The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen Read Online Free Page B

out.
    Jake waved the phone and said, “He won’t say who he is.”
    Winston stood up. “Huh? What do you mean?” He took the phone. “Hello?”
    “Winston Breen?” It was a deep male voice.
    “Yeah?” said Winston.
    “Did you break the code?” This was said in what Winston guessed was supposed to be an ominous, mysterious tone. It didn’t quite get there. And now that the voice had said more than two words, Winston thought it might be a kid lowering his voice to sound older.
    “Who is this?” he said.
    His question was ignored. “Did you break the code?” whoever it was asked again, in the slow, deep voice of a summoned demon in a horror movie. Except this voice cracked a little on the final word.
    Well, he must be talking about the principal’s code—the one that got them into the puzzle event. What else could he mean? Winston said, “Yes, I did.”
    “Then . . . I’ll be seeing you,” said the voice, dropping to a dramatic whisper. There was a click as the mystery caller hung up.
    What was that ? Winston, baffled, slowly hung up and stared at the phone as if another bizarre call might come through at any second.
    Mal and Jake were looking at him. “So who was it?” Mal asked.
    “He didn’t say.”
    His friends glanced at each other. “Well, what did he want?”
    “He wanted to know if I cracked the code. And he wanted to tell me that he’d be seeing me.”
    They considered that.
    “Okay. That’s really creepy,” said Jake. “Do you know who it was?”
    “I just told you. He didn’t say his name.”
    “Yeah, but you’re Mr. Puzzle Solver, so maybe you figured it out anyway.”
    Winston shook his head. “I have no idea.”
    Mal flopped back to the floor and picked up the video game joystick. “Eh. Crank call,” he said. “If he’ll be seeing you, I guess we’ll know soon enough. Who wants to play? Jake, you’re up.”
    Jake looked disgusted. “Forget it. I’m done.”
    “Win?” said Mal.
    “Yeah, sure. One more game.” But he couldn’t shake off the strange phone call. Who was that?
    Frowning and distracted and knowing that Mal was about to wipe the floor with him, he nonetheless sat down and started a new swordfight. Jake threw himself back on the sofa.
    Winston shook his head and tried to move the phone call to a holding cell in his brain, to think about later. “Hey, Jake,” said Winston as he took the controller. “If you don’t want to play this anymore, I know something else you can do.”
    “What?” said Jake.
    “There’s something fun that you can do that contains the letters of SWORD in that order, but has nothing to do with swords.”
    Jake nodded, unsurprised. Puzzles popped out of Winston with no notice. “And I have to figure out what that is.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you later if you can’t get it.”
    (Answer, page 239.)

CHAPTER THREE
     
    THE LAST TIME Winston participated in a large-scale puzzle event, he’d woken up at dawn and spent several hours wandering around his house, urging time to go faster. Time refused. Winston had pulled his hair out in frustration as he watched the minutes crawl, crawl, crawl.
    When Winston opened his eyes on Friday morning, he knew immediately that the same thing was going to happen again. The light in his room was wrong—instead of bright summer sun, it was a pale mixture of daylight and darkness. Bracing himself for the worst, he rolled over and looked at his clock. Five forty-five. All year long he’d gotten up at seven o’clock, groaning and wishing for ten more minutes of sleep. Now, on the first day of summer vacation, he was awake and raring to go before full sunrise.
    There was nothing to be done about it. He was awake like it was high noon. Winston got up and wandered around the house. There was nobody to talk to—his parents and sister were still asleep. He flipped through the television stations, but the only things on were news shows, infomercials, and cartoons for babies.
    On one channel, though, he