The Mystery of the Singing Serpent - M. V. Carey [4]
He was almost asleep when the pounding began at the door.
“Mrs. Jones! Mrs. Jones, let me in!”
Jupiter sprang out of bed, snatched his robe and charged into the hall. Aunt Mathilda was halfway down the stairs, with Uncle Titus behind her. Jupe followed and saw his aunt unlock the door.
Marie, the Jamison maid, almost fell into the house. “Oh, Mrs. Jones!” she wailed. She was in her bathrobe and slippers.
“Marie, what is it?” asked Aunt Mathilda.
“Can I stay here tonight?” pleaded Marie. She collapsed into a chair and began to weep.
“Marie, what is the matter?”
“The singing!”
“What?” said Aunt Mathilda.
“The singing.” Marie twisted her hands. “There’s something in that house and it’s singing.” She grasped Aunt Mathilda’s arm. “It was horrible. Not like anything I ever heard. I can’t go back there!”
Chapter 3
The Insistent Client
AS GENTLY AS SHE COULD, Aunt Mathilda released herself from Marie’s grip. “I’m going to call the Jamison house,” she announced.
Marie sniffled. “Call if you want,” she said. “But I’m not going back!”
Aunt Mathilda dialed the Jamisons’ number and reached Miss Patricia Osborne. The conversation was brief.
“Miss Osborne says she didn’t hear anything strange,” Aunt Mathilda reported when she hung up the telephone.
“Miss Osborne would say that!” exclaimed Marie.
“What do you mean?” asked Aunt Mathilda.
“I mean … I mean she’s peculiar and there’s peculiar things going on in that house and I’m never going back. Not for anything!”
Marie would talk of it no more, and she didn’t go back. She spent the night in the spare bedroom. In the morning Uncle Titus went to the Jamison house and collected her suitcases, which Allie Jamison had packed. Uncle Titus then drove Marie to her mother’s home in Los Angeles.
“I wonder what Marie heard,” said Jupiter Jones after she had departed.
Aunt Mathilda only shrugged.
Jupiter was still wondering several days later when he walked across the street from his house to the salvage yard in the middle of the morning. Hans and Konrad, the two Bavarian brothers who helped out at the yard, were cleaning a marble mantelpiece. Uncle Titus had bought it from the wreckers who were dismantling a burned-out house in the Hollywood Hills.
“Pete is in your workshop,” said Hans.
“He want to use the printing press,” added Konrad.
Jupe nodded. He did not need to be told that the press was in operation. He had assembled the press himself, out of old parts, and while the machine was efficient enough, it was noisy. He had recognized the familiar clanking and groaning the moment he came in the gate of The Jones Salvage Yard.
Jupe went quickly past piles of old lumber and stacks of steel beams to his outdoor workshop. It occupied a corner of the yard out of sight of the main area, which was Aunt Mathilda’s special domain. The shop was sheltered from the street by the tall wooden fence that enclosed the entire yard, and it was partially sheltered from the weather by a six-foot-wide roof which ran all the way around the inside of the fence. Uncle Titus had built the roof to protect his most valuable junk.
In the workshop, Jupiter found Pete Crenshaw bent over the press, running off a stack of business cards. Jupe picked up one of the cards and examined it. It read:
THE THREE INVESTIGATORS
“We Investigate Anything”
? ? ?
First Investigator – Jupiter Jones
Second Investigator – Peter Crenshaw
Records and Research – Bob Andrews
Pete stopped the press. “Satisfied, First Investigator?” he asked.
Jupiter nodded. “Very neat,” he said. “And it’s gratifying to know that the firm of The Three Investigators has been so successful. I wasn’t sure, when we started, that we would ever need an additional supply of business cards.”
Pete did not comment. He had been somewhat less than confident when he had joined with Jupiter Jones and Bob Andrews to found The Three Investigators. But Jupe’s superior powers of deduction, Bob’s talent for detailed research and his own athletic abilities had proved a