What did she mean? Apparently she still didn’t want to think about her problems, but the children did. Penny seemed bursting with things she wanted to say. They had passed the dam and were just coming to the place where the North Hollow road turned off at an angle, when the little girl suddenly cried out, “Here’s where we were when the bad men went off with Mommy’s pocketbook.”
“Did they go down that road?” asked Horace.
“No,” said Paul. “They drove off down the main road. That’s where we met those kids who are having the magic show. But Wally Brown wasn’t with the kids who found Mom’s pocketbook—”
“Maybe he didn’t want them to look for it! Maybe it was his voice we heard!” exclaimed Judy.
“It’s a good theory and basically sound,” Horace pointed out, “but your timing’s wrong. The voice said ‘Don’t look for it!’ before Mrs. Riker lost her pocketbook—not afterwards. I figure the robbery happened in a matter of minutes after those men left you.”
“I don’t understand it,” Honey put in. “It was in the paper this morning.”
“Horace is talking about the theft of the pocketbook, not the big robbery. But I have a feeling they’re related in some way,” Judy said thoughtfully.
“Maybe one is the uncle of the other,” Horace teased her. “Seriously,” he continued, “I agree that there may be some connection. If this magician had been with them—”
“He isn’t a robber,” Penny interrupted. “I know he isn’t. His magic is real. You’ll see at the magic show. We can go to it, now that we’re coming back to live with you, can’t we, Judy?”
“What’s this?” Horace asked in surprise. “So you’re going to live with Judy, are you? Don’t you think Peter may have something to say about that?”