“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:
“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!”
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.”
“But who would know about the clock and the messages?” Bob demanded. “That’s what I don’t see.”
“Well, we know Mr. Jeeters knows about the clock,” Jupiter said. “And he may have told someone else. And then there are Carlos and Gerald Cramer. We obligingly told them almost everything before we learned it was the wrong Gerald. So several people know quite a bit about our activities.”
“Too much to suit me!” Pete grumbled. “Is that message Bob got as wild as the ones we have, Jupe?”
Jupe spread out the message Bob had handed him.
“It is equally incomprehensible,” he said.
“Can’t you just say it’s a skullbuster?” Pete groaned. “Why be a walking dictionary?”
“All right,” Jupiter agreed, with a slight grin. “It’s a ring-tailed, double-barrelled skullbuster. Is that better?”
“Now you’re talking my language!” Pete said.
“Now let’s see if we can make any sense out of it,” Jupiter went on. “First, Bob, give me a full report on your meeting with Mr. King and with Miss Imogene Taylor.”
Bob did so, and Jupe listened carefully, making mental notes.
“So Mr. King is sick in the hospital,” he murmured. “And Mr. Clock sent the clock to him thinking he would investigate and get all these messages and solve them — and then what? That’s the question.”
“The message pasted to the bottom of the clock said, ‘Then act. You’ll be glad you did’,” Bob reminded him.
“Exactly,” Jupiter said. “But why would he be glad? What would happen? It’s up to us to find out. Now let’s take the messages in order. The message Bob and Harry got from Miss Taylor is obviously first, so let’s study it first.”
He spread out the message and they all stared at it. It still said:
“Speak for yourself,” Pete said gloomily.
“At first glance,” Jupe went on, “these peculiar sentences look something like the definitions of words in a crossword puzzle. My deduction is that each line means one word, and when we get all the words, we’ll have a message six words long.”
“But what words?” Pete wanted to know. “Where is it quiet even in a hurricane?”
“The best place to be in a hurricane is in a storm cellar,” Harry said.
“Or a bank vault,” Bob added.
“I don’t know.” Jupiter pinched his lip. “Maybe a bank vault would fit. We’re probably talking about something valuable, you know — ”
“How do you figure that?” Pete demanded.
“Why go to so much trouble unless it’s about something valuable?” Jupiter asked. “No, it’s about something valuable and it could be in a bank vault. Now let’s go on to line two. It says,
Now, what other words are there for ‘advice’? Pete, hand me that dictionary on the shelf.”
Pete handed him the dictionary from a shelf of books, and Jupiter leafed through it.
“Here we are,” he said, “ ‘Advice: an opinion or recommendation to a course of action.’ Let’s see how that fits. Bank vault — opinion —… It doesn’t sound right.”
“It sure doesn’t,” Pete agreed. “If you want my suggestion — ”
“Pete, stop!” Jupiter cried.
Pete stared at him. “Stop? Why? I was just going to tell you my suggestion — ”
“That’s it!” Jupiter told him. “Suggestion. A suggestion would be a polite way to give advice, wouldn’t it? I think you’ve solved the line for us.”
Pete blinked. “Then maybe it isn’t so hard after all,” he said. “Still, I don’t make any sense out of ‘bank vault — suggestion’.”
“Neither do I,” Jupiter agreed. “But we still have to get the rest of the words.”
“The third line is,
“Bank vault — suggestion — battle!” Harry exclaimed. “That’s worse than ever.”
“I agree,” Jupiter said, frowning. “But — ”
At that moment his aunt’s voice came in through the open skylight.
“Jupiter! Dinner-time. We’re closing up shop.”
“I’ll be right there, Aunt Mathilda,” Jupiter said into a microphone that connected with a speaker in his aunt’s office. To the others he said:
“I guess we’ll have to quit for the day. Harry, can you come back tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so,” Harry told him. “My mother needs me to help her round the house. Besides, I can’t see that we’re getting anywhere.”
“Well, then we’ll keep in touch with you,” Jupiter answered. “You can keep an eye on Mr. Jeeters. Don’t forget how Mr. Jeeters tried to get that clock from us. Maybe he was the one who followed you and Bob and stole the clock from the parked car.”
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Harry agreed. “I don’t trust him. He’s up to something.”
“Meanwhile we three — ” Jupiter began. He was interrupted again, this time by the ringing of the telephone. He picked it up.
“Three Investigators, Jupiter Jones speaking,” he said.
“Hello,” said a voice he couldn’t place at first. “This is Gerald Watson. You called at my home this afternoon for a message from Bert Clock.”
“Yes, sir?” Jupiter answered.
“Well, I’ve been thinking it over and I just thought I ought to tell you — since you left me your card — about what happened after you left.”
“Something happened?” Jupiter asked.
“Someone else came asking for the message,”
Mr. Watson told him. “A tall, dark-haired South American with a small friend. They said Bert Clock had sent them.”
“But you couldn’t give them the message,” Jupiter said, puzzled. “You’d already given it to us.”
“That’s true,” Mr. Watson said. “But they asked whom I had given it to and I showed them your card. They copied down your names. I began to wonder whether I had done the right thing. I didn’t like them very much — that Carlos was too smooth a talker.”
“It can’t be helped,” Jupiter said. “Thank you for letting me know, Mr. Watson.”
He hung up and turned to the others.
“Carlos and Gerald Cramer know our names now,” he said. “They undoubtedly want the messages and the clock. Mr. Jeeters wanted the clock. Some unknown person, maybe a third party we haven’t met yet, actually stole the clock. There’s an awful lot of interest in this mystery, and I wish I knew just what we’re in the middle of.”