The Mystery of the Blazing Cliffs - M. V. Carey [41]
Jupe smiled at Mary. “In time we’ll probably find that it was you who suggested to Barron that the radio be monitored,” he said, “and not Barron who asked you to listen. It was your radio, wasn’t it? And there was a tape recorder hidden in it. The message from the spaceship was on tape, just like the President’s message.”
Mary’s air of competence had deserted her. She seemed almost in tears. “I don’t know anything about it,” she insisted.
“Yes, you do, Mary,” said Jupe. “You and the lieutenant are friends—good friends.
Elsie has a picture in her room. It’s a picture taken at a New Year’s Eve party. There is a dancing couple in the background—a young woman with long, fair hair is dancing with a bearded young man. You cut your hair before you came here, Mary, or I’d have recognized you instantly. And Lieutenant Ferrante, alias Spratt, shaved off his beard.”
“You want me to shoot this kid?” asked Bones.
“You shoot Jupe and you’ve got to shoot everybody in this room,” said Hank Detweiler grimly. “If you want to be tried for a mass murder, well …” He made a gesture as if to say that he did not greatly care.
Then he turned to look at Elsie. “You really are a find,” he said. “I should have had my head examined, getting you the job here.”
“What did you expect?” she cried. “Am I supposed to be grateful for a chance to cook and scrub and worry about leftovers for the rest of my life? And watch Jack grow old in that rotten little shop, making a nickel here and a dime there? We were meant for better things!”
“Like what?” roared Detweiler. “The women’s prison at Frontera?”
“Don’t say that!” wailed Elsie. She stood up, her face frantic. “We’ve got to go, Jack,”
she said to the lieutenant. “Get out of here. It’s late and … and we’ve got to …”
She stopped. There was a distant sound of cars on the drive.
“Someone’s coming!” said Bones.
Jupe looked past Bones and through the side window. He saw a lithe, muscular shape dash from behind a clump of bushes to the big house, grab the cellar door, and slam it shut over the stairwell. The person then sat down on the door and watched as Charles Barron marched from behind a corner of the big house. Barron faced the guard who had been left in the drive.
“Don’t try any violence,” Barron warned. “My wife will be here at any moment with the police.”
Barron had scarcely uttered the words before two cars from the sheriff’s department roared up the drive. They stopped with screeching tyres just beyond the ranch house. The back door of one car opened and Mrs. Barron leaped out.
“Ernestine, be careful!” cried Charles Barron. “You could be killed doing that!”
“Yes, dear,” she said as she ran over to him.
The armed guard by Barron sized up the situation. He dropped his rifle and put up his hands.
There was a thumping at the cellar door and Pete leaped aside. The door flew up and Ferrante’s three men started out, then froze where they were at the sight of the cars. The sheriff’s men were tumbling out of the vehicles with their guns drawn.
Barron gestured toward the men in the cellar doorway. “They’re all tired out from digging for treasure,” he told the deputies. “You’ll find two more tied up by the dam. And there are a couple more in the ranch-house kitchen, where my youngest guest Jupiter Jones has been keeping them entertained. I don’t think they’ll give you any trouble. Jupiter has probably convinced them that it would do them no good.”
He began to chuckle. “There may be hope for us yet,” he said. “We have some very fine young people today.”
Chapter 18
Mr. Sebastian Asks Some Questions
ON A BRIGHT AFTERNOON about ten days after they returned to Rocky Beach, the Three Investigators set out on their bikes. They passed the beach community of Malibu, then turned off the Pacific Coast Highway on to the rutted side road called Cypress Canyon Drive.
At the end of the drive lived Mr. Hector Sebastian, a friend of the boys.