The Key Suspect

Early one morning, middle schoolers Emily Jones and Matthew Parker arrive at school to find every locker in the long front hallway standing wide open. Principal Vogler is baffled: he found them that way, nothing seems to be stolen, and no one had permission to touch them. For Emily and Matthew, partners in the Jones and Parker Detective Agency, it looks like the start of their biggest case yet. Their curiosity only grows when classmate Dion Farkus turns up suspiciously early and refuses to say why he is there.

The clues run dry fast. At lunch, the investigation stalls when Matthew gets hopelessly distracted by Suzu, a new student who recently moved from Japan. Suzu greets them politely and says she has heard people speak of the two detectives with respect, which leaves Matthew barely able to talk in full sentences. Later, another new student, Suzu's friendly brother Morrie Rydell, stops them in the hall to gush about how much he admires their detective work, adding that he loves mysteries even though he is no good at solving them.

Principal Vogler answers their questions but every lead dead-ends. The lockers can be opened with a master key, but only two keys exist, both accounted for, and they cannot be copied without a manufacturer's code. The list of locker combinations is hidden away by the school secretary, and the security alarm never went off. The principal asks the police to watch the school at night, but Emily has a hunch the mystery is not over.

She is right. The next morning every locker is open again, and again nothing is missing. Emily reasons that opening three hundred lockers by combination would take about five hours, so the culprit must have a faster way in, and since nothing is ever stolen, the open lockers must be a message: I am smarter than you, try and catch me. She becomes convinced the message is meant for the two of them.

When they go to question the janitor, Mr. Redekop, they find Dion already chatting with him, which strikes them as odd. Mr. Redekop explains that the security system only has sensors on the doors and windows, none of which have been tripped, and that Morrie suggested hiding a camera on a locker to record the hallway overnight. Then he hands Emily an envelope he found by her locker. Inside is a haiku: "The pale night queen, so patient, ever watching, she sees the pane yawn." The detectives decode it: the moon watches a window open at night. Searching a cluttered storage room, they discover a window with a broken lock, rigged with a wire so the alarm never notices it opening. Moments later Emily spots someone outside testing that very window. It is Suzu. Emily tells Matthew, "Sorry to break you the bad news, but your crush is our culprit." After all, a haiku is a Japanese poem, and Suzu is from Japan.

They tail Suzu to a hardware store, where a discarded receipt shows she bought a combination lock, key blanks, and a precise measuring tool. Then they follow her home and are startled to see her meet Morrie and go inside with him. Emily hurries to tell Principal Vogler everything.

The third morning changes everything: the lockers are open once more, but this time things are spilled everywhere and items have been stolen. Principal Vogler calls Suzu to his office, where she surprises everyone by bringing Dion along and announcing she has news about the case. Matthew lays out their evidence, deducing that Suzu used the key blanks and the store-bought lock to make her own master key by hand. Suzu calmly agrees, and hands the key over, but asks a question that stops them cold: if she had already been opening lockers every night, why would she need to make a master key just yesterday? She explains she was only testing a theory to prove such a key was possible. She found footprints by the rigged window, staked it out at night, and watched Dion climb through and open the lockers with a key of his own, even watching him take things. Forced to empty his pockets, Dion produces a master key but insists he is being framed: someone left it in his locker with a smiley face sticker, and he only used it out of curiosity. When stolen property turns up in his locker, the principal declares the case closed, even as Dion sputters, "I didn't do this, okay? I mean, okay, I did it, but..."

Emily is not satisfied. If Dion was behind everything, why open the lockers for three nights and steal only on the third? She reluctantly admits this is the first case the Jones and Parker Detective Agency could not truly solve.

That night at home, Suzu wonders the same things aloud to Morrie. The haiku clue was far too clever for Dion, and someone seems to have been pulling puppet strings, perhaps even using a secret to keep Dion from protesting. She asks Morrie directly to tell her he had nothing to do with the locker incident. He only answers, "Alright, I'll tell you that." Suzu says she does not want things to go awry again, that she wants to do right by their new friends and their family. Morrie simply says everything is good and tells her good night, leaving the real mystery hanging in the dark.