The Case of the Ruined Pumpkin Pie
Suspects:
Seth
Julie
Tim
Mark
Lisa
Have you ever noticed that near a holiday, teachers will sometimes ask you what that holiday means to you? Well, for me Thanksgiving means a lot of chaos. That's not usually what teachers expect to hear, but in my case, it's true. Before I explain, let me introduce myself. My name is Sam Childers and I'm 12 years old. I'm one of five children in my household and unfortunately for me, I'm right in the middle. I have two older brothers, Steve and Simon, ages 17 and 14; a younger sister named Suzanne who is 10 years old; and a younger brother named Seth who just had his seventh birthday. My parents did that annoying thing some parents do where they name their kids so that the first initials are the same. I guess they thought it would be cute since their names are Stephen and Sylvia and since they named us the way they did, we'd all have names that start with "S". They may think it's cute, but I don't think it's cute at all! It becomes a problem when you want to do something as simple as mark a plastic cup as yours so no one else drinks out of it. Most people just put their first initial. If I just write an "S" on a cup, it accomplishes nothing except for having an "S" on my cup, just like six other cups, one for each of my four siblings and one for each of my parents. We all learned at an early age not to use initials to mark things. Instead, we use symbols. For instance, my symbol is a triangle.
Anyway, that's just my immediate family. My dad has eight brothers and sisters and my mom has three sisters. My dad's brothers and sisters have a total of 24 kids and my mom's sisters have a total of 10 kids. This means I have 24 cousins on my dad's side of the family and 10 cousins on my mom's side of the family. By now you're probably asking what this has to do with holidays and chaos. Okay, here's the missing piece of the puzzle: every Thanksgiving, we have both my mom's family and my dad's family over for the holiday meal. That's right. When you include my grandparents, we have over 25 adults and 39 kids in our house for Thanksgiving every year.
How do we do it? Well, first of all I think my parents are crazy. I think that's a requirement for having over 60 people in your house at one time for Thanksgiving. Secondly, everyone brings a dish to add to the dinner and we turn our dining room table into a buffet table. You'd think seating would be tricky. You can't even have the traditional "kid table" because no one makes a table that seats close to 40 kids. Luckily, our living room is pretty large and our basement is huge. Most people eat in our finished basement, but people are scattered all over the house. Even though there's not a traditional "kid table" the kids usually hang out with the kids that are around their own age. That's one of the good things about having 34 cousins. There are quite a few that are around your age. So, now you have an idea of the scene at my house on Thanksgiving and you can see why Thanksgiving equals chaos in my house.
The fun part of the holiday is watching the little kids like my brother Seth and all of my cousins around Seth's age. When they get together, they cause so much trouble that they drive the adults crazy! It's always some different kind of trouble every year. The best part about that is that no kid ever directly confesses to causing the commotion. They also won't directly tell on another child. So, this gives me a chance to play "Detective". This will be the third year that I've gotten involved to help find the guilty party for whatever someone has done. The last two years, I was able to find the troublemaker with no problem. I was sure someone would cause trouble this year too. I just wondered what it would be.
Thanksgiving Day finally arrived and the guests started pouring in. When people first start coming over, there's always a lot of fuss with the adults getting things set up, so I went in my room to play video games. My cousin Ricky, age eleven joined me. As more people showed up, a few more cousins around my age came into my room to join Ricky and me.
We weren't in my room long when I heard a female adult yell, "Alright! Who did it?" Here it was! The moment I've been waiting for! One of the little kids caused trouble already. It was only 32 minutes since the first set of guests arrived. It was a new record! Usually the kids don't cause any trouble until after the meal. This time, it was before the meal. I rushed into the dining room to see what happened, when I saw my Aunt Carol standing in the middle of the room with one of the pumpkin pies in her hands. Let me rephrase that. It WAS a pumpkin pie. Now it was a mess! Someone had scooped a lot of it out with their fingers, and not just in one place. The entire pie was ruined. You could tell by the finger marks that it was one of the little kids.
It was time to have fun and find out who did it. There were five suspects with fingers about the size of the marks in the pie: my brother Seth, Julie, Tim, Mark and Lisa. These kids were between six and eight years old, with Tim being the youngest and Julie being the oldest. So, I questioned each one of them. Each year they're very creative with their answers. As I previously stated, none of them will directly tattle on one of their cousins or on themselves, but none of them will lie either. So, each year I'm in for a treat as to how they'll answer. This year, they chose what I like to call the "Neither/Nor, Either/Or method". You'll understand soon enough what that is. I asked each of the five suspects one question: "Who did it?" These are the answers they gave me:
Julie said, "It was neither Simon's brother nor Erica's brother."
Lisa replied, "It was either David's sister or Jen's brother."
Seth answered, "It was neither Becky's sister nor Mark."
Tim said, "It was either David's sister or me."
Lastly, Mark said, "It was neither a six-year-old nor Lisa."
You're probably thinking that it would've been easy for me to figure out who did it because I know my family. Well, you're right, but you don't need to know my family to know who ruined the pie.
Solution:
Clue # 1: We can tell that it wasn't Seth because in the story we already know that Sam's brothers are Steve, Simon and Seth. This also makes Seth and Simon brothers and Julie said that it wasn't Simon's brother. This leaves four suspects: Julie, Tim, Mark and Lisa.
Clue # 2: Seth said that is wasn't Mark, so this leaves three suspects: Julie, Tim, and Lisa.
Clue # 3: Tim said it was either he or David's sister, but we don't yet know which of the girls is David's sister.
Clue # 4: Mark said it wasn't Lisa, which leaves Julie and Tim as suspects.
Clue # 5: Mark also said that it wasn't a six-year-old. When Sam introduces us to the five suspects, he states that they are between the ages of 6 an 8 years old. He also states that Tim is the youngest. Therefore, we now know Tim is 6 years old, which means that Tim didn't put his little hands into the pie. Now we know that Julie is the guilty one.