Who Ate My Hotdog?

This is my entry for the Susana Loenard Hill The Fourth of July Secret Mystery Contest.  Enjoy this 333 word whodunnit story for children and Happy Independence Day!

By cyclonebill from Copenhagen, Denmark (Hotdog  Uploaded by FAEP) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Every Fourth of July, my entire family comes over for a barbecue. Usually, it’s a lot of fun.  This year, there was a serious problem. Somebody ate my hotdog.

It was there one minute, and then it was gone. I left it to get a root beer.  When I came back, there were only some crumbs from the bun.

“Who ate my hotdog?” I asked.

Dad said he’d been grilling the whole time.

Mom said she ate too much of Aunt Rosie’s pasta salad and was already full.

It was probably Peter.  It was the sort of thing my older brother would do.

Nope, it wasn’t Peter.  He’d been helping Uncle Fred get the fireworks set up on the dock.

Could grandpa have done it?  There’s no way grandpa would steal my hot dog.  But wait, is that ketchup on the corner of his mouth?  I always eat my hotdogs with lots of ketchup.

“Grandpa did you eat my hot dog?”

He chuckled.  “No, my boy, I ate my hotdog, not yours.  But I think I might know who did.”

He pointed a long shaky finger toward the picnic table.  Who was he pointing at?  Cousin Sally?  Then something caught my eye.  A hotdog was moving across the table.  It inched its way along the red and white checkered table cloth. It went past the potato salad, past the watermelon, past the corn on the cob until it fell to the ground. 

I peered into the shadows under the table and then I saw the guilty party. Our dog, Jack, gobbled up the spoils of his sneaky theft.

Well, at least I knew who ate my hotdog.  The only thing to do now was to ask dad for another one. I made my way back to the grill.  Dad gave me another hotdog.  I covered it with ketchup.  I sat at the table and was about to enjoy my first bite when I realized something awful had happened.  

Someone drank all my root beer!