The Mystery of the Blazing Cliffs - M. V. Carey [24]
Jupe turned away from the window and crossed to the fireplace. He lifted the engraving of Barron International away from the wall, and he smiled.
“Finally!” he said aloud.
There was a safe under the picture. It was an old-fashioned safe and it did not have a combination lock. Instead it could be opened with a key.
Jupe guessed that Mrs. Barron was not aware that the safe was there. He wondered if Barron had found it in some antique store and had had it installed in the house after the place was moved to California. He tugged at the handle. The safe was securely locked, as he had expected. The roll top of the desk was locked, too, and so were the filing cabinets.
Jupe sat down in the armchair and imagined that he was Charles Barron. What would he lock in a safe? And would he carry the key to the safe with him when he went riding? Or would he leave it in the house? Or would he have a second key?
Jupe brightened when this idea occurred to him. Charles Barron was thorough. Surely there was a second key hidden in the house.
Jupe took heart and began to search. He knelt and felt the undersides of the chairs and the desk. He groped along the tops of the two windows and the door. He peered behind the files. At last he lifted the edge of the rug and saw a floorboard that was shorter than the others, and a different colour. He pulled at the edge of this board with his fingernails, and the board lifted up. Underneath was a compartment with the keys.
“Not really so clever, Mr. Barron,” Jupe murmured. He took the keys—three of them on a ring—and opened the safe.
There were velvet boxes in the safe—jewel boxes. Jupe opened them one after another and gazed in awe at emeralds and diamonds and rubies. There were necklaces and rings and watches and stick pins and bracelets. Most of the pieces were old-fashioned in design.
Jupe guessed that they had originally belonged to Mr. Barron’s mother.
So Mrs. Barron’s jewels were not in a safe deposit box as she believed. Did anyone else—besides Charles Barron—know that? The jewels were certainly worth stealing. But were they worth an elaborate hoax? Jupe thought not. He wondered why the jewels had been moved to the house. Then he realized that this was only one more sign of Barron’s distrust of his own world. A safe deposit box could only be as safe as the bank it was in, and Charles Barron did not believe in banks. He believed in land and gold.
Jupe locked the safe and turned to the roll-top desk.
The second key on the ring opened the desk. The first object Jupe saw when he rolled the top of the desk back was the metal clamp that had been found on the meadow that morning. Jupe turned it over in his hands, then put it aside. He sat down in the swivel chair and began to go through the chequebooks that were heaped in the desk.
There were chequebooks from a number of banks in several cities—the Prairie Bank of Milwaukee, the Desert Trust Company of Salt Lake City, the Riverside Trust Company of New York, and the Central Illinois National Bank of Springfield. Jupe flipped through the stubs in each of the books and saw that the last cheque written on each account was for the entire balance. Barron had closed out all but one of his accounts. The one that remained open was with the Santa Barbara Merchants Trust. The last entry in the cheque register for this account showed that Charles Barron had more than ten thousand dollars on deposit.
Jupe leaned back in his chair and began to read through the list of cheques, and he almost whistled aloud in astonishment. Millions of dollars had been deposited in the Santa Barbara institution in the past two years, and huge cheques had been written on the account. Some of the money had gone to pay for equipment for the ranch. There were cheques to a feed company and cheques to several oil companies and cheques to