“What if I’m not smart enough?” she asked. “What if none of us are? This is the three hundred and seventy-third idea I’ve tried, and I’ve failed every time. And I thought this one was different. I was so sure the lever was important! I thought I had to be right this time!”
Chess and Natalie kept patting and smoothing, but Chess covered his face with his spare hand, and Natalie wiped her own eyes.
Chess and Natalie were crying, too, or close to it. Neither of them said anything. Maybe they didn’t know what to say.
“Well . . . ,” Finn began. “Maybe the lever is important, just not the way you thought. Why would someone have moved it from one place to another in the secret room if it wasn’t important? Didn’t you say we should look for fingerprints on the lever? Why don’t we try that? If we try everything we can, something has to work. Right?”
“That’s not . . .” Emma sniffed. “I don’t think that’s statistically sound reasoning.”
Finn had no clue what that meant, so he just kept talking.
“Somebody help me. How do we check for fingerprints?”
Natalie wiped the back of her hand across her face again, then pulled out her cell phone. She typed something quickly before handing Finn the phone.
She’d called up a website about dusting for fingerprints.
“Okay, this says we can use baking soda,” Finn said, handing the phone back. “Natalie, your dad’s got baking soda in the kitchen, right?”
“Probably,” Natalie said, with a sniffle of her own. “But if you go down there, he’ll want to talk to you, and—”
“I’ll be sneaky!” Finn called back over his shoulder as he raced for the door.
Finn didn’t really care much about fingerprinting the lever. He didn’t know if it was important or not. But he couldn’t stand seeing the others so frozen. At least if they tried to find fingerprints on the lever, they’d be doing something. Not just huddled in a heap, missing their mothers.
When Finn got to the staircase, he switched to tiptoeing. He shouldn’t have worried about being quiet, because Mr. Mayhew had the TV downstairs cranked up loud, some sports announcer calling excitedly, “Did you see that? No one else has quite that approach. . . .”
Finn jumped past the last three stairs, hitting the floor with a thud.
“Natalie?” Mr. Mayhew called, spinning his chair to the side.
Oops.
“No, it’s me,” Finn said, holding up his hands as if to prove he was innocent. “I’m just, uh, going to the kitchen for a drink of water.” Now, why wouldn’t he get it from the bathroom upstairs? “I wanted ice.”
“Okay,” Mr. Mayhew said. But he didn’t spin back to the game. “Is Natalie still . . . Oh, what am I saying? She lost her mother. Of course she’s still upset. She’s never going to get over that. And . . . neither am I.”
He whispered the last part.
Don’t think about Mom, Finn told himself. Don’t let yourself be sad like Mr. Mayhew.
But he couldn’t help feeling a little sad for Mr. Mayhew. It suddenly seemed awful that Mr. Mayhew was sitting in his huge living room all alone, watching the basketball game all by himself. At least Finn and the other kids had each other.
“If we Greystones weren’t here,” Finn began, “would Natalie be with you, cheering for, well, whoever you’re cheering for?”
“Are you asking if she’s a Cavs fan, too?” Mr. Mayhew said. He slid down in his chair. “Or are you asking if she’d be down here with me or upstairs texting in her room like she probably is right now?”
“Teenagers do that,” Finn said, as though hanging out with Natalie made him an expert.
Mr. Mayhew gave a sad laugh. “Well then . . . how about you stay and watch the game with me?” He winked. “We’ll pretend it isn’t past your bedtime.”
“Thanks, but . . . I’d fall asleep,” Finn said. He faked a huge yawn. “Then you might have to miss a big play, carrying me up to bed.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Mr. Mayhew said. He winked again. Or maybe he was blinking back tears. “Who’s the grown-up here, and who’s the kid?” He waved his hand in a way that was probably supposed to look cheerful. “Go on, get your drink of water. Then it’s off to bed for you, young man!”
Finn kind of did want to stay with Mr. Mayhew now, to cheer him up.
But when we get Mom and Ms. Morales back, that will cheer up everybody, he told himself. That will fix everything. So that’s what we have to focus on.
He watched Mr. Mayhew spin his chair back toward the TV. Then Finn sprinted for the kitchen, grabbed the baking soda, and raced back up the stairs.
The other three kids had unfrozen enough that they’d assembled paintbrushes, Scotch tape, and black construction paper.
“This says we sprinkle the baking soda on, brush it off as gently as possible, and if there are fingerprints, we’ll see them outlined in white,” Natalie explained, reading directions from her phone. “We put tape over each distinct fingerprint, pull the tape off, and then move the tape to the black paper. That preserves the image.”
“And I say we start on this flat section in the middle,” Emma said, pointing. “I’m pretty sure I only touched the edges, and Chess says he only touched the edges on one end when he pulled on the lever, opening and shutting the tunnel. . . .”
Finn saw how the edges of the lever were raised higher than the midsection.
“Hey, does anybody else think this looks like a big Pez?” he asked.
“A what?” Natalie said.
“A Pez—you know? The little white candy you get from a Pez dispenser?” Finn said. “The candy doesn’t taste like much, but it’s fun because the dispensers can be shaped like Darth Vader heads or frogs or Batman or . . . whatever . . . and so eating Pez is like eating Batman’s tongue, or Darth Vader’s, or . . . didn’t they have Pez dispensers when you were my age, Natalie?”
“Finn, I’m only five years older than you!” Natalie protested. “Of course we had Pez and Pez dispensers when I was in second grade!”
But Finn saw he’d gotten Natalie to laugh. Finn counted that as a victory.
“Yeah, see, you just need to put the letters P-E-Z right there on that lever, and it’d be, like, Pez for giants!” Finn said.
He pointed, and Emma grabbed his hand.
“Don’t touch!” she reminded him.
“Here,” Chess said, opening the box of baking soda in Finn’s other hand. “How about you start pouring this?”
Finn let the baking soda rain down onto the lever. His aim wasn’t great—some heaped over the edge onto his old shirt, which the others had kept under the lever.
“It’s snowing!” Finn called, because even if this didn’t work, he was determined to cheer up the others by making this fun. He grabbed a paintbrush. “And now I’m painting with snow. . . .”
“Gently, remember?” Emma said.
Finn had just speared a particularly large clump of baking soda, and he’d been about to yell, Hi-YAH! He decided not to do that. For a moment, all four kids silently bent over the lever, brushing baking soda in from the edges, toward the hollowed-out part.