6 PANCAKE FALLS

PANCAKE FALLS The first thing Bean did was dust for fingerprints. Al Seven was always dusting for fingerprints. Here's how you dust for fingerprints: First, you sprinkle powder. Then you gently dust it away. And then you whip out your magnifying glass and peer through it, and— ta-DA!—you see the fingerprints of the bad guy! Bean didn't really understand how that part worked, but the dusting part was fun. Gently, Bean sprinkled baby powder on the yellow rope. Gently, she brushed it away with a paintbrush. Everyone leaned in to look.

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Bean whipped out her magnifying glass and peered through it. She saw rope. "Just as I thought," she said. She nodded slowly and made her voice low. "There are no fingerprints here." Ivy nodded slowly, too. "No fingerprints." "But that doesn't help us at all!" said Dino. "Why is there a rope on my house?" Bean made her eyes very narrow. "Time will tell." She put her magnifying glass in her pocket and looked at the sky. Speaking of time, it was almost time for dinner. Her dad came out on the front porch. "Bean!" he called. "You can't leave now!" said Dino. Al Seven never said good-bye. He said things like "Catch you later, chump." But that was really mean, so Bean said, "Bye, you guys. See you tomorrow."

The next morning was completely regular— yawn, splash, stumble, cereal, banana, where's my jacket, somebody took it, oh here it is, bye— until Bean got outside and saw Ivy. Ivy was standing on the sidewalk in front of her house, watching the ground. She was watching the ground so seriously that she didn't hear Bean running up behind her. "Bug?" asked Bean. She hoped it was a big one.

Ivy shook her head and pointed. The yellow rope had grown in the night. Where it had ended the day before, on Dino's lawn, there was now a knot. More yellow rope went across the lawn, circled around Dino's tree, down his driveway, and next door to Ivy's house, where it snaked in and out of her fence posts and ended at her stairs. "Wow," said Bean. It was a real, genuine mystery. "Yeah," said Ivy. She turned around and looked at Bean carefully. "Did you do it?" "Me?" squawked Bean. "No! No way!" She stopped squawking and looked carefully at Ivy. "It wasn't you, was it?" Ivy shook her head. "No. I thought it was you." "How would I get up to Dino's chimney?" Bean pointed out.

They both turned and stared at the rope. "It's the real thing," muttered Ivy. Bean nodded. They both tried to look tough. But they couldn't. "Cool!" they yelled at the same time. For some reason, Dino didn't think it was cool. "It's creepy," he said, when they met up that afternoon. Sophie S. and Ruby and Trevor nodded. They thought it was creepy, too.