The Mystery of the Carnival Prize Read Online Free

too.”
    A small table was set up. A tall boy with curly blond hair was calling out, “Bring home a toy for your children. Buy a soft, furry stuffed animal.”
    The girl with him had braces on her teeth and long brown hair. She was holding a toy giraffe. She was showing it to people who walked by.
    “They won all those prizes at my Dime Toss,” Freddy said.
    “They didn’t win,” Eric said. “They cheated you out of them.”
    Ms. Benson parked her car. She told Cam, Eric, and Freddy to wait inside. She would talk to the two children.
    As Ms. Benson walked from her car, the girl came over to her. She tried to sell Ms. Benson a teddy bear. Then Ms. Benson started to talk. She called to the tall boy.
    “What’s she saying?” Eric asked.
    “I can’t hear her,” Cam said. “And I can’t open the window. It’s stuck.”
    “So is mine,” Freddy said.
    They watched as Ms. Benson talked to the two children. Then Ms. Benson walked back to the car. The two children followed her, carrying the stuffed animals.
    “Jennifer, Eric, and Freddy,” Ms. Benson said as she opened Cam’s door, “I’d like you to meet Bert and Sylvia. They are going to give these prizes back. And they agreed to help in the library every Monday afternoon. Isn’t that nice?”
    Neither Bert nor Sylvia smiled. “Are you taking us to the police?” Bert asked.
    Ms. Benson shook her head. “I’m sure you have learned your lesson,” she said. Bert and Sylvia put the prizes into the trunk of Ms. Benson’s car. Then they folded up the small table and walked off.

    “Well, you children caught two thieves,” Ms. Benson said as she drove back to school. “By cheating at the Dime Toss, they were stealing those prizes. You also solved a mystery. I was wondering why there were so many winners at Freddy’s booth.”
    Later that afternoon, the winner of the Button Jar Guess was announced. A first-grade boy’s guess was the closest. The toy kangaroo mother and baby that he won were almost as big as he was.
    “I don’t care if I didn’t win,” Donna said. “At least Cam won a school T-shirt for me.”
    “And she won a banner for me,” Diane said.

Chapter Nine
    A few days later, Cam and Eric were back in school. Spring vacation was over. At three o’clock, when the class was getting ready to go home, Ms. Benson asked Cam and Eric to wait. Then she walked with them to the library.
    “Oh, there you are,” the librarian said when they walked in. “Ms. Benson told me how you figured out what was happening at the Dime Toss. You two must read a lot of mysteries.”
    “We do,” Eric said, “but that’s not why we can solve mysteries. It’s Cam’s memory. It’s amazing. She remembers everything she sees.”
    The librarian told Cam and Eric that with the money from the fifth-grade carnival he bought a new encyclopedia. Inside the front cover of each volume he wrote, “This encyclopedia is a gift from the fifth grade.”
    Then the librarian took two mystery books off his desk and said, “Ms. Benson gave these books to the library. Look at what she wrote inside them.”
    Cam opened one of the books and read aloud, “ ‘These books were given to the school library in honor of two great solvers of mysteries, Jennifer Jansen and Eric Shelton.’ ”

    When Cam and Eric left the library, Bert and Sylvia were busy working. Bert was putting books away on the shelves. Sylvia was sitting at a desk, fixing torn books with tape. Bert and Sylvia pretended not to see Cam and Eric.
    Cam and Eric had borrowed the two new mysteries. As they left school, Cam told Eric, “I don’t think the mysteries in these books will be as easy to solve as the carnival mystery.”
    “Sure they’ll be easy,” Eric said. “We’ll read carefully. We’ll look for clues. And when you get near the end of the book, if you want to remember a clue from the beginning, you don’t have to look back. Just close your eyes and say, ‘Click’!”