2~

Marcie maneuvered past the clusters of conventioneers in a huff. She had just made it to the main entrance, when a reproachful thought stopped her cold in her tracks.

Quinlan.

A pang of guilt moved through her as she thought about the ebullient principal. This was as much Quinlan's event as it was Marcie's schoolmates'.

"Walking out on Principal Quinlan. Way to go, Marcie," she said to herself. "She was nice enough to invite me to the toast. That was an honor. I can't ruin her moment like that."

She turned around and marched back through the crowds.

It had finally clicked as to why Quinlan had invited her in the first place. She wanted Marcie to represent the school by being there, just as much as they did. To embarrass her school with such childish behavior, as storming off, would not only have been inconsiderate, but selfish to an almost personal degree.

Hoping that Principal Quinlan hadn't noticed her slipping away, Marcie reached for the doors and prepared to quietly reenter the ballroom unobtrusively.

The doors were locked.

She twisted the door knobs a bit more vigorously, but the doors resisted her, and after a few more pulls and soft raps on the doors, a troubled Marcie muttered to herself, "This doesn't make sense."

She left and a few minutes later, she returned with the building's manager and a security guard.

The manager pulled out a ringed mass of keys, selected one, and slid it into the locks. They opened.

What he, the guard, and Marcie saw next was chilling.

Bodies had littered the floor of the ballroom.

The ballroom looked as though it played host to a silent, bloodless massacre, as though the biblical Angel of Death had swept through the room, leaving juice-stained victims in his implacable wake.

Marcie hesitated to enter. She wanted to check on her principal, on the others, but the disturbing tableau had momentarily locked her legs in frightened inactivity.

Only after she saw the guard and manager step past her, did she finally find the nerve to follow them into the room.

"What happened in here," the manager asked, kneeling beside a prone woman. The reassuring sound of her snore brought with it hope for the others, and with a few light, quick slaps to the cheek, the woman stirred slowly into conscious life again.

"I don't know, sir," Marcie answered, following the manager's lead in reviving Principal Quinlan. "I left the room for a few minutes, and when I came back, it was locked."

Marcie looked around the space. Guests and officials were sprawled on the floor, close to the caterers' table, some still holding spilled cups lightly in their limp hands. Reporters and photographers fell in a heap a little further away from their subjects.

The manager walked over to another body, but called over to the guard, who had succeeded in rousing another victim.

"Barnaby, call an ambulance," he ordered. "We'll keep working here." The guard nodded, and then left the room.

Quinlan peered up at Marcie with bleary eyes, and asked, "Marcie? What...hit me? I was drinking a toast to the competitors, and the next thing I know, I hit the floor."

"The drinks must've been spiked with some sort of knock-out drug," Marcie easily surmised. If that was the case, she thought, then that quickly begged the question...

"Where are the caterers?" Marcie asked aloud. Of all the adult bodies discovered, not one of them wore the white livery of the catering staff.

She was about to mentally file them away as possible suspects to mention to the authorities, upon their arrival, when Quinlan, looking around, unsteadily, groggily asked another question that earned its place of top priority in Marcie's mind.

"Marcie...where are the kids?"

If Marcie had thought this year's Olympiad had seemed a bit sedate, then the sight of the sheriff and his deputies questioning the rallied science magazine reporters and photographers, and the stalwart members of Crystal Cove's emergency medical teams settling the nerves of revived guests and officials, put that all to rest.

While other deputies questioned distraught family members and others, Deputy Bucky walked away from a fellow deputy that had relayed a report to him.

He spied his commanding officer standing on the stage, by the podium, looking over the emotional hubbub near the caterers' table, down below, and questioning the event's host.

Bucky waddled up to Sheriff Bronson Stone's side and reported the other deputy's findings.

"Sheriff, we found the catering truck parked in the loading dock out back," Bucky said. "The real caterers were tied up in the back and their uniforms were missing."

Stone stroked his squarish chin, thoughtfully. "That connects with what the event coordinator, here, said. The caterers were gone when everyone woke up." Stone turned his attention back to the frazzled man.

"Now when you woke up," the sheriff confirmed. "The junior eggheads were gone and you found this..." He gestured to the flat-surfaced object opened and sitting on top of the podium. "sitting over here."

"Yes, Sheriff!" said the host, the fear of losing his well-paying job, heavy in his voice. "In the history of the Olympiad this has never happened before. An attack and a multiple kidnapping? This could ruin the event for good!"

"Well, why didn't you have security screen your guests before your little nerd shindig?" Stone drawled.

"We prided ourselves that we enlightened people had no need for such measures," the host answered with quick pride, then added, uncomfortably, "And Sheriff, I would thank you to please stop disparaging our Olympiad. This is, or rather, was a grand celebration of intellectual excellence."

Stone sniffed at that. "And yet you people were the ones who got rolled on. Ya don't look very smart from where I'm sittin'."

"But you're not sitting, Sheriff. You're standing," Marcie said from behind him, peering past the big man to see the object on the podium. It was an open laptop. Its monitor was on and a glowing message was writ on its face.

The host, wondering why a girl was present on the stage with the adults, and how that could possibly help, took a closer look at Marcie's face, recognized it for the first time today, and brightened, despite the situation.

"Marcie Fleach?" he asked. "I would have expected you to competing again with your partner, Velma Dinkley."

"If we had," Marcie said. "We probably would have been just waking up from the punch, like everyone else."

"Indeed. Still, Principal Quinlan neglected to tell me that she had invited you. If she did, I would have brought you up on stage to make a little speech. But why are you here?" the host asked, wanting to know, for the sake of conversation, her reasons for attending, if she was not participating.

Marcie, thinking he was wondering why she was on stage with them, while she studied the message on the computer screen, simply answered, "Curiosity."

It was a truthful response, she had to admit. Curiosity had steered her, almost subconsciously, to the stage, after she had made sure that Principal Quinlan was put right, and had noticed the laptop.

The host scratched his bald spot in thought. "I hadn't seen this laptop on the podium when I came to speak. I wonder who left it."

Stone, bored of the talk between the two, and realizing that he wasn't getting any of his sheriffing duties in, chimed in.

"It's obvious that we're dealing here is some geek who's trying to get back at all of you brainy types because you didn't let him join your little computer club," Stone dismissed.

Marcie thought that out and, with an honest start, said to the sheriff, "You know, Sheriff, that's not such a bad hypothesis."

"It's not?" he asked, suspicious that a brainy type would agree so quickly with him. Then he asked, as an afterthought, "And what's a hypothesis?"

"A guess," Marcie answered. "Perhaps that was the motivation of this attacker." She turned to the host.

"Has there ever been any threats to stop the Olympiad because of disgruntled entrants?" Marcie asked him.

"Not at all," he explained. "As you know, all competitors are screened based on their scholastic achievements, test scores, and grade averages. You, yourself, Miss Fleach, have had scores that consistently put you and Miss Dinkley in the highest percentile for acceptance in the Olympiad, year after year. An historical triumph for the event, as a whole."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," an indifferent Stone grumbled, waving the accolades away.

Marcie ignored Stone's rudeness and read the message. "Answer the riddle to get the code and start the game." She then pondered, "What game?"

The host looked at the computer again and said, "I haven't the foggiest."

Marcie reached over and, taking a chance to proceed further, tapped the ENTER key.

"Hey, cut that out," Stone chided her. A four-line riddle appeared in the screen's center for her to read next.

"This crystal's wondrous to a fault,

When pay day comes, it's in a vault,

It also grinds plants to a halt,

What is the crystal? It's name is-blank."

"Salt," Marcie said, matter-of-factly.

Stone, not understanding a bit of the proceedings, gave a weary scowl to Marcie that she recognized all too quickly, because it was given to her all too frequently, these days.

"What are you doing here, anyway, Margo?" he asked. "This is a police investigation, not a trivia game."

"It's Marcie, Sheriff," she corrected, patiently. "and the answer is salt."

"I suppose whoever left this wants someone to type it on the screen," the host suggested. Reaching past Marcie, he typed in the word "salt" over the underlined space underneath the riddle. In response, the computer showed him a frowny face and a distressing message.

"Ah! It didn't work!" the host said, panicking. "We have two minutes and two more tries before it erases all the riddles, and we never see the children again!"

Quickly, Stone glowered at the girl in justification. "You see? You don't know what you're doing. Now get outta here, Marsha, before I run you in for interfering in my sheriffy duties."

Marcie ignore his threats, but couldn't understand what was going on. It was the right answer.

"But, Sheriff, the answer is salt!" she explained, hoping that he would calm down, and let her stay and help. "It's a crystal, in ancient Rome, it was used as money, and if enough of it is spread on fertile ground, plants won't grow."

Marcie turned to the host, and bade him, "Type sodium chloride!"

The host typed the words in, and again, a frowny face appeared.

The host trembled. His actions were possibly dooming the young contestants as he typed, and he seriously began to wonder if letting one of the previous champions of the Science Olympiad call the shots on a kidnapping investigation was the wisest course of action. "It didn't work!"

Marcie screwed up her face in frustration and stared at the laptop in deep thought. It was salt, she thought, angrily. She'd bet her life on it, but then, with a pang of fear, she suddenly understood, as the host did, that she was actually betting the missing children's lives.

She decided to take a calming breath and think. No emotions. Just reason. Then a thought came to her.

Quickly, she typed in the chemical notation for sodium chloride, and breathed a prayer.

A smiley face appeared as her reward, and the next riddle appeared on the screen. Relieved, she read on.

"Three riddles will tell where three teams are hidden,

This may be a game, but I'm far from kiddin',

Follow the clues that I have written,

To a code for a bomb, to be overridden."

Everyone shivered at the mention of a bomb. With a word, the stakes had just jumped to a very urgent and uncomfortable level.

A second riddle scrolled across the monitor. This time, the sheriff read, his mind trying to decipher the conundrum as fast as he could read it. It seemed very unlikely.

"Team One is in this place, concealed,

With bones for sale and thrones on wheels,

Steel tanks save and blades can heal,

A martial sounding place revealed."

Stone turned to Bucky, all business. "Alright, get this thing to the lab and have it dusted for prints, while we figure out what this riddle means."

He then turned to where Marcie had been standing. "Okay, girly, you-"

She was gone.

He looked out over the ballroom, scanning every worried or reassuring face below, checking every far corner of the room. Nothing. There wasn't a single sighting of that messy mop of brown hair anywhere.

The sheriff growled low in irritation, as he descended from the stage. He had a feeling that she was going to get involved somehow, and was getting a little tired of her sticking her spectacle-balancing nose where it didn't belong.

Stopping by the catering table, Stone sighed, frustrated that he didn't get to finish his harangue, and asked a tag-along Bucky, "Where did she go?"

"I don't know, Sheriff."

"Eh, it's just as well," Stone said, haughtily. "This is a case that requires the keen mind of years of law enforcement, and the instincts of a street-wise jungle cat."

"Yes, sir," Bucky gushed.

Stone rubbed his throat for a moment. "Working on a case like this makes me a tad thirsty." He looked over and saw a filled, abandoned cup next to the punchbowl.

The street-wise jungle cat was out soon after.