The Westing Game - Softcover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1 - SUNSET TOWERS

Chapter 2 - GHOSTS OR WORSE

Chapter 3 - TENANTS IN AND OUT

Chapter 4 - THE CORPSE FOUND

Chapter 5 - SIXTEEN HEIRS

Chapter 6 - THE WESTING WILL

Chapter 7 - THE WESTING GAME

Chapter 8 - THE PAIRED HEIRS

Chapter 9 - LOST AND FOUND

Chapter 10 - THE LONG PARTY

Chapter 11 - THE MEETING

Chapter 12 - THE FIRST BOMB

Chapter 13 - THE SECOND BOMB

Chapter 14 - PAIRS REPAIRED

Chapter 15 - FACT AND GOSSIP

Chapter 16 - THE THIRD BOMB

Chapter 17 - SOME SOLUTIONS

Chapter 18 - THE TRACKERS

Chapter 19 - ODD RELATIVES

Chapter 20 - CONFESSIONS

Chapter 21 - THE FOURTH BOMB

Chapter 22 - LOSERS, WINNER

Chapter 23 - STRANGE ANSWERS

Chapter 24 - WRONG ALL WRONG

Chapter 25 - WESTING’S WAKE

Chapter 26 - TURTLE’S TRIAL

Chapter 27 - A HAPPY FOURTH

Chapter 28 - AND THEN . . .

Chapter 29 - FIVE YEARS PASS

Chapter 30 - THE END?

Sunset Towers

The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!

Sunset Towers faced east and had no towers. This glittery, glassy apartment house stood alone on the Lake Michigan shore five stories high. Five empty stories high.

Then one day (it happened to be the Fourth of July), a most uncommon-looking delivery boy rode around town slipping letters under the doors of the chosen tenants-to-be. The letters were signed Barney Northrup.

The delivery boy was sixty-two years old, and there was no such person as Barney Northrup. . . .

“In [The Westing Game] the author shows once more that no one can beat her at intrigue, at concocting marvelous absurdities.”

—Publishers Weekly

OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE IN PREMIUM EDITIONS:

SPEAK
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton,
a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc., 1978
Published by Puffin Books, 1992
Reissued, 1997
This edition published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008

Copyright © Ellen Raskin, 1978

ISBN: 9781101157459

■ FOR JENNY who asked for a puzzle-mystery ■ AND SUSAN K.

INTRODUCTION

Until 1970, Ellen Raskin was considered an illustrator, not an author, although she had written the texts of her notable picture books, such as Nothing Ever Happens on My Block; And It Rained; and Spectacles. And until 1969, I didn’t really know her, although when I was the children’s-book editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, she had illustrated Books: A Book to Begin On, by Susan Bartlett, and Come Along!, by Rebecca Caudill—as well as doing for us some of the one thousand book jackets of which she was so proud.

Our friendship really began in the smoking car (like the title character of Moe Q. McGlutch, Ellen smoked too much) of a Pennsylvania Railroad train en route from New York to Philadelphia, where we were both speaking on a panel. I stopped to say hello, and she said, “I’m sitting here alone because I’m so nervous. I hate speaking.” “I hate it, too,” I said, “and I’ve given up smoking.” In the depressed gloom that followed this exchange, the beginning of a bond was formed.

That same year I moved from Holt to E. P. Dutton. Their office was located at Union Square and Seventeenth Street, only a short walk from Ellen’s apartment on Eighth Street, and we got together more often. One day, Ellen confided that she had always wanted to adapt Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti, as a picture-book text. I thought of the lavishly rich visual details of the poem, and I longed to see how she would illustrate it. ”Would you do the book for me?” I asked. “Yes,” she answered. “Jean [Jean Karl, her editor at Atheneum] doesn’t want it.” Ellen was always candid. So she did do it—her first book for Dutton. One of her exquisitely intricate paintings for that book now hangs on my wall.

We often talked about our lives, and I particularly loved stories about her family and how she and her parents and sister drove around the country during the Great Depression so her father could look for work, an epic safari that took them from Milwaukee to California. “You should write a book about growing up in the Depression,” I told her.