The three young Carstairs woke early Tuesday morning. There was a feeling of excitement, a sense of great things about to happen, the same feeling that was in the air on the day school was out or the circus was in town. They tiptoed around the house as quietly as kittens, not to wake Mother. An extra hour’s sleep now would make her look even prettier at dinnertime.
In the middle of breakfast, April had her idea. She laid her fork down, gasped, and said, “Dinah! Mr. Holbrook’s daughter!”
“Huh?” Dinah said. Archie stared.
“We’ve got to see that picture of her,” April said. “Today. Because.” She paused for a minute. “She’s a burlesque star. Or maybe—was a burlesque star.”
“Was?” Dinah repeated. She looked a little dazed.
“Bette LeMoe was a burlesque star, too,” April said dramatically. “And—if she’d been Mr. Holbrook’s daughter—”
Dinah choked on her milk. She said, “April! My gosh!” Archie pounded her on the back until she got her breath again.
“Where does Mr. Holbrook live?” April asked.
“Up on Washington Drive.” Dinah said. “It’s about four blocks from here. He’s got a housekeeper. She’s cross. Joella and I went up there once to try and sell her a ticket to the PTA garden tea, and she kept us there fifteen minutes telling us why she wouldn’t buy one.”
“Fine,” April said. “Wonderful. That’s just what we need.” She picked up her fork, returned to the scrambled eggs, and said, “We’ll go up there right after school. You and Archie ring the front doorbell and try to sell her a—a magazine subscription. While I sneak in the back and look for the picture.”
“Yipes!” Archie said happily.
Dinah frowned. “Suppose you get caught.”
“Then I’ll get arrested and put in jail,” April said serenely. “Don’t be a gloomy gus. Suppose I don’t get caught and do find the picture.”
“If I’m gonna keep her busy while you search,” Archie announced, “you won’t get caught, don’t worry. I know her. She’s got a very fine garden, and I’ll borrow Flashlight’s dog and take him along.”
“Archie,” April said, “you’re a genius. For that you can have my jam.”
Archie sniffed, reached for the jam jar, and said. “I just happen to know you don’t like this kind of jam.”
“But, April.” Dinah said. “This is Tuesday.”
“So what?” April said. “It usually is.”
“Except when it’s raining,” Archie said. “Then it’s Saturday.”
“But if you look at it with one eye shut it turns pink,” April said.
“Only I like the striped ones best,” Archie said.
April said, “But you can’t do that, because it’s Tuesday.”
“Quiet, you kids,” Dinah said in exasperation. “It is Tuesday.”
April and Archie stared at her and said in unison, “Did we say it wasn’t?”
There followed the elaborate ceremony that had to be carried out whenever two people said the same thing. Little fingers hooked. “Make a wish.” “Bread ’n’ butter.” Then Archie went on scraping out the jam jar, and April said, “What does Tuesday have to do with it?”
“Tuesday I have after-school gym class,” Dinah said. “I don’t get out till four-thirty.”
“Oh, heck,” April said. “You would!” She thought for a minute. “You’ll have to cut gym.”
“I can’t,” Dinah said miserably. “I’ve already cut three times this term. Once when Archie wanted to see that Roy Rogers movie, and once when it was such a nice day to go swimming, and once—”
“Wait a minute,” April said. “I know. You’ve sprained your ankle.”
Dinah automatically glanced at her ankles. They seemed perfectly intact.
“Archie,” April said, “get the adhesive tape. Thank goodness for those Girl Scout first-aid lessons!”
Dinah looked bewildered, then finally said, “Oh!”
Ten minutes later April had finished a magnificent job of taping the ankle. “Now,” she said. “Mother was sleeping when you left for school, so you couldn’t ask her for an excuse slip. That gym teacher is such a shot bag that she prob’bly won’t remember it by next gym class. If she does, by that time we’ll be able to explain all to Mother. Got that straight?”
Dinah nodded.
“We’ll invade the Holbrook house at four o’clock on the dot,” April said. “And meantime—don’t forget to limp!”
At two minutes to four Dinah and Archie walked up to the house on Washington Drive. Dinah was still limping, and Archie was leading Flashlight’s big brown mongrel on a tightly held leash. April was going up the alley, parallel to them.
“A subscription to Farmer’s Wife magazine,” Dinah muttered. “What the hash-e-cash-kuk am I going to do if she says she’d like to subscribe to it?”
“Tell her you’ll come up tomorrow and bring the thing to write out,” Archie advised, “and then I’ll let Samson loose. That’ll keep her busy.”
Dinah sighed. They turned in the front walk and she could see April, behind the house, waiting in the shrubbery.
Lawyer Holbrook lived in a medium-sized, unpretentious stucco bungalow with neat, very ordinary grounds, and a carefully arranged garden at one side. A large, cross-looking white cat was dozing by the sundial. Samson growled. Archie jerked on the leash and said, “Shut up.” He beamed at Dinah and said, “Oh, boy—if Samson ever gets loose after that cat—”
Dinah rang the doorbell. A minute later a tall, bony, gray-haired woman came to the door and said, “Well?”
“Would you like to take a year’s subscription to the Farmer’s Wife magazine?” Dinah said timidly.
The gray-haired woman glared and said, “Do I look like a farmer’s wife? Does this look like a farm?”
“No, ma’am,” Dinah said in a small voice. “But—”
“If she sells ten subscriptions she gets a genuine diamond ring,” Archie said.
The gray-haired woman’s lips tightened. Then she launched into a ten-minute dissertation on why she wouldn’t subscribe to the Farmer’s Wife, what she thought of impudent children going around selling subscriptions and bothering their neighbors, and the bad behavior of modern children in general. She ended by saying, “And you take that dog right out of here!”
Dinah felt sudden panic. April must still be in the house. She was to have signaled to them from a vantage point in the alley the minute she got out, and so far she hadn’t been heard from.
Mr. Holbrook’s housekeeper started to go into the house and close the door. Archie let go of Samson’s leash. Samson promptly went after the cat, who squalled and fled. The housekeeper shrieked, and ran after Samson. Archie and Dinah ran after the housekeeper.
The resulting confusion lasted a good five minutes, and ended in the back yard, with the cat halfway up a telephone pole and Samson raising a terrific row at the bottom of the pole. The housekeeper was screaming at Dinah and Archie. Dinah and Archie were just plain screaming.
In the midst of the excitement April slipped out a side window, raced around the house, and joined the group, exclaiming loudly, “Archie! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, letting that awful dog chase that poor little pussycat!” The poor little pussycat climbed six feet higher up the pole, hurling profanities at Samson.
April grabbed Samson’s leash, put it in Archie’s hand, and said sternly, “You go right straight home! This minute.” Archie beat it fast, dragging a still-barking Samson after him. Dinah ran after him. April lingered just long enough to say sympathetically to the housekeeper, “You’d better call the fire department. That cat’ll never get down that pole by herself.”
She caught up with Dinah and Archie halfway up the street.
“Well?” Dinah demanded. “Did you find it?”
April nodded. “I found it. It was in his desk drawer, right where I thought it would be. I left it there, because it wasn’t evidence.”
“Why not?” Dinah said.
April sighed. “The picture of Mr. Holbrook’s daughter is pretty lush, what with those beads and peacock feathers. But she’s big and blonde and a little on the beefy side. She doesn’t look any more like Bette LeMoe than—Archie does.”
Dinah stared at her. Archie let go of the leash, and Samson, thoroughly unnerved by now, ran for home.
“Do you mean,” Dinah said grimly, “that we went through all this, and chased a cat up a telephone pole, and I went around limping all day, just to find out—nothing?”
“Listen, Goony Gussie,” April said. “We found out something very important. We found out that Bette LeMoe wasn’t Mr. Holbrook’s daughter. That’s a big help. Because now we know Mr. Holbrook wouldn’t have wanted to murder Mrs. Sanford because she was mixed up in the Bette LeMoe case. All we have to do now is find out who did murder Mrs. Sanford.”
Dinah sniffed, and said nothing.
“And,” April said, “let’s get that bandage off your ankle before we get home and Mother sees it and wants to know what happened to you.”
Removing the bandage took a little doing, and considerable debate as to procedure. April borrowed Archie’s Boy Scout knife and tried slitting it down the side. That didn’t work. Dinah suggested trying to soak it loose with nail-polish remover. April reminded her they didn’t have any nail-polish remover. Finally Archie, in exasperation, grabbed one end of the bandage and yanked. Dinah yelped once. The bandage was off.
Dinah put her ankle sock and shoe back on again and they started home.
“Stop limping,” April whispered as they crossed the front porch.
“It’s a habit now,” Dinah said in a melancholy voice. “I’ll probably limp all the rest of my life, and it’s all your fault.”
They went into the house and headed for the kitchen. On the table was a big lemon pie, put there to cool, with a thick, delicately browned meringue. On the stove was the meat loaf, ready to be put into the oven. It smelled—heavenly! There was a casserole of scalloped potatoes waiting beside it and, wonder of wonders, onion soup simmering on the low burner. April sniffed ecstatically and said, “Super!”
Jenkins, Inky, and Stinky were sitting on the kitchen floor, gazing wistfully at the stove. The makings of a magnificent salad were on the rack in the sink. The biscuits were cut out and ready to be baked.
“April,” Dinah said happily, “he’s as good as handcuffed right now.”
April frowned. She said, “Listen! Is that the washing machine?”
They listened. It was the washing machine. And, in the back yard, Mother was whistling The Wreck of the Old Ninety-seven, loudly and cheerfully.
With a sudden premonition of disaster, April ran into the back yard, Dinah and Archie close behind her. She stopped just beyond the porch and said, in a scandalized voice, “Mother!”
“Oh, hello,” Mother said. “It was such a nice day, and I had some spare time, so I decided to wash all the old camp blankets. The last ones are in the washer now. Want to help me hang up?”
“But, Mother,” Dinah said. “Your new manicure!”
Mother stared at her. Her jaw dropped. She said, “I forgot all about it.”
She looked at her hands, and so did the young Carstairs. The three-dollar manicure was an utter ruin!