Cam Jansen

The Snowy Day Mystery by David A. Adler, 2004.

One snowy day, Cam Jansen and her friends are on the school bus outside of their school.  Because of the snow, a lot of parents have decided to drive their kids to school, and with all the extra cars, it’s difficult for the bus driver to pull up and let the kids out.  Cam and her friend, Eric, pass the time while they’re waiting with a memory game.

Their game proves useful later, when one of their teachers discovers that someone has stolen three computers from one of the classrooms.  There are footprints in the snow outside the classroom window, but the window was locked from the inside after the theft.  Whoever took the computers must have actually entered the school and passed them to someone outside.  But, computers are big and heavy.  How did they get them away without anyone seeing them?

Cam and Eric begin to investigate, and Danny, a classmate with a habit of telling really bad jokes, tags along.  Part of the solution to the mystery has to do with all of the extra cars in front of the school that morning.  The thieves’ car would have blended in with all of the others, except that they were doing something that none of the other cars were doing, something that Cam realizes that no car would have had a reason to do.  Cam saw the thieves leave herself and is later able to describe the car to the police, but the unusual thing about it doesn’t occur to her until she thinks about where the thieves parked their car.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.