The Escape Room

Mateo had been in Melbourne for only three weeks when his host family gave him a strange birthday present: a ticket to an escape room. "You'll love it," they said. "You have sixty minutes to get out, and you can't do it alone."

On Saturday afternoon he found himself in a small dark room with four strangers: Priya, a nurse; Ben and Chloe, two students who had just finished their exams; and Mr. Walsh, a retired policeman who looked very serious. A voice came from a speaker. "A painting has been stolen from the museum. One of four suspects took it. Find the thief, find the key, and you will be free. Your sixty minutes start now."

Nobody moved. Then Priya laughed. "Well, we can't just stand here. Let's look for clues."

The room was full of objects: an old desk, a map of the city, a broken clock and four photographs on the wall. Under each photograph there was a name and a job: a cook, a driver, a guard and a cleaner. Ben opened the desk drawers while Chloe examined the clock. Mateo, who was still a little shy about his English, started reading a letter he had found behind the map.

"Listen to this," he said. "The painting disappeared at midnight on Friday. The cook was working in a restaurant until one in the morning. So it can't have been the cook. He has an alibi." "Good," said Mr. Walsh, nodding. "That's exactly how we used to think at the station."

Chloe found a bus ticket inside the clock. "The driver was on the night bus to Geelong at eleven. That's two hours away. He couldn't have been at the museum at midnight." "So it must have been the guard or the cleaner," Ben said. "Thirty-five minutes left."

For a long time, they couldn't find anything else. Priya checked the floor, Mr. Walsh tapped the walls, and Ben started to get nervous. "Maybe it's a trick. Maybe we're not supposed to escape." Mateo wasn't listening. He was looking at the photographs again. "The guard might have done it," he said slowly, "but look at his hands. They're clean. And the cleaner... there's paint under her nails. Blue paint. The same blue as the painting."

Mr. Walsh smiled for the first time. "The boy's right. She must have touched the painting. It was the cleaner." Chloe typed the name on a small box next to the door. Something clicked, and a key fell out.

They managed to open the door with four minutes to spare. In the light outside, the five strangers hugged like old friends. "Where did you learn to think like that?" Priya asked Mateo. He shrugged. "My grandmother in Montevideo loves detective novels. I used to read them to her every summer." Then he smiled. "I wasn't able to understand everything you said in there. But I was able to understand the clues."