CHAPTER V
THE MISSING OUNCES
It was only when the glistening brown turkey was carried to the dinner table the next day that the boys had any relief from the constant barrage of kidding they had been receiving all morning.
“I never thought I’d have to urge the menfolks of my family to put their minds on food,” Mom said, “but that is exactly what I’m doing. The boys have had enough teasing. After all, they’re not always wrong.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Sandy said, sliding into his chair.
“All the same,” Ken said, “I still—”
“If you start all over again, Ken,” Mom warned, “I won’t be responsible.”
Ken smiled at her. “O.K., Mom.”
Dinner conversation was limited to murmured comments about the food, which Richard Holt insisted was better than any he had ever had in the most famous restaurants of the world. And after dinner a heavy peace settled on the household, broken only when occasional callers dropped in for brief holiday visits. Outside it had grown slightly warmer, but the gray sky promised more snow. By six o’clock heavy snowflakes were falling steadily.
Richard Holt roused himself from a sleepy contemplation of the fire. “This is no night for you boys to drive me into New York,” he announced. “I’ll take the train instead.”
“Why don’t you just stay over until morning?” Pop suggested. “Doesn’t look as though this will last long. The roads should be better then.”
The correspondent shook his head. “Wish I could. But I promised Granger I’d be in early tomorrow morning to talk over that Washington assignment.” He turned to the boys. “Unless you’re actually snowed in here I’ll expect to see you tomorrow, as we’d planned. I’ll meet you at the apartment in the afternoon, and we’ll have dinner before the wrestling matches.” He got to his feet. “Anybody have a timetable?”
“There’s a train leaving here at six fifty,” Bert told him.
“Good. I can make that easily.”
“We’ll at least drive you to the station, Dad,” Ken said.
“And afterward we’ll print up those negatives, so we can bring them in tomorrow to show you,” Sandy added.
About an hour later Sandy was proudly studying the first print from his new camera. “Look at this,” he told Ken. “A four-by-five print from a negative less than half an inch square! That little peanut certainly has a wonderful lens.”
“Mmm,” Ken murmured. “Great.”
Sandy dropped the print back into the tray and prepared to enlarge the next image on his tiny strip of film. “Wish we’d gotten a picture of Bert snowed under by pans last night,” he said, grinning over his shoulder.
“I think that event will live in our memories all right without a picture to remind us,” Ken assured him.
The phone rang as he finished the sentence and he reached out to pick up the darkroom extension.
“Hello. Brentwood Advance,” he said automatically.... “Oh, Mr. Morris.... Yes, this is Ken.” He listened for a moment. “No, we don’t,” he said then. “Never saw him before.... Really? Well, he’ll probably get in touch with you. I don’t see why you should have to worry about it.”
“What’s up?” Sandy asked, when Ken hung up the receiver a moment later.
“Sam Morris wanted to know if that man with the broken watch crystal was a friend of ours,” Ken reported. “He remembered seeing us talk to him.”
“Why?” Sandy asked, his voice preoccupied. He was using a magnifier to focus the image being projected on his enlarger easel.
“The man had just given Sam a twenty-dollar bill to pay for his crystal when the fire started,” Ken explained. “Sam stuffed the bill in his pocket as he ran out to pick up the wastebasket, and when he came back later to give him his change the man had disappeared. Sam thought he could send him his change if we knew who he was.”
“Nobody else but Sam would worry that much about it,” Sandy said. “Anybody else would figure that if the man wanted his change he’d come back for it—or remember it in the first place.”
“I know.” Ken dropped into a chair. “But the man said he was just passing through Brentwood, remember? Maybe by the time he realized he’d forgotten his change he was too far away to come back, and not knowing Sam’s last name couldn’t call him up. Anyway, that’s how Sam thinks it was.
“Wish we could have helped him out,” he went on after a minute. “For the man’s sake as well as Sam’s. I still think Mom would be out one jewel box if he hadn’t been standing at that window when the fire happened.”
“You can’t prove that by what happened last night.” Sandy grinned as he rocked a tray gently.
“How right you are. Especially,” Ken admitted, “since I stayed awake until daylight and can practically swear nobody tried to get in the house all night.”
“Were you awake too?” Sandy grinned again. “So was I—and without even trying. Every time I got sleepy Bert’s face seemed to rise up before me and—”
“Same thing happened to me.”
Neither of them spoke then for some time. Sandy worked steadily. Finally he said, “Here, make yourself useful. Take these prints out of the hypo and set them washing in the sink. I’m just going to print up that picture of the fire and then I’ll call it a day.”
“Sure,” Ken agreed.
“Look at this,” Sandy said a few minutes later. He was holding up a wet eight-by-ten print and pointing to one corner of it with a dripping forefinger. “Take a look at that car,” he said, as Ken joined him. “The one parked right across the street from Sam’s store.”
“I’m looking,” Ken told him. “What am I supposed to see?”
“The man in it leaning out of the window to see what’s going on,” Sandy told him impatiently. “Isn’t he the one who was getting his watch crystal fixed?”
Ken bent closer. “Sure enough! Must have been caught in the traffic jam.” He took hold of Sandy’s wrist and held it so that light fell more clearly on the print. “Could you make the enlargement any bigger?”
“Sure. But why?”
“If we could read the license plate on that car maybe we could help Sam out after all.”
“That’s an idea. But we won’t need a print for that. I’ll just make a larger projection.” Sandy dropped the wet picture back into the tray, adjusted his enlarger to a bigger image, and turned on the light. “Now you can see the number,” he said, pointing to the tremendous image on the easel.
“Right. That does it.” Ken copied the number off on a scrap of paper. “It’s a New York license. And I’ll bet Dad can get the car owner’s name from the New York Motor Vehicle Bureau. We’ll phone him when he’s had a chance to reach home.”
Sandy’s prints were all washed and on their drying boards by the time Ken got his father on the telephone. Richard Holt laughed when he first heard Ken’s request.
“Don’t tell me you’re on the track of another mystery,” he said. “After last night—”
“This is something else, Dad,” Ken broke in hurriedly. He explained about Sam Morris’s phone call and their subsequent discovery of the watch-owner’s car in Sandy’s print. “Sam was so nice to us we just thought we ought to try to help him out.”
“You’re right,” Richard Holt said quickly. “We should. I’ll call Global and have the agency’s Albany man put in an inquiry. Ought to have the owner’s name for you tomorrow.”
“O.K. Swell, Dad. Sandy says to tell you the little camera’s a honey,” he added before he hung up.
“You ready to go home now?” he asked Sandy.
“I will be in a minute. Just want to take these prints off the boards. Most of them are dry now.” One by one he began to lift them from the chromium plates, examining each one as he turned it face up. “Look at them,” he said admiringly, reaching for his magnifying glass. “I could enlarge them to eight-by-tens and still have pretty sharp prints!”
“Do your gloating at home,” Ken suggested. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but I believe I’m actually hungry.”
Sandy grinned. “Turkey sandwiches sound pretty good to me too.” He put the prints into an envelope and slipped them into his pocket, along with his magnifying glass. “All right. Let’s go.”
As they walked away from the Advance office Sandy said, “If there’s any of the dressing left I could do with some of that too. And maybe even a piece of mince pie.”
Ken seemed too preoccupied to comment on the suggestion, and when he finally spoke, Sandy had driven the convertible halfway home. “There could be just one reason for anybody wanting that box badly enough to burglarize two houses and set a fire,” he declared. “It must be valuable.”
“Now, look,” Sandy protested, maneuvering the car carefully along the ruts of a snowy street. “We’ve been through this. Your father said the box wasn’t valuable. He ought to know. Besides, after last night—”
“Dad isn’t an expert on antiques,” Ken interrupted. “The only reason he thinks it isn’t valuable is because he apparently didn’t pay very much for it.”
“Well, apparently the man who sold it to your father didn’t think it was very valuable either, or he’d have asked more for it,” Sandy pointed out reasonably.
“Maybe he had his own reasons for selling it cheaply,” Ken said darkly. “Dad assumed it was part of the porter’s own household stuff—heirlooms, I suppose—that he was selling off because he was broke. But suppose Dad was fooled? Suppose the box was stolen and offered to Dad inexpensively, just so he’d buy it and bring it through American customs. Then the idea would be to steal it from him, once it was here, and sell it for its real value.”
“But it hasn’t been stolen,” Sandy reminded him. “Nobody tried to get it last night. Besides, there’s a hole in your argument big enough to drive a truck through. If a valuable box had been stolen, the customs authorities would have been alerted to watch for it. And no matter how well they know your father by now, they’d have shown at least a little curiosity when he turned up with something they’d been warned to watch out for. In fact, they’d probably have landed on him like a ton of bricks.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t that valuable,” Ken admitted. “Maybe it’s not the sort of thing that would arouse an international hunt.”
Sandy laughed. “I see. It’s only valuable enough to cause two burglaries and an attempted arson. You’re just not making sense, Ken.”
Sandy had driven the car into the Allen garage, but he made no effort toward getting out. “I’m not going into the house with you while you’re still on this subject,” he announced. “I’ve stood all the ribbing I want to take for one day. Well? Are you convinced?”
Ken smiled faintly. “I’m convinced that your arguments are unanswerable—for the moment,” he admitted. “But do you honestly believe there’s no connection at all between that unlocked door at Dad’s apartment, the attempted entry into the house here, and the fire at Sam’s?”
Sandy ran his gloved hand through his hair. “I’ll go this far: I’ll agree they make a curious string of coincidences. And you know how I mistrust coincidences. But don’t ask me what the connection is. And don’t expect me to believe that the box is a priceless antique.” He turned the door handle. “And don’t go on about this when we get inside,” he added menacingly.
“All right,” Ken agreed. “I’m with you there.”
The rest of the Allens were already in the kitchen. Pop, towering on one side of his tiny wife, was slicing generous slabs of white meat from the turkey carcass. Bert, towering on Mom’s other side, was cutting bread. Mom, between them, was making sandwiches.
“Ha!” Bert said. “The demon sleuths—and probably on the trail of food this time.”
“Lock up the pots and pans, Mom,” Pop contributed.
“Now that will do,” Mom said firmly. “Boys, get the milk from the icebox and get some glasses.”
Sandy brought his pictures out as soon as they had sat down, to ensure a safe subject of conversation. “Look what that little camera can do,” he announced proudly.
The strategy was effective. Even Bert became engrossed. And half an hour later, when the boys were left alone in the kitchen to clean up, Bert forgot to warn them against setting further booby traps as he went up to bed.
“I’ll wash,” Ken said. “We’d better put these things away before they get splashed,” he added, beginning to gather together the prints still spread out among the dishes.
Suddenly he halted and bent low over the table. “Where’s your magnifying glass?”
“Here,” Sandy said, handing it to him. “Why?”
Ken was holding one print close to the light and peering at it through the glass.
Sandy grinned proudly. “Is that the one where you can even tell what time it is by the kitchen clock?”
“It’s the one of Mom sitting alongside the cupboard. But look where the box is—the iron box, I mean.”
Sandy shrugged. “I remember where it was then—on the kitchen scale. Mom put it there while she was working on the lining.”
“And you put it there the night Dad got home. Remember?” There was mounting excitement in Ken’s voice. “Just before Dad dropped it.”
“That’s right. I did. So?”
“Then you said something about how much it weighed. Do you remember what you said?”
Sandy looked at him questioningly, but a moment later he obediently wrinkled his brow in an effort to recall the moment. “Let’s see. I said something about how heavy it was for its size. And—wait—I think I said it weighed exactly four and a half pounds.”
“That’s what I thought you said!” Ken sounded triumphant. “But take a look at this. The box didn’t weigh that much last night when you took this picture. Look what the scale shows here. It’s considerably under four and a half. Isn’t it?”
He handed the picture and the magnifying glass to Sandy, and Sandy studied the print carefully. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “But this is a tiny image. Maybe—”
“Let’s check up. Mom hasn’t got the lining fastened in yet. The box must weigh just what it did last night.”
Ken disappeared for a moment and came back carrying it in his hands. He put it on the kitchen scales, and both boys watched silently as the pointer swung back and forth in diminishing arcs. Finally it came to rest.
“Four pounds and five ounces,” Sandy said wonderingly. “But how can that be? I must have been wrong the other night. But I was sure—” He broke off abruptly. “Could Sam have done anything to the box to reduce its weight? Do you suppose he had to take something off in order to fix it?”
Ken was still watching the scale as if fascinated. “He just straightened the bent lever. Even if he had removed it entirely that wouldn’t have reduced the weight by three ounces.”
He looked up, finally, into Sandy’s puzzled face. “I don’t think this is the same box Dad brought home,” Ken said.