We kept on listening but didn’t hear a thing, so we decided to turn the flashlight on the boathouse again, which we did, and sure enough it had been painted, a nice pretty green color. It even looked like it had just been painted.
“Smell the paint?” Poetry said, and I did—for the first time.
That green boathouse had its door closed and looked as innocent as Little Jim’s face looks when it is, and there wasn’t a sound of any kind. A lonely loon let out a wavering wail from across the lake and another one answered him from close to the shore, not far from the dock where we had just left Santa’s boat, but there wasn’t another sound anywhere.
“What about the door creaking on its hinges?” I said.
“Just remember it, when we start to questioning the suspect later on,” Poetry said, and his voice was as calm as if he was actually a detective. But his hand was on my arm, and I could feel it trembling a little. We loaded up our arms with wood as quick as we could and started toward the cottage.
We were both trembling when we got inside, but we’d made up our minds to keep quiet so as not to scare Tom Till. Also if we were only imagining things on account of wanting a mystery so bad, and if there really wasn’t any, we didn’t want to seem silly to anybody except ourselves, which wouldn’t be so bad.
We unloaded our two armloads of wood into the big wood box in the corner beside the stove, and then looked around and saw on the table in the corner a copy of a Minneapolis newspaper, and on the very front page, a big headline which said, “FEAR OSTBERG KIDNAPPER HIDING IN CHIPPEWA FOREST.”
I stared and stared at the heading and sidled quickly over to the table, and in the light of the flashlight, on account of the kerosene lamp not being bright enough, I read the whole story.
I was remembering the radio program I’d heard back in our house at Sugar Creek, about a little girl being kidnapped at St. Paul... Poetry sidled over to me and we read the newspaper together while Santa and Tom Till were opening the icebox and getting out some bottles of pop. Poetry’s hand was gripping my arm so tight that it hurt, but I didn’t say a word. I was concentrating on the news story of the little girl who had been taken from her home in St. Paul, and hadn’t been found yet, and I was making up my mind that the kidnapper or whoever he was, was maybe right that minute right out there in Santa’s boathouse, and the Ostberg girl was there, too. The father of the little golden haired girl had already paid the ransom money of $25,000 but the kidnapper hadn’t left the girl where he’d promised to.