The Case of the Missing Minute

by Sarah Morell

  Mom was not quite as enthusiastic, in this case meaning she thought we were too young to go traipsing around asking questions of adults around town. She called Fred Barns Private Investigations – Detective Agency, probably to tell Fred we were off the case. Somehow the conversation went in our favor. I could only hear my mom’s side.

  “Hi, this is Melody Stolidmeyer. Yes, industrious children. Yes, very imaginative. I wasn’t sure if they should be getting involved in a real case like this. Oh, I see,” Mom smiled. “Oh, well that does make a difference. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Yes. $100. Are you sure? Should they report to you if they find anything, or your wife Nan? I will see her at choir practice on Wednesday. Thank you for taking the time to explain.”

  Ivy blurted out excitedly as soon as Mom hung up the phone, “What did he say?”

  “Well, he thought you three girls were very professional. He was very impressed by your new agency and even your questions.”

  “So, are we back on the case of the missing pocket watch?” Ivy asked.

  “I have to talk to your father about it first, but you will likely be able to do it. Don’t get your hopes up too high. The police have searched the house high and low. Mr. Barns has been in there with his two sniffer dogs and so far no one has found the watch.”

  We learned a lot more when Mom talked to Dad on the phone that night. They usually talk for a few minutes while he is driving home from work. Apparently, Mr. Barns thought 3 little children might have better luck talking to Mr. Grumpkins, I mean Mr. Oswald. Plus, it would be a good deed for us to go spend some time over there anyway. Mr. and Mrs. Oswald don’t get a lot of young visitors and Fred Barns thought it would do them some good.

  It was obvious, by the time Dad got home that he was as excited as we were. It wasn’t like he thought the case was that important, but it was a great excuse to use the machine. We had to make him an honorary agent of the 4DDA.

  Ivy and I had trouble sleeping that night. We stayed up by the night light writing out all the questions we were going to ask Mr. Oswald tomorrow when we went over to his house. Mom had already made arrangements for us to stay over there for a couple hours. Mrs. Oswald was even going to make us lunch. I hope it isn’t cod liver oil and tuna fish.

  Mom dropped us off and told me to call if we needed anything. The first thing we did was tell Mrs. Oswald about our detective agency. Of course she didn’t believe anything about the machine, but no one does. She thought we were cute as buttons, whatever that means.

  Lunch wasn’t too bad, although I did find several long cat hairs in my soup. I didn’t bother telling Ivy. I thought she would just get grossed out. She is very particular about her food. The blue raspberry lemonade was amazing though. Mrs. Oswald told us that she picks the raspberries herself out in the garden. They freeze the fruits and then blend them into a slurry that they filter into the lemonade. It was fantastic. I must have had 5 glasses, which seemed to make both the Oswald’s proud.

  We had our first clue though. It would have been springtime when the pocket watch went missing. Maybe Mr. Oswald went outside to help tend the garden and dropped the watch outside. I explained this to the Oswald’s, who thought this probably wasn’t the case, but it was at least plausible. Mr. Oswald, who I no longer consider Mr. Grumpkin, was even able to find an old metal detector for us to use.

  We spent the next two hours in the garden, sometimes eating a cherry tomato, looking for the pocket watch. We strung up strings in a grid just like they do on the archeology channel. Then we set about looking in each grid for anything metal. The Oswald’s sat outside watching us under a sun umbrella at the big round wooden table that Mr. Oswald must have made decades ago.

  We struck gold, or I should say steel, right in the middle of the garden. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a large metal rototiller tine that had broken off the tiller several years earlier. That was all we found in the whole garden. We were so dirty by the time we were done; we didn’t dare go into the freshly painted and carpeted house.

  When we got home, we told Dad all about our day. Mr. Oswald was convinced that he had last seen the pocket watch at his desk. He had his small chest sized safe out for the final inventory of precious coins and collectibles. He even showed us the page where he had written down – 1 Gold Pocket Watch. The desk had been torn apart in every way possible and even the safe, but nothing had been found.

  Instead of disappointment, Dad was brimming with excitement. He said, “Tell me again. Why didn’t you go into the house?”

  Ivy spoke up, “It was too clean. We would have really messed the place up if we went in so muddy and dusty from the garden.”

  “Perfect, just as I thought,” he said as he rubbed his hands together and paced excitedly. “We start up the machine right after church tomorrow.”

  Chapter 9 – Solving the Mystery is hard work

  We sat in the driveway after church. The garage door was still opening and we were eager to get out of our nice clothes. I thought Dad might drive into the garage even before the door was all the way up, but he waited. We all did our normal Sunday afternoon race to get into play clothes, but Dad won this time.

  Mom was still in her nice outfit holding Abacus. Dinner had been in the oven for the last couple hours and the house smelled great. The cherry pie was just going in as the beef roast was coming out. I am not fond of carrots, but the potatoes looked really good. I can still smell the cheesy hash brown casserole. I have to say Mom topped herself with dinner. As good as the beef was, the pie topped with ice cream was almost too much. I wanted to just go to sleep, but Dad insisted that we get going on the case.

  Abacus was still in her nice dress. I have no idea how she managed to keep it clean all the way through three courses of Sunday dinner. Ivy rushed upstairs to get Abacus some play clothes. They didn’t match at all. The socks didn’t even match one another, but we were all too lazy to go get a matching outfit. After dinner was put away we all headed to the machine.

  Dad insisted that Mom stay in the pole barn instead of going into the machine with us. She was a little disappointed, but knew it would be too dangerous to go. We piled into the machine with much less stuff this time. Ivy thought ahead and brought snacks and drink boxes, but we didn’t have a change of clothes or blankets and pillows this time.

  Dad said, “Ok, tell me again. What day was Mr. Oswald inventorying his collectibles?”

  “It was March 3rd,” Ivy said. “I remember the date on the top of the page.”

  “We can assume it was during normal waking hours. So we have a window of time from say, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. I bet Mr. Oswald doesn’t get moving until closer to 10 a.m. Let’s start at 10 and work our way up from there,” Dad concluded.

  He sat in the main chair that looked more like a hard metal bucket seat. Everything in the device was metal. There was not plastic or fabric anywhere to be found inside; probably because it wouldn’t stand up to the time interference. It might have had fabric at one point that had turned to dust like the manuscript Dad found. I watched really closely at his insistence. I was the backup driver in case anything ever happened to him on our trip.

  The course was laid in. All the instruments were set and the coordinates plotted. We tried to get as close to the Oswald house as we could, but for some reason the machine would only park us in the woods behind the house. The machine stopped; well, it never really moved. It was a strange feeling in some ways because it wasn’t like we moved at all. It was like the door closed and then opened into a different world. It wasn’t even like an elevator where you can feel the up or down motion. There wasn’t any motion at all.

  Before we climbed out, we set our watches for 60 seconds and rushed out of the machine. I am still not used to the quietness that follows. We rushed over to the back window and looked down into the basement. The lights were off and no one was around. It was the first time I realized just how short 60 seconds really is. We heard the beeping of the watch and rushed back to the machine just in time.


  The door whirled from one side to the other and there was Mom. We left the machine and she looked puzzled.

  “Did you forget something?” she asked.

  It was our turn to look puzzled. “We are already back,” Dad said. “From your vantage point it must look like we didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Well, what did you find?” she asked.

  “Nothing. It was 10 a.m., but no one was awake yet. At least I didn’t see any sign of someone being up and about.”

  “They won’t be moving, right?”

  Dad answered, “No, but there should still be lights on and doors open.”

  I added, “Dad, there was something strange in the basement. When we were down there yesterday the desk was against the other wall. When we were there today, in the past, a few minutes ago, UGH, you know what I mean. When we were just there on March 3rd the desk was not where it is now.”

  “Good to know. I think that actually may be important. You guys ready to go back?”

  Ivy spoke up and Mom looked very worried, “Can you at least get us closer so we don’t almost miss getting in the machine again?”

  “What? Benjamin, what is Ivy talking about?”

  “It was nothing. We will set our wrist timers for 45 seconds next time so we don’t cut it so close. The machine wouldn’t actually appear close to the house for some reason.”

  Mom didn’t look pleased with this answer. None of us really knew how dangerous the machine was. It could be that if we are outside of the machine it just transports us back anyway. It could just as likely, trap us in the past, for all we knew.

  The second trip wasn’t any more productive, but Dad at least got the machine to appear next to the garage so that we didn’t have as far to run to get to the basement window. We looked in, but no lights again. It had to take Mr. Oswald at least an hour or two to document all the collectibles so we just kept trying the next hour.

  The third trip we didn’t even bother going back to the pole barn. Dad just programmed in the same location at 1 p.m. The door rotated around the machine and there we were back at the side of the garage. We rushed over to the side of the house to look in the window again and voila, the light was finally on, but no Mr. Oswald.

  We tried again at 2 p.m, but no Mr. Oswald. Finally, at 3 p.m. we found him. He was sitting there motionless with a large silver coin held up to the light. He had a small magnifying glass in one hand, examining something on the face of the coin. Ivy tugged at our shirts and pointed to the list. It was really difficult to read from this distance and angle, but there was no pocket watch listed that we could see.

  This time we programmed the machine for 3:15 p.m. The door opened and we all rushed over to the window. There, in the bottom of the safe we could make out the glint of the pocket watch. There were diamonds on top that reflected the light perfectly. Mr. Oswald still had several more coins to catalog so we figured 5 more minutes before he would examine the watch.

  I have to tell you that this is not an exact science. It took us so much trial and error that we probably appeared there 10 more times looking for the precise moment when the pocket watch was removed from the safe. It was clear from the look on his face that this was his most treasured possession. He must have been thinking of the 35 years of work it had taken to achieve the reward of the coveted gold pocket watch. This still didn’t help us determine what happened to the pocket watch after the inventory. That was still several more jumps, as that is what we started calling it, into the past.

  I noticed that every time we walked the same path back to the window it was like we were making a path in the grass. The parts of the grass that could interact with our little time bubbles would bend under our weight. The spot near the window was looking pretty worn down, as if someone had been sitting there for a long time. This is just another one of those things we would have to be careful of in the future.

  We discovered through our last few jumps that Mr. Oswald had received or placed a phone call as he was putting away the collectibles. Instead of the pocket watch going in first, he left that beside the small safe while he added the rest of the coins to their proper place. He had one hand clumsily holding the phone when he bumped into the safe just enough to cause the pocket watch to tip gently off of the table. It must have rolled onto the carpet and right into the open framed wall that had not been finished with dry wall yet. The watch sat there just out of sight right below the window that we were looking through.

  The case had been solved, or mostly solved. Now we just had to get back to our time and let Fred Barns know where the watch was so that we could collect the reward. When we finally reappeared in the pole barn, Mom looked a little worried.

  “You guys must have been gone a long time,” she said. “I tried knocking on the device, but it sounded different, almost hollow like it wasn’t really there. You must have been like that for at least 30 minutes.”

  “It was nothing,” he started to say, but then the wave of tiredness hit us all. It was as if we had been doing hard backbreaking work all day long. I swear it felt like bed time already. It was clear from everyone else’s face that they felt the same way.

  Ivy verbalized what we were all thinking, “I am going to bed. Wake me up in the morning.”

  With that we all headed back into the house to get some rest. I understood what the manual must have felt like. We had been in the machine too long. We were going to have to be much more careful about using it in the future. Time catches up to you. There just isn’t any way around it.

  I slept and slept. Apparently, we all slept, even Mom, who wasn’t that tired. Abacus never made it out of Mom and Dad’s bed that afternoon. I woke up around 9:30 p.m. to go to the bathroom and discovered that everyone else was starting to rouse as well. We had a very late supper and relayed the day’s events to Mom as we ate.

  Chapter 10 – The Reward

  Monday was rainy. Dad had already left for work. Mom drove us into town, insisting that it was too wet to ride our bikes the whole way. We found a parking spot near the library a couple doors down from Fred Barns Private Investigations – Detective Agency.

  Mom entered first carrying Abacus. The no smoking sign was still clearly posted on the door, but the office had the odor of a freshly extinguished tobacco pipe. The smoke still clung in the air near the ceiling. The currents of the door opening three times were evident in the pattern it was making. I stood transfixed, watching the smoke trail into three competing waves breaking against the far wall.

  Mom cleared her throat and poked at my arm. I was still mesmerized, in this case meaning I was still looking at the smoky patterns forming on the ceiling, with my mouth wide open in a gawking posture. I was finally stirred out of my concentration by the second or third throat clearing.

  “Oh,” I said. “We have information about the pocket watch.”

  “When do we get the reward?” Ivy added hastily.

  “Hold on,” Fred Barns said. “We still need to actually find the watch before we can issue a reward. Do you have the watch with you now?”

  “No, but we know where it is,” I said. “It took some deductive reasoning, but we figured it out.”

  Mr. Barns looked amused and my Mom just raised her eyebrows and rolled her eyes.

  “Ok, tell me what you got.”

  We proceeded to tell him what we suspected, being very clear not to tell him we actually saw it happen. This led to some phone calls and finally to an excited response from Mr. Barns.

  “OK, you coming?” he asked.

  “Where are you going?” Mom asked in return.

  “The Oswald place. If what you are saying is true, then we should be able to find the watch right away.”

  We climbed into the car again. I strapped in Abacus, which meant Ivy got the front seat on the way to the Oswald’s. We were there in no time flat. When we got out of the car, curiosity got the better of me. I snuck around the back side of the house to see if our trail was still there, but it wasn’t. I forgot
that it would have been a couple months ago that we had left the trail. It must have grown back by now.

  Mom poked her head around the side of the garage. “What are you doing back here?”

  “Oh nothing,” I said.

  We went into the house. Mr. Barns, Mom, Ivy, Abacus and I took off our muddy shoes next to the front door. Everyone followed me down to the basement where I pointed to the wall right below the window.

  Mr. Oswald said, “Yeah that is where the desk used to be. I forgot about moving that during the renovation. We had to move it so they could get the wall boards in place.”

  I pointed again to the window and told them I thought the watch probably just fell off the table and landed in the wall. No one noticed it when the wall board went up and it was probably still right there.

  Fred Barns asked Mr. Oswald if it was ok to remove one section of the wall board. He reluctantly agreed. A utility knife was produced by someone, probably Ms. Oswald. A square pattern was cut into the wallboard and then a small saw was used to precisely remove the piece. A pen flashlight was used to look into the wall.