark and Lora admitted their role was to ring the back doorbell and distract the Wrights.

To make up for their misdeed, the four teens raked all the leaves from the Wrights’ property the next day.

Sixty-Second Solutions 9

Larry Porter was known as the Boy of 1,000 Voices.

Not only could he perfectly imitate the speech of cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo and SpongeBob SquarePants, but he could also mimic any teacher or student in Sallami Middle School, a talent that made him popular each morning in the hallway.

On this particular September day, Samantha Spade – the town’s greatest amateur detective – and her friend, Billy Archer, were part of a small crowd of seventh-graders gathered around Porter’s locker.

“Hey, Porter, do Mr. Cunkel,” said Aaron Posthaste.

Mr. Cunkel was the shop teacher, a tall, lumbering man with a very high voice. Behind his back, kids called him Canary Cunkel.

“No problem – for two bucks,” Larry replied, holding out his open palm. Aaron dug into his pocket and produced a one-dollar bill.

“This is all it’s worth to me,” Aaron said, waving the dollar in front of Larry’s face.

Frowning, Larry grabbed the dollar and stuffed it into his wallet. The Boy of 1,000 Voices had long ago learned to capitalize on his talent.

With payment made, Larry puckered his lips as if to kiss a lemon and squeezed shut his eyes. He was getting into character. When he spoke next, his voice was a dead-ringer imitation of the shop teacher.

“Aaron, put down that hammer and get out your shop project!” he squeaked. Everybody except Samantha and Billy roared with laughter. They both thought that Mr. Cunkel was a nice man and a good teacher.

“Porter, you’re a card!” said Aaron, clapping Larry on the back. “Better save that one for posterity.”

“Good idea,” said Larry, still imitating Mr. Cunkel. He reached into his pocket and fished out a small cassette recorder. Larry lived in constant dread of the day his voice would change and leave him unable to do funny imitations, so he carried a cassette recorder with him at all times.

With the “Record” button pressed, he imitated what Mr. Cunkel might sound like if he smashed his finger in a vice.

“OK, OK, break it up, kids,” said Mrs. Young as she came out of her. Larry stuffed the cassette player into his pocket before she realized what he was doing. “Everybody to their homerooms, pronto!”

As Samantha walked to her desk, she heard Aaron ask Mrs. Young if they could get a drink before the morning bell rang. The teacher said yes. A minute or so later, Larry asked the same question and was also given permission.

During the Pledge of Allegiance, Samantha saw Aaron stroll into the room and throw something into the trashcan before going to his desk.

As Mrs. Young was taking attendance, Larry burst into the room, his shirt ripped, his hair in disarray. He tripped over a chair and landed flat on his face.

“My goodness, Larry, what happened?” cried Mrs. Young as she picked him up from the floor.

“He – he stole my dollar!” shouted Larry, pointing toward Aaron.

“That’s a lie!” said Aaron, outraged.

Amid much blubbering, Larry told his story. He said that after the two boys had gotten a drink, Aaron started pushing Larry, demanding back his dollar. When Larry told him no, Aaron pulled him into the boys' bathroom and threatened to beat him up.

“When I saw what he was going to do, I hit the ‘record’ button on my cassette player when he wasn’t looking,” Larry sniveled. “I got the whole thing on tape.”

“He’s lying, Mrs. Young!” Aaron repeated.

Mrs. Young asked for the cassette.

“See, that’s the problem,” Larry continued. “When I told Aaron that the whole conversation was taped, he grabbed the recorder, took out the cassette and ran out of the bathroom. I only have the recorder now because he dropped it on the way out.”

Samantha raised her hand. “Mrs. Young, I saw Aaron throw something away when he came into the room.”

The teacher went to the wastebasket and peered into it. Sure enough, she found a micro-cassette.

Larry placed the cassette into his player and immediately hit “Play.” The first thing everybody heard was his voice imitating the shop teacher. Mrs. Young folded her arms across her chest and frowned.

Soon, they heard Larry’s own voice, begging Aaron not to push him again. A voice that sounded like Aaron’s demanded the dollar. Then, several thumps and bumps, followed by Larry explaining that the whole incident was on tape.

“Give me that,” they heard Aaron say. There was a click, then nothing but the hiss of the cassette tape.

Aaron stood up and repeated, “He’s lying, Mrs. Young. It didn’t happen that way at all!”

According to Aaron, he met Larry coming back from the drinking fountain. Larry had given him the dollar and the cassette tape, said that he was ashamed of himself for mocking a teacher, and asked Aaron to throw away the tape. He even waved the dollar bill for the class to see, not realizing that it made him appear even guiltier.

“But, Aaron, that’s your voice on the tape, demanding the money,” said Mrs. Young.

That doesn’t prove anything,” said Aaron. “He’s the Kid of 1,000 Voices! He was imitating me!”

Mrs. Young conceded that Aaron had a point. She said she wasn’t sure which story to believe.

“I am, Mrs. Young,” said Samantha, standing up. “That cassette tape is all the evidence you need.”

WHICH VERSION OF THE STORY IS TRUE, AND HOW CAN SAMANTHA BE SO SURE? SEE BELOW FOR THE SOLUTION.


Larry said that Aaron had snatched the cassette tape out of his recorder as soon as he knew about it. But when he played the tape to the class, it had already been rewound.

Aaron would have no way to rewind the tape without the player; only Larry could do that.

Larry, angry that his imitation had earned him one dollar less than expected, saw a chance to get even when he heard Aaron ask to get a drink. After receiving permission to do the same, Larry recorded the fake bathroom confrontation on the way to the drinking fountain, then gave Aaron the dollar and asked him to throw away the tape.

If no one had witnessed Aaron throwing the tape away, Larry would have volunteered to check all the area wastebaskets himself, to “prove” his story.

Larry received an after-school detention for imitating Mr. Cunkel’s voice, and spent it cleaning and sweeping the shop classroom.