Trixie, Brian, and Jim followed Spider to the window in the second-story office. The street down below was almost deserted. Now and then a car went by, but the pedestrians were few.
There was an excellent view of the front of the showroom building. No one could possibly enter without being seen by the four watchers stationed opposite.
Trixie never left the window. Brian and Jim and Spider were not quite so vigilant. Now that they were within sight of the showroom they seemed to feel more secure. They sat around a desk in the office talking.
The minute hand on the clock began its slow journey around the dial. It was eleven fifteen. Then eleven thirty.
Brian and Jim, restless, walked around the room, unable to keep still. Trixie shuffled her feet in the chair where she sat watching.
“Why don’t you kids go on home?” Spider asked. “You need sleep if you’re going to be on the job all day tomorrow. Don’t you see how quiet everything is? I’ll stay around here till it starts to get daylight.”
“We’ll stay a while longer,” Jim insisted. “We haven’t been here an hour.”
“Yes,” Brian said, “we’ll get plenty of sleep, because the show doesn’t open till nine o’clock in the morning.”
“We’ll get the heebie-jeebies just standing around,” Spider said. “Anyone want to play cards?” He drew a pack of cards from his pocket. “How about it, Trixie?”
“I was thinking that if you’ll give me the key,” Trixie said, “I’ll go down to the showroom and finish putting the price tags on the dolls and aprons. It’s the only thing we didn’t finish.”
“Better not,” Spider said. “If you turn up the lights, someone passing is sure to think something’s wrong.”
“I don’t need to turn the light up. I can work under that bulb in the corner,” Trixie insisted. “It won’t take me long. Then I guess we’d better go on home, maybe, if Spider is going to stay here anyway.”
“Want me to go along, Trixie?” Jim asked.
“I’ll be okay, Jim,” Trixie answered. “You stay and play cards with Spider and Brian. This job will only take a few minutes.”
Trixie let herself into the showroom. Everything’s so beautiful, she thought. And it’s so quiet.
She found the square paper slips where Honey had left them on the shelf beside the lines of aprons. Carefully she spread the slips under the light and went to work.
A car went noisily by outside. It disappeared in the distance, but another sound took its place—a faint shuffle, a shuffle that came from—the back room!
Startled, Trixie put down the paper tag she was working on, and listened.
“Keep right on at what you were doing, sister!” a hoarse voice whispered.
Trixie jumped to her feet.
“An’ sit down!” the voice ordered. “Don’t make a move! Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you, sendin’ my nephew to reform school? Now it’s your turn for trouble! Sit down!”
Snipe Thompson! Trixie, shaking from head to toe, obeyed, sat back in the chair.
“Now you bend over that desk like you was workin’,” Snipe ordered. “I know your brother and that Wheeler kid and that fly cop Webster are upstairs next door. I want ’em to stay there just a little bit longer. You bein’ here makes it easier for us. We’ll promise you a little ride when we get through, sister, to pay you for your kindness. Get busy at what you were doin’!”
Trixie, frantic, not knowing which way to turn, did as Snipe ordered and tried to write the tags.
Automatically the Bob-White distress call formed on her lips. They’ll kill me for sure if I make any kind of a noise, she thought. What can I do?
Her fingers clenched the pencil. Almost without thinking about it, she began to draw three little stick figures on the tags:
Mechanically she continued drawing the same figures, her heart pounding so she could scarcely breathe.
“Bring that gold box back here!” Snipe commanded hoarsely. “Just pick it up and walk right back here. Get some of that silver on your way.”
At Snipe’s command Trixie went back and forth, back and forth, till all the silver had been carried out and seized by two masked figures.
As Trixie turned to go back into the showroom after every last bit of silver had been carried out, she saw Jim leave the entrance to the building next door. “Thank goodness,” she breathed and stood still in the partition doorway to try to obscure Snipe’s view.
It was too late!
“Get back in there and keep workin’ on those tags!” Snipe commanded. “Don’t say a word about us! I’ll have a gun trained on you every second. If that guy mentions the silver, tell him you took it out back for safekeeping. If you spill one word I’ll drill both of you!”
Jim turned the knob and came into the showroom.
“It seemed to be taking you a long time so I thought I’d see what had happened, Trixie,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, Jim,” Trixie answered slowly. “Everything’s all right. I’m just tagging the aprons, see?”
Then an idea flashed through her mind. “Take a look at the tags,” she said. “See if you think the prices are right.” Trixie gathered up a few of the paper squares topped with her SOS call.
“I’ll put them here on the desk and go on pinning others on the aprons,” she said, mindful of Snipe’s warning not to approach Jim. “Maybe you’ll think the prices are too high. Go over to the desk and look at them, Jim.”
“How do I know anything about the price of aprons?” Jim asked. “Whatever you and Honey have decided is all right. Will it take you much longer to finish your work?”
“I don’t think so, Jim.” Trixie’s voice was tense. “I’d feel better if you’d please check on the prices we’re asking,” Trixie begged, near despair.
Jim only waved his hand to show he wasn’t interested. “Whatever you and the other girls have decided,” he said, “goes for me.”
“We got some of the prices out of that page in the St. Nicholas,” Trixie said desperately. “That page of figures in that old magazine we found in the attic.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Trixie. Get the job finished as soon as you can. We’ll wait about another fifteen or twenty minutes and then I think we’d better be moving on home. Nothing around here to worry about. Say, Trixie, wasn’t there a lot of silver out here on display? That was what worried you, wasn’t it? You thought it showed too much from the street. Did you put it under cover?”
The chest where the silver had stood was next to the desk where Trixie had been filling out the tags. Jim walked over to it as he finished his question. “Hid it someplace, did you?” he asked.
Trixie, conscious of Snipe’s gun, forced herself to answer casually, “Yes, Jim. I put it out of sight.”
“Good girl!” Jim applauded. “Soon as you’re through we’ll go home. I’ll go get Brian. We’ll be back in a jiff.”
When Jim stood at the chest inquiring about the silver, Trixie made a last frightened effort to communicate with him. If only he had looked at her she could have formed words with her lips. He didn’t. In a flash, though, frantically, she dropped into Jim’s coat pocket a handful of the paper squares she had been marking. At the top of each one was the Bob-White coded call for help:
It was almost a hopeless gesture. Jim would never find the SOS call in time. How could he?
Utterly helpless, Trixie watched Jim walk across the room, open the door, and leave.
“Good thing for you you didn’t squeal!” the coarse voice from the back room whispered. “You’re a smart cooky. Now bring back that carved desk the whiskered old gent stole from us an’ … what’d you say?” he asked the man with him. “Oh, yeah, the swords, too. My frien’ here says it’s a matter of honor to get ’em both back, desk an’ swords.”
Painfully and slowly, for she was almost fainting with fear, Trixie picked up the carved lap desk and carried it to the back room. It was her first glimpse of Snipe. One loo
k at his vicious unshaven face filled her with new terror. He grabbed the desk from her roughly, then commanded, “Go back and get the swords we had—an’ a couple more for good measure!”
Two lumpy dirty bags filled with silver and the jewel box were piled at the back door. The door was at the far end of the back room. We couldn’t see that door from upstairs, Trixie thought sadly. Jim and Brian and Spider can’t see it now. Everything we have is going to be stolen and I’ll—
“Get goin’, sister!” Snipe ordered. “The swords!”
Jim will never find those paper squares, never in all the world … they’ll just find my body somewhere … oh, Moms! Daddy!
Hopelessly Trixie took the samurai swords from the wall. Slowly she went toward the back room. Snipe stood inside the door, his greedy hands stretched out. “Now come with us, sister,” he said. “We like your company.”
“Reach for the sky!” a sharp voice commanded from the alley door.
Spider stood there, his revolver covering Snipe and his accomplice.
“Drop your gun!” he ordered Snipe’s pal who held the sawed-off shotgun aimed at Trixie.
“Frisk ’em both!” Spider said to Jim and Brian.
Trixie, in the door, dropped the samurai swords and, with an exultant cry, picked up the dropped shotgun and thrust it in Jim’s hands. “Shoot ’em in the legs!” she shouted hysterically. “Then they’ll never get away! Oh, Spider! Oh, Jim! Oh, Brian!” Her knees buckled and she dropped into a nearby chair.
Jim and Brian quickly tied the arms of the two men. Spider’s shrill whistle brought the patrolman on the run. He summoned the patrol car, and, when it came, the trussed thieves were loaded into it.
Where scarcely a soul had been on the street a few moments before, a crowd milled. Brian and Jim, and Trixie, too, who had recovered miraculously, restored the nearly stolen articles to their places in the showroom.
Then they watched while Spider nailed bars across the back door.
With a quick look around, the trio went out the front door, locked it behind them, and crossed the street to Brian’s jalopy.
“I never want to live through another half hour like that one,” Trixie said wearily. “Why couldn’t you see that I was trying to tell you something, Jim?”
“I’m just dumb, I guess, Trixie,” Jim said unhappily. “I thought you’d really flipped when you kept talking about the price of the aprons.”
“But I tried so hard to let you know. Snipe held that gun on me all the time.”
“Let’s not think of that,” Brian said, clutching the wheel of his jalopy tightly.
“I even tried to tell you about that page in St. Nicholas magazine,” Trixie went on.
“I know,” Jim said. “That’s what made me wonder when I went back upstairs. It sounded so crazy.”
“How did you finally find out?” Trixie asked. “Did you find the SOS?”
“Did he?” Brian shouted. “He pulled that bunch of price tags out of his pocket when he stuffed his gloves in there. He hit the ceiling!”
“Then we all hit the stairs!” Jim added. “I’d like to get my hands on that Snipe Thompson!”
“He’ll go to prison now for sure,” Trixie said. “Maybe he’ll stay there this time. Gee, I hope Moms and Dad won’t be mad at me.”
“They won’t be,” Brian said. “They’re pretty swell!”
The next day crowds thronged the showroom from the opening hour until it closed. Every article on the sales side of the room was sold, with orders for more.
Mr. Stratton and the members of the school board all came. They bought things and walked around as proudly as though they had originated the idea of the antique show.
At eight o’clock Jim and Trixie locked the front door and drew the blinds. All the borrowed antiques had to be returned to the owners that night. Regan and Tom carried them to the waiting station wagon and pickup truck parked in back of the building.
“Forget them,” Regan told the Bob-Whites. “Tom and I’ll deliver them.”
Spider put the day’s receipts into a strongbox and handed the heavy box to Trixie for safekeeping.
At home in the Belden kitchen, Trixie, Honey, Diana, Jim, Brian, and Mart counted the money.
The total sent them whooping around the kitchen like Indians.
It amounted to $763.94!
“We still haven’t sold the rings that were in the musical jewel box,” Jim said. “I don’t know how much more money that will mean.”
“Spider’s almost sure Trixie will get a reward for helping capture Snipe Thompson and his pal,” Mart said. “Do you know, I think the detective business may not be a bad business to get into after all. This is about the third reward Trixie will have had.”
“If there is any reward, it will go into the UNICEF fund,” Trixie said, “and,” she added ruefully, “Moms said there must be no more detective work till school’s out.”
“Did you promise?” Honey asked hopefully.
“No,” Trixie said, her blue eyes brightening. “No, I don’t believe Moms asked me to promise.”
The Mysterious Code Page 15
