Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Disgusting Sneakers (7 page)

So she was talking about something else when she said, “I’ve decided to get rid of the gray. I don’t like it.… No, the length is all right.”

Encyclopedia realized she was talking
about her
hair
. She was making an appointment with the beauty parlor in the shopping center!

That’s where the boys found her.

She said she had put the gray skirt in Ike’s shopping bag by mistake and moved it from the front door to her bedroom closet.

Ike returned the pamphlet to Hewitt just in time!

The thief was Ann, who knew too much.

She told Tessie Bottoms that someone had stolen Phoebe’s right sneaker while Phoebe was clipping her “toenails.”

That was her slip.

Only the thief, having seen Phoebe in the garage, could have known she was clipping her toenails, not her fingernails.

Phoebe had told Ann merely that she was clipping her “nails.”

When Encyclopedia pointed out her mistake, Ann confessed. She gave Phoebe her third prize, a can of foot powder.

“Wait till next year,” Phoebe vowed.

The word
copy
tipped off Encyclopedia.

If the boxes were searched in the United States, the police would think the clay pots were only cheap copies.

The pots were actually three thousand years old and worth a fortune.

Had the pots really been meant for sale in Spain as cheap copies,
copy
would not have
been written in English. It would have been written in
Spanish
, as were the fake addresses on the boxes.

Chief Brown checked. The pots had been stolen from a museum in South America. They were to be sold in the United States to a dishonest dealer, who would rub the word
copy
off each pot. He would then sell the pots at their true worth to rich, unsuspecting U.S. customers.

The smugglers were arrested.