“I believe you’re right, Arden,” Terry said quickly. “Then either Dimitri left and took the box with him, or somebody broke in and stole it. But if Dimitri took the box he wouldn’t have had to break the cupboard open. He had a key. Some thief has been here.”
“If that happened—where is Dimitri?” Sim asked excitedly.
“That’s what we’ve got to find out,” Arden declared. “We’ll have to look very carefully in case there are any clues about. Come on.”
Systematically they went over the old boat, but after a careful search they had learned no more. When they completed their tour, they assembled again in the main room.
There the covered canvas loomed up as large, in their disturbed imaginings, as a forbidding specter. Sim touched a corner of the cloth.
“Don’t, Sim,” Arden stopped her.
“Perhaps we ought to,” Sim suggested. But Arden shook her head. They should not raise the cloth.
In their search they had found nothing significant except the place where Tania had been tied up; it was outside, near the stern of the boat. There was no dust, of course, to tell them how long the place had been unoccupied, but an open window through which the rain had come, soaking cushions and the floor, gave evidence that at least no one had been there since the storm had begun. Or, if they had, they had not troubled to close the window.
“These brushes are stiff with paint,” Terry remarked, picking up a long-handled one that lay near a color-filled palette. “And the paint on the palette is hard too,” she continued. “That’s unusual; all the other brushes are soaking in turpentine, and when we were here before, Dimitri had just cleaned his palette.”
“He must have left suddenly, then,” Arden guessed. “He was very neat in his painting. It looks pretty serious to me,” she concluded.