Stage Two Hullabaloo

By Verity Weaver and Courtney Huddleston

The Quetlock Quavers have reached the pinnacle of their middle school careers: the statewide Music and Variety Talent Contest. They’ve drafted Bert Bishop, retired music teacher and bassist extraordinaire, for an important solo at the start of their opening piece. Rehearsals go off without a hitch, yet when the orchestra takes its place on Stage Two to begin its set, everyone is there except for Bert.

Was he ferried away aboard another orchestra’s bus? Maybe he was a casualty of an amateur magician’s trick. Did the dodgy tuna sandwich he ate finally do him in? Unless it was the performance hall’s resident ghost . . . He couldn’t have just vanished, could he?

Crack open a What Happened? book to investigate a preposterous mystery from four different perspectives. See what the witnesses get right . . . and what they get hilariously wrong. Bet you’ll never guess what really happened!

• Language: English
• Publisher: North Star Editions
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781631633218

Book preview

Stage Two Hullabaloo © 2020 by North Star Editions, Mendota Heights, MN 55120. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Book design by Jake Slavik

Illustrations by Courtney Huddleston

Design Elements: Shutterstock Images

Published in the United States by Jolly Fish Press, an imprint of North Star Editions, Inc.

First Edition

First Printing, 2019

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weaver, Verity, author. | Huddleston, Courtney, illustrator.

Title: Stage two hullabaloo / by Verity Weaver ; illustrated by Courtney Huddleston.

Description: First edition. | Mendota Heights, MN : Jolly Fish Press, [2020] | Series: What happened? | Summary: Bert Bishop, the bass player for the Quetlock Quavers, goes missing right before the statewide Music and Variety Talent Contest, and each musician has his or her own theory about what happened to him—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001870 (print) | LCCN 2019006346 (ebook) | ISBN 9781631633218 (ebook) | ISBN 9781631633201 (pbk.) |ISBN 9781631633195 (hardcover)

Subjects: | CYAC: Music teachers—Fiction. | Musicians—Fiction. |Orchestra—Fiction. | Contests—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | LCGFT: Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.W41777 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.W41777 St 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001870

Jolly Fish Press

North Star Editions, Inc.

2297 Waters Drive

Mendota Heights, MN 55120

www.jollyfishpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter 1

Where's Bert?

Saturday, March 17, 5:52 p.m.

Tonight was the night—the finals of the statewide Music and Variety Talent Contest. With just eight minutes until the stage two curtain went up, the Quetlock Quavers were in a flurry of excitement, checking and rechecking their music and warming up their instruments. There were high fluttery notes from the flutes, low farty notes from the trombones and tubas, and the loud clang of a dropped triangle from the percussion section, followed by an even louder cry of pain: OWWWW! Watch what you’re doing, clumsy. That landed on my toe!

This was it—their grand moment in the spotlight, on a proper stage in a proper theater, in front of all their family and friends. This was their chance to shine, to prove to the waiting judges that they were THE best school orchestra in the whole state. Even better than those stuck-up show-offs from the Quetlock Heights Academy, with their silly tartan ties and blazers. The snooty academy concert orchestra might have won the title last year . . . and the year before that . . . and every year stretching back to the beginning of talent show time, but their reign was over now. There was a new school orchestra champion in town, waiting behind the curtain in their red Quetlock Quavers T-shirts, ready for the performance of their lives.

The orchestra had been practicing nonstop for weeks. For months. They knew their opening piece, Foxtrot for Elephant, back to front and inside out. They knew it so well they could have played it in their sleep. In fact, one of the flautists, Piper Lewis, had been doing just that for the last three nights in a row. She was still humming it when she woke up each morning, her fingers picking out the notes on imaginary flute keys as she lay there under the covers. And Cody Clendon, the Quetlock Quavers’s percussionist, was no better. He’d been tapping out his part on every desk in school for the last two weeks, much to his teachers’ annoyance. Stop tapping, Cody, and work on your math problems . . . Less tapping and more Spanish, please, Mr. Clendon . . . CODY CLENDON, STOP THAT TERRIBLE TAPPING!

It wasn’t just Cody’s fingers drumming out the opening bars of Foxtrot for Elephant now, though. Nervous excitement had set his arms and legs off too, elbows jerking up and down like a hyper chicken.

BUMP!

CLATTER!

CRASH!

Ow, ow, ow! cried his neighbor, as the cymbal went flying off after the triangle. "Watch out, clumsy, that’s my other toe!"

Shh, hissed the conductor, Mrs. Allegro, waving her baton at them. We don’t want the judges to hear you arguing. Good luck everyone, she added. Let’s make it a good one. Our best performance yet.

Good luck, whispered the violins to the violas.

Break a leg, said the clarinets to the oboes.

May the force be with you, said the bassoonist, who was a bit of a Star Wars nut. Psst, Ying, it’s time to put your book away and get warmed up.

What? Oh. Sorry. Ying Cheung put down her library book and picked up her trombone, squeezing her lips into shape.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Six minutes to go. The nervous chain of good luck wishes carried on, rippling across the stage in soft, whispering waves.

Good luck, hissed the first cello to the second.

Good luck, mouthed the second cello to Dev Shah, on third.

Good luck with the solo, Bert, said Dev, turning to his neighbor. Retired music teacher Bert Bishop wasn’t an official member of the Quetlock Quavers, but he came in to help whenever one of their pieces called for a double bass. Like Foxtrot for Elephant, with the four-bar solo at the start—the first four bars of their entire set.

Wait a minute, said Dev, clocking the empty stool beside him. "Where is Bert?" His glasses were still there on the music stand where he’d left them after rehearsals but there was no sign of his music. And there was no sign, more importantly, of Bert himself.

Dev stood up and peered over the top of his spy-style sunglasses, looking for a tell-tale