The Counterfeit Mystery

by Norvin Pallas

  “Not much stamina, these young people,” said Mr. Smith with a shake of his head, but nodding toward his wife. “We used to stay out till dawn.”

  Upon arriving back at the farm, they climbed out of the wagon, brushed themselves off, and began to gather their things together.

  “Don’t forget about my purple cow, Ted,” the farmer called after him. “You’ll have to come out and see her when you’ve got time.”

  “I’ll remember,” Ted promised, without exactly promising to come. His curiosity was beginning to mount, however. Why did Mr. Smith keep insisting that he had a purple cow, and what made him think that Ted in particular would be interested? It was just one more incident to file away in the back of his mind.

  “We had a wonderful time, Mrs. Smith,” he called. “Maybe we’ll be doing this again sometime.”

  “We were glad to have you, Ted, and all the others. Come back soon.”

  With that the party broke up, and cars began to file out of the farmyard. Ted was with Nancy in the back seat of Nelson’s car, as before.

  “Well, I’d say we had a pretty good time, wouldn’t you, Ted?” asked Nelson.

  “Sure did.”

  “These girls planned a real shindig for us. We’ll have to plan something back. How long before you leave town, Ted?”

  “About another couple of weeks yet.”

  “Well, that’ll give us some time. You’ll be here for a while, too, won’t you, Nancy?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll stay as long as I can. I’m still looking for my lost town.”

  “I’ll drop Nancy off first, Ted. Then I’ll take you home, if you want me to.”

  “No, thanks,” said Ted happily. “I can walk, and maybe Nancy will let me talk with her for a while.”

  They got out in front of her apartment house, and Nelson drove off amid an exchange of good nights. Ted and Nancy stood on the sidewalk for a moment, then walked slowly toward the steps. They were home earlier than expected, and there didn’t seem any particular reason to hurry.

  “Did you mean it, Nancy, about losing a town, or was that just a story?”

  “No, I’ve really lost it, Ted. It’s hard for me to understand what happened to it, for I’m sure there was a town named Freeport at one time. I never expected any difficulty, but by the time I came way out here I found no one had ever heard of it.”

  “Is it really important to you that you find it, or is it just a matter of curiosity?”

  He thought that her face suddenly sobered. “I feel that it’s awfully important, Ted. I don’t mean in the way of money, or anything like that. My grandparents did own some property in Freeport, but I suppose that’s all been disposed of. No, I want it for a reason which seems to me much more important than that. What I want most is to find out who I am.”

  “Who you are?” asked Ted, puzzled. “You’re Nancy Lindell, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s my name. But what’s a name, after all? Two people might have the same name, and yet they’d be altogether different persons. What I want most is to find out what sort of person I am.”

  “And you think finding Freeport would help you?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated a moment, then went on, “Perhaps you didn’t know it, Ted, but my mother and father died when I was very small. I can hardly remember them now. I’ve never known my family at all.”

  “You’ve known your aunt,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, although she isn’t really my aunt. She’s a second cousin, and she knows very little about my family. Especially, she doesn’t know anything about Freeport, or my grandmother, the mayor, for they are on opposite sides of my family.”

  “Supposing you did find Freeport, Nancy—then what?”

  “Well, I’d try to find out more about my grandmother, and perhaps about my father when he was a little boy. I don’t know whether I can make you understand, Ted, but it seems to me something like this. A person tends to become what the people around him want him to become. If I had been raised by my father and mother, then they would have brought me up in a certain way, and I would have become a certain kind of person. But that didn’t happen to me. I don’t know what sort of persons they were, or what they would have expected of me. Until I know that, I won’t know just what sort of person they would have wanted me to be. Does this sound awfully silly, Ted?”

  “No, I don’t think so, Nancy,” he said musingly. “You mean, if your parents had lived, you might have become a different sort of person than you are now. And you’d sort of like to find out what this different person would have been like, and perhaps become more like that person yourself.”

  “That’s it, Ted. And if I could find out before I went to college, I think it might help me to decide which way I want to point my life, what I want to do and to become.”

  “Will you let me help you, Nancy?”

  “Help me in what way, Ted?”

  “Well, why don’t we have lunch together tomorrow, and then stop at the library and see what we can find out about your Freeport? Maybe it won’t be so hard after all.”

  “That sounds interesting, Ted. Let’s do it. And thank you for a wonderful evening. Margaret isn’t angry with me, is she?”

  “Oh, no, not at all.”

  “I’m glad, because she’s an awfully nice girl, Ted, and I know you’ve been friends for a long time. Good night.”

  “Good night, Nancy.” He waited till she was upstairs, and he saw brighter lights flash on in the apartment overhead.

  CHAPTER 10

  PURPLE MONDAY

  Shortly after noon on Monday, having had lunch at the restaurant, Ted and Nancy visited the library. Having explained their mission to the librarian, she gave them a huge volume that listed all the cities, towns, and villages in the entire state. They immediately turned to the F’s, but running down the list soon determined that Freeport was not listed.

  “There’s a Fremont,” Ted observed, “but that’s as close as we can come.”

  Nancy looked disappointed, but was not prepared to give up. “It’s just possible that the name has been changed, or the town annexed to a larger city, since my grandmother’s day. Is there any way we can check on that?”

  They discovered that whenever such a thing occurred, the old name or names were listed in parentheses after the present name. There seemed to be no way to discover these older names except by going through the entire list. It was a long job, consuming most of the remainder of their lunch hour, and when it was finished they were no nearer to their goal than they had been before.

  “I can’t understand it,” said Nancy thoughtfully. “I’m certain there was a town of Freeport, even though there seems to be no record of it now. From the way my grandmother described it, it must have had several thousand people. And there was a town square, and a village hall and fire wagon, and she mentioned a waterfall above the town.” She considered for a few moments. “I wonder if Freeport could be a ghost town—someplace where people used to live but everyone has now moved away for some reason or other.”

  Ted grinned. “If it was a ghost town, it’s probably disappeared by now. The tourists would have carried it away piece by piece. We can easily check on that, though. I remember seeing a book about all the ghost towns in the state.”

  He found the volume he was looking for without much trouble, and they went through it rapidly. There were only half-a-dozen hamlets which could be considered ghost towns by any stretch of the imagination, and none of these fitted the bill. None had been named Freeport, nor did any of them seem large enough to have a mayor.

  “Well, we really didn’t get anywhere,” Ted decided as they left the library.

  “At least we know a few things that won’t help us,” Nancy pointed out, “and sometimes that can be a big help. It does seem silly to believe a person could have lost a whole town, doesn’t it?”

 
; “Especially one as large as this,” Ted decided. “Well, we won’t give up on it entirely. I’ll ask around among some old-timers, just to see if they can remember anything about Freeport. Maybe something will turn up.”

  After leaving Nancy, it occurred to Ted that it might be amusing to put an ad in the Town Crier: “Lost, one town, name of Freeport, believed to have been governed by a woman mayor. Will finder please advise the Town Crier. No personal questions will be asked.”

  Silly, of course, but a newspaper item just might turn the trick, if their other resources failed.

  Ted was seeing less than usual of Mr. Woodring these dap. He rushed around from one appointment to another, and the stamp plan seemed to be catching fire. Ted had seen him only briefly that morning, but late in the afternoon Mr. Woodring came in. It was just a little early, and he seemed to have a little time to spare.

  “Well, what have you been doing with yourself, Ted?” he asked, for they had become more friendly in the last few days.

  “Oh, we had a hayride Saturday night,” Ted explained. “Nancy—you remember her—claims that there is—or was—a town named Freeport in this state, but no one ever heard of it. Did you, by any chance??’

  “No, I don’t think so, though I’m not very well acquainted in this state. I know a Fremont, of course.”

  “No, she says it isn’t Fremont. Well, I’m planning on asking some of the older residents.”

  “How did the young people like the stamps?” asked Mr. Woodring, changing the subject.

  “Oh, I guess they like them all right. Most of the boys make fun of them, but then I guess boys don’t do very much shopping anyway—not enough to bother saving stamps. They did kind of tease me about the stamps, though.”

  “What about them?” asked Mr. Woodring, alert to any possible criticism of the stamp plan which might affect their business adversely.

  “Just the color of the stamps. Everybody else says they’re blue, but they look sort of purple to me. So of course that started them kidding me about the purple cow.”

  Mr. Woodring seemed to have pricked up his ears. “What makes you think the stamps are purple?”

  “Oh—I don’t know. Don’t they look a little bit purple to you?”

  “Of course not.” He was probably speaking more harshly than he intended. “They look like a pure blue to me.”

  Ted could see that Mr. Woodring was upset and he tried to smooth things over. “Oh, well, maybe I was just expecting too much. I hope you don’t think I’ve been shooting off my mouth. I certainly didn’t want to do anything to hurt the stamp plan, and I don’t think I did. It’s just the way a young crowd gets to kidding around.”

  “I understand.” But Mr. Woodring acted as though he didn’t understand, and his thoughts might have been a hundred miles away. He hardly said good night as Ted packed, up his few things and left for the night.

  Ted’s earlier doubts about the color of the stamps had almost disappeared but now he began to wonder. If Mr. Woodring was upset about this talk about a purple cow... did he really have anything to get upset about? The matter remained on his mind during supper and afterward as he tried to settle down to the evening paper. Why did those stamps look purplish to him and to Nancy, while they looked normal to everyone else? It didn’t seem possible that the two of them had suddenly become color blind. Surely there must have been something in their past experience, some conditioning influence, which led them to regard those stamps in a different light than other people did. What was different about Nancy and him? Then, suddenly, he had it, and sat bolt upright. That was it, of course! He almost ran to the telephone to put through a call to Nelson.

  “Say, Nel, can you come over right away?”

  “Sure. But what’s up, Ted? You sound excited.”

  “Something about those stamps. Don’t say anything to anybody else. I’ll explain it to you when you get here.”

  His voice must have sounded urgent because Nelson drove up hardly five minutes later.

  “O.K., Ted, let’s have it. You’ve got me almost jumping out of my skin with curiosity.”

  They sat down on the swing, and Ted began with an air of suppressed excitement:

  “You say these stamps still look blue to you, don’t you?”

  “Yes, and they look purple to you, don’t they?”

  “Well, purplish, anyway. Now what makes you think they’re blue? You’re comparing them with other blues you have known in the past, and they seem all right to you and almost everybody in town. But they don’t look right to Nancy and to me. Now why don’t they?”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “Because Nancy and I are comparing them with something else. We saw different stamps, and we know that these aren’t the same. The others were a pure blue, just like those on the posters at the office.”

  “Where did you see these other stamps?” asked Nelson.

  “At the Town Crier office, the day Mr. Woodring first came in to talk about his plan.”

  “Did anybody else see them?”

  “I’m trying to think. Mr. Dobson passed them over to us, but he didn’t have his reading glasses on, so I don’t think he paid any attention to them. Carl Allison wasn’t in, and Miss Monroe came in just as Mr. Woodring was leaving, so she didn’t see them either.”

  “You don’t have any samples of those other stamps now?”

  “No, Mr. Woodring took them back. The only stamps anyone else has seen are the ones the stores have put in circulation, mostly Kirtland’s. And those stamps are all more purple than the old stamps.”

  Suddenly Nelson began to grasp what Ted was driving at. “Hey, Ted, you think maybe these new stamps are counterfeits?”

  “Blazes, I don’t know. Let’s try to figure out if they could be. Trading stamps aren’t quite the same as money. You know how it is with currency or coins. Hardly anybody could tell you where he got every bill or every coin he’s carrying around with him, and just in case he could, the person he got the bill from probably couldn’t tell you where he got it. Money circulates so rapidly and through so many hands that if you try to trace a counterfeit bill it isn’t going to be very long before you lose track of it. Even if you do find the counterfeiter, he could claim to be just an innocent party.

  “Stamps are different. People hardly ever pass them around from one to the other. The Blue Harvest company distributes them to their salesmen, the salesmen sell them to the stores, the stores give them to their customers, and the customers turn them back to the Blue Harvest company for redemption. That means there aren’t very many people involved, and that most people will know where they got their stamps.”

  “Well, supposing these stamps are counterfeits, who’s responsible?”

  “Let’s work it out. It couldn’t be Kirtland’s and the other stores. Apparently they’ve all got the purple stamps. And I don’t see how it could be the Blue Harvest company. After all, they print the stamps. Anything they say is good, is good. They could print any kind of stamp they want, as long as they’re willing to redeem it. Of course they could print some stamps and later claim they were counterfeit so they wouldn’t have to redeem them afterward. But by the time they tried that the whole stamp plan would collapse, and I don’t think that’s what they want. They’re trying to build up confidence in these stamps, so they can stay in business for a long time.”

  “So that leaves—” said Nelson meaningfully.

  “Yes,” said Ted with deep regret, “that leaves nobody else but Mr. Woodring. If these stamps are counterfeit, he’d have to be responsible. There just isn’t anybody else available.”

  “But what would he have to gain from it, Ted?”

  “Well, I suppose there must be some way for him to make money on the deal. I imagine, when he turns over a batch of stamps to Kirtland’s, the store pays him for the stamps, and then he has to account back to his company for t
he stamps he has sold. But if he sold Kirtland’s some phony stamps he’d printed himself, he could just put the money in his pocket, and the Blue Harvest company wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “But when people began to turn these stamps in for redemption, wouldn’t Blue Harvest know then?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe Mr. Woodring hoped that the counterfeits were so good that the Blue Harvest company wouldn’t notice the difference. It turned out that they weren’t that good, and that’s what led to his trouble.”

  “But even supposing, Ted, that the counterfeits were very good imitations, wouldn’t the Blue Harvest company soon notice they were getting more stamps back than they were giving out?”

  “I suppose so, but maybe that would take quite a few months. Mr. Woodring could plan on pulling out before then.”

  Suddenly Nelson pounded his hand into his fist. “Maybe there’s another way for Mr. Woodring to make money, Ted—a lot of money. There are lots of different kinds of trading stamps, and the business must be awfully competitive. Maybe one of these other companies hired Mr. Woodring to put fake Blue Harvest stamps into circulation, in order to discredit the Blue Harvest company and send them out of business.”

  “That may be. Oh, I suppose there are lots of ways an unscrupulous person could make money on a deal like this. For example—I don’t think this really happened, but it’s just a possibility—one of the North Ridge stores could have hired Mr. Woodring to discredit the Blue Harvest stamps. Only one thing really bothers me. These stamps are different. If anybody saw both the old and the new stamps, he’d notice the difference right off. Would Mr. Woodring be able to take a chance like that? At least he’d want counterfeits that were good enough so he wouldn’t get tripped up right away.”

  “Don’t you see, Ted, it has to be that way,” Nelson pointed out. “These counterfeits had to be poor, so that the difference would be quickly noticed. That would be the only way the stamps could be easily discredited.”

  “Yes, that may be right. But if so, then Mr. Woodring wouldn’t be planning on hanging around very long. As soon as he knew he’d worked all the damage he could, he’d light out. Oh, oh, I just thought of something terrible!”