The dining-hall bell rang exactly like every morning, except this morning already smelled wrong.
“Amy, move!” Jessica shoved the girls’-wing door with her shoulder. “If we are not first in line, the boys will take all the sweet rolls.”
“There are always sweet rolls,” Amy said, tying her hair with an elastic. “You only run like that when you think someone is handing out prizes.”
“That is not true,” Jessica said. Then she whispered, “Okay. A little true.”
They ran down the hallway. Falafel the rabbit passed them without hurrying, a lettuce leaf in his mouth, as if he were the real principal of the place. Behind them Alice shouted, “Save me a seat!” and Penny answered, “Only if you run faster than the rooster!”
In the yard, Kuku the rooster already stood on a wooden stool, announcing the morning to the world in short sharp calls. David the handyman walked by with a box of screws and told him, “Morning to you too, boss,” and Kuku answered with one crisp crow, as if he had approved the schedule.
“There’s Leo,” Amy said.
Leo waited by the dining-hall door, a small bag on his shoulder and his hair still wet from the sink. “There’s a problem,” he said with no hello.
“What kind of problem?” Jessica asked. “Are the rolls gone?”
“Worse,” Leo said. “No smoothies.”
Amy stopped. “What do you mean no smoothies? Yossi makes smoothies every Tuesday. Today is Tuesday.”
“That is why I said problem,” Leo said, and opened the door for them.
Inside, the usual noise of chairs and plates filled the room, but by the serving counter stood Yossi the cook in a clean apron, looking like someone who had discovered that the sun had been stolen. On the counter sat a giant bowl of fruit, bananas, strawberries, milk, ice, everything waiting. Only one thing was missing from the middle, exactly where the giant wooden spoon always hung, the one with the long handle and the small carving on the side: “Yossi’s. Do not touch.”
“Where is my spoon?” Yossi asked the air, then asked Counselor Shira, then asked Counselor Noam, then asked the bowl itself.
“Maybe you put it in the dishwasher?” Noam offered carefully.
“I do not put that spoon in the dishwasher,” Yossi said. “That spoon does not fit in the dishwasher. That spoon is the queen of the kitchen. No spoon, no smoothie. No smoothie, rebellion. I know these children.”
“We are not rebelling,” said a small boy at the first table. “We only want mashed banana.”
Amy walked up to the counter. “When did you last see it?”
Yossi looked at her. “You are Amy. The girl with the notebook.”
“Yes,” Amy said, and pulled the small notebook from her pocket. “When.”
“Last night, after dinner. I washed it, dried it, hung it on the special hook. The special hook is empty. Look.” He pointed at a hook above the counter. The hook was empty, and only a pale circle on the wall said the spoon had lived there for years.
Jessica rose on her toes. “Maybe it fell behind the fridge?”
“A spoon the size of an oar does not fall behind a fridge without sounding like an earthquake,” Yossi said. “Someone took it.”
Just then Oliver came in from the boys’ wing, shirt on backward, wearing the smile of someone who had already done something before breakfast. Behind him two older boys laughed at a private joke.
“Morning,” Oliver said. “Why does everyone look like juice without a straw?”
“Yossi’s spoon is missing,” Shira said. “Do you know anything?”
“Me?” Oliver put a hand on his chest. “I only know good things. For example, that Sugar the pony ate three apples this morning, and that Falafel slept on David’s shoe.”
“Oliver,” said House Mother Ruthie from the doorway, coffee mug in hand and hair not fully brushed yet. “If you took something from the kitchen, say so now.”
“Mom, I did not take a spoon,” Oliver said. “Why would I need a giant spoon? I do not stir lakes.”
Amy wrote in her notebook: Oliver denies it. Smile too big.
“Boys!” called a boy from the back table. “If there are no smoothies, we win the first point of the week. The girls always win on smoothie mornings because they run faster to the line!”
“That is not a rule!” Penny shouted. “And anyway, without smoothies we all lose!”
“Wrong,” the boy said. “We lose less.”
“Enough,” said Principal Mr. Cohen, who walked in exactly in time to hear the word competition. “Today we have a clean-hallway contest between the wings, not a contest over who shouts louder about fruit. Yossi, is there a solution?”
“There is one solution,” Yossi said. “Find the spoon. Until then there are rolls and pancakes. No smoothie.”
A group sigh rose, the kind only a dining hall full of children can make.
Amy closed her notebook. “We will find it.”
“Who is we?” Mr. Cohen asked.
“Me, Jessica, and Leo,” Amy said. “And Falafel, if he agrees.”
“Falafel never agrees to anything,” Leo said. “He only goes to interesting places.”
Ruthie smoothed Amy’s hair gently. “Just do not go into the storage room without David, and do not accuse children without proof. And you,” she turned to Oliver, “if that spoon suddenly appears next to one of your inventions in the yard, you and I will have a long talk.”
“I am offended,” Oliver said, but he already made room in the pancake line.
They took rolls and sat at the end of the long table. Alice and Penny joined at once.
“So what do we do?” Alice asked. “Check the boys’ wing first? Because it is always them.”
“Not always,” Leo said.
“Almost always,” Penny said.
“We start in the kitchen,” Amy said. “A mystery starts where the thing disappeared, not where it is fun to blame someone.”
Jessica bit her roll. “You sound like a book.”
“I sound like a detective,” Amy said, half smiling. “After breakfast we go into the kitchen with Yossi. Then we check the hook, the floor, the back door to the yard. If someone carried a spoon that size, they did not fly out the window with it.”
“Maybe they did,” Oliver called from afar, as if he had heard, “if they had wings.”
“They do not have wings,” Jessica said.
“Kuku does,” Oliver said.
“Kuku does not have wings big enough for Yossi’s spoon,” Leo said with complete seriousness, and Amy wrote that down too, because sometimes Leo’s seriousness was the best clue they had.
When the plates were empty, Yossi waved them over. “Come on, detectives. Five minutes. After that I have to peel potatoes with a regular spoon, and that is an insult to the profession.”
They entered the kitchen. It smelled of waiting bananas and dish soap. Amy knelt by the empty hook. On the floor, right underneath, was a small almost-dry water mark, and beside it a little fine sawdust.
“Sawdust?” Jessica whispered. “In the kitchen?”
“David is building a new bench in the yard today,” Leo said. “But sawdust should not get this far.”
Amy lifted a finger. On the tip sat a speck of glowing orange paint, the kind Oliver loved to smear on anything that moved.
“I found something,” she said.
“What?” everyone asked together.
Amy looked toward the back door that opened to the yard, where Sugar the pony gave a short whinny, Kuku ran across his stool, and Falafel sat with a fresh leaf. The orange paint on her finger glittered in the light.
“I found,” Amy said quietly, “that the spoon did not leave alone.”
Jessica squeezed her hand. “So what now?”
“Now,” Amy said, opening the notebook again, “we follow the sawdust, the paint, and whoever thinks you cannot spot a prank in the morning.”
Behind them Yossi called, “If you find it by noon, the smoothies come back with whipped cream!”
“With whipped cream?” Jessica shouted already on the way to the yard.
“With whipped cream!” Yossi answered.
“Wait,” Leo said by the yard door. “If there is sawdust and orange paint, that means someone came through here with something wooden.”
“Or with a wooden spoon,” Jessica said. “Do you think Oliver is building something again?”
“Oliver is always building something,” Alice said. “The question is whether this time he built with Yossi’s spoon.”
“I am not accusing anyone yet,” Amy said. “I am only going to look. Penny, let Falafel come if he wants. He gets in the way less than people think.”
“Falafel?” Penny called after the rabbit. “Are you coming on the case or staying with the lettuce?”
Falafel looked at her, dropped the leaf, and hopped after Amy as if he had answered, “The case.”
“If it is Oliver,” Jessica said, “I want to be there when Yossi sees the spoon.”
“If it is not Oliver,” Leo said, “I want to be there even more.”
“Come on,” Amy said. “Detectives do not wait for smoothies to get warm.”
Amy did not mean to, but she smiled. First mystery of the morning, friends beside her, and an orange mark on her finger. That was exactly how a detective was supposed to start the day.
