Everybody at Maple Ridge Middle School loved Bobby the Bobcat. Well, they loved his head. Bobby's head was huge and orange and fuzzy, with glass eyes and long white whiskers, and it lived in the trophy case outside the front office, except at games, when an eighth grader named Robert put it on and did cartwheels.

At the softball game last Friday, Robert did one cartwheel too close to the bleachers. RRRIP. Bobby's left ear was hanging by a thread.

After the game, Mrs. Metts the custodian carried the head back to the trophy case, holding it way out in front of her. Mrs. Metts has a name tag that says ROSALIE and a ring with about a hundred keys on it.

"Lord have mercy," she said. "This poor thing smells like a gym sock."

On Monday morning, Diana got to school early, like always. Diana is in sixth grade and she is going to be a detective when she grows up. She has a notebook and everything.

She walked past the trophy case. She stopped. She walked backward.

The trophies were there. The ribbons were there. But Bobby the Bobcat was GONE.

Diana looked at the trophy case very carefully, the way real detectives do. The glass wasn't broken. The little lock wasn't scratched. Whoever took Bobby had a key. Then she put her nose up to the glass and sniffed. Lemons. She wrote both things down.

Her best friend William came up behind her eating a granola bar. "Why are you smelling the trophy case?"

"Bobby's been stolen," Diana said. "And it was an inside job."

Just then the principal, Mr. Weatherspoon, came out of the office, saw the empty case, and turned the color of a tomato.

"Who has keys to this case?" Diana asked him.

"Me. Ms. Green, because the trophies are from her teams. And Mrs. Metts, of course, but she has keys to everything." He patted all his pockets. "Has anybody seen my glasses?"

"They're on your head," said William. They were.

That afternoon Mr. Weatherspoon got on the loudspeaker and said that if Bobby wasn't back by Friday, there would be NO Spring Spirit Rally against the Pine Hollow Eagles. The whole school groaned at the same time. You could hear it through the walls.

After school, Diana and William stayed to look for more clues. William got down on his stomach and looked under the trophy case. "AHA!"

It was a feather. A big one, brown with white stripes.

"An EAGLE feather!" William said. "Pine Hollow did it! It's sabotage!" William loves the word sabotage. He uses it about twice a day.

Diana put the feather in an envelope. A good detective doesn't jump to conclusions.

Just then Mrs. Metts came around the corner pushing her cart. She works the after-school shift, from three o'clock until everybody's gone home.

"Hey there, sugar," she said. "What are y'all doing on the floor?"

"Looking for clues," said Diana. "About Bobby."

Mrs. Metts laughed and patted her on the shoulder. "Oh, honey. Don't you worry about Bobby. He'll turn up looking better than ever." And she pushed her cart on down the hall, humming.

Diana wrote down exactly what she said, word for word.

"Better than ever?" said William. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't know yet," said Diana. "But I'm going to find out."

On Tuesday they went to question their first suspect: Ms. Green, the P.E. teacher.

The gym was LOUD. Forty kids were playing dodgeball, and Ms. Green stood in the middle of it all with her whistle, like the captain of a ship in a storm.

"Ms. Green, do you know where Bobby the Bobcat is?"

FWEET! went the whistle. "Nope," said Ms. Green. "And between you and me, I'm not sorry he's gone. That head smelled like a locker room. I've been telling Mr. Weatherspoon for three years to throw it out and buy a new one."

William's eyes got huge. "Where were you this weekend?" he asked in his best TV detective voice.

"At a coaches' meeting two hours away. All weekend. Ask anybody." FWEET! "Why?"

Before William could answer, a red dodgeball came flying out of nowhere and bounced off the top of his head. BOING.

"Sorry!" somebody yelled.

"I'm okay!" William yelled back, from the floor.

On the way out, Diana looked back. Ms. Green was watching them leave. She didn't look guilty. But she didn't look sorry either.

Their second suspect was Robert, the eighth grader who wears Bobby at games. They found him after school on the front steps, waiting for his ride.

Robert is very tall and very quiet. He listened to all their questions and then he sighed.

"Honestly? I'm kind of glad Bobby's gone. At the Spirit Rally I have to dance in front of the whole school, and I'm the worst dancer in the eighth grade. Maybe the world. And that head smells. A lot."

William wrote GLAD!!! in his own notebook and underlined it three times.

"But I didn't take him," Robert said. "I've been Bobby for two years. Plus I don't have a key to anything. My mom says I'd lose it."

Behind them, Mrs. Metts was mopping the front hall. Diana noticed that she had Band-Aids on three of her fingertips.

"Did you hurt your hand, Mrs. Metts?"

Mrs. Metts held up her fingers and smiled. "Occupational hazard, honey," she said, and winked.

Diana wrote that down too. She had a feeling about it. She just didn't know what kind of feeling yet.

On Wednesday morning somebody had written EAGLES RULE on the chalkboard in the cafeteria in giant letters. Everybody was mad.

"See?" said William. "Sabotage!"

At lunch, Diana didn't even eat her sandwich. She went looking for clues instead, and William came too, eating a bag of cheese puffs.

By the boiler room door they found Mrs. Metts's cart, parked. It smelled like lemons and bleach. Stuck to the handle was a little tuft of orange fuzz.

"Look at this," Diana whispered.

William looked. Then he looked at his fingers, which were orange from the cheese puffs.

"Oh. That's probably me," he said. "I touched it. I think? I touch a lot of stuff."

Diana sighed. That's the trouble with having William for a partner. She put the fuzz in an envelope anyway, just in case.

Then the fire alarm went off. It was only a drill, but by the time everybody had stood in the parking lot for twenty minutes and come back in, the cart was gone.

After school, Diana and William rode their bikes all the way to Pine Hollow Middle School. There was one really big hill. William walked his bike up it. Diana did not.

The Pine Hollow team was at softball practice. Diana marched right up to the dugout and held up the feather. "Is this yours?"

A girl took off her catcher's mask, looked at it, and laughed so hard she had to sit down. "Come see Eddie," she said.

Eddie the Eagle was their mascot. The girl pulled his head out of a bag in the equipment shed. It was made of brown felt. ALL felt. There was not one real feather on it anywhere.

"Our old one got rained on and all the feathers fell off and it looked like a plucked chicken," she said. "Everybody laughed at us for a whole season. So now he's felt."

"Oh," said William.

"And we didn't write on your chalkboard either. We were at the planetarium all day yesterday."

On the ride home William was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "So it WASN'T sabotage."

"Nope," said Diana. "But somebody wants us to think it was."

On Thursday the chalkboard mystery solved itself. Two eighth-grade boys got caught writing EAGLES DROOL right under EAGLES RULE, and it came out that they'd written the first one too, as a joke, to get everybody fired up. They had to stay after school and wash every chalkboard in the building.

But the feather still didn't make sense.

Then, in art class, Diana looked up from her clay pot, and there it was. On the wall was the sixth grade's bird project, paper birds with real craft feathers glued on, and on the art teacher's desk was a bag of brown feathers with white stripes, exactly like hers.

"Somebody carried a stack of those birds down to the office last Friday for Parents' Night," the art teacher said. "Feathers everywhere. I'm still finding them."

So the feather was just a feather.

After school, Diana was waiting for her mom by the side door when Mrs. Metts pulled in for her shift. She lifted a big laundry bag out of her back seat very gently, like something breakable was in it. Something round and lumpy.

She carried it into the custodian's closet and locked the door behind her.

Friday morning it was raining. Mr. Weatherspoon came into the office shaking water off his raincoat. Diana was there with a note from home about the dentist.

Mr. Weatherspoon reached in his raincoat pocket for his car keys and pulled out a little yellow sticky note instead. It was all wrinkled and blurry, like it had been through the washing machine.

"That's my handwriting," he said. "When did I write this?"

Diana looked over his elbow. Most of the ink had run. All you could still read was:

BOBBY — B...... — FRI — R.M.

"B?" said Mr. Weatherspoon. "B what?"

William had come in to borrow a pencil. He read it and turned white. "B... BURIED? Somebody BURIED Bobby?"

"Nobody buried Bobby," said Mr. Weatherspoon, but he didn't sound very sure. Then he took a deep breath. "You know what? We're having the Spirit Rally anyway. Two o'clock. A school is more than a head." He announced it on the loudspeaker, and you could hear the cheering all the way from the gym.

Diana wasn't cheering. She was reading her notebook from the very first page.

At two o'clock the whole school was packed into the gym. The band was playing. The cheerleaders had green and gold pom-poms. The Pine Hollow softball team even came and sat on the visitors' side and waved, and everybody waved back, sort of embarrassed about the chalkboard.

Robert sat in the front row in a regular T-shirt, looking relieved and sad at the same time. Where Bobby should have been dancing, there was just an empty spot on the floor.

Mr. Weatherspoon tapped the microphone. "Welcome to the Spring Spirit Rally!"

Everybody cheered except Diana. She was turning pages faster and faster. Lemons. Keys. A torn ear. A smelly head. "Better than ever." Band-Aids. Orange fuzz. A laundry bag. A sticky note. R.M.

And all at once, like a light turning on, she knew.

She stood up on the bleachers. "Mr. Weatherspoon!" she shouted. "I know who took Bobby! And I know WHY!"

The band stopped. The whole gym turned to look at her. William's mouth fell open.

And right at that exact moment, the big doors at the end of the gym began to creak open...

"It was Mrs. Metts!" Diana said. "But she didn't steal him!"

Everybody started talking at once. Diana held up her notebook and talked louder.

"The case was opened with a key, and she has keys to everything. The glass smelled like lemons, and so does her cart. Bobby's ear got torn, and she said he smelled like a gym sock. She has Band-Aids on her fingertips, and that's what happens when you sew something thick. My grandma gets them every Christmas. The orange fuzz was Bobby fuzz, not cheese puffs. And she said he'd turn up looking better than ever."

"But the sticky note..." said Mr. Weatherspoon.

"R.M. is Rosalie Metts. It's on her name tag. And B isn't for buried. It's for BATH. She told you last Friday that she was taking Bobby home to wash him and fix his ear and have him back for the rally. You wrote it down. And then you..."

"...forgot," said Mr. Weatherspoon, and turned the color of a tomato for the second time that week.

That's when the doors finished opening, and in walked Mrs. Metts, holding Bobby the Bobcat high over her head. He was fluffy. He was BRIGHT orange. His ear was sewn back on so you couldn't even tell, and he had brand-new whiskers.

"I'm on the after-school shift," she said into the quiet. "Nobody tells me anything. What did I miss?"

The whole gym went crazy.

Robert put the head on. It smelled like lemons. He did the worst dance in the history of Maple Ridge Middle School, and everybody got up and did it with him, even Ms. Green, even the Pine Hollow team, even Mr. Weatherspoon, with his glasses on his head.

THE END