John, Mike, Ben and Sally have formed a detective club called the Barton Avenue Detectives. The following story is the sixth of six cases contained in this collection.

Money, Money, Money (part 3)

It was a wild and wonderful morning after that as everyone in the neighbourhood looked for the money. Gardens were trampled and bushes mangled. Mrs. Thompson chased a group of searchers all the way down the block when she found them digging in her flower bed. It took old Mrs. Bailey almost an hour to walk the four blocks home from the super market-she had a paper bag full of groceries and everybody kept stopping her to check for the money. The trash cans along Bloor Street were sifted over and over again with a fine- toothed comb. People crawled under porches and poked through garages; a few even climbed up onto their roofs to see if the bank robber had tossed the sack up there. But no one found the paper bag with the ten thousand dollars in it. It seemed to have disappeared.

The Kids from B.A.D. were just as unlucky as everybody else. They looked everywhere without finding so much as a single ten-dollar bill. Ben fell into a garbage bin behind one of the stores on Bloor Street and climbed out again with only a couple of banana peels to show for his trouble. Mike and John fished through a sewer grating for almost an hour before pulling up a paper sack they had seen floating in the drain water. They found the remains of a tuna fish sandwich, but nothing else. Sally and Jessica chased a dog for five blocks trying to get at a paper bag he was carrying. When they finally got it away from him they found it was full of garbage. At two o'clock the detectives finally met back at Ben's house. They were all very disappointed.

"I was so sure we were going to find it," Sally sighed.

"Well, at least nobody else was lucky either," said Mike. "I heard on the radio that the money is still missing."

"I guess we can look some more after school tomorrow," Ben suggested, but it didn't cheer anybody up much.

The Monopoly game, when they went back to it, just wasn't the same as it had been in the morning. The play money looked very fake and everybody was feeling pretty low. John was taking it the worst of all.

"This is the first time the Barton Avenue Detectives have ever failed on a case," he said. "I just don't understand how it could have happened."

Sally landed on one of John's hotels and paid him twelve hundred dollars. John was feeling so bad that he didn't even count the money, just stuck it under his side of the board and sighed.

Then Christopher poked his head in the doorway. "Hey, you guys, I'm ready," he announced happily.

"Go away, you can't play," Ben told him.

"I can too," insisted Chris. "You said I could."

"No, we didn't," said John. "What we said was you had to bring your own money if you wanted in. Real money."

"Well, I've got some," said Chris, coming over to sit down.

"He just got his allowance last night," explained Ben.

"How much does he get?" asked John.

"Fifty cents," said Ben.

"Go away, Chris," John told him. "You'd need hundreds to play."

"I've got hundreds," said Chris. "I've got more than hundreds." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of bills, all tens and twenties, and all of them real.

"Where did you get that from?" Sally demanded.

"I found it," said Chris. "If it isn't enough I can get more."