The mystery of the stolen cookies

There was a boy named Jack. His friends used to make fun of him for he was very small, and looked kind of funny with his curly red hair, and many many freckles. But everyone loved being with him and laughed at his silly jokes.
But lately, there was something that was bothering Jack. Every night, after dinner, his mother would go up to his bedroom and leave a chocolate chip cookie on his bedside table. The annoying thing was that when Jack went to bed, the cookie had disapeared. And this kept happening. Every single night, Jack would walk up the stairs, brush his teeth and head to his room, just to find that the cookie had been stolen. "This is it," thought Jack one night, "I'll get dad's beige coveralls, grandpa's pipe, mom's glasses, and make myself a detective." And so he did. For the next two weeks, Jack would walk around the house investigating and trying to solve the mystery of the stolen cookies.
First, he went up to his father. With the glasses on the tip of his nose, he asked, "Are you the one who's been eating my cookies? I've noticed you are getting fatter and fatter..." But Jack soon found out that his father was not the one he was looking for. He had something called "diabetes". Not that Jack knew what that meant, but apparently it was some disease that didn't allow him to eat sugar. So if his father was not the one with a sweet tooth, then it had to be his mom. Serena, Jack's sister, was out of the question, for she was allergic to chocolate. She would certainly steal his gummy bears if they weren't so hidden, but not the cookies. So once again, Jack went up to his mother, and accused her of stealing his food. "Don't you know I'm on a diet? And why would I give you a cookie if I was to eat it myself later?" answered an angry mom. Jack figured that made sense. The only thing he couldn't understand was the reason why his mother was on a diet. "Adults," he thought, always doing weird stuff."
So the time passed and Jack still didn't know who kept eating his cookies. It wasn't dad, it wasn't mom, it wasn't Seresa, none of his friends were allowed to come over to his house so late, the babysitter would leave before dinner, and grandpa was asleep very early... What a mystery! "Maybe we have rats," thought Jack one day. Very carefully, he put some traps in his bedroom, but not even one rat was caught.
So Jack had one last idea, "I'll stay up the whole night, and I won't leave my room until someone comes to steal my cookie." And that's what he did. But at the very same moment that he turned to put on his pajamas, a tiny sparrow came into the room through the window and took his cookie. Jack didn't see a thing... "There must be a ghost," he figured. "I give up. I thought being a detective would be simple. Now I know how wrong I was."

Carmo A. Sousa