The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale - Marc Brandel [4]
“Maybe someone reported the stranded whale,” Pete suggested after a moment. “And they sent some men down to rescue it.”
“Good reasoning,” Jupe told him approvingly. When he said that, it usually meant he had just been thinking the same thing himself. “Now, if someone saw a whale swimming around in a homemade pool on the beach, who would they call, I wonder?”
He did not wait for an answer. He was already walking back to their bicycles. Pete and Bob rolled up the tarpaulin and followed him.
“Ocean World.” Jupiter answered his own question a half hour later. “That’s who they’d probably call.”
The Three Investigators were sitting in their Headquarters in the junkyard.
Headquarters was a thirty-foot mobile home trailer that Titus Jones had bought a long time ago and had never been able to sell. Gradually great heaps of junk had been carefully piled up around it, until by now it was completely hidden from the rest of the yard, and the boys had their own secret ways of entering it.
Inside, the trailer was equipped with a laboratory, a photographic darkroom, and an office containing a desk, an old filing cabinet, and a private phone which the boys paid for with the money they earned working in the salvage yard.
“Ocean World,” Jupe repeated. He was sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk, looking through the western area phone directory. He found the number and dialed it.
A loudspeaker was attached to the phone so that all three boys could hear the ringing tone and then a man’s voice answering.
“Thank you for calling Ocean World,” the voice said. “Ocean World is located off the Pacific Coast Highway, just north of Topanga Canyon.” It was obviously a taped message.
Jupe listened impatiently as the man went on to tell them the price of admission and the times of the various shows that the open-air aquarium put on for the public. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the message that Jupe showed any interest.
“Ocean World is open from ten to six, Tuesday through Sunday,” the man said. “Every day except Monday you –”
Jupe hung up.
“Just our luck,” Pete said. “We call on the one day of the week the place is closed.”
Jupiter nodded absently. His round face was puckered with concentration, and he was pinching his lower lip again.
“So what do we do now?” Bob asked. “Try again tomorrow?”
“It’s only a few miles down the coast road,” Jupe said. “Why don’t we cycle there tomorrow and pay the place a personal visit?”
At ten o’clock the next morning the Three Investigators padlocked their bicycles in the Ocean World parking lot and bought their tickets at the gate. For a while they wandered along the paths of the vast aquarium, pausing to watch the sea lions and penguins playing in their big open pools. Then Bob saw a sign outside a white painted building.
ADMINISTRATION, the sign said.
Jupe knocked on the door.
“Come in,” a polite voice told them, and the Three Investigators stepped into the office.
A young woman was standing behind the desk. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit and her body was tanned a deep, even brown. Her hair, cut rather short, was dark and feathery like an Indian’s. Taller than any of the Three Investigators, she had wide, strong shoulders and narrow hips that made her look streamlined in a supple way, as though, like a fish, she would be more at home in the water than on dry land.
“Hi. I’m Constance Carmel,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“We wanted to report a stranded whale,” Jupe told her. “At least it was stranded until we made a pool for it …”
He went on to explain everything that had happened at the cove the day before, ending with their discovery that the whale they had rescued had vanished.
Constance Carmel listened without interrupting.
“All this happened yesterday?” she asked.
Bob nodded.
“I wasn’t here yesterday.” She had turned away from the