- One last time, we're back in Green Lake in the time of Sam the onion man.
- There were no yellow-spotted lizards in the town then, the narrator tells us, but they did live in the hills beyond the town.
- One afternoon, three men come to Sam and ask for some of his "lizard juice" – they're going rattlesnake hunting in the morning, and they know that Sam's juice will keep the lizards away.
- The lizard juice, it turns out, is made from pure onion juice – if the men drink it, they'll be protected from lizard bites. Lizards, Sam tells them, "don't like onion blood" (49.13).
- Aha! Now it makes sense.
- Back to Stanley's story: as they drive away from Camp Green Lake, Ms. Morengo explains that she's a patent attorney (a lawyer who works with inventors). She's helping Stanley's father patent a new product he's invented, and when she heard about Stanley's arrest, she started looking into it.
- Her investigation uncovered evidence that proved that Stanley couldn't have stolen the sneakers.
- That's when Zero tells Ms. Morengo that <em>he</em> was the one who stole the sneakers. Earmuffs, Ms. Morengo: she tells him not to mention it to her again.
- Looks like everyone's off the hook.
- We finally find out what Stanley's father's invention is: a spray that eliminates foot odor. And guess what? It smells of peaches.
- The exhausted boys fall asleep in Ms. Morengo's backseat. As the car speeds away, rain falls – for the first time in over a hundred years – into the dried-out lakebed behind them.