SUSPICIONS
Tom Swift looked at Dr. Layton. The medical man had paused in his departure on hearing the telephone bell and the ensuing talk.
“Doctor,” began Tom, “I don’t want to disobey your advice, but I’ve simply got to talk to Ned’s father. Something may have happened. I’m beginning to get worried. There may be more at the bottom of this than just an accidental explosion in my laboratory.”
“I’d rather you stayed in bed,” said the physician. “You oughtn’t to move around so soon after such a shock. Can’t you move the telephone in here?”
“I’ll get an extension wire that I have in my room and plug it in,” offered Mr. Swift, and while Mrs. Baggert was telling Mr. Newton that Tom would soon speak to him, Mr. Swift, with the help of Eradicate, quickly had an extension telephone rigged up at Tom’s bedside. Then the young inventor talked to the father of his business manager.
“Are you sure, Mr. Newton, that Ned isn’t in the house, sleeping his head off?” was Tom’s first question.
“No, he isn’t here,” was the worried answer. “When he didn’t come down to breakfast we didn’t think anything of it at first, as he was going to be at your place late, he said, and we wanted to let him get as much rest as he could.
“But when we looked into his room a little while ago to see how he was sleeping, he wasn’t there. His mother said that she hadn’t heard him come in during the night, but even then we weren’t alarmed. We thought he had spent the night with you, as he so often does.”
“No,” Tom said slowly, “Ned isn’t here. He left my laboratory somewhere around midnight and I thought he was going straight home. But wait a minute!” Tom exclaimed as a new idea came to him. “I just happened to think. He might have gone to see Miss Morton and have stayed there all night, being too tired to pull up and head for home.”
Ned Newton was engaged to Miss Morton and, more than once after calling there and finding himself stormbound, he had been persuaded by her parents to remain over night.