Five-minute Mysteries 5 by Ken Weber

Author:Ken Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781552978689
Publisher: Firefly Books
Published: 2013-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

The narrator has described his plan as “foolproof” but there is potential for glitches. What are the possible weaknesses in his perfect crime?

Solution

24. Mr. Mayo’s Wakeup Test

Only three students in Mr. Mayo’s senior English class had even a vague idea how to pronounce his real name (it was Salvatore Luciano DiMastromontellamayo) and none of them at all had the foggiest idea how to spell it. Their conviction — for it was conviction, handed down over the years and elevated now, beyond the status of myth — was that other than Mr. Mayo himself, only his mother could spell it. The students knew his name had 16 syllables — that was common knowledge. They also knew that Mr. Mayo had been born and raised in Switzerland where he grew up speaking Italian, German and French; that he had lived in Aberdeen, Scotland, for ten years where he’d learned to speak English with a Celtic burr; and that after marrying a Canadian girl from Calgary (who kept her own surname because she too didn’t relish the challenge of spelling, or even pronouncing, DiMastromontellamayo) he’d moved to northern Arizona because the red hills reminded him of Tuscany where, curiously, he’d never been!

In fact, except for the mystery surrounding his name, the students in senior English knew and regularly exchanged quite a lot of information about Mr. Mayo. In part, they did that because he was an element in their lives that they all had in common. Partly, it was because students love to compare notes about their very best and very worst teachers (Mayo was one of the former) and because the students in senior English had the good fortune to begin every school day in Mr. Mayo’s class. It was well-established lore at Woodrow Wilson Composite High School that if you were not fully awake when the morning bell signaled the beginning of the school day, the first five minutes with Mayo would cleanse your brain of even the stickiest cobwebs.

Quite simply, this outcome was a product of Mr. Mayo’s effervescent personality. There was no room for drowsiness or inattention in whatever space he happened to occupy. It was also because he began every single class with a brief test. Nothing so mundane and ordinary as a pop quiz, but rather a mental challenge, a puzzle, a conundrum. Often, but not invariably, these twisters were built around some tricky element in English usage and grammar. Another important thing the students understood about Mr. Mayo was that he not only knew all there was to know about the complexities of the English language — and loved every one of them passionately — he was committed to exposing and correcting every perceived violation of proper usage and to herding all his students along that same path. That’s why the responses to the morning test on Thursday, February 19, veered directly to a consideration of language for the solution.

The test, delivered orally by Mr. Mayo, went like this:

Pietro cuts an apple in half while making lunch for his sister, Luciana, and asks which piece she would prefer.

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