The Case of the Golden Goblet

Every Halloween, our community hall holds a costume contest, and the prize is a golden goblet that has been handed from winner to winner for twenty years. I help run the contest, so I was there all evening, from the first parade to the final judging.

Four finalists were still in the hall at nine o’clock. Wren Halloway, five foot eleven, wore a vampire costume with a long red cape that brushed the floor wherever she walked. Milo Grant, five foot four, wore a skeleton suit with glow-in-the-dark bones. Ivy Chen, five foot eight, wore a witch costume with a tall pointed hat. Sam Reyes, six foot even, wore a scarecrow costume, with a straw hat banded in orange felt and straw poking from his sleeves.

At nine o’clock the lights went out for the ghost-story moment, just as planned. Ninety seconds later the lights came back on, and the goblet was gone. Its glass case stood open on the display table, the latch undone, and nobody had seen a hand reach for it in the dark.

Above the display table hung a paper bat, strung at exactly six feet. It had been torn down in the dark, and the tear was smooth and round. Ivy’s pointed hat would have torn it to a point, and Milo, at five foot four, could not have brushed something six feet up without climbing — and no chair had been moved, and no footprints marked the table.

The floor around the table was dusty from the pumpkin-bread stall, and it held two clean shoe prints and nothing else. No long swept line ran through the dust. Wren’s cape brushes the floor with every step she takes, so wherever Wren had walked in the dark, her cape would have swept a line through that dust. There was none.

One clue pointed the wrong way, and I nearly followed it. Red glitter was smeared on the case latch, and Wren’s cape is covered in red glitter. But Wren had carried the goblet to its case at seven o’clock, setting up the display herself. Her glitter was already on the case, and on every other display item, long before the lights went out. It proved nothing at all.

Caught on the latch itself were several pale strands of straw. Only one costume in the hall sheds straw: Sam’s scarecrow suit, stuffed with it. The strands were fresh, not dusty, and they had snagged exactly where a hand would have to grip to undo the latch.

Sam told me he had been at the caramel-apple stand for the whole blackout. But the vendor shook her head. Sam had left the stand at eight fifty-seven to fetch napkins, she said, and he came back at five past nine — without any napkins. The stand is at the far end of the hall, and the only route back to it from the kitchen passes the display table.

So I lined the facts up: the bat torn at six feet with a smooth, round tear, the dust with no swept cape line, the glitter that proved nothing, the fresh straw on the latch, and the napkins that never came. Only one person fits them all. Who took the golden goblet?