The Purple Bird Mystery (10 page)

“It shouldn’t be, Mr. Martin. Pop says it’s safe away out here on the golf course …” He reached out a hand that shook from fear or excitement, he wasn’t sure which, and turned the knob. The door opened.

“Jeepers!” Djuna said. “Are you going in, Jimmy?”

Jimmy drew back his hand as though the doorknob were red-hot. “No, sir! Not me! It could be
anybody
in there! A murderer, maybe!”

Mr. Martin smiled. “I should think it’s a sneak thief at the worst, son. Let’s go in and look. Want me to go with you?”

“Oh, yes, please, Mr. Martin!”

“I’ll go, too,” said Djuna. A not unpleasant thrill coursed down his back.

“Let me go first.” Mr. Martin stepped softly across the threshold into the Douglas house, pushing the door wide open before him. “He’s probably gone by now.” He strode to the foot of the stairway. “But just in case, suppose we take a look around down here first, to see if anything’s been disturbed. Okay, Jimmy?”

“Okay,” Jimmy croaked. “But let’s all go together. This is scary!”

They made a quick tour of the ground-floor rooms together. Jimmy noticed nothing out of the way in living room, hall or dining room. In whispers he explained to Mr. Martin that everything seemed to be exactly as he’d seen it that morning. There were no evidences of search or theft. The silver in the dining room buffet-drawer was undisturbed. And although many unemptied moving cartons still cluttered the hall, Jimmy thought that none of them had been moved or opened.

Mr. Martin led the way to the kitchen down the passage from the front hall. “How about in here, Jimmy?”

“The back door’s wide open!” Jimmy gasped. “That’s wrong. Grandma shut it when she finished the dishes after breakfast, just when I was starting for the caddy-house. It wasn’t locked, but it was closed!”

Djuna said in a voice he tried to keep from squeaking, “It’s sure open now.”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Martin suggested calmly, “this is how our burglar left when he heard me ringing the doorbell. He was doubtless in a hurry. And it’s only three steps into the woods from your back porch. He’d be well hidden out there.”

“What’ll we do now?” Jimmy asked.

“Upstairs,” Mr. Martin said, squeezing Jimmy’s shoulder encouragingly. “Not much danger he’s still up there now, I should say. Unless he came
in
through the back door and left it open as an escape route.”

Djuna said, “I’ve been listening all the time since we came in, Mr. Martin, and I haven’t heard a sound from upstairs.”

“You wouldn’t, if he’s still there and knows we’re here. Let’s go up.” Mr. Martin led the way upstairs. The two boys hung back, waiting, as Mr. Martin instructed them to, until he reached Jimmy’s bedroom door and looked inside. Then, after a swift glance around the room, he turned and motioned them to come on. “There’s nobody here now.”

“How about the cupboard?” Djuna asked, peeping around the jamb.

“Open and unoccupied,” reported Mr. Martin.

So Jimmy and Djuna joined him in Jimmy’s room. Their eyes went swiftly around, trying to take it all in at one glance, as though a burglar might materialize in a corner if they looked at another too long.

Djuna let out his breath in a sigh of relief. “Does anything look different, Jimmy?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Uh-uh. Everything’s just the way it was.” Then he walked to the old chest beside his bed and said in a wavering voice, “Except for my chest. It’s pulled out a couple of inches from the wall. It was tight up against the wall this morning!”

“You sure of that?” asked Mr. Martin sharply.

“Course I’m sure, Mr. Martin. I know exactly how it’s supposed to be.”

“That’s funny,” Mr. Martin said in a peculiar tone. “Isn’t that the old chest that had a drawer broken the other day, when you moved in?”

Jimmy nodded and pulled open the top drawer. “Hey!” he said indignantly. “My stuff’s all messed up, too!”

Djuna and Mr. Martin looked into the drawers as Jimmy opened them one by one. Sure enough the shirts, pajamas and underwear they contained were in confusion. Slowly Mr. Martin nodded. “Somebody’s certainly been searching through these drawers,” he said, “or has taken everything out and thrown it in again in a hurry.” He mixed the tangled clothing about with one hand. “Can you tell if anything’s missing, Jimmy?”

“Sure I can tell. Nothing’s missing, Mr. Martin. But why should there be? Who’d want any of this old stuff? It wouldn’t fit anybody but a kid my size.”

Mr. Martin thought for a minute. “I think what happened, Jimmy, is that somebody sneaked into your house and
started
his search for valuables in this chest here, and I disturbed him before he could look anywhere else. What do you think, Djuna?”

Djuna said, “Well, this chest is the only thing that’s in a mess, and the noises you heard came from this room.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Martin thoughtfully, “and the noises could have been made by pulling this chest out from the wall, opening the drawers, scrambling around in them, and then slamming them shut when he heard me at the door.”

“Gosh, I’m sure glad you came along and scared him away,” Jimmy said warmly. “Djuna and I were just coming in to get a piece of chocolate cake and we might have run right into him!”

“Well,” said Mr. Martin, “I’m sure somebody’s been in here who had no right to be. The sooner the police start looking into it the better, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sure!” said Jimmy eagerly. “We can use the phone downstairs.”

At this, Djuna, who had been thinking very hard, spoke up. “Maybe we ought to tell Mr. Douglas about it first, Mr. Martin.”

“Why waste time?” Mr. Martin said. “Mr. Douglas won’t be home until dinnertime, Jimmy says.”

“I know, sir. But maybe Mr. Douglas sent somebody over here from the Club to get something for him out of Jimmy’s chest, how do we know? Maybe it wasn’t a burglar at all. And even if it was, I bet the Fieldcrest Golf Club wouldn’t want anything in the newspaper about a burglar. Wouldn’t that be bad publicity, Mr. Martin?”

Mr. Martin laughed heartily. “Thinking of bad publicity, Djuna. At your age? You could be right, of course. I didn’t think of that.”

Djuna suddenly found that he had an ally. Jimmy said earnestly, “Mr. Martin, my father would be awful mad if we did anything to make people think there were crooks around the Club. I think we should tell him about the burglar first, the way Djuna says, and then let
him
call the police if he wants to.”

“And besides,” said Djuna, “I don’t think the police around here are the kind who could help us find a burglar, Mr. Martin. Edenboro doesn’t have any policemen at all, and there’s only one in Brookville. And Socker Furlong says
he’s
a fathead. He never catches any real criminals. He just spends his time writing out parking tickets.”

Mr. Martin grinned.

“Of course, there’s a state police barracks near Brookville,” Djuna admitted. “But they wouldn’t be interested where nothing’s been stolen.”

“Well, it’s up to you,” Mr. Martin said. “A few hours’ delay in reporting it can’t make much difference, if that’s the law enforcement situation in these parts.” He took a quick look at the other rooms on the second floors, but found no other signs of the burglar’s activity.

As he prepared to depart on foot for the clubhouse, Mr. Martin said, “I still want to take a couple of golf lessons from you father, Jimmy. Maybe I can catch up with him later today, or tomorrow. You sure you feel all right about staying here by yourselves, now?”

“Yes, sir, and thanks, Mr. Martin. If you hadn’t been here, Djuna and I would have been scared stiff.”

“I
was
scared stiff,” Djuna said.

“Forget it, boys. Glad to help.” Mr. Martin headed down the dirt track toward the clubhouse.

D
JUNA
and Jimmy, by common consent, sat down on the terrace steps in the sun, reluctant to reenter the house.

Both boys remained conscious of the empty house behind them, and of the sinister unknown presence that had invaded Jimmy’s room only minutes ago. Yet neither boy admitted his uneasiness to the other; outdoors there was nothing of which to be afraid. Still, it was a measure of their preoccupation with their recent mysterious visitor that all thought of Grandma’s luscious chocolate cake, the original object of their trip to Jimmy’s house, had long since faded from their minds.

Jimmy picked up a rock and nervously began to rub it against the edge of the stone step on which they sat. At length he looked at Djuna with an expression half comic, half serious. “Remember I said the other day that out here in the country, probably nothing much ever happens?” he said. “Boy, was I wrong!” He snickered, “I’ve only been here three days and already I’m smack in the middle of a mystery.”

“Maybe it’s not a mystery.” Djuna spoke without much conviction. “Maybe it wasn’t a robber in your room. That’s why I thought we should tell your father before we called the cops. He could have sent somebody over here for something, couldn’t he?”

Jimmy shook his head. “What would Pop have wanted out of my chest? He’s in a meeting with the golf committee, for Pete’s sake, not with an underwear and pajama committee!”

“If nothing was touched except your chest.”

“And nothing was.”

“So who do you think it could have been in your room?”

“Maybe it was Mr. Swift. He wants my chest. But you’re the mystery solver, Djuna. What do
you
think?”

“I don’t think it was Mr. Swift. He’d have come in his car, and there’s no car. Anyway, how would Mr. Swift know your house would be empty so he could come and search it without anybody stopping him?”

“How would anybody know that? It was probably just some crook broke into our house looking for anything he could find.”

“In your chest and no place else? Did you tell anyone this morning that Grandma was going shopping?”

“Only Mr. Jonas, so he’d know Pop and I were both going to be around the club all day, even for lunch.”

Djuna wanted to let it go at that, because he knew how Miss Annie hated him to involve himself in mysteries; but although he honestly tried, he couldn’t force himself to lose interest in this exciting problem of the thief in Jimmy’s room. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at his friend and began to rub a stone along
his
edge of the step.

“You know something, Jimmy?” Djuna said softly.

“What?”

“It could have been Mr. Martin who searched your chest.”

Jimmy sat up straight and pitched his rubbing stone down onto the turnaround. “What are you talking about, Djuna? That’s crazy! Why, Mr. Martin was the one who
heard
the burglar up in my room! And he was right there on the front porch ringing the bell when we got here!”

“That’s what he maybe wanted us to think. But it could have happened a different way.”

“How? How could it have been Mr. Martin in my room?”

Djuna said soothingly, “Don’t get sore, Jimmy. I’m just figuring out a theory, like a detective. Something it
could
have been.”

“You’ve got me all mixed up,” Jimmy mumbled.

“Listen, Jimmy. Suppose Mr. Martin got to the house here a little while before he said he did? And suppose he didn’t ring the doorbell at all, but walked right in the unlocked front door and up to your room and began to look in your chest for something?
He
could have pulled the chest out from the wall and searched it. And he just told us he heard somebody else in your room to keep us from suspecting that it was him!”

“You’re nuts, Djuna! How could Mr. Martin have got downstairs and out on the terrace and be ringing the doorbell and everything by the time we got here?” He added triumphantly, “And how would he know we were even
coming
here at that particular minute?”

Djuna brushed his hair out of his eyes and said, “I thought you’d ask that.”

“Well?”

“That’s easy. I looked out the window of your room while you and Mr. Martin were examining your chest. And you know what I could see, besides part of the seventh fairway?”

“What?”

“That little old winding road coming up through the golf course to your house, Jimmy! That’s what. And if Mr. Martin kept watch out of the window every minute or so while he was looking through your chest, he’d have seen us riding our bikes in this direction in plenty of time to run downstairs onto the terrace and pretend to be ringing the doorbell when we got here.”

“I never thought of that. How stupid can you get?” Jimmy’s admiration of Djuna’s detective prowess vanished quickly, however, when he thought of another question. “Hey, wait a minute, though. If that’s what happened, why would Mr. Martin say anything to us about hearing noises in my bedroom? Why wouldn’t he just leave when we told him nobody was home?”

“That’s the largest question yet,” Djuna confessed. “Unless he wanted to make up something to explain why you’d find your chest drawers all messed up.” Djuna shook his head. “But why should he worry about that?”

Jimmy said, “See? It doesn’t make sense. It couldn’t have been Mr. Martin.”

“It
could
have.”

This conversation eased the tension both boys had been laboring under during their search of the house with Mr. Martin. They felt full of confidence once more. So much so that Djuna, standing up on the terrace steps and throwing his rubbing stone as far into the woods as he could, suggested matter-of-factly, “Let’s go in and take another look at your chest, what say? Maybe we can find a clue.”

Jimmy agreed without hesitation. “Clues are what you need to solve mysteries, aren’t they? Okay, you go first.”

“Okay,” Djuna said. “But I hope that burglar has gone for good! It would be pretty spooky, wouldn’t it, if he came back to finish his search and found us in your room?” Djuna hesitated, daunted by this mental picture, then said in a small voice, “Maybe we better wait for your father.”

“That burglar’s gone!” Jimmy averred stoutly. “Who’s scared? We’ve got to find those clues while they’re fresh, Djuna. Every mystery I ever read says you’ve got to get them while they’re fresh. I’ll go first, if you’re nervous.”

This bold offer drew the only possible reply from Djuna. “No, I’ll go first,” he said firmly. “Come on.”