“You see,” Judy pointed out, “my cat did tip over this tobacco jar and roll the ring out to us. Peter, we’d better find him.”
“He’s disappeared before,” Peter reminded her as they searched the house, upstairs and down. “He always comes back. We may find him waiting for us in the car. I left the windows open.”
“You two are really fond of that cat, aren’t you?” Danny’s father asked, calming down now that he had seen the evidence. “What I can’t figure out is how he got inside my house in the first place.”
“We told you. He crawled in through this hole.” Judy pointed out a jagged opening near the kitchen door. “You can see it was gnawed by beavers. They really did haul away some of this stuff to build their dam. Your son watched them do it. But, apparently, someone else was watching, too.”
“You’re not accusing me again, are you?” He was still on the defensive, but Judy and Peter soon convinced him they were not accusing him of anything.
“We’re just trying to find out the truth. You can help us, Mr. Anderson, if you will,” declared Peter. “You know where this furniture came from, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he replied with emphasis, “but I suspect it’s loot from the Roulsville flood. Somebody stored it here six years ago and set up a shop to refinish and resell it more recently, I suppose. But it was done without my knowledge, and I won’t take the blame for it!”
“You won’t have to, but we are asking you to help us find out who did it,” Peter told him. “My wife took a picture of him when Danny was trailing him. Danny thinks—”
“Danny thinks I’m the thief, doesn’t he?” his father interrupted. “That’s why he refused to see me?”
“He’ll know who the thief is tomorrow when I show him this picture blown up and separated from the one of the table leg. Do you see what happened?”