Pun Detectives and the Case of the Missing Music! (Part 15)

Ancient stairs groaned as I skipped them by twos and threes, practically sliding to the first floor of the Old Building. In a wall-mounted glass case near the entrance to the building hung a map. The glass wasn’t hard to remove. It was one of those cheap cases that fit snug into place with a rubber lining around the edges, no screws necessary. The map came off without resistance too, the old adhesive on its back giving way easily to a tug or two.

Back in HQ, I spread the map out flat on the cardboard table, pinned its corners down with my potted cactus and some other random junk that I pulled out of my backpack.

It was a map of the school, an old one that had been in that glass case for god knows how many years.

At the top of the map, toward the north end of the school, was the Old Building. That was where I was right now. It bordered a tiny orange grove that was no more, save for one tenacious tree. Behind that was a big field and, past that, a few neighborhoods that I’d never been to.

On the bottom of the map, at the south end of the school, was the New Building. Even though the New Building was new, it was still on this old map. What that really meant, of course, was that the New Building wasn’t actually all that new anymore. It had been built a number of years ago, when the Old Building was no longer enough for the school’s growing number of students. This was the first building you’d see if you entered the school from the front, and it was where most of our classrooms were too. According to the map, it also housed a brand-new cafeteria, the library, and the science labs, not to mention the music practice room.

But that wasn’t true anymore. Just recently, most of the specialty rooms had been moved.

With a thick black marker, I drew a large square on the empty left side of the map. The West Wing. This was a new building, newer than the New Building. In just the last year, it had come to house all the specialty rooms that used to be in the New Building, all to accommodate the school’s growing student body and make room for even more classrooms in the New Building. That didn’t mean we had gotten a new library, cafeteria, or anything else though. Somehow, it seemed like all the old facilities had been sliced out of the New Building and rearranged into the West Wing, an architectural patchwork. However that worked. Don’t even ask. Because I sure didn’t know. Grandpa had his ways. Either way, the point was that nothing in the West Wing felt new even though the building itself was.

The East Ring, on the other hand, was a different story. I drew another structure, this time in the empty space on the right-hand portion of the old map, in the shape grandpa’s face. Wanting to be true to life, I made sure to make it as fugly as I possibly could. Unlike its western counterpart, this monument to unyielding narcissism and deranged egomania actually was new, inside and out. Meant to have been called the East Wing to match its counterpart on the west side, an unfortunate and irreversible typo wound up permanently labeling this asinine structure the East “Ring.” It was equal parts funny and lame to most of us, but all the athletes who used the courts and pools and gyms and training centers in the Ring itself probably couldn’t have cared less what it was called as long as it existed and gave them a decent place to practice.

North. South. West. East.

Up. Down. Left. Right.

The Old Building. The New Building. The West Wing. The East Ring. Those were the four main buildings at school. Somewhere, amidst all of this, was a stash of violins, secreted away and protected by a pun. I was going to use everything I knew and every bit of punning prowess left within me to figure out what that pun could be.

Then and only then would I finally call this detective game quits.

I went over the facts in my head.

Fact #1: Violins can’t be stored just anywhere. Striking Eyes had made that much clear. I didn’t know for sure, but that probably meant that they couldn’t be kept willy nilly. They needed their own spot, specific to them. A place for violins and violins alone. Like Striking Eyes had just explained, the violin was a rather unique instrument. It was a string instrument with a very particular set of strings.

Fact # 2: Vance was almost definitely behind the theft. He was a swimmer, and the star of the boys’ swim team at that. But that wasn’t all he was. He was a triathlete. Swimming, tennis, and track, Valentine had said. I had searched his favorite hangouts, his locker, all over the place, even the last places you would think to look, and still I had found no trace of the violins.

Well, those were the facts gone over. There was also the matter of whether or not the violins had been moved off school grounds in the last week. It was a possibility. One I preferred not to entertain. After all, if the violins really weren't here anymore, that meant they were outside of my purview. More importantly, and pathetically for me, it meant I would never be able to find them.

If I assumed they were still at school, which I thought may very well have been the case, then I still had a job to do.

And just like before, I was completely, totally, utterly… wait, no! It couldn’t be! All of a sudden, in a flash of inspiration, I knew! I knew where the violins were!

…Just kidding. I was still stumped.

Even still, I didn’t give in. I was like a man possessed. Something deep inside drove me on. Call it some kind of deep-rooted dissatisfaction with how things had turned out, some inability to accept failure for once in my life. Call it some perverted form of Stockholm syndrome, an unhealthy attachment to a job that I’d been literally forced into at riot-gear-point. Call it whatever because I’d just go right ahead, ignore all that, and call it lunacy, plain and simple. Because without Striking Eyes here to give me any more clues, without Lily by my side any longer, and without my friends to back me up, I was practically a lunatic for thinking I could do this on my own, no one else to 👉depend👈 on.

But I had to try.

Where could they be? Where could the violins be hidden? A place just for violins, somewhere I hadn’t looked yet, somewhere Vance would hide them… I scanned the map again and again. Up. Down. Left. Right. Up. Down. Left. Right. Up. Down. Left…

…Right?

No.

No way.

That couldn’t be!

My back straightened instinctively. My heart was beating a mile a millisecond.

I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a coincidence.

But it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. I knew that what I had noticed, what I had discovered, was much, much more than that. Because if there was one thing I had learned since all of this started, it was the importance of a typo, even a seemingly random one. And if there was one thing Lily’s disappearance had taught me, it was that sometimes, what’s missing is the most important thing of all.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Missing Music (Part 15)!
To be continued in Part 16!