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spool of clear fishing twine, one pencil and one eraser, a kaleidoscope, and a horseshoe magnet, which she yanked with some effort from the metal bucket. “I’ve been through dozens of these,” she said, holding the magnet up for them to admire. “This is the strongest I’ve found.” Finally she showed them a length of slender nylon rope coiled around the bottom and sides of the bucket.
    “That’s a lot of stuff to carry,” Sticky remarked.
    “It’s all useful,” Kate said, putting her things away again. “Take this morning, for example. Some crazy-looking girl dropped her pencil down a storm drain out on the plaza —”
    Reynie and Sticky looked at each other.
    “— and if I didn’t have my bucket with me,” Kate continued, “she’d have been up a creek without a paddle.” A thoughtful expression came over her face. “Hmm, a paddle would be great to have. But no, I suppose it would be too big to haul around. Still, it
would
come in handy sometimes —”
    “Did you help Rhonda get her pencil back?” Reynie asked.
    “Of course I did. I just… now wait a minute. How did you know her name?”
    “Finish your story,” Reynie said. “We’ll tell you later.”
    So Kate told them how she had pried up the edge of the metal grate with a screwdriver on her Swiss Army knife. After dragging the grate aside, she tied her rope to a nearby bench and lowered herself into the drain, using her flashlight to find the pencil in the darkness.
    “It had rolled down into a crack,” she explained, “about ten and a half inches deep, so I put a drop of glue on the end of some fishing twine — that’s why it pays to have a pen light, too, you know, so you can hold it in your mouth and point it when you need both hands for something like putting glue on twine. Anyway, I poked the twine down into the crack until it reached the pencil. Gave the glue a few seconds to dry, then pulled it right out. I couldn’t have done any of that without my bucket, now could I?”
    “Weren’t you afraid?” Sticky asked. He’d been terrified himself and didn’t want to be the only one.
    “Of what? Getting wet? It was perfectly dry down there. We haven’t had rain for days.”
    Something about Kate’s story had caught Reynie’s attention. “How did you know that crack was ten and a half inches deep?” he said. “I don’t see a tape measure in your bucket.”
    “Oh, I can always tell distances and weights and that sort of thing,” said Kate with a shrug. She glanced around. “For example, just by looking at it I can tell this room is twenty-two feet long and sixteen feet wide.”
    Sticky, irritated that Kate hadn’t been frightened in the dark drain, was inclined to be skeptical. “Are you sure?”
    “Of course I’m sure.”
    “Let’s measure,” said Reynie, fetching the ruler from the pencil woman’s desk.
    The room was twenty-two feet long and sixteen feet wide.
    Impressed, Reynie whistled, and Sticky said, “Not bad.”
    “Okay, back to your story,” Reynie said. “Did Rhonda offer to help you cheat on the test?”
    Kate’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You sure seem to know a lot about it. Were you spying on me somehow? If you were, then I guess you know I called her a loon.”
    “We weren’t spying, but that’s what I figured,” Reynie said. “So I take it you solved the puzzle? Unless, of course, you knew all the answers.”
    Kate snorted. “Who in the world could possibly know the answers to a test like that?”
    “Sticky did,” said Reynie.
    It was Kate’s turn to be impressed. “Not bad,” she said, and Sticky ducked his head shyly. “Now what’s this about a puzzle?”
    Once again Reynie and Sticky looked at each other.
    “But if you didn’t know about that,” said Sticky, “how did you pass?”
    “I
didn’t
pass. Nobody in my session did. To tell you the truth, I think the only reason they let me stick around was because I helped Old Yellow Suit out of a tight spot.”
    Of course