The Case of the Wilted Broccoli (5 page)

Elon pointed to the back wall of the office. A line of three black-and-white photographs showed Edward Bannon, Frank Bannon, and Tom Bannon from left to right. It looks like Edward Bannon founded the company in 1959, and ran the business for more than thirty years, until he turned it over to Frank in 1995. Frank ran the business until last year, and that left Tom.
 

The door opened, and Brett came through followed by Tom Bannon. Brett went back to his desk without another word, seeming glad to have handed them off to someone else. He got back into his paperwork without a second glance.

Tom had sandy hair, a friendly smile, and though he was an adult, he looked pretty young. Younger than their parents at least. "Hello kids," he said, approaching with his hand out. "I'm Tom Bannon."

They shook hands with him, one after another.
 

"Brett said you want to know more about our company."

"Yes, we're learning at Mt. Hood Elementary about food supply chains," Willow said, "and we'd like to interview you."

"How about we start with a little tour, and then you can ask me questions in my office?"

Tom was nice and helpful, and Linden instantly liked him.
 

"That would be great," Elon said.

"Well, I'm Tom. My grandfather, Edward, started this company." He gestured up toward the photographs they'd already discovered. "He turned it over to my father, Frank, who in turn gave the company to me when he passed away last year."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bannon," Willow said.

Tom looked at the photograph of his father, distracted, then turned back to the kids. "That's all right. It was unexpected. I always knew he wanted me to take over the family business, but I didn't think it would be for a long time." He shook his head, then pointed at the room they were in. "This is the main office. It's where we take orders from restaurants, and place orders with suppliers."

"Do you just order what the restaurants want?" Linden asked.

"No, it doesn't work like that most of the time. Restaurants want their food for that week, but suppliers can take weeks to get food to us. So we have to guess what restaurants will want ahead of time, and order it. Some stuff is pretty routine. Mt. Hood Elementary is going to want three hundred hamburgers every Tuesday, and so that's easy. But a restaurant might say they want whatever fish is fresh as long as it's salmon, halibut or tuna. Some restaurants pay extra because they want what's local and fresh, and so they'll take whatever is in season right around here. We're a little unusual in that we service both institutional customers and premium restaurants."

They stared at him blankly.

"Sorry," Mr. Bannon said. "Institutional customers are school cafeterias, hospitals, and workplaces. They usually want a lot of the same food, pretty inexpensively. Whereas a nice restaurant wants the best food they can get, even if that changes from week to week."

"Our school gets both," Elon said. "We get fresh, local foods on Monday and Friday, and the, uh, cheap food on the other days."

"So you do," Mr. Bannon said. "I forgot about that. I think it's the first time we've ever done that with a public school. Well, do you want to see the warehouse where we keep the food?"

"Yes, please," Linden said.
 

Mr. Bannon led them through a door into an immense warehouse. From here they saw a dozen enormous garage doors, half of which had trucks backed up to them. Inside the warehouse, small forklifts moved pallets of food, while other trucks were unloaded by hand.

They followed Mr. Bannon deeper into the warehouse.

"These are the dry goods," Mr. Bannon explained, pointing to immense shelves on their right. "This is where we have non-perishable goods that don't require refrigeration. That's stuff like flour, sugar, and oil, as well as spices and seasonings. We also have prepared food like crackers."

"Those are the biggest shelves I've ever seen," Willow said.

"They're called pallet racks," Mr. Bannon said, chuckling. "Each pallet is about four feet by four feet, and our racks go three levels up. The top level is twelve feet high, and can take a four foot tall pallet, which makes the very top..."

"Sixteen feet," Linden finished. He loved crackers, of any kind, and he stared at the largest container of saltine crackers he'd ever seen. It must have been four feet wide and four feet tall. "Who needs that many crackers?" he blurted out.

Mr. Bannon laughed. "Hopefully nobody. That's a full pallet of crackers, and we'll need to break that down into smaller boxes to send out to restaurants. It's in such a big container because it's easier to move with the forklift that way."

They trailed Mr. Bannon toward the trucks, but he suddenly turned them left, bringing them to a huge metal structure in the center of the warehouse. The whole place was way bigger than a soccer field, and the middle was taken up by a house-sized shiny white building.

"This is the part I always loved visiting as a kid," Mr. Bannon said. "It's our refrigerator. If you want to go inside, you have to put on a jacket." He led them to a row of winter parkers with furry hoods.
 

They each put one on. Linden laughed as Elon pulled the hood over his own head and disappeared inside the adult-sized parka. Then Mr. Bannon opened a small door, and they walked into the refrigerator. It was another warehouse, just on a smaller scale, and it was COLD. Like winter-time cold. Clouds of frosty air circulated around them as they walked.
 

"This is where we keep produce that needs refrigeration, like vegetables, milk, eggs, and fresh meat. We have a separate freezer just for frozen foods like hamburgers and meats, but it's too cold to take you kids in there."

They stared in awe. The section just for eggs had to be ten feet long and equally tall. There must have been to be an entire truckload of eggs. Thousands of eggs, millions of eggs.

Linden hated eggs, and all he could think was
yuck!
but he didn't want to make Mr. Bannon feel bad, so he didn't say anything out loud.
 

By the time they got out of the refrigerator, Linden's fingers were frozen, and everyone's cheeks were red. They laughed with Mr. Bannon as they stamped their feet to get warm.

"That's fun, isn't it?" he said, with a big smile.

"It is," Willow said.

"Let's go see where they unload the trucks, next." Mr. Bannon hung up his parka and walked toward the door.

They rushed to follow, and Elon ran across the warehouse floor ahead of Mr. Bannon.

A loud beeping noise sounded from somewhere, and suddenly a forklift came around a corner, right toward Elon.

The forklift driver hit his horn. The loud blaring startled Elon, whose eyes went big as he dove toward a pallet of rice. The forklift swerved, nearly dropping its load of boxes, and narrowly missed Elon.

Suddenly an older man in a hardhat ran toward them, yelling.

"What the--" he yelled, then he saw Mr. Bannon. He pointed at the kids. "What the heck are they doing here, Tom?" He gestured all around the giant warehouse. "We're trying to work."

"Sorry, Jack, I'm just giving them a tour."

"Well, they could have gotten killed. The forklift would have crushed that kid." He punctuated each statement with a finger jab toward Mr. Bannon.

The adults kept arguing, Jack's arms moving wildly as he spoke, but they never stopped to check on Elon. Willow ran over to where Elon sat on a pile of rice bags. "Are you okay?"

Elon looked up, his eyes red like he wanted to cry, but he nodded and grabbed Willow's hand.

Mr. Bannon came over to them. "I'm sorry about that. It's my fault. I should have let Mr. Hutchins know we'd be back here." He glanced over to Jack Hutchins, but the older man just shook his head and walked away.

"Are you hurt?" Mr. Bannon asked Elon.

"I'm fine."

"Why don't we go back to my office."

They all nodded, subdued now, and stuck close to him.
 

When they got into Mr. Bannon's office, he pulled up an extra chair, so there was room for each of them to sit in front of his desk.

Mr. Bannon took his own seat. "Mr. Hutchins is our foreman and runs the warehouse. He's been with us since I was your age. Again, I'm really sorry about that forklift."

"It's okay," Elon said.

"Mr. Bannon," Willow started, "can you tell us where the food comes from for our school? Exactly which farms?"

"Mt. Hood Elementary orders a lot of food," he said. "It's not a short list. Let's look at a few things." He turned to his computer, then swiveled the monitor so they could see it too.

"Here's one week's delivery." He scrolled down through several pages, then went back up to the top. "Here's the first item. Three hundred pre-made hamburgers. They came from Beaverton Meat Processing. They do all the burgers for Portland schools. But I don't know where they get their meat from. Second item is two hundred pounds of pre-cut broccoli. We source that from Smith & Jones, a big food distributor in California. All of the vegetables come from them."

"All of the vegetables?" Willow asked, thinking of the wilted broccoli she'd tried to eat the other day.

"Anything in season, in the United States, yes. It's almost all grown in California."

"But what about the local foods?" Willow said. "I thought that's supposed to come from within four hundred miles."

"I forgot about that." He scrolled farther down in the list. "Yes, here we go. We've got another hundred pounds of fresh, uncut broccoli, for Monday delivery. That comes from Cascadian Falls, which is about fifty miles away. Good stuff, too. We use Cascadian Falls for local restaurants, too."

Linden suddenly felt inspired. Willow had mentioned the broccoli before. "Do you have any broccoli we can try? Can we see the difference?"

Mr. Bannon looked in the direction of the warehouse. "I don't think I should bring you back there again. But if you wait here, I'll get some."

He left, and they fidgeted in their chairs.

"Good idea," Willow said.
 

Linden smiled.

A few minutes later Mr. Bannon came back holding a head of broccoli in each hand.

"Here we go." He put each one down on the desk. "This one, on the left, is from Cascadian Falls. You can see the dark green color. It's a little smaller, but that's because it isn't watered so intensely. But it has a good, strong smell of broccoli, and a nice flavor."
 

Mr. Bannon's enthusiasm came through as he discussed the food. "On the right side we have the one from Smith & Jones. It's a little bigger, a little paler, but still nice. You can see it's got a little bit of wiggle in it from the drive up by truck."

Willow picked up each one, smelled it and touched it, and then passed it on to the boys.

"I need to go in a few minutes," Mr. Bannon said. "I've got a phone call with one of our customers. I hope this was helpful."

"Yes, thank you," Willow said. "Is there any chance we could get a printout of the suppliers? Then we could draw them on a map."

Mr. Bannon thought for a minute. "Sure." He scribbled on a sticky note. "Bring this to Brett, and he'll print it out for you."

"Thanks a lot," Elon said.

Mr. Bannon shook hands with each of them, and then they left.

In the outer office, Brett looked at the sticky note and sighed, then a few minutes later handed them a thick printout stapled together.

As soon as they got outside, Willow blurted out, "That broccoli was nothing like what was served at school! The stuff at school was soggy and brown. There's something weird going on!"

"But what?" Linden asked.

"Maybe someone is stealing the broccoli," Elon said.

"Why would anyone steal broccoli?" Linden asked. "That's crazy. I could understand maybe if someone stole ice cream, or cookies. It would be wrong, but at least there's be a reason for it. Besides, the broccoli isn't missing. It's just bad when it gets to school."

"I don't know," Willow said. "Maybe there's a broken refrigerator somewhere. Whatever it is, we're going to figure it out."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

O
N
THE
WAY
home, they took the streetcar to the #6 bus. Willow boarded deep in thought. "What did you guys notice there?"

"Mr. Bannon was nice," Linden said.

"I nearly died," Elon groaned.

"None of the food was rotten," Linden said, "even though you were sure it was going to be."

"Maybe they hid it because we were coming," Willow said.

"Nobody knew we were coming," Elon said. "They couldn't have hidden anything."

Linden pulled out a slice of toast and started eating. "They could have hidden it while we were in that office with Brett."

"Where the heck did you get toast?" Willow asked.

"Bobby made it."

"Bobby is not--" Willow was cut off by a honking horn. She shrugged. "I think Elon's right, they couldn't have hidden anything. There wasn't time. But somehow that disgusting food is ending up in the school kitchen. Let's get to school early on Monday morning, really early, and watch them unload the food truck."

Elon shook his head. "No way, Jose. We already have to get up at six a.m. to be there by eight. I am not getting up any earlier.

"It's just one day. I promise to work on the drone all weekend."

"Promise?"

"Pinky swear."

"Starting as soon as we get home?"

"Yes, I will."

Elon held her to her promise. Once they arrived home, Willow barely had time to go to the bathroom before Elon was checking on her. She brought her laptop into the garage.
 

Linden and Elon had the quadcopter on the center workbench, arguing quietly over the motor attachments.

"Zip ties are what everyone uses," Linden argued.

"It's going to be ugly," Elon said. "I don't want random plastic clogging up our design."

"They're strong and lightweight," Linden countered. "That's why they're so popular."

Elon shook his head. "I need to it be beautiful, Linden. Grandpa didn't fix the dining-room table by screwing a sheet of plywood over the top, did he? No, he took the whole thing apart, planed it, glued it, finished it."