The Purple Bird Mystery (11 page)

On feet that lagged slightly despite their brave words, Djuna and Jimmy pulled the screen door open. Pausing on the threshold before entering, they listened so intently for sounds inside the house that Djuna could plainly hear the thud of his heart as it banged against his ribs.

“I can’t hear a thing, can you?” Jimmy whispered.

“No. Come on.”

They tiptoed across the hall and began to mount the stairs to the second floor, keeping their ears tuned for mysterious sounds. There were none. So gradually the boys picked up speed, all but convinced that the upper floor was indeed empty now and therefore no menace. They went through the doorway to Jimmy’s room shoulder to shoulder, sharing courage, and moved over to Jimmy’s chest.

The old chest had been left where they found it, pulled a few inches from its place against the wall. After staring at the chest for some time without seeing anything that even remotely resembled a clue, Djuna sighted along the chest top toward the window. “Not even any fingerprints,” he proclaimed in some disgust. “You’d think the burglar would have left fingerprints, at least.”

“Maybe he wore gloves,” Jimmy suggested, “or wiped his fingerprints off with his handkerchief.”

“He must have. This is a great place for fingerprints, this polished wood. He opened the drawers to mess up your stuff, so he must have touched the chest somewhere beside the drawer handles.”

“Yeah, because he even pulled the chest clear out from the wall.”

“That’s another funny thing. What’d he do that for, do you suppose?”

“He must have wanted to look behind it.”

“Or else to look at the back of the chest itself. What about that?” Djuna peered down the small space between chest back and wall. “I can’t see anything down there,” he said. “Let’s push the chest back where it belongs, shall we?”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to touch anything until the police get here. That’s what all the stories say.”

“That’s right. But I don’t think anybody’ll care if we move this chest three inches! I want to look at something under there.” Djuna pointed.

“What”? asked Jimmy, startled. He stooped over and peered under the chest, following Djuna’s pointing finger. “What’s that thing?”

A small object lay on the floor, just under the front edge of the chest.

“That’s what I want to see. But don’t touch it, Jimmy,” he warned his friend. “Just help me move the chest enough so’s we can see it.”

Jimmy at once grasped one end of the heavy chest while Djuna shifted the other end back against the wall, exposing the object on the carpet.

“Heck,” said Jimmy, “it’s nothing but a little piece of wood, Djuna.”

Djuna nodded. He felt disappointed, too.

“You think it could be a clue?” Jimmy asked, trying to pump some excitement into their discovery.

“Maybe we could tell better,” said Djuna thoughtfully, “if we knew what this little piece of wood is.”

“Gosh, anybody knows that. It’s one of those things like triangles they have on the bottom of dresser drawers to hold the sides and bottom together. And to keep the drawer from going in too far when it’s shut. See the glue on it? I bet it’s off the back of one of these drawers.”

Djuna breathed, “No fooling, Jimmy! That wooden triangle’s off the back or bottom of a drawer?”

“Sure.” Jimmy nodded. “At least, maybe. It isn’t an important clue, is it?”

“I’m not sure. But if you’re right, it might mean the burglar didn’t only look
in
the drawers for whatever he wanted, but took the drawers
out
of the chest, besides!”

“You mean he might have smashed off that little piece of wood when he was opening a drawer or putting it back in again in a hurry?”

“Jeepers!” said Djuna.

“Oh, it’s probably just a chip that was knocked loose when we broke the drawer bottom,” Jimmy remembered suddenly. “And it only fell out now. It doesn’t seem important enough for a good clue.”

“If we knew where this piece of wood came from, we could tell whether it was knocked loose then or today,” Djuna said. “Mr. Boots fixed the bottom drawer. But if there’s a chip missing on one of the
other
drawers we’ll know the burglar did it, won’t we?”

“That’s right, Djuna. Let’s look, anyway.”

Djuna hesitated. “Well, we’ve gone this far, we might as well finish the job,” he decided finally. “Top one first, Jimmy. You take that end, and I’ll hold this end.” He pulled open the chest’s upper drawer and took a firm grip on the handle with his left hand and the side of the drawer with his right. “You got it, Jimmy? Hold it tight, now, and lift ’er out.”

“Clear out?”

“Yes. Careful, though.” The drawer came free of its slot without even a scrape. As Jimmy inadvertently tilted it, its contents—a wild miscellany of boy’s treasures—cascaded to one end of the drawer with a clatter.

“Hey, don’t spill my stuff!” Jimmy cried, returning the drawer to level position. “Let’s dump it out on the bed, Djuna. Then we can turn the drawer over and look for where the chip was.”

“Okay. Turn ’er upside down.” They turned the drawer over and deposited its contents on the coverlet of Jimmy’s bed. And as they did so, Djuna uttered a triumphant exclamation, dropped his end of the drawer onto the bed, pointed at a spot toward the rear of the drawer bottom, and said, “There’s where the wooden brace came from, Jimmy! See that light place? There’s some old dried-up glue there, too. So the burglar
did
take the drawers clear out of your chest! I bet …”

He broke off abruptly. For Jimmy’s eyes weren’t looking where Djuna was pointing. They were focused on an entirely different spot.

Djuna looked back at the drawer, because Jimmy was pointing now, too. “L-look at that, Djuna!” he stuttered. “It’s writing!”

“It
is,”
Djuna muttered, going around to the foot of the bed so he could see better. “Writing! Boy, that’s real old writing, too, Jimmy! Black and faint …”

“What’s it say?” Jimmy moved to stand beside Djuna and stare in fascination at the faded script somebody had traced long ago on the bottom of the drawer. “That’s a capital
F
first, isn’t it? With all those curlicues?”

“Yes.
F
and then
o
and then
w
, don’t you think?”

“And an
l
,” Jimmy said. “That spells
Fowl
, Djuna.”

Djuna laughed. “Chicken!” he said. “Or else the first part of the man’s name who built the chest. If his name was Fowler, for instance …” Djuna’s voice trailed off as he saw the unlikelihood of his theory. If the chest’s maker had started to sign his name, why hadn’t he finished it? After all, there was plenty of surface to write on, as anyone could plainly see. So what was the idea?

Jimmy was still muttering the word
Fowl
to himself in bewildered fashion when Djuna darted to the chest and called urgently, “The
second
drawer! Maybe it’ll have writing on it, too.”

Between them, they set a world’s record for emptying a chest drawer. Then they lifted the drawer out of the chest and reversed it.

Jimmy’s voice cracked. “There
is
more! Do you think it’s a good clue?”

“I never saw a plainer one in my life,” Djuna said solemnly, “and I’ve seen quite a few clues, too. What’s this one say?”

Jimmy read out without hesitation,
Relief in
. He had become accustomed to the old-fashioned flourishes on the script and could read it more readily now.

Djuna whistled.
“Relief in?
Relief in what? This is crazy, Jimmy. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Bottom
drawer!”

They took even less time to dump out the bottom drawer and pull it from the chest. Only when they reversed it, and saw the clean new wood of the drawer bottom that Mr. Boots had cunningly fitted, did they remember that this drawer would tell them nothing.

“Put ’er back in,” Jimmy directed. “This is the one the movers broke.”

They put the drawer back in.

“The others might as well go back, too,” Jimmy decided. “We saw all the words they had on ’em, Djuna.” So they replaced the two top drawers, and returned their contents without much care for their arrangement. “I’ll clean the drawers up later,” Jimmy said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and turned an awed face to Djuna. “That bottom drawer had writing on it, too!” he announced. “The reason I know it did is …”

“Because Champ found a piece of it in Mr. Boots’s shop, and it had letters on it?” Djuna finished for him, his thoughts hurrying ahead of his words.

“Right! Remember? The writing was just like the writing on these two drawers. And it said
purp
. Wasn’t that it?”

“Yes,
purp
. We laughed at Champ for finding a piece of wood that had a slang word for dog on it …”

“It still doesn’t mean anything,” said Jimmy. “Does it? You’ve had more experience with ancient inscriptions than me, of course, Djuna—”

“Fowl Relief in Purp,”
Djuna said. He shook his head, repeating the phrase several times. But he could make nothing of it. A vague memory was nagging him, however—a feeling that if he could only recall something he had forgotten, it would help him to decipher this queer inscription or at least to complete it.

Suddenly he captured the elusive thought. “Say, Jimmy,” he began, at the same instant that Jimmy turned to him and said, “Say, Djuna!”

They both stopped and laughed. “I bet we’ve thought of the same thing at the very same time,” Djuna chuckled. “That’s the way great detectives are supposed to do when they’re clicking on a case together, Jimmy! What’d you just think of? The other pieces of the broken drawer?”

“Yes!” Jimmy’s eyes were shining with detective zeal. “The pieces my father told me to throw away the day the movers broke the drawer! If we could get those pieces, and
they
have writing on them, and put them with the writing we saw on Champ’s piece from Mr. Boots’s shop, we’d know what the whole message is!”

“Then what are we standing here for?” Djuna asked. “Let’s go find ’em! Where’d you put them, Jimmy?”

They nipped out the door and down the stairs in a flash. “In the trash can out back of the house!” Jimmy called over his shoulder. “It was only three days ago, so they should still be there!” He skidded as he took the corner from the foot of the staircase into the passage that led to the kitchen. “Out the back way!” he said breathlessly, Djuna directly on his heels. “Gosh, I hope they’re still there!”

Emerging from the kitchen onto the small back porch of the house, Djuna saw the trash barrel standing under the trailing bough of a weeping willow at the edge of the woods behind the house. The barrel was so full of trash that waste paper was bulging over its top. With relief he realized that the barrel probably hadn’t been emptied since Jimmy moved in.

They arrived at the barrel together, and tipped it over without hesitation, spilling the rubbish over the turf. Jimmy scrabbled frantically in the hodgepodge of old papers, cartons, food containers and discarded wrappings that tumbled from the barrel. Then, with a yell of triumph, he sprang up with two broken pieces of board. “Here they are, Djuna!”

Djuna tried to be calm. “We’d better put that rubbish back in the barrel before we do any more detective work,” he advised out of his wide experience, “or Grandma will probably give us fits, Jimmy.”

So Jimmy and he gathered up the spilled rubbish as quickly as they could and put it back in the barrel.

“Now!” Jimmy gasped at last. “Let’s look at these boards.”

Together—and moving slowly now, as though they felt a reluctance to piece out the final meaning of the mysterious inscription on the chest drawers—they walked around to the front of the house and seated themselves on the terrace steps once more.

They turned the two broken pieces of wood until the rough splintered edges fitted together in such a way that they were sure they had the pieces as they had originally been joined in the bottom of the drawer. Then they leaned forward, scarcely breathing, to read the message that was revealed. It was in the same faded black lettering, the same thin, old-fashioned-looking writing, with its fancy flourishes. There could be no doubt that it was part of the same message whose beginning they had already seen on the bottoms of the other two drawers of Jimmy’s chest.

The writing spelled out what at first seemed to be a French phrase:
le bird
.

“Le bird?”
said Jimmy. “What’s that mean? It’s no better than the rest of that stuff!
Le bird
!
“
His voice held a vast disgust.

“Don’t forget this goes on the end of that word
Purp
we found on Champ’s piece of wood,” Djuna reminded him. “So before the movers broke it, the two words on the bottom drawer of the chest must have been
Purple bird.”

“The whole thing’s silly. A purple bird, Djuna? What’s a purple bird got to do with anything?”

Djuna shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. The complete message says:
Fowl Relief in Purple Bird. If
we got the drawer messages in the right order, that is.”

Jimmy promptly cleared up any doubts on that score. “The three drawers are all different depths,” he said, “and each one fits into a special opening. So nobody could have got the drawers mixed up.”

“All the same,” said Djuna, “this queer inscription doesn’t mean anything to me. Does it to you? It’s your chest, Jimmy, or your father’s, anyway. Maybe he’d know whether this message means anything?”

Jimmy’s denial of that possibility was vigorous. “Not a chance,” he said. “Pop never even knew there was writing on the drawers.”

“Well, then we ought to tell him right away. The writing might mean something important to him, even if we don’t understand it.”

“But he’s still in that meeting with the golf committee. They’re pretty near the most important people in the whole Club, that committee. I don’t think Pop would want us to bother him.”

“What’ll we do, then?” Djuna asked.

Suddenly a new voice unexpectedly asked, “Is anything wrong?”

Djuna and Jimmy, engrossed in their discussion, jumped. And there was Joe Morelli coming around the terrace from the direction of the woods beside the seventh fairway.