“We’ve been trying to see you alone all evening, Sis. But, golly, you’re busy as triplets.” She stuck her hand in her pocket and pulled out the worn scrap of paper. “Judy and I found this in a bottle buried under a big rock down on the beach.”
Penny frowned tiredly. “Oh, Marjorie, not another one of your clues!”
Marjorie bit her lip. “I know you think we’re silly to keep looking for buried treasure, Penny. But this is part of a message and it has something to do with the Log Cabin and a well.”
Penny laid the scrap on her desk and tried to read it. The girls showed her what they had been able to decipher.
“Oh, dear,” Penny said. “I’m too tired now to think about clues. I’m sorry, girls. Go on to bed now. It’s late. Leave this with me, and the first chance I get in the morning, I’ll show it to Peter. He’s the detective of our group, and if anyone can figure what this is all about, it’s he.”
After the girls had gone up to their rooms, Penny added to herself: “I’m glad Peter arrived today for more reasons than one. Something mysterious is going on. Who was our prowler? Who wrote those anonymous letters? Who put the map in the lid of the old jewelry box? And what sense does this scrap of paper make?”
The next morning, right after breakfast, she was asking Peter the same questions. He listened attentively as she filled in all the details.
When she had finished, he said very seriously: “I don’t like any part of this, Penny, especially the letter that threatened you. Frankly, I wish you had turned it over to the police. Even if there were only latent fingerprints on it, they could have sent it to the FBI in Washington. Those experts don’t miss a thing, and if the man is a criminal, his fingerprints will be in their files.”
“But,” Penny objected, “if he is a criminal, he would have been smart enough to wear gloves.”
“That’s true,” Peter admitted. “But there are other ways of discovering who wrote those letters. For one thing, although he undoubtedly did his best to disguise his handwriting, he couldn’t completely. No one can. We all develop certain characteristics when we first learn to write, and those characteristics stay with us forever.”