The Big Mistake Club, Part 9: The Mystery of Three Socks

The Big Mistake Club, Part 9: The Mystery of Three Socks

The Story Begins

After gym class, the changing room always looked a little as if a small storm had swept through it. Hoodies lay on the benches, water bottles rolled beneath them, and the air smelled of rubber flooring and fresh air from the open window.

Adam was just zipping up his red hoodie when he suddenly stopped.

“Wait,” he said in a quiet, important voice. “We have a problem.”

Ela adjusted her purple glasses. “If it’s your trainer, you’re standing on it.”

“Not that problem.” Adam pointed to the corner by the bench.

Three socks lay there. One was blue and white striped. The second was yellow with tiny green dots. The third had a picture of a smiling badger on the heel.

Samo crouched beside them with one trainer in his hand. “Are all three of them lonely?”

“Exactly!” Adam stood up straight. “Three lonely socks. That can’t be a coincidence.”

Ela examined them. “Not even two of them match.”

“That’s the most suspicious thing about it,” Adam declared. “Someone must have brought them here. Or someone took them away. Or…” He thought for a moment. “…there’s a big sock theft going on.”

“Who would steal only one sock from a pair?” Ela asked.

“A very clever thief,” Adam replied. “One who doesn’t want you to notice straight away.”

Samo picked up the sock with the badger. “And if the thief has one sock, what does he wear on the other foot?”

Nobody answered that.

Then Adam pulled a short pencil from his pencil case. “The Big Mistake Club is forming a Sock Search Team!”

“That sounds as if we should have our own badge,” Samo said happily.

“We don’t,” Ela said.

“Not yet,” Adam added.

Someone knocked on the changing-room door. The children hurried out, taking the three socks with them. Adam carried them carefully on his open palms, as if they were precious evidence.

In the hallway, their classmates were already waiting for the next lesson. Adam scribbled three circles on a piece of paper and drew an arrow to each one.

“Theory number one,” he began. “The striped sock belongs to an athlete. Stripes are fast.”

Ela looked at the striped sock. “Stripes are stripes.”

“Theory number two: the spotted sock belongs to an artist. Dots are like paint.”

“They’re green,” Samo observed.

“And theory number three,” Adam continued without pausing, “the badger sock belongs to someone with a cat at home. A badger and a cat are… animals.”

Ela was silent for a moment. “Or they’re just ordinary lost socks.”

Adam opened his mouth, but just then Samo turned to a group of children by the notice board.

“Excuse me,” he asked seriously, “are you athletes, artists, or cat people?”

Tomáš from the next class blinked. “I’m hungry.”

“That isn’t an option,” Samo said, looking at Adam’s paper.

“I have a turtle at home,” Nina said.

“Is that nearly a cat?” asked a boy with curly hair.

“No,” Ela said.

“Maybe a little,” Adam whispered.

Soon, half the hallway knew that the Big Mistake Club was looking for the owners of three socks. Someone pointed at their feet, while someone else asked whether slippers counted. Samo carefully noted the colours of everyone’s socks, but he also tried to work out who stomped loudly and who walked quietly.

“Why are you watching their steps?” Ela asked.

“Adam said we should look for clues.”

Adam looked as if he had just discovered a new branch of detective science. “Actually, that isn’t a bad idea.”

“It is,” Ela said.

Meanwhile, Mrs Benková appeared at the gym door. She was wearing a dark green jumper and carrying a rolled-up mat.

When Things Start to Change

“I see,” she said calmly, “that the hallway has turned into the sock division of the police.”

Adam straightened his shoulders. “We’re investigating a serious case.”

“Three socks,” Samo added.

Mrs Benková looked at Adam’s palms. “That really is three. An excellent start to an investigation.”

Ela hid a smile.

“And have you tried looking there?” the teacher asked, nodding towards the gym.

A large wicker basket stood against the wall beside the door. The children had passed it many times, but they had never paid it any attention. Now it looked as though it held a whole little world of forgotten things.

A red hat stuck out of it, along with a gymnastics belt, a bottle without its cap, a blue glove, and a pile of other socks.

“Is that the lost-property basket?” Samo asked in surprise.

“Yes,” Mrs Benková said. “After every gym class, everything left on the benches, underneath them, or sometimes even on the windowsill is brought here.”

Adam leaned over the basket. “And nobody told us about it?”

“The basket has been here since September,” the teacher replied. “Perhaps you had more important things to look at. Such as shoelaces, balls, or your own noses while doing somersaults.”

Ela noticed that the things in the basket were arranged in a strangely tidy way. Hats were on one side, gloves on the other, and the socks were sorted by colour.

“You sort them,” she said.

“A little,” the teacher admitted. “By class, by colour, and by whatever can be recognised without a detective’s magnifying glass. Otherwise, children would get lost in their own mess.”

Samo solemnly stroked the rim of the basket. “And when does it get to rest?”

“During the holidays,” Mrs Benková replied without hesitation.

Adam was about to search the entire basket all at once, but Ela raised her hand.

“A simple plan,” she suggested. “We’ll check the name tags. Then we’ll ask in the classrooms. And we won’t sort people by how loudly they stomp.”

“All right,” Adam agreed. “But we’ll make a map of the sock trail. Just a small one. Very clear. Perhaps with a key, arrows, and secret symbols.”

“That isn’t a small map anymore,” Ela said.

Even so, Adam sat on the floor and began to draw. The striped sock got a blue arrow, the spotted sock a green one, and the badger sock an orange one. Meanwhile, Samo spoke to the children much more carefully.

“Have you, by any chance, lost one sock?” he asked. “You don’t have to be a cat person.”

That was better.

By the door to the next classroom, Klára suddenly called out. “Wait! I think the yellow one with dots is mine.”

She pulled a hand towel from her bag. The other sock, exactly the same, was caught in one corner of it.

“I thought I’d put both of them in my bag,” she said, blushing.

“One of them decided to travel without you,” Samo said.

“It probably fell by the bench,” Klára said.

“First case solved!” Adam cried, drawing a large circle on the map.

Mrs Benková smiled slightly. “And without questioning the turtle.”

But two socks still remained: the striped one and the badger one. What was more, two other blue socks lay in the basket. They looked similar, but neither was exactly the same.

Adam rubbed his chin. “Now it’s getting complicated. Maybe we have a double thief.”

“Or double chaos,” Ela said.

Samo looked at the badger. “Maybe the badger knows the answer.”

“The badger is drawn,” Ela reminded him.

“Drawn things can have good taste too,” Samo replied.

An Important Moment

Later, it turned out that the striped sock belonged to Miško. After gym, he had accidentally put on a friend’s similar sock and left his own on the bench. When he noticed, a sock with little rockets was sticking out from his other foot.

“At least I was faster,” Miško said, looking at the rockets.

“That explains the stripes,” Adam whispered. “Not completely, but a little.”

Only the badger sock remained. The children returned to the gym, checked the benches, and asked a few more classmates. Nobody claimed it.

For a moment, everything was quiet. Adam’s map fluttered in his hands in the draught from the open door.

Just then, Mrs Benková took a thin card from a small compartment in the basket. It had Class 2.B written on it.

“I haven’t had time to take this part of the basket next door yet,” she said. “Maybe the badger is from there.”

In Class 2.B, Zuzka spoke so quickly that she nearly dropped her pencil. “The badger is mine! I was looking for it this morning!”

The other sock was in her locker. After gym, Zuzka had borrowed an ordinary grey sock from a friend because her own had been left somewhere by the bench. The badger sock had then ended up in the basket with the other lost things.

Three lonely socks. Three different children. Three completely ordinary mistakes.

Adam looked at his map for a while. “So there’s no secret sock mafia?”

“No,” Ela said.

“No cat gang either?”

“No.”

Samo held up his empty hands. “But the basket was important.”

Adam nodded. “Very important. Even more important than my key with the arrows.”

“That’s a big admission,” Ela remarked.

After the last lesson, they opened the club notebook in their classroom. Its corners were already bent, it had a few juice stains, and on one page was a drawing of an old case that none of them could fully explain anymore.

“The case will be called The Mystery of Three Socks and the Badger Witness,” Adam suggested.

“The badger didn’t witness anything,” Ela said.

“But it looked very trustworthy,” Samo added.

Ela picked up the pencil and wrote a new rule: “Before a big search, first check all boxes, baskets, and corners.”

Under the sentence, Samo drew a basket with three socks in it. Adam wanted to add a detective hat, but in the end he drew only a small arrow.

Mrs Benková stopped at their desk. “Good work. A good detective doesn’t just ask lots of questions. They really look around too.”

The children nodded.

As they left the classroom, Samo looked back at the notebook once more. “And what if the basket gets lost?”

Adam immediately drew breath.

Ela tossed her braid over her shoulder. “First we check all boxes, baskets, and corners.”

Their laughter rang through the hallway, and by the gym the wicker basket stood calmly in its place, full of things that might have another story tomorrow.