Then Mark Hanson came by. He was home from the University for the week-end, and on his way to an afternoon date with Ellie. Mrs. Beyers met him in front of our house, and made some crack about him marrying an heiress, and he shrugged and came up on the porch to talk to Grandfather.
“Family tradition to the contrary,” he said, “I don’t think that violin is worth a button. And it can’t possibly be a Stradivarius. It has a very odd shape — too short and too wide. Did you notice?”
“One violin looks just about like another one to me,” Grandfather said.
“I talked to Mr. Gardner — he’s the orchestra director at Wiston High School. He says thousands of violins have a Stradivarius label, but all it means is that the violin maker copied a Stradivarius violin, or tried to. This one isn’t even a good copy.”
“What does Ellie think about all this?” Grandfather asked.
“Oh, she agrees with me, but we’re both worried about her mother. The truth will be a terrible blow to her, and there doesn’t seem to be a thing we can do about it. Mr. Gardner is coming over this evening to see the violin. Most likely one look is all he’ll need.”
“If it’s the wrong shape, as you say, then anyone who knows violins would see that right away. When is he coming?”
“He wasn’t sure — sometime after eight.”
“I’ll be over,” Grandfather said. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
“Glad to have you,” Mark said. “But please don’t tell anyone else he’s coming. What he has to say may not be good news, and I don’t want a big audience there.”
Mark went after Ellie, and the two of them walked back up the street hand in hand, Ellie looking pretty in a new spring dress and Mark admiring her as a fiancé should. By that time I’d gotten tired watching the procession, so I went off to play baseball; but I made a point of being on hand when Grandfather went over to Peterson’s that evening.
News has a way of getting around in Borgville, and there was a good crowd there — enough to fill the parlor, anyway. Mrs. Peterson bustled about, happy and excited, trying to feed everyone. The Peterson family legend got another kicking around, and every now and then someone would go into the dining room for another look at the violin.
It was nearly nine o’clock when Mr. Gardner came up the street, driving slowly and looking for house numbers, which very few houses in Borgville have. He had to be introduced to everyone, and he went through the motions of this in a very abrupt way, as if he wanted to get on with the business at hand. I noticed when I shook hands with him that his hands were white and soft, and sometimes he would bow to a lady and show the bald spot at the top of his head.
“It’s in here,” Mark said finally, and led him into the dining room. Miss Borg and Mrs. Peterson and Ellie went along. The rest of us crowded up to the big arch that separates the dining room from the parlor, and watched.
Miss Borg tried to give Mr. Gardner the flashlight, so he could see the label, but he waved it away. “I don’t care what’s written inside,” he said. He picked up the violin, and it came out of the case trailing loose parts. He looked at it, turned it over for a glance at the bottom, and put it back.
There wasn’t a sound in the house. In the parlor everyone had stopped breathing.
I will say this for him — he didn’t prolong the suspense.
Mrs. Peterson’s face went suddenly white. “You mean — it isn’t worth anything?”
“Worth anything?” Mr. Gardner snorted. Grandfather snorts sometimes, when he’s real disgusted, but this was a different kind of snort. A nasty kind. “It’s worth something, I suppose. If you had it fixed up, which would cost — oh, maybe fifty dollars, if you include a new case — then you might be able to sell it for twenty-five. My recommendation is that you burn it — there are enough bad violins around. One less would make the world a better place — a better place for violin teachers, anyway.”
He left without waiting to be thanked — though Mrs. Peterson was in no condition to thank him anyway. Everyone else left right after him, except Miss Borg, who was indignant, and Grandfather, who seemed very thoughtful.
“The idea!” Miss Borg said. “Why, he didn’t even look at the label!”
“If you don’t mind...” Mrs. Peterson said. Then she started to cry, and it wasn’t at all like the crying she’d done when she thought the violin was worth a lot of money.
“Don’t burn it just yet,” Grandfather said to Ellie. “I want another look at it myself.”
Ellie nodded, and Mark showed us to the front door.
“Well,” I said to Grandfather as we crossed the street, “I guess the wedding reception is back in the church basement.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “I finally remembered something,” he said.
“Something about the violin?”
“It was such a long time ago. I was only a boy, you know, when Old Eric died. But it seems...”
He went straight up to the rocking chair in his bedroom, where he usually takes his problems, and he was still rocking when I went to bed. I couldn’t see how rocking would turn Mrs. Peterson’s piece of junk into a valuable violin, but I didn’t ask him about it. There are times when it is better not to bother Grandfather with questions, and one of them is when he’s in his rocking chair.
In the morning it seemed as if all his rocking was wasted, because Sheriff Pilkins dropped in while we were still at breakfast, to ask Grandfather if he’d heard anything about a burglary the night before.
“Not yet, I haven’t,” Grandfather said. “Where was it?”
“Elizabeth Peterson’s house,” the Sheriff said. “Someone stole a violin.”
Grandfather and I yelped together. “Violin!”
“Yep. She had this violin on her dining-room table, and when she came down this morning it was gone. Naturally she can’t remember the last time she bothered to lock her doors. Funny thing, though — the burglar wasn’t really stealing it. He was buying it. He left her an envelope full of money.”
“How much money?” Grandfather asked.
“A thousand dollars.”
Grandfather whistled, and I dropped the toast into my cereal. “Last night Mr. Gardner said that violin might be worth twenty-five dollars if she spent fifty dollars fixing it up,” I said.
“So I heard,” the Sheriff said. “There are some funny angles to this case. How many people knew she had what might be a valuable violin?”
“Half of Borg County,” Grandfather said.
“Right. And how many of them knew this Mr. Gardner said the violin was practically worthless?”
“Those that were there last night, and whoever they managed to tell before they went to bed. Maybe about a fourth of Borg County.”
“That leaves a lot of people who didn’t know.”
“You won’t have any trouble narrowing down your list of suspects,” Grandfather said. “There aren’t very many people around here who’d have a ready thousand dollars for a speculative flutter on a violin.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“How is Elizabeth taking it?”
“Not very well. She’s pretty blamed mad about the whole thing. She’s sure now that the violin is worth a fortune, and someone is trying to do her out of it.”
“It’s just possible that taking a thousand dollars for that violin is more of a crime than stealing it.”
“That’s what I think myself. But Elizabeth is certain the thief wouldn’t have left the thousand if he hadn’t known it was worth a lot more. She wants her violin back, and hang the money. Which is why I’m here. You didn’t chance to notice any suspicious-looking characters hanging around last night, did you?”