Sandy waited until they were outside the store and then he spoke. “I don’t suppose you have any ulterior motive in offering to get in touch with—what’s his name?—with this Barrack fellow?”
Ken grinned. “You have a low suspicious mind.”
“It’s not nearly as suspicious as yours,” Sandy retorted. “You have no reason to believe that box is valuable. And Sam didn’t exactly support your idea of the thing having been switched—”
“He didn’t say he was sure it was the same box,” Ken interrupted. “And I still think it’s possible that Dad brought home a valuable antique, and that somebody stole it and left in its place a worthless modern copy—the one we’ve got now. But don’t worry. I’ve thought of a way to check up on that theory. We’ll take the box in to Felix Lausch at the Metropolitan Museum and ask his advice.”
“That’s an idea.” Sandy’s eye lit up at the thought of the art expert who was Richard Holt’s friend and who would, both boys knew, give them any aid he could. “If Lausch says this is an old box, but not worth very much, then we’ll write the whole thing off as a bad dream. Right?”
“Fair enough,” Ken agreed.
Before they left for New York, some time before noon, they wrote a note to Mom and left it on the kitchen table.
“We’re borrowing your new jewel box so we can show it to Mr. Lausch,” it read. “Hope you won’t mind. We’ll take good care of it.”
Sandy stared at the note dubiously as they departed. “She’ll mind, all right,” he said. “Mom likes to own antiques, and she even brags about ’em once in a while. But she’ll think we’re crazy to take one all the way to New York to show to an expert.” He shrugged. “Well, come on. But I’m going to tell her it was all your idea, when she starts lighting into us.”
By two o’clock that afternoon they were climbing the stairs to the Holt apartment on Seventieth Street. There was a scrawl in Ken’s father’s handwriting propped against the phone. “Call me at Global when you get in,” it read.