This one has been bugging me for years! I read this book in the late ’80s or early ’90s, and I don’t remember much about it other than these two things: (1) there was some sort of mystery with a lottery ticket, and I’m pretty sure what had happened was that the guy selling tickets at the store somehow knew the ticket was a winner and kept it for himself – I want to say the person who was trying to buy it was mentally challenged in some way perhaps, or there was some other reason why he thought the person wouldn’t appreciate the winning ticket; and (2) there’s a scene where the main character (a young girl) is in a body of water and trying to hide from a boat – I’m pretty sure it’s night and that she is floating in an inner tube, and to hide, she ducks her head inside the tube. Oh, and I think the cover was edged in a bright blue. Thanks!
Stump the Bookseller
New format, same book stumper solving.
I think it’s The Case of the Lost Lookalike by Carol Farley from 1988. It’s part of a series about two sisters, Flee Jay (short for Felice Jennifer) and Clarice. Flee Jay wants to be a detective, but her pretty younger sister is a child genius who has more aptitude for it, and they kind of compete to solve mysteries, although it usually takes the two of them together to get to the bottom of things.
In The Case of the Lost Lookalike, the mystery at first seems to concern a child who disappeared 40 years ago. Flee Jay and Clarice are spending the summer at a lake with their aunt, and someone there says that Clarice is the very image of a little girl who was apparently kidnapped years ago. The girl’s father is now a strange hermit who lives on an island in the middle of the lake. But, as the girls puzzle over this old mystery, they come to realize that the girl’s disappearance isn’t the real issue at all (although they do find out what happened to her before the end of the book). The real issue is that people are pretending that Clarice looks like the missing girl so they’ll have an excuse to go out to the island where the girl’s father lives.
A woman who works for the hermit has a grown son named Ronnie whose mind is rather child-like. Ronnie bought a lottery ticket at the local store just for fun, and the people there have realized that the one he bought is a winner. But, the son doesn’t really understand the lottery or that he’s won a lot of money. Instead of showing the ticket to his parents, he hid it somewhere. Other people are trying to get it and claim the winnings before he tells his parents about it, and getting out to the island where the hermit lives is part of their attempt. There is also a scene in the book where Clarice is trying to spy on someone by hiding inside an inner tube floating on the lake. My copy of the book has a blue-green border around the cover image.
YES! This is it, thank you so much!!! Seriously, I’ve been searching for this one for YEARS.