The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin Read Free Book Online Page B

down?” The secretary toppled into a chair next to the invalid before he could reply. “Here, I stole a macaroon for you. It’s so sticky you’ll be tasting it all day; I must have six strands of coconut between my upper molars.” Chris took the cookie. “Just look at that smile, it could break your heart.”
    Angela wished her partner had not said that; it seemed so insensitive, so crude. But at least Sydelle was talking to him, which was more than she was able to do. Angela, the fortunate one, standing like a dummy. “Um, I know Denton wants to work on the clues with you. He’s snowbound, too.”
    “You ver-r pred-dy.” How did “pretty” come out? He meant to say “nice.” Chris bent his curly head over the geography book in his lap. She wasn’t laughing at him. It was all right to ask her because she was going to marry his partner. “Wha ar-r g-gra annz?”
    Angela did not understand.
    Chris fanned the pages of the book to a picture of a wheat field. “G-gra-annz.”
    “Oh, grains. You want to know the names of some grains. Let’s see, there’s wheat, rye, corn, barley, oats.”
    “O-ohss!” Angela thought the boy was going into a fit, but he was only repeating her last word: oats.
    Sydelle was puffing her warm breath on the window and wiping a frosted area clean with her sleeve. “There, now you’ll be able to watch the birds again. Anything else we can do for you, young man?”
    Chris nodded. “Read m-me short-han n-noos.”
    The pretty lady and the funny lady moved quickly out the door. One limped, but it was a pretended limp (he could tell), not like the limper on the Westing house lawn.
    Oats. Chris closed his eyes to picture the clues:
    FOR PLAIN GRAIN SHED
    Grain = oats = Otis Amber. For + d (from shed ) = Ford. But neither the delivery boy nor the judge limped, and he still hadn’t figured out she or plain. He’d have to wait for Denton Deere; Denton Deere was smart; he was a doctor.
    Chris raised his binoculars to the cliff. Windblown drifts buttressed the house—something moved on the second floor—a hand holding back the edge of a drape. Slowly the heavy drape fell back against the window. The Westing house was snowbound, too, and somebody was snowbound in it.
     
     
    Only one of the players thought the clues told how the ten-thousand-dollar check was to be spent. Take stock in America, the will said. Go for broke, the will said.
    “In the stock market,” Turtle said. “And whoever makes the most money wins it all, the whole two hundred million dollars.” Their clues:
    SEA MOUNTAIN AM O
    stood for symbols of three corporations listed on the stock exchange: SEA, MT (the abbreviation for mountain), AMO.
    “But am and o are separate clues,” Flora Baumbach said.
    “To confuse us.”
    “But what about the murderer? I thought we were supposed to find the name of the murderer?”
    “To put us off the track.” If the police suspected murder, she’d be in jail by now. Her fingerprints were over everything in the Westing house, including the corpse. “You don’t really think one of us could have killed a living, breathing human being in cold blood, do you, Mrs. Baumbach? Do you?” Turtle did, but the dressmaker was a cream puff.
    “Don’t you look at me like that, Turtle Wexler! You know very well I could never think such a thing. I must have misunderstood. Oh my, I just wish Miss Pulaski had shown us her copy of the will.”
    Turtle returned to her calculations, multiplying numbers of shares times price, adding a broker’s commission, trying to total the sums to the ten thousand dollars they had to spend.
    Flora Baumbach may have been wrong about the murder, but she was not convinced of Turtle’s plan. “What about Buy Westing Paper Products? I’m sure that was in the will.”
    “Great!” Turtle exclaimed. “We’ll do just that, we’ll add WPP to the list of stocks we’re going to buy.”
    Flora Baumbach had watched enough television commercials to know that Buy