Pop was on his feet. “We’re on our way, ma’am. On our way. Come on, Holt, you drive down with Bert and me.”
Ken and Sandy took the shoe box with them when they left a few minutes later, but they didn’t go directly to Sam Morris’s shop. They went to the office first.
“We think you ought to know about something that happened last night, Pop,” Sandy said abruptly, when he and Ken joined the others in the Brentwood Advance office. “Ken came downstairs in the middle of the night and—”
“No!” Bert leaped to his feet with an expression of mock horror. “You mean he found Mom peeping in the box?”
Sandy didn’t even laugh. “Tell them, Ken.”
Ken made his report as brief as possible. “You can see the scratches on the lock yourselves,” he concluded, “when we go back to the house.” He turned to his father. “And if somebody also broke into your apartment last night, Dad, it certainly looks—”
Bert’s laugh interrupted him. “It’s not enough for you two to imagine one burglar. Oh, no—you can do better than that.”
“Nobody tried to burglarize my apartment, Ken,” Holt said. “I just didn’t lock it properly myself.”
“How do you know?” Ken asked. “Can you be sure, Dad?”
“Doesn’t it seem strange,” Sandy put in, “that the minute you land in the country somebody breaks into the house where you’re staying, and at the same time your own apartment is mysteriously—”