"Mr. Bullfinch. He returned something I'd left at his house." Jerry's eyes were on his plate.
"What did you leave over there?"
Count on Cathy to want to know all of his business. "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," Jerry told her.
"I can whistle," Andy suddenly boasted. "I can whistle real good. Want to hear me?"
Without waiting for the wishes of his family to be expressed, Andy pursed up his lips and whistled. He still was not much of a whistler, yet from the shrill piping emerged a faint resemblance to a few bars of "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
A great light dawned on Jerry. Andy at the scene of the crime. Coal dust on Andy. And now the clincher, his whistling "The Stars and Stripes Forever." It had been Andy in the Bullfinch house. Jerry was as sure of it as of the nose on his face. "While I was out looking in the garage he would have just had time to get out of the house," Jerry thought. "I'll make him tell. It's not fair for me to be blamed for something he did. Mr. Bullfinch won't be hard on Andy. He'll think he's too little to know better."
"I guess we won't have any more whistling at the dinner table," Mr. Martin reproved Andy gently.
Andy looked as well-scrubbed and innocent as a perfect angel. Or a nearly perfect angel, Jerry thought. Jerry remembered how Andy would shut up like a clam about something he knew he should not have done.
"He can be like a can of sardines. You can't get a thing out of him unless you have a key," thought Jerry. And he wondered how he was going to pry the truth out of his little brother.