Alibis

Jules Kendall invites Bridget Perkins to a murder mystery party at Whit's End, where Mr. Whittaker has closed the shop and given the kids the first floor for the evening. Bridget has spent every penny she had on a new dress for the occasion, but she is nervous anyway. She feels like an outsider, convinced that the other guests are Jules's friends, not hers. Jules assures her that no one thinks of her that way and tells her to relax and have fun.

Jay Smouse runs the game, handing out character cards to the five players. Ryan Cummings hams it up as Charlton Dollarbags III, a ridiculous tycoon who made billions selling spring-loaded doorstops. Jules is Lorelei Precious, a hopelessly confusing character who was raised in Alabama but talks like she is from England. Bridget plays Timmy "Teaspoon" Spoonwaggle, a Hollywood star so famous she may replace Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. Cooper Calhoun is stuck playing Bruno Napski, a dim football player, and suspects Jay assigned the roles on purpose - especially since Jay has conveniently given himself the part of the brilliant detective. But when Jay reaches for the envelope containing the solution to the mystery, it is missing. Jay insists a thieving rat living in the walls of Whit's End must have taken it. Since a mystery with no solution is pointless, Jules launches the group into a game she and Buck invented instead: mop bucket bowling.

The crashing pins bring Mr. Whittaker downstairs to see what is going on - and just then Bridget screams. She has gone to the library to get her phone and been drenched by a bucket of maple syrup rigged above the door, then blasted with feathers by a fan. The syrup missed her new dress but soaked her hair. Since the trap wasn't there when she left her coat earlier, someone at the party must have set it. As Whit says, "It looks like we have a real mystery."

Whit begins investigating, and one by one the kids pull him aside to accuse each other, each backing up the charge with a wildly exaggerated story. Jay fingers Cooper, claiming Cooper wanted to prove he could be clever after Bridget teased him for having no creativity or sense of humor. Bridget blames Ryan, who lives next to a chicken farm full of feathers and is supposedly jealous of the time she has been spending with Jules. Cooper accuses Jay, who wandered into the kitchen - where the floor is sticky with syrup - right after losing the envelope, and even tries to trick Jay into a handshake to check for syrup residue. Ryan points at Jules, who had access to the fan and was upset that Bridget bought the very dress Jules had been saving up for. Finally Jules suggests that Bridget syruped herself for attention, which would explain why the mess so neatly missed her beloved dress. Through it all, each accuser generously excuses one suspect with the same line: "I'm ruling you out because you're Mr. Whittaker."

At last Whit gathers everyone and announces his solution: nobody did it - the prank was on him. When their game fell apart, the kids cooked up a fake mystery for Whit to solve, with the syrup as Jay's idea and the feathers as Bridget's. The kids admit it, delighted, until Whit brings up something that puzzled him: what did their prank have to do with the money missing from his desk? He explains that he left his office unlocked when he ran downstairs, and when he returned, the day's receipts were gone. The kids are horrified - that was never part of their game. But instead of accusing one another, they scramble for any other explanation: a breeze blew the money away, a burglar climbed through a window, or maybe it really was Jay's rat.

That, Whit reveals, is exactly how he saw through their prank in the first place. Real friends who know each other would never be so quick to point fingers, so all that finger-pointing had to be an act. Faced with what seemed like real trouble, they would sooner blame a rat than one another - and no money is actually missing at all. Whit set them up to prove it. Bridget marvels that he knew them better than they knew themselves, and that he gave them all more credit than she did. Earlier, when Bridget slipped back into her woe-is-me outsider routine, Jules had already told her firmly that these people are loyal, that they like her, and that they were excited she came. Now Bridget sees it is true. As Ryan groans that the mystery within a mystery was really another mystery, Whit gets the last word: "Don't try to outfox the master."