"Carey, M.V. - The Three Investigators 15 - The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carey M.V)

6

The Investigators Have a Client



HANS was immediately sent to the telephone box on the main road to summon the police, who appeared within minutes and searched the house from attic to cellar and found nothing--nothing but the strange, charred footprints in the kitchen.

Officer Haines sniffed at the footprints, measured them, dug a few bits of burned linoleum out of the floor and put them into an envelope. He gave Jupiter a cool look. "If you know anything about this, and you're holding out on us--" he began.

"Ridiculous!" snapped Aunt Mathilda. "How could Jupiter know anything we don't know? He has been with me all day, and he was just going downstairs to help Mrs Dobson with the groceries when those--those footprints appeared."

"Okay. Okay," said the officer. "Only he has this habit, Mrs Jones. He's always around when trouble happens."

Haines put the envelope with the burned bits of linoleum in his pocket. "If I were you, Mrs Dobson," he said, "I'd get out of here and go back to the inn."

Eloise Dobson sat down and began to cry, and Aunt Mathilda angrily ran water into a kettle and set about making a heartening cup of tea. Aunt Mathilda believed there were few crises in life which could not be eased by a good hot cup of tea.

The police departed for headquarters. Tom and Jupiter went quietly out into the big front yard and sat on the steps between the two huge urns.

"I'm almost ready to think Hans was right," said Tom. "Suppose my grandfather is dead, andа.а.а."

"I do not believe in ghosts," said Jupiter firmly. "What's more, I don't think you believe in them, either. And The Potter made great preparations for your visit. Why should he return and frighten your mother that way?"

"I'm scared, too," Tom admitted, "and if my grandfather isn't dead, where is he?"

"The last we knew, he was up in the hills," said Jupiter.

"But why?" demanded Tom.

"That may depend on a great many things," Jupiter said. "How much do you really know about your grandfather?"

"Not much," admitted young Tom. "Just what I've heard my mother say. And she doesn't know much herself. One thing, his name wasn't always Potter."

"Oh?" said Jupiter. "I have always wondered about that. It seemed too coincidental."

"He came to the United States a long time ago," Tom said. "About 1931 or so. He was a Ukrainian and he had a name that was so full of c's and z's that nobody could pronounce it. He was taking ceramics at a night school in New York when he met my grandmother, and she didn't want to be Mrsа.а.а. Mrsа.а.а. well, whatever it was, so he changed his name to Potter."

"Your grandmother was a New Yorker?" asked Jupiter.

"Not really," said Tom. "She was born in Belleview, just like us. She went to New York to design clothes or something. Then she met this Alexander Whosis and she married him. I don't suppose he wore a long white robe in those days. She wouldn't have gone for that. She was pretty square."

"You remember her?"

"A little. She died a long time ago. I was only a kid. Pneumonia. From what I've heard, in the family you know, she and my grandfather didn't hit it off from the beginning. He was real good at ceramics, and he had a little shop, but she said he was awfully nervous, and had three locks on every door. And she said she could not stand the continual smell of wet clay. So when my mother was going to be born, she came back to Belleview, and she stayed."

"She never returned to her husband?"

"Nope. I think he came to see her once, when my mother was a baby, but she never went back to him."