Nothing stolen! Who had entered the house then, if not a burglar? The thing had resolved itself into a mystery, and everyone looked at his neighbor with puzzled eyes. Breakfast was completely forgotten.
“What gets me,” said Sherry, “is where those footprints started from. By the way they point, the man was going downstairs, but they begin in the middle of the stairway. Clearly he didn’t start at the top. Do you suppose he came in through the landing window?”
He examined the triple window on the landing closely, but soon looked around with a puzzled expression on his face.
“The windows are all fastened from the inside,” he reported, “and there’s no sign of their having been tampered with. It doesn’t look as though anyone could have come in this way.” He examined all the rest of the windows on the first floor, and found them all latched and their latches undisturbed. The doors, too, were locked from the inside. The cellar windows had a heavy screening over them on the outside which could not be removed without being destroyed, and this screening was everywhere intact.
“He must have come in through one of the upstairs windows after all,” said Nyoda. “There were about a dozen open in the various bedrooms. The window in the room Hinpoha and Gladys sleep in is directly over the front porch.”
Hinpoha and Gladys gave a simultaneous shriek at the thought of the mysterious intruder coming through their room while they lay sleeping.
“But if he came down from upstairs, why aren’t the footprints all the way down, instead of beginning in the middle?” insisted Katherine. “He couldn’t have come down from upstairs; he must have come in through this window on the landing,” she said decidedly, going up to the window and looking it over sharply for any sign of having been opened, and, by shaking the wooden framework of the little square panes vigorously, as if she would shake the truth out of it by force.
The window, however, still yielded no sign of having been opened, and the sill outside bore no marks of an instrument. The mystery grew deeper. How could those footprints have started under the landing window if the feet that made them did not enter by that window?
“Maybe he did come from upstairs after all,” said Sahwah, whose lively brain had been working hard on the puzzle, “but his foot didn’t begin to bleed until he was half way down. Maybe he hurt it on the landing.”
“Sat down to trim his toe-nails and cut his toe off, probably,” suggested Justice, and the girls giggled hysterically.