“No, sir,” Jupiter agreed. “It was a spooky radio show, wasn’t it?”
“The spookiest,” Gerald Watson said. “Used to open with a scream — Bert Clock did the screaming — and then went on to all kinds of weird mysteries. Bert and Rex King wrote it. I believe Bert suggested the plots and Rex wrote them. He was very good at puzzles and clues and so on. Well, well, that’s ancient history.
“What are you here for, anyway, boys? Not selling magazine subscriptions, I hope?”
“We’ve come for a message that Mr. Clock sent you,” Jupiter said. “He left another message saying to ask you for it.”
“Oh, the message!” Mr. Watson quickly brightened up. “Yes, yes, of course. Out of the blue it came — haven’t heard from Bert Clock in years, except for Christmas cards. Come in, come in. I’m sure I can dig up that message for you.”
He led them into the house, into a neat and tidy room whose main feature was a big tape recorder and a shelf that held box after box of recorded tapes. From a desk drawer he drew an envelope. It had been opened. “Here you are,” Mr. Gerald Watson said. “I opened it — curiosity got too strong for me. But I couldn’t understand a word of it.”
Jupiter took out the message and he and Pete examined it. It said:
Take one lily; kill my friend Eli. Positively number one. Take abroom and swat a bee. What you do with clothes, almost. Not Mother, not Sister, not Brother; but perhaps Father. Hymns?Hams? Homes? Almost, not quite.
“Isn’t that a dandy message?” Mr. Watson asked as they read it. “I tried to figure out what it means, but I didn’t get anywhere. That first line — I never knew any friend of Bert’s named Eli. Sounds as if he meant to kill Eli and put a lily on his chest, doesn’t it?” He chuckled. “ ‘Give it to anyone who comes asking for a message,’ he said, and you did, and I have, so there it is. By the way, I don’t think I know who you are.”
“Oh, excuse me, here’s our card.” Jupiter gave him a Three Investigators business card. Mr. Watson studied it gravely, then shook their hands.
“Delighted to meet you,” he said. “If you’re interested in Bert Clock, perhaps you’d like to hear some of the old radio shows we did together — the ones that started with him screaming. They were jim-dandies! Every time he screamed differently. And the plots! They don’t write shows like that for television these days. All those boxes of tape you see — they hold every show I did with Bert Clock.”
Pete and Jupiter were tempted. They knew that some of the old radio shows had been much spookier than anything on television now. But they really couldn’t spare the time. So they said good-bye and went out to the waiting car, still puzzling over the message. Jupiter asked Worthington to take them back to The Jones Salvage Yard, and said to Pete, “I hope Bob and Harry will be there when we get back. If they managed to get a message, too, we’ll put them all together and see if we can puzzle them out.”
Bob and Harry, however, were not at Headquarters — at least not Headquarters for The Three Investigators. They were at the Rocky Beach police headquarters, being led into Chief Reynolds’s office by the policeman who had arrested Harry for speeding.
“The chief says he knows you,” the officer said to Bob. “But don’t think you’ll get away with anything. You speed-happy kids are a menace to decent citizens!”
He led them into an office where Chief Reynolds, a heavy-set man, sat behind a big desk covered with papers. The chief looked up.
“Well, Bob,” he said, “I’m sorry to see you here. What Officer Zebert tells me sounds rather serious. Driving recklessly over the mountains, could have killed both of you and maybe other people, too.”
“Excuse me, Chief,” Bob said. “We weren’t driving recklessly. We were being chased by another car. It had just caught us when Officer Zebert came up, and the other driver got away.”
“Being chased, eh?” The officer smiled knowingly.
“You should have seen them going round those curves, Chief! Then they were racing side by side down Mountain Road. If anyone else had come along then, they would have all been killed.”
“Now why should another car chase you?” Chief Reynolds asked. “Anyone could guess you wouldn’t be carrying much money with you.”
“We’re on a case,” Bob said. “We’re investigating a mysterious clock.”
“A mysterious clock!” It was Officer Zebert who spoke. “Did you ever hear such a crazy story, Chief?”
“It’s true,” Bob insisted doggedly. “We investigated a green ghost once, Chief. You remember that time. You even asked us — that is, Jupiter Jones and Pete Crenshaw and me — to help you find out what it was.”
He was referring to a mystery which Chief Reynolds at the time had frankly admitted had him totally baffled. Now the chief nodded.
“That’s true,” he said. “Where is this clock and what’s so mysterious about it?”
“It’s in the car out back,” Bob said. “If we could bring it in, we could show you why it’s so queer.”
“Right!” the chief said. “Zebert, go bring the clock here.”
“It’s in a zipper bag on the front seat,” Bob said, as the officer departed. “You know I want to believe you, Bob,” the chief said as they waited. “But we’ve had so much speeding and reckless driving by teenagers that we have to do something about it — Here comes Officer Zebert. Did you find the clock, Zebert?”
The officer shook his head.
“Nothing there,” he said. “The front seat’s empty. No clock, No bag. Nothing — ”
Bob and Harry stared at each other.
“Golly!” Bob exclaimed. “The clock’s been stolen!”
12
Questions — But No Answers
“I wonder what’s keeping Bob and Harry?” Pete said as Jupiter, at his desk in Headquarters, bent over the message from Mr. Watson. “I’ll take a look outside and see if they’re coming yet.”
He went to the corner, where a length of thin stovepipe came down from the roof. From this Jupiter had fashioned a periscope which he called the See-All. Junk was piled as high as the roof around the trailer, hiding it from the outside world, and it was necessary to use the See-All to see over it.
Pete took a quick look and reported that Harry’s car had just driven into the yard. A few moments later a code rap came on the trapdoor which opened into Tunnel Two. Pete lifted the trapdoor and Bob and Harry, looking rather tired, climbed into the office.
“Did you get the message?” asked Jupiter.
“We got a message, yes,” Bob said. “But we can’t understand it.”
“May I see it?” Jupiter requested. “And do you have the clock?”
“Well, no, I don’t have it.” Bob looked unhappy.
Jupiter glanced at him sharply. “You’ve lost the clock?”
“It was stolen!” Harry blurted out. “While the car was parked at the police station.”
“What were you doing at the police station?” Pete asked. “Did you run into something too big to handle?”
“We were arrested for speeding,” Harry reported. “You see, coming over the hills someone started chasing us — ”
Between them he and Bob told the story of their adventure. Bob finished up by saying, “Chief Reynolds finally let us go. He said he didn’t know what we were mixing into, but if it was something important enough to be chased for, we’d better turn it over to the police.”
“I don’t think the police would really be interested in what we know so far,” Jupiter said. “They would be inclined to call it some kind of joke. We ran into a little trouble, too.”
He and Pete told of their encounter with Carlos and the little man, who, Jupiter now said, looked like a jockey or an ex-jockey.
“So you see,” he said, “someone’s interested in the clock and the messages. The clock was probably stolen by the same man who chased you two. When he saw the officer taking you to police headquarters, he followed and took the clock from the car.”