Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Disgusting Sneakers (6 page)

There was—more old-looking pots. Each
had the word
copy
painted on its bottom.

“I get it!” Charlie said. “Somebody is smuggling fake old pots. When they reach Spain, the word
copy
will be wiped off. The buyer will be told the pots are three thousand years old!”

Encyclopedia did not answer. He was puzzled.

If Charlie was right, what was the point of all the secrecy?

The boys sealed up the boxes and sneaked outside. As they pedaled away, Encyclopedia suddenly understood.

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “They’re smuggling …”

WHAT?

(
Turn to
this page
for the solution to The Case of the Smugglers’ Secret.)

To tell Davenport where he’d hidden the stolen jewelry, Nolan wrote a four-word code.

As the key to the code, he wrote the four words on a sheet from a desk calendar.

The four words stood for days of the week.

Nolan dropped the letters
d-a-y
. Then he used the other letters to form words.

So,
Nom
= Monday,
Utes
= Tuesday,
Sweden
= Wednesday, and
Hurts
= Thursday.

The unwritten fifth word was
Fir
, or Friday.

The jewelry was found inside a twenty-gallon jug of earth from which grew the young fir tree in Nolan’s nursery—just as Encyclopedia had foreseen.

Bugs claimed the teacup belonged to Fu Chee himself.

He felt safe in telling the lie. He knew Encyclopedia could not check his story. The restaurant was no more, and Fu Chee had moved to Utah.

It was his word, Bugs thought, against Becky’s.

But Encyclopedia spotted something that
Bugs had overlooked.

The handle on the white cup.

Bugs had “picked up the white cup by the handle,” remember?

Chinese teacups do not have handles.

Caught in his own lie, Bugs returned the cup to Becky.

Bugs lied about overhearing Encyclopedia and Sally planning to rob his house.

He also lied about his house being robbed twice in the past month. He wanted Encyclopedia and Sally to look like housebreakers.

But Bugs made a mistake. He said someone had sneaked up behind him and hit him on the back of the head.

If that was true, Encyclopedia realized, Bugs wouldn’t have fallen onto the pieces.

He would have fallen forward, all right. But the pieces of the vase, or almost all of them, would have dropped behind him and not in front of him.

All the pieces were between “his head and feet.”

After his rescue by the police, Mr. Dunn told what had happened.

The man who brought his TV set from the repair shop had bent to plug it in. As he did, Mr. Dunn saw his back pocket. It held a gun.

Alarmed, Mr. Dunn left a note in code in case there was trouble. The deliveryman, who turned out to be the kidnapper, read
the note and asked what it meant.

Mr. Dunn told him it was just a reminder to himself to have his sister, a nurse, read up on his hiccoughing. He said Crabcake was her pet name for him.

Encyclopedia saw that the top four words gave the code away. Each word had three letters in alphabetical order.

The key word,
Crabcake
, was underlined. The letters were
a-b-c
.

Thus,
ABC TV Repair!

In the twins’ canoe, the water lay evenly because they were about the same weight, as were Encyclopedia and Tommy.

Not so with the Baldwin sisters. Nancy, the heavier, sat in back. Since the canoes were tied to the dock by the front end, she got in first and out last.

So when Peggy got in, the rainwater had pooled at Nancy’s end. Peggy’s sneakers
might have got damp, but they should have dried by the time she got out.

Yet Peggy had left “wet footprints” on the dock.

Because of Encyclopedia’s eagle eye, the sisters confessed.

Seeing the door of the ranger station open and the ranger’s boat gone, Peggy had waded ashore behind the station to investigate. She wore her sneakers because of the rocks. Spotting the fishing rods, she couldn’t resist stealing them.

The sisters had hidden the rods in the mangroves. They planned to pick them up another day.

The children were asked to write nine three-letter, common body parts.

When Mrs. Taylor read Chester’s and Cindy’s lists, Tyrone looked over her shoulder. He learned which word Cindy had missed.

After the game Encyclopedia looked at Cindy’s list. The first eight body parts she
had written were leg, eye, ear, arm, jaw, rib, lip, and toe.

The ninth body part was at the bottom of her list. Encyclopedia knew it had been given her by Tyrone.

He had blown a bubble-gum bubble.

The ninth word was
gum
—the kind that surrounds your teeth.

Shamed, Cindy gave Chester her prize.

Wilford Wiggins had to prove that the tree was the one mentioned in the ship’s log by Black Jack Lefever.

The pirate had written that he had carved his name on a small tree as a guide to where the treasure was buried.

Naturally, after more than a century the tree would have grown tall. Wilford figured
that Black Jack’s name would now be high above the ground.

So he carved
BLACK JACK LEFEVER
twenty feet up the trunk.

That was Wilford’s mistake!

As Encyclopedia knew, a tree grows higher mainly from the top. A mark put on the trunk of a tree will stay about the same height above the ground no matter how tall the tree grows.

The telephone call Mrs. Ryan made was not about returning the gray skirt. Just Skirts, the store where she bought the skirt, was closed for inventory.