“Just how long has Mr. Riker been away, Mr. Post?” Horace asked.
“Now look here, young feller,” the caretaker turned on Horace belligerently, “I’ve done nothing but answer questions all day—police, insurance men, fire department—they all got nothing better to do than come and bother me. So don’t you start in.”
“But Mr. Post, please,” Mrs. Riker said pleadingly. “I wrote to Mr. Riker over two weeks ago, telling him I was driving here with the children. I even told him the route we were taking. Surely, when he was expecting us, he wouldn’t just disappear. Something must have happened.”
The caretaker shrugged. “I dunno, ma’am,” he said, and added grudgingly, “All I know is, a couple of weeks ago he suddenly got rid of all the help in the house, closed it up, and told me he was off on a trip to India. He said I was to stay on to look after things, and he’d be back when he got back. Some folks say,” he lowered his voice, “Paul Riker’s locked himself up in that vault.”
“But the door was open and the vault is empty,” Judy protested. “What did he build it for, anyway?”
“He had it built about two years ago,” Abner Post replied. “Said he might as well get some good out of all the money he made when he sold the business.”
“What was his business?”
Judy had asked the question simply out of curiosity. She was quite unprepared for the answer.
“This’ll tell you,” Abner Post replied shortly, handing her a card.
Judy stared at it. Then she passed it around. The room buzzed with comments. It was startling, to say the least. On the card was lettered:
RIKER MEMORIALSMonuments, MausoleumsDesigners and Builders for Four Generations
Underneath was the name, Paul Riker, an address and phone number, as well as a notation in very small print: “Exhibit Open Every Day.”
“An exhibit!” exclaimed Honey, handing the card back to Judy, who asked if she might keep it. “So that’s what it was.”
“This is his own monument on the card, the very same statue and everything,” observed Horace.
“And there were four generations of them,” Judy added. “But you say he sold the business?”
“Talk did it,” the caretaker explained. “All those heathen statues and pictures he filled the house with. Folks began calling him a heathen too. It got even worse after he put up that monument. I told him he was making a big mistake. ‘What good is a big tombstone to a man after he’s dead?’ I asked him. ‘Let others build it if they think you’re worth it.’ And would you believe it, he told me he had no friends or kinfolks who thought he was worth a visit, let alone a monument. He and his nephew had quarreled over the business, and the rest of the family let him pretty much alone.”
He turned to Helen Riker. “If you’re Philip’s wife, why didn’t you ever come to visit?”
“I have come,” Mrs. Riker said, very low.
“Well, you’ve come too late. I keep bachelor’s quarters. It’s no fit place for a woman, and you can see for yourself the big house is burned down.”
“When did the fire start?” Judy asked.
“Last night,” Abner Post answered shortly. “And Idon’tknow how it started,” he added defensively.
“Could that be because you weren’t here?” Judy asked sweetly.
“Certainly I was here,” the caretaker exclaimed. “I’m always here.”
“You couldn’t have been here when the house was looted Thursday night,” Judy pointed out reasonably. “From what the paper said, the thieves must have had to bring a van to remove all those art treasures, and you would have seen it.”
“Now look here, miss,” the caretaker exclaimed furiously. “Are you trying to say I was mixed up in the robbery?”
“Robbery!” Mrs. Riker gasped. “Uncle Paul’s beautiful treasures were stolen? Oh, how dreadful!” Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “I suppose his jade collection was stolen too. Yes,” she added in a whisper, “I have come too late.”
Judy’s hand closed around the tiny object in her pocket.
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Mrs. Riker,” she said mysteriously.
Horace made good time coming home. He was really driving too fast, Judy thought, but she didn’t say anything. She was too busy thinking about the caretaker, who had stood watching them sullenly as they drove away.
“Horace,” she said suddenly, “either that manwasinvolved in the robbery, or else he was away at the time and is trying to keep it secret.”
“It’s no good trying to keep secrets like that,” Honey said. “I tried it once, and it didn’t work. I only got myself tangled in a web of lies. It was when I told the truth that everything came clear.”
“I’m glad you said that,” declared Judy. “I think the truth would solve most of our problems. Don’t you, Mrs. Riker?”
“Nothing,” she replied, “will solve my problems now. I wish I had never come back. At least I could have kept the memory of the place the way it used to be.”
“Was it such a pleasant memory?”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “It was anything but pleasant except for one happy summer. That summer stood out so clearly in my memory that it made me forget all the dreary hours that followed. It all comes back to me now. The house was filled with heavy, carved furniture. There was one chair with snakes curling over the back. You couldn’t sit in it. A statue sat there. You had to be quiet when you went near it. There were so many statues! But I think I remember the quiet most of all. I wasn’t allowed to interrupt if anyone spoke, but nobody ever said anything much except, ‘Don’t touch!’ And there were so many beautiful things I wanted to touch. Now where are they?”
“At least they didn’t go up in smoke when the house burned,” Horace pointed out.
“It is a strange thing,” agreed Judy. “The thieves didn’t know they were saving them. Your uncle should be grateful.”
Mrs. Riker smiled, as if the thought of his gratitude amused her. Then she said, “What really distresses me is the condition of the caretaker’s cottage. You wouldn’t think it to look at it now, but that kitchen was once almost as pleasant as yours, Judy, if I may call you that. Do call me Helen.”
Honey turned around and smiled at Judy, remembering a secret between them. She had been called Helen for a little while before Judy found out that her real name was Grace Dobbs and that she was Peter’s sister.
“You like that name, don’t you?” Honey asked.
“Yes, and I like Helen Riker,” Judy declared warmly. “I think we are going to be good friends.”
“I hope so. I’m like Uncle Paul,” Mrs. Riker admitted. “I need friends as I never needed them before. My husband is dead, as you must have guessed. He was a reckless driver, especially when he was alone. He was killed in an accident.”
“What was that?” asked Horace, cutting down on his speed.
“You heard it. You might take it as a warning,” Judy told him. “You have plenty of time to write up this story. TheHeralddoesn’t go to press until tomorrow morning. ‘Slow down and live,’ as the road signs say.”
“Thanks, I will,” he replied. “I was just trying to get you home in time for supper.”
“I’ll get supper better if I’m all in one piece. I haven’t decided what we’ll have, but you’re all invited,” Judy told them.
But Horace said he had other plans—which included Honey.
“Anyway,” Judy said, “we want you and the children to stay, Helen.”
Mrs. Riker smiled as if the use of her first name cemented their friendship. She was a beautiful woman when she forgot to be worried and frightened. Judy guessed she was still in her early thirties.
“You must have married very young,” she commented a little later.
“Too young,” Helen Riker replied. “I hadn’t learned to do my own thinking.”
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!’beforeMrs. 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?”
“He didn’t even know about the tourist sign,” Judy confessed. “We put it up this morning as a sort of a lark. We might have trapped the robbers, but it looks as if we caught the victims instead.”
“You may have caught them both. The robbers who stole my pocketbook asked if I knew where Uncle Paul’s jade collection is,” Mrs. Riker confessed, “but if the house was robbed two days ago, they’d have been there already.”
“That would be a story: ‘THIEVES OVERLOOK VALUABLE JADE COLLECTION,’” Horace commented.
“But did they?” Judy asked. “My theory is that they only overlooked one piece—”
She stopped suddenly, deciding not to mention the tiny green object in her pocket until she had shown it to Peter and discussed the whole thing with him. Quickly she changed the subject to ask, “Could the police have known about the fire when they gave you the news of the robbery, Horace?”
“Who knows?” he replied. “Everybody seems to be playing the game of secrets. The theft of your pocketbook should have been reported, Mrs. Riker. You’re protecting the thieves when you hold back information from the police.”
“Oh dear!” she said, becoming suddenly flustered. “I didn’t mean to do that. I suppose they should know what happened, but please keep my name out of it. I don’t want to become involved. Maybe you could tell them I have my pocketbook back—”
“Empty,” Horace reminded her.
“They didn’t want it,” Penny spoke up. “They only wanted what was inside.”
“Whatwasinside?” asked Judy, hoping her new friend had taken Honey’s little speech about truth-telling to heart.
“There’s a light inside,” observed Honey“There’s a light inside,” observed Honey
“There’s a light inside,” observed Honey
“Not much,” Mrs. Riker replied quickly. “I only had a few dollars left, just about enough to get us to Uncle Paul’s. There was nothing else of any consequence.”
“No green doll?” Judy wanted to ask. But would Helen Riker admit it? They were nearly home now, but the game of secrets was not over. Even Horace acted as if he knew one.
“What does consequence mean?” Penny was asking.
“The dictionary says it’s the natural result of an act,” Judy began.
She had read the dictionary once in order to win a spelling bee, and often quoted definitions from it.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m so confused I don’t know what I mean,” Mrs. Riker confessed. “I didn’t tell those horrible men where anything was. I couldn’t have. I didn’t know!”
“They must have overlooked something or they wouldn’t have stopped you. How did they know who you were?” asked Judy.
“A voice from the trees told them, no doubt,” Horace said dryly.
Her brother was joking, Judy knew. But he had certainly found out something. They were just passing the tree that had “talked,” but there was no voice from it now. The rain had turned to snow which clung to the branches, frosting them with white. The house had a white roof.
“There’s a light inside,” observed Honey as Horace drove up the snowy slope to stop before the door.
“What are you going to do with this?” asked Horace as he brought in the tourist sign.
“Maybe you ought to hide it,” laughed Honey, taking it from him and standing it behind the kitchen door.
Usually the door into the combined kitchen and dining room was left open. It swung against the living-room wall. From within the kitchen came the odor of something cooking.
“Peter has given me up for lost and is cooking his own supper,” Judy exclaimed. “Come in, Helen. Mrs. Riker, I want you to meet my husband, Peter Dobbs.”
Peter looked more like a coal miner than a G-man as he turned from the stove to regard the group in the doorway. A boyish grin spread slowly over his face.
“I’m happy to know you,” he said. “If I had been warned that Judy was bringing company home I would have dressed for the occasion and prepared something more elaborate than canned soup. You’ll have to excuse my appearance,” he added after a quick introduction to the children, “but fighting forest fires is dirty work.”
“Forest fires!” exclaimed Judy.
“Are you a forest ranger?” Paul wanted to know. “Did you help put out the fire that burned Uncle Paul’s house down?”
“I’m afraid I was too late for that,” replied Peter, “but I did volunteer to help the chief deputy and his forest rangers. They had to keep the forest fire from spreading. The control of forest fires,” he continued, “is everybody’s business. Even boys and girls can help by reporting any brush fires they see.”
“We didn’t see the fire. We just saw the Destroyer,” Paul said.
“Paul means the statue on his uncle’s tomb,” Judy put in quickly. “I recognized it and told him what it was.”
“You recognized it? Were you there?”
Peter had abandoned his soup-making to listen.
“We all were,” Honey answered. “Mrs. Riker was on the way to visit her uncle—”
“He is my husband’s uncle, not mine,” Helen Riker pointed out. “That makes him the children’s great-uncle.”
Judy laughed. “Little Paul ran up to the vault and knocked, and he thinks he heard someone say ‘Go away!’ And, honestly, Peter, there was no one inside. We looked, and it was empty.”
“The voice must have been carried from somewhere,” Horace concluded. “It could have been a trick of the wind, like the talking tree.”
“Is that what you think it was?” asked Judy. “I don’t see how a trick of the wind could make a tree talk, do you, Peter?”
“If the trees I saw today could have talked,” he replied, “they would have all screamed, ‘Save us!’ We did our best, but it was the rain that finally put the fire out, after the wind changed.”
“That was just about the time those men stopped here, wasn’t it, Judy?” asked Honey.
“What men?” asked Peter. “I still don’t get it.”
“No wonder,” Judy told him. “We took the sign down and hid it behind the door. Here it is,” she added, dragging it out. “You might call it Exhibit A. Isn’t it a beauty? Honey lettered it herself.”
“Tourists Welcome,” he read aloud, the puzzled frown on his forehead deepening. “What was the idea?” he questioned. “Are we suddenly in the tourist business?”
“I’m afraid we were,” Judy admitted, “and we’re also deep in another mystery.”
Eagerly the children began telling him about it, but their mother stopped their chatter by offering them some of the soup Judy was dishing out, and telling them to keep quiet while they ate it.
“Don’t dish out any for us, Judy,” Horace told her. “I promised Honey I’d take her out to dinner, and I mean to keep my word if all the restaurants aren’t closed—”
“We’ll be back if they are. ‘Bye, all!” Honey said as she followed him out into the snow.
The ground was covered now. What a day it had been! First the dry weather with forest fires raging, then rain, and now snow!
“It’s just too much for me,” sighed Judy.
Peter had had a word privately with Horace before he left. Afterwards Judy brought out what she called Exhibit B—the empty pocketbook. Peter whistled in surprise when he saw it. But Mrs. Riker seemed unwilling to talk about it. She soon pleaded a headache and asked that she and the children be shown to their rooms.
Judy made them as comfortable as she could in the two spare bedrooms and then returned to the kitchen to prepare a little more supper for Peter. She gave him the kiss she had been saving for him and said, “I thought you might like to follow the soup course with another one of meat and potatoes. I’ll have them on your plate in a jiffy.”
“What about your own plate?” he asked.
“I’m not hungry,” she admitted. “I had enough to eat with Mrs. Riker and the children. For once we have a mystery with too many clues and I’d rather sort them out in my mind and talk. Peter,” she asked abruptly, “did you ever hear of a green dolly?”
He looked puzzled. “A green dollar? Who hasn’t? They’re all green except the silver and gold ones.”
“I didn’t saydollar. I saiddolly. You know, one of those things that children play with.” She spelled it, “D-o-l-l,” and Peter laughed.
“Turn off the advertising, Angel. I get it. Are you speaking of a talking doll?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Penny asked me to help her find a green doll she said her mother had in the pocketbook that was stolen from her. But Helen Riker won’t tell me. She said there was nothing of any consequence in her pocketbook, but there was certainly something worth stealing. Those men must have been looking for her when they stopped here. I took the license number of their car.”
“Good girl,” approved Peter. “I knew you would. Now, if you can describe them—”
Judy described them in detail, answering a few more questions Peter asked her about them.
“They stopped short in front of Helen Riker and crowded her car into the ditch. Then the men jumped out and questioned her about her uncle’s jade collection at the point of a gun. She told me that much. But she won’t admit she had anything of value in the pocketbook they drove off with. What do you think was in it, Peter? Why do I get mixed up in such fantastic adventures?”
“Perhaps,” he replied mysteriously, “it’s because you’re married to me. I’m on the trail of a green doll myself. In fact, quite a number of them. These clues you speak of may be just the ones I need.”
“Peter! Really? Then maybe Icanhelp you. Take a look at Exhibit C!” And Judy drew the tiny green jade figure from her pocket and laid it down before him.
Peter gave a long, low whistle of surprise. Then he asked Judy exactly where she had found the little idol.
She told him and added, “It isn’t quite the way Penny described it. This looks more like a hunter than a doll.”
“It may be a clue when we start hunting for the rest of the jade collection,” declared Peter. “Have you any more clues as good as this one?”
Judy laughed. “I’m afraid not, but it won’t do any harm to list the clues I do have.”
“First of all,” Peter said, “is that tourist sign. I’ll never understand how you get these sudden impulses, but it certainly led Mrs. Riker and the children to the right place.”
“That’s true,” Judy admitted, and sighed. “Naturally they were looking forward to meeting their uncle. It must have been a terrible shock to them to find his house destroyed.”
“What about their other uncle?” asked Peter. “Doesn’t he have a house?”
“I don’t know,” Judy replied. “Helen wouldn’t let the children talk about him. Penny acted as if she’d never heard of him before. It was the old uncle they were expecting to visit, not the young one.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” confessed Judy. “There’s a big secret of some kind. Helen’s trained Paul to keep it, but not Penny. The trouble is, I don’t think Penny knows all of it. And she has such an imagination! I actually feel sorry for her, the way they stop her every time she wants to talk. But it may be necessary. Helen Riker may be in danger.”
“What about you?” asked Peter. “You’ve really handed yourself a problem, sweetheart. If she’s in danger, I’m afraid you are, too.”
“I know, Peter.” Impulsively she kissed away the worried frown on his forehead, nearly stabbing him with the pencil she was holding. “But why should I be any safer than you are?” she asked. “You’re nearly always in danger—”
“From pencils? Only when I’m with you,” he returned, laughing. “Actually, pencils are about the only weapons I’ll be using for the next few weeks. Most of the time I will be sitting at an office desk doing very undangerous routine work.”
“You weren’t today,” she reminded him. “You were fighting forest fires.”
“Today,” he said, “was a little unusual. But let’s talk about your day. I want to get the facts straightened out in my mind.”
“My day?” Judy questioned, thinking back. “For me it always begins when I first open my eyes and say to myself, ‘Here is another mystery to solve.’ Every dayisa mystery, Peter, because you never know one minute what wonderful, beautiful, or even terrible thing will happen the next. That’s what makes life so exciting and—and wonderful.”
“It takes a pretty wonderful person to see it that way,” declared Peter.
“You’re wonderful, too,” she told him. “How foolish I was to worry for fear you might not understand. You see, we put up the tourist sign before Horace came with the news of the robbery. At first it was just for fun. We didn’t really think anyone would stop. And then, just after we put up the sign, those three men came along. They didn’t drive down our road. Maybe it looked too steep or something. They just parked their car by the mailbox and started to explore the grounds and ask questions. One of the men asked about the house, but I told him it wasn’t for sale. It’sourhouse, Peter. Nothing in the world could make me want to sell it.”
“But it is a little lonesome, is that it?”
“A little,” she admitted, “when you’re at work. But today Honey was with me, and then of course Helen and the children came. Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly.
“What now, Angel?”
“An idea I had. Penny did say something about getting into trouble when you didn’t tell things,” Judy remembered. “She was talking about her mother. And then she said, ‘I’d never, never steal anything after what she told me. Only bad people steal.’ I agreed with her and it seemed to bother her, and then she said something about it’s being different for children. What do you suppose she meant by that?”
“Obviously some child she cared about had stolen something. I doubt if it was Penny herself.”
“Was it Paul?”
“Not if I’m any judge of character,” Peter said. “What else can you remember?”
“A lot of things. I’ll write them down. There were still more clues in the paper if we only had it. I think Helen must have taken it upstairs with her.”
“We don’t need it,” Peter told her. “I’m familiar with every word in it. You see, our office released the news. Horace didn’t tell you, but he got it from me.”
“He did? Then you know more about it than he does! Can you tell me who the thieves were?” Judy asked. “Was it the caretaker?”
“Possibly, although it was he who reported the robbery.”
“And what about the jade collection? If this green doll was part of it—Peter! It must have been. But why was Helen taking it there unless—” Judy kept interrupting herself as more ideas flashed through her brain. Then, suddenly, she knew.
“It was!” she exclaimed. “I remember it now! It said in the paper that a priceless Oriental jade collection had been stolen—”
“Was believed to have been stolen,” Peter corrected her. “It makes quite a difference.”
“Not in what I’m trying to say,” she continued. “I don’t remember it word for word, but it went on to say that the valuable jade pieces had been collected during Paul Riker’s travels through the Far East. They were little statues of gods and goddesses! I had forgotten that until this very minute. And there was something else about their value being even greater if they were matched pairs. Does that mean there’s a goddess for every god? Then, if one happened to be missing, it would be worth a lot of money, wouldn’t it? And if the burglars knew where it was, they’d try to steal it, wouldn’t they? And they’d try to find out about the rest of the collection. Oh, Peter! That was what you meant when you said you were on the trail of quite a number of green dolls, wasn’t it? And this one I found may lead us to all the others.”
“It may,” Peter replied soberly. “On the other hand, it may lead us into more trouble. If Mr. Riker himself dropped it in the vault—”
“I give up,” Judy interrupted. “But this green ‘doll’ is jade, isn’t it, and it was stolen from Mr. Riker’s collection, don’t you think, Peter?”
“Yes, I do,” Peter agreed, “but if anyone stole it I’m afraid you’re the guilty one, Angel. You’d better let me have it before it gets you into more trouble. It may be the mate to the one Mrs. Riker had stolen from her.”
“Oh dear!” Judy began. “I hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t,” Peter reassured her. “I know your motives were good when you took it, and a great deal of good may come out of it, so don’t worry.”
“I won’t,” Judy promised, inspiration suddenly erasing all worry from her mind. “Oh, Peter!” she cried. “I have a wonderful idea. Come up to the attic with me. There’s something up there I want to show you.”
Judy and Peter climbed to the third floor, tiptoeing so as not to disturb their sleeping guests. All was quiet on the second floor. The stairway went right on up to what was not a cobwebby old attic, but three neat little rooms at the top of the house.
The room in the middle had dormer windows that gave enough light for sewing. Here Judy had placed her sewing machine. Opposite it was a large chest of drawers, a chair, and a bookcase filled with things she treasured.
In one of the other rooms her grandmother’s things were stored. Judy had never got around to sorting all of them.
In the third room were things she had saved herself. The wall was lined with books she had loved and didn’t want to part with. She had taken them all to her grandmother’s house the summer before the flood. Her old dolls were there too.
It was in this room that Judy found what she was looking for—a stack of old magazines.
“It must be in this pile here somewhere,” she told Peter, rapidly going through the stack. “It was an article in an old issue ofLife, and it had lots of pictures in color of Hindu gods and goddesses. I’ll know it by its cover—a Hindu girl with some kind of an ornament on her forehead. Do you remember it, Peter?”
“I believe I do,” he replied. “There were pictures of gods and goddesses on a big fold-out page. Some of them were in the Riker collection. They were hardly what you’d call dolls, although some of them were green. To the more educated Hindus they have become symbolic.”
“You mean like our sandman?” asked Judy with a yawn.
Peter laughed. “I never thought of it that way, but I guess the sandman is a symbol of sleep, and you and I could use some of it. We can look through the rest of these old magazines another time.”
“It’s no use. It isn’t here. We’d better go down.”
Judy picked up Buttercup, her favorite doll. “I’m going to tuck her in bed with Penny,” she told Peter, “so she’ll find her when she wakes up.”
She laughed at Peter’s objections as she carried the doll down to the children’s bedroom on the second floor and placed her in Penny’s arms.
“You see, I didn’t wake Penny,” she whispered to Peter. “Isn’t she an angel? I wish—”
The wish went unexpressed as Judy pounced upon the very magazine she had been hunting for. It was on the little night table right by Penny’s bed, and it was open to the big fold-out page covered with pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses.
“Go ahead! You can take it,” Paul said so suddenly that he startled Judy and nearly made her drop the magazine.
He was wide awake in the other bed.
“Where did you find it?” Judy whispered.
“In the closet. I was showing Penny the pictures. Is it almost morning?”
“Almost,” Judy told him. “Now go back to sleep. I’d better follow my own advice,” she said to Peter when they were in their own room.
“Are you going to take that magazine to bed with you?” he asked.
Judy still had it in her arms.
“Why not?” she retorted, making a face at him. “It contains all the mysterious secrets of the mysterious East and if I want to solve this mysterious—”
“Darling,” Peter interrupted, “if I hear that word again I shall place a blindfold over your mysterious gray eyes—”
“Try it!” she challenged him.
Judy won the scuffle. In spite of Peter’s protests, she began to read the article, though not from the beginning. She had opened the magazine to a huge picture of Shiva.
“This,” she pointed out, “is Shiva or Siva, the death god or the Destroyer. I recognized the figure on the tomb from this picture. But Penny mentioned the name Sita, and that seems to ring a bell, too.”
“It should.” Peter turned the page and spread it out before her. “Here they are,” he said. “Rama and Sita are the ideal man and woman in India. They should never be separated, and no marriage is complete without their blessing—”
“That’s rather sweet, don’t you think? Oh!” Judy gasped, pointing to one of the two little idols pictured. “Look, Peter. This is the one I found in the vault. Our green doll is Rama!”
“Rama!” Peter exclaimed with satisfaction. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Angel. If we can just make sure this is not the ‘green doll’ that was stolen from Mrs. Riker—”
“I’m almost sure it isn’t,” Judy exclaimed. “When Penny was talking about it, she kept referring to the dolly as ‘she,’ and this little idol is the figure of a young man. Besides, Peter,” she added excitedly, “when I was trying to think of the name of the Destroyer, Penny said the name was Sita. Then she said, ‘Oh, no, that was the name of the—’ and her mother made her be quiet. Oh dear,” she finished mournfully, “we found Rama and lost Sita, and they should always be together.”
“Perhaps they will be, Angel, soon,” Peter promised mysteriously.
Judy eyed him curiously. “Don’t answer this if it’s confidential information,” she began carefully, “but I’m just dying to know why it makes a difference whether this green doll is the one Helen Riker had, or not.”
“I can’t answer your question specifically, Angel,” Peter said slowly. “But I can tell you one thing, because it will be released to the papers tomorrow anyway. There may not have been a robbery at all.”
“Peter!” Judy stared. “What do you mean? The art treasures are gone, aren’t they?”
“They were,” Peter said. “But we learned today that the Montrose Moving and Storage Company received an order to move the stuff to their warehouse on Thursday evening. The order is supposed to have come from Paul Riker. My theory is that the old man saw the forest fire spreading in the direction of his house, and wanted to save his treasures. However, the insurance people take a different view. They point out that although the house did burn down, the forest fire was not the cause. In fact, the burned area around the site of the Riker mansion was what stopped the spread of the forest fire in that direction. They think Mr. Riker wanted to ‘have his cake and eat it too,’ as the saying goes.”
“Peter!” Judy’s eyes were snapping with excitement. “Do you mean to tell me all those things have been sitting in a warehouse while everyone has been trying to catch the robbers? But you yourself said only this evening that you are on the trail of a number of green dolls. Oh,” she gasped, as the thought struck her, “that must mean the jade collection isn’t—”
She stopped suddenly as Peter put a gentle hand over her mouth.
“I wouldn’t have been able to answer your next question, Angel,” he said, laughing at her startled expression, “so let’s change the subject.”
“All right, Peter,” Judy laughed too, “at least we have one real robbery left—those men who held up Helen Riker. Peter, they must have been the moving men! Honey recognized one of them.”
“There’s undoubtedly some connection, and we’ll investigate it,” Peter said. “But I don’t think it’s quite as simple as it sounds.”
“You mean, there’s Helen Riker herself? I told her I was afraid I’d caught the victim instead of the robbers. And do you know what she said, Peter? She said, ‘You may have caught them both.’ But she couldn’t be involved in a robbery that didn’t happen.”
“If that was a piece of stolen jade she was carrying around with her, she’s going to have a hard time proving her innocence,” declared Peter.
“Somehow, I can’t believe she’s really guilty,” Judy murmured.
“Perhaps not,” Peter said, “but we both know she’s holding something back. And if her husband was this millionaire’s nephew, why was she driving a fifteen-year-old car hardly fit for the road?”
“Horace told you about the car, didn’t he?”
“Yes, and I mean to have a look at it. There’s still a lot we don’t know.”
“And a lot I’m too sleepy to think about. There was one more thing I wanted to tell you.”
“Good night, maybe?” Peter laughed. “I’m ready to turn in myself as soon as I run downstairs and make a couple of telephone calls.”
“At this hour?”
Peter laughed. “I won’t wake anybody up. I’ll put out Blackberry and lock up. By then you may have thought of it.”
He returned a few minutes later. Judy was still awake. She said a little drowsily, “I know what it was. I wanted to tell you how she described her uncle’s house, the quiet and everything, almost as if she used to live there, but how could that be? Paul Riker was her husband’s uncle, not hers.”
“You knew my grandparents when I was a little boy,” Peter reminded her.
“That’s true. She must have lived near them. But there are no other houses near by except the caretaker’s cottage. Could she have been the caretaker’s little girl?”
“Why don’t you ask her?” Peter suggested.
Judy said she would first thing in the morning. But morning brought new problems. Mrs. Riker woke everybody up screaming that the children were missing.
“I found a doll in Penny’s bed,” she wailed. “It was put there as a warning—”
“It was put there as a surprise,” Judy told her. “I tiptoed in and put it there myself. It’s my old doll, Buttercup, and there’s nothing mysterious about her. The children were all right then.”
“They aren’t now. This is too much!” Helen Riker cried, becoming hysterical. “If those robbers entered the house during the night and stole them, I’ll never forgive myself. Maybe they think I lied to them when I said I didn’t know where Uncle Paul kept his jade collection. They may think if they hold the children they can force me to tell—”
“Wait a minute!” Peter stopped her. “Before you jump to any such conclusions, tell me when you last saw the children.”
“Why, when I put them to bed.”
Peter made a quick investigation, and reported that no one had entered the children’s room except Judy and himself.
“What about their clothes?” he asked. “Are any of them missing?”
“They must be wearing their snow suits,” their mother began.
“And why not, on a nice snowy morning?” asked Peter. “It looks to me as if they just got up early and ran out to play.”