Encyclopedia Brown Finds the Clues (8 page)

In the test thought up by Encyclopedia, Mr. Van Swigget played the part of the criminal mastermind.

He had hired the masked men to rob him—of the wrong necklace!

Remember how the masked man on the stairway had thrown the supposedly glass necklace away? Had it truly been glass, it would have broken on the stone floor.

But the “glass” copy that the police chiefs saw on Mr. Van Swigget’s desk wasn’t broken. It was “perfect.”

So the necklace on his desk, which had been thrown to the floor, had to be the diamond necklace. Diamonds, being harder than stone, wouldn’t have broken on the stone floor.

The masked men had stolen the glass necklace!

Thus in the make-believe theft Mr. Van Swigget not only kept the diamond necklace. He would have collected the fifty thousand dollars’ insurance money besides!

Miss Wentworth said she hadn’t touched anything in the bedroom since the theft.

Her bed was pressed so tightly against the wall that a fountain pen was trapped in between. And the sheets were tied to the foot of the bed and run out the window.

The thief, “a huge man,” carrying the heavy statue of a lamb, had supposedly climbed down the sheets.

Yet when Bugs Meany, a boy, had climbed up the sheets, what had happened?

His weight had
pulled the bed away from the wall!

Had the huge man really climbed down the sheets, the bed would have been pulled away from the wall when Chief Brown and Encyclopedia first saw it.

Miss Wentworth admitted the statue hadn’t been stolen.

The fake robbery was a stunt to get publicity for her new picture,
The Stolen Lamb.

Encyclopedia knew that Mark had hurt his leg jumping out the window with the tool chest.

Mark couldn’t have hurt the leg as he said—hitting it against the coffee table.

The five-story house of cards was still standing on the coffee table. If Mark had hit the table hard enough to knock himself down, the house of cards would have crashed!

When faced with this fact, Mark confessed.

He had stolen the tool chest and hidden it in the yard next door. Returning to the living room, he had made up the part about seeing the thief escape.