“He is not, sir!”
“What about his son, Roger?”
“He isn’t here, either. Stanley, tell them to go away!” the voice from upstairs called more shrilly. “Roger is out. He won’t be back until afternoon.”
“We’ll wait, if you don’t mind. We’re in no hurry.”
Pushing himself past the startled Stanley, Horace pulled Judy along with him. “There’s news here,” he whispered, “and I don’t mean small stuff. Unless my eyes deceive me, that’s a police car driving up the road. We can watch from this window!”
CHAPTER X
Blackberry Leads the Way
The room in which Judy found herself seemed to be all windows. There was no furniture in it except for a round rug on the polished floor and a bench against one wall. In the other three walls were high windows with deep cabinets built under the window sills. On top of them were big glass tanks and little glass tanks filled with everything from tiny tropical fish to goldfish the size of flounders. Horace nearly dived into one of the fish tanks as he rushed to look out and see what was happening. Nothing, apparently, was.
“They’re simply cruising around out there,” he observed. “Do you think they’re looking for the fountain?”
“They won’t reach it in a police car,” Judy replied. “They—” She stopped suddenly. The round rug on the floor was hand-hooked and looked very familiar. So was the cat that sat motionless in the center of it, fascinated by the moving fish.
“Horace!” she exclaimed. “That’s Grandma’s rug! She did deliver it here, and that looks like—it is!” Gathering the cat in her arms with another exclamation, she hugged him against her cheek and then, holding him back to look at him, asked in amazement, “Blackberry! What in the world are you doing here?”
“What he intended to do was obvious,” Horace observed with a grin. “What would any cat do in a room full of fish? I didn’t recognize him when he crossed our path out there and then darted through the door.”
“He led us here!” cried Judy. “He’s always leading me into adventure.”
“And trouble,” Horace added. “By the way, sis, are you sure he is Blackberry?”
“Of course I’m sure,” replied Judy, tilting the cat’s head to show her brother the proof. “No other black cat has the same tiny white hairs that look as if someone had spilled milk on his nose. They’re on his feet, too. When I first saw him I said they made him look like a blackberry dipped in sugar, and Peter agreed that Blackberry was a perfect name for him.”
“A ‘purrfect’ name?”
“Exactly,” Judy agreed, “with the accent on the purr. The white hairs don’t show as much as they did when he was a kitten, but I’d know him anyway by the crackle in his purr. Listen to him, Horace! He’s so glad to see us.”
“I wonder,” Horace said, still grinning. “He seemed rather glad to see the fish before we came in. My big news story may turn out to be nothing but a fish story after all. At least I know what his hobby is.”
“Whose hobby?” asked Judy. “You don’t even know who owns the fish. Stanley could be taking care of them for the Brandts. It does seem to me I remember goldfish in the pool around the fountain.”
“When you fished for the diamond you showed me?”
“No, Horace, it was the other time, when I thought the fountain was enchanted and made my wishes. I know I saw flashes of gold in the water. I wonder if any of these fish are ever kept there.”
“Probably—in the summer. In the winter the pool seems to be reserved for more valuable things. I wouldn’t mind fishing for diamonds. There may be more—”
“Sh!” Judy stopped him. “Wasn’t that the doorbell?”
Horace looked out the window. The two policemen who had been cruising around the grounds were no longer in the police car. It was parked in the circular driveway. The bell rang again. Blackberry stiffened in Judy’s arms and pricked up his ears. She could hear Stanley’s voice.
“Mrs. Cubberling is resting. She does not wish to be disturbed this morning.”
“Is she Cubby’s wife or his mother?” Judy whispered.
“Who knows? Mr. Cubberling may be the neighbor I’m looking for,” declared Horace. “Listen!”
“Two government men were here last night,” Stanley was saying. “Mrs. Cubberling can’t tell you any more than she told them.”
Judy’s gray eyes widened in alarm when she heard this. The FBI! Had she accidentally stumbled into a mystery Peter was investigating?
“I didn’t mean to!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Horace! One of those government men could have been Peter. What’ll we do? I promised him I’d never follow him on another one of his investigations.”
“You didn’t follow him on purpose,” Horace reassured her. “I’m not so sure Blackberry didn’t, though. Cats aren’t bound by promises.”
“I wish girls weren’t. I do so want to help—”
“Listen!” Horace interrupted.
The voices outside were becoming louder. Judy heard Roger Banning’s name and the name of Dick Hartwell. Cubby wasn’t mentioned. Neither was the dark stranger whose name Judy did not know. Finally Stanley called upstairs in an extremely agitated manner, “There are two gentlemen here, madam. They’re officers of the law and they have a search warrant—”
“That does it!” Horace whispered. “It’ll be news all right. They’re going to search the house.”
“They’ll find us!” cried Judy. “Horace, they mustn’t! That door over there seems to lead to the garden. Maybe we can slip out without being seen.”
“An excellent idea! That’s using the brain cells. Now,” Horace announced a few minutes later when they were safe beyond a thick yew hedge that bordered the garden, “we’ll do a little searching for ourselves. Think you and Blackberry can lead me to the fountain?”
“I think so.” Judy still had the cat in her arms. “Stop squirming,” she told him. “I’ll let you down when we find the path.”
“Maybe he can help us find it,” Horace suggested.
“It wouldn’t be safe,” Judy objected. “How do we know that dark man isn’t lurking around somewhere waiting to catnap him? Seriously, there may be danger. If you come to a fence, don’t touch it. The wires are charged with electricity.”
“Friendly lot, aren’t they?” asked Horace. “There’s your fence.”
They had come upon it sooner than they anticipated. The whole wooded portion of the estate seemed to be fenced off with chain-link fences and electrically charged wire.
“What do they keep in here?” was Horace’s next question. “I’m not eager to meet any ferocious animals.”
“The only animals I saw were made of stone,” Judy told him. “Lions, but they don’t bite. They only spurt water out of their mouths when the fountain is on, and I imagine it isn’t today. It’s too cold. The pipes would freeze—”
“And moan,” Horace said. “You know what weird sounds can come out of hollow pipes when the wind is blowing. You probably only imagined the words.”
“I don’t imagine words. You know that. Please don’t start that argument all over again,” begged Judy. “It doesn’t get us anywhere, but the path will. This fence crosses it, but I think I can find the place where we got through it yesterday. After that we just followed the path. We can find it all right with the tower to guide us. It’s somewhere in that direction.”
Judy tried to point, but found the cat in her arms something of a handicap. He was still struggling to free himself.
“You won’t hold him long,” Horace prophesied.
“But I have to,” Judy insisted. “I don’t want him to run away from us. He may be a big help if we explore the fountain. If there really is a cave underneath it and if we can squeeze inside, we’re bound to find something if only more water pipes. If I can crawl in behind those cupids—”
“If the water is turned off,” Horace finished for her. “That makes six ifs. I counted them.”
“There are apt to be seven or eight, if not more,” declared Judy. “But Blackberry can explore places we can’t. The trouble is, he can’t tell us what he finds—”
“Me-aurr!” interrupted the cat.
“In words, I mean,” Judy corrected herself. “You tell us in your own way, don’t you, Blackberry? I wish you could tell us how you got here. Did Peter bring you?”
“Peter wouldn’t bring a cat to help him investigate a crime,” Horace began. “Maybe you didn’t shut Blackberry in the attic—”
“Blackberry!” cried Judy as the cat leaped from her arms.
It was a squirrel that had attracted him. He soon chased it up a tree and out on an overhanging branch. The squirrel escaped, but Blackberry was now on the other side of the fence. With one leap, he was on the ground.
“A good idea!” approved Horace. “Blackberry is leading the way again. That’s how we’ll get over. You’re next, Judy. I’ll hold you up.”
“It seems to me we’re doing it the hard way. Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed when she was in the tree. “I can see the house from here. Those policemen are just coming out. Do you think they’ll recognize your car?”
“Probably,” replied Horace. He was having a little more difficulty climbing the tree since there was no one to boost him.
“Do you think they’ll search the grounds?”
Judy, who was wearing slacks, slid down the branch easily and dropped to the ground, but it broke with Horace. He got up, rubbed a skinned place on his elbow, and replied, “Probably,” as if nothing had happened. His dignity seemed to be more hurt than any other part of him. Judy just had to giggle. Blackberry, apparently not liking the commotion caused by Horace’s fall, darted off into the bushes.
“He got away in spite of me,” declared Judy, “but he’ll be back. He likes to help me explore. I would have taken him with us yesterday, but Lorraine doesn’t like cats. She says they’re creepy.”
“She said quite a few unpleasant things, didn’t she?” asked Horace.
“It was only because she was upset,” Judy excused her. She was beginning to wonder if she should have told her brother anything about Lorraine’s problem. There seemed to be problems enough without that. The next one they encountered was a thick growth of thorny bushes. They were nearer the tower now. The path couldn’t be far away.
“If only they hadn’t planted so many kinds of holly, and all with prickly leaves,” Judy complained. “Maybe they think they need more than electric fences to keep people away.”
“Away from what?” asked Horace stopping to extract a thorn from his finger.
“The fountain, I guess. There is some secret about it. There must be,” Judy decided. “There! I can see it now, through the bushes, and it is turned off. Hurry, Horace! I can hardly wait to explore it.”
CHAPTER XI
Under the Fountain
Judy reached the fountain ahead of Horace. It looked even more forsaken than it had the day before. When they finally stood together beside the circular wall that enclosed the dry pool, even Judy could feel no enchantment.
“It’s gone—whatever it was,” she said mournfully.
“The water’s gone. I can see that much. They must have a good drainage system,” Horace commented.
“For the big pool, yes.” Judy could not shake off the feeling of disappointment. “There may be a little water in the center fountain,” she added more hopefully. “Shall we go across?”
“Might as well,” Horace agreed, following her. Blackberry, who had reappeared, remained at the edge of the pool watching. There were no fish. Thus the fountain held no charms for him.
“Come here, Horace!” Judy called presently to her brother. “You said you wanted to fish for diamonds. Well, this is the place.”
Horace found the little pool in the center of the fountain very uninteresting and said so. There was nothing in the water but sticks and dead leaves. Furthermore, it was icy cold.
“Now I understand your frozen tear story a little better,” Horace continued. “I suspect Lorraine has more to cry about than she told you. If she doesn’t trust Arthur, she has a reason—”
“Perhaps an imagined one. She is jealous. You remember how hard she made it for me in high school—and afterwards. Of course,” Judy admitted, “Arthur did like me, and I thought I was in love with him. He is romantic-looking and I was too young to realize that true love is more than going places with someone who makes a nice impression. Peter makes a nice impression, too. But not a romantic one. You sort of feel his strength. Oh, Horace! I wish I’d told him about this before we came. I should have called him instead of going to that movie with Honey.”
“I’m afraid we won’t find out much, anyway. You say the fountain spoke to you—”
“Yes, but not until I’d made my wish. Yesterday it was only a moaning sound. I did think it said, ‘Go away!’ but maybe you were right, Horace. Maybe it was just a noise in the pipes. I’d feel a little foolish speaking to it now.”
“More foolish than usual?” Horace teased.
“Just for that I will! Oh, fountain!” Judy began. “Speak—”
A noise in the holly thicket interrupted her. A policeman poked his head through the bushes and shouted, “Hey! What are you doing here?”
“We’re just exploring,” Judy replied calmly. “If we find anything we’ll let you know.”
“Oh, it’s you,” the policeman said and withdrew to go into conference with his companion. Judy heard something in a low voice about previous mysteries she had solved.
“Chief Kelly says he’ll never forget the day he met Judy Bolton,” she heard. “After emptying a bag of jewels on his desk, she invited him to a ghost party. He tells me she’s been chasing ghosts ever since.”
“Think that’s what we’re doing?”
“It looks that way. Let Judy and her brother explore the woods if they want to. They’re better at finding jewels than we are. There were none in the safe. Mrs. Cubberling was only too glad to have us look there. Who knows? Maybe they’ll turn up in a hollow tree.”
“Did you hear that?” Judy whispered. “They’re looking for jewels. They think maybe we can find them because we did find the loot from that other robbery. Listen!”
There was more conversation as the voices drifted away. Peter’s name wasn’t mentioned but, because the policemen seemed to approve of what Judy was doing, she felt sure Peter would, too.
“We’re trespassing,” she told Horace a little later, “but the law doesn’t mind. I heard them say they’d made a mistake, but did they? They didn’t do much searching around this fountain.”
“If there’s a story here, we’ll just have to uncover it ourselves,” declared Horace. “I’d like to explore that tower over there. If there are stairs inside, we could climb them. We’d have quite a view from those peepholes.”
Judy saw the peepholes he meant. They were about halfway up the tower. She suspected the police had already viewed the estate from up there and found nothing suspicious. She had not told them about the diamond she had found in the fountain, nor did she intend to tell them until after she had talked the whole matter over with Peter. Apparently only Stanley, the butler, and Mrs. Cubberling had been at home when the house was searched.
“Cubby is probably her husband,” Judy decided. It had been a fairly young voice that had called from upstairs. “But where does Roger Banning fit in?” she asked Horace. “Do you think he could be here as a plumber’s helper? His father is supposed to be a plumber.”
“There are plenty of pipes here. Someone must have to keep them in working order. They’ve even got them in the lions’ mouths.”
Judy giggled. “Lois noticed them before. She said it gave Mr. and Mrs. Lion a startled
expression, as if they were saying, ‘Oh!’”
“Maybe they’ve found the jewels those policemen are looking for,” Horace suggested with a laugh. “Apparently Cubby, as you call him, and Roger Banning made themselves scarce on purpose—”
“And that other man, whoever he was,” Judy put in. “He really frightened Lorraine. Did I tell you she lost the ring Arthur gave her? I mean she lost it unless it was stolen. She didn’t want to tell us about it, but when we found the diamond I looked to see if it came out of my ring, and then I noticed Lorraine wasn’t wearing hers. She acted guilty about it, too. Oh dear!” she suddenly exclaimed. “Is that the police car driving away?”
“Sounds like it,” agreed Horace. “I felt safer with them here, didn’t you?”
“Oh, I feel safe enough,” Judy replied carelessly. “Blackberry will protect us. He’s up there on the wall keeping watch—”
“Of what?” asked Horace. “Birds?”
“Of course not,” retorted Judy. “I trained him not to catch them.”
“What about fish?”
There was a twinkle in Horace’s eye as he asked this question. He had not forgotten the room with the fish tanks. How Blackberry happened to be there was still a mystery. The house, as well as the grounds, puzzled Judy.
“Something is going on here. Something—fishy.” She laughed and then shivered. There was a chill about the deserted fountain that made her wish she had worn warmer clothing. Her hands were especially cold.
“If it’s news,” Horace said, “it’s being well kept from us. Shall we explore below?”
“Let’s,” agreed Judy. “It can’t be any colder down there than it is up here, and I am curious. Come on, Blackberry!” she called to her cat. “Don’t you want to help us explore?”
“It’s too damp for him,” explained Horace when the cat refused to come.
Together Horace and Judy edged in between the cupids. Judy giggled at the pipes running up their backs to the bowl of the fountain. Exploring underneath, they found a dark opening which Horace bravely entered.
The Third Girl Detective Page 21