“You want this one, Mum?” called Tom, poking his head into the front room.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Mrs Dobson.
“It’s got a fireplace,” said Tom. “And wow, look at that wild thing!”
Tom and Jupiter leaned the headboard against the wall and looked at that wild thing. It was a ceramic plaque, fully five feet across. It was set into the wall above the fireplace.
“The double-headed eagle!” said Jupiter Jones.
Tom cocked his head to one side and examined the scarlet bird, screeching from both pointed beaks. “Old friend of yours?” he asked Jupiter.
“Possibly an old friend of your grandfather’s,” said Jupiter. “He always wore a medallion with that design on it. It must have meant something special to him. There are rows of double-headed eagles on those two big urns by the front steps. Did you notice them?”
“I was busy,” said Tom. “We had a bed to move.” Aunt Mathilda’s footsteps were heavy on the stairs. “I hope that man thought to get enough sheets,” worried Aunt Mathilda. “Jupiter, did you see mattresses anywhere?”
“They’re in the back room,” called Tom. “Brand new. Still have the paper round them.”
“Thank goodness,” declared Aunt Mathilda. She yanked open doors until she found the linen closet, and there were the sheets, also new, the mattresses and blankets. And two new pillows still encased in plastic.
Aunt Mathilda threw open one of the front windows. “Hans!” she called.
“Coming!” Hans was making his way up the front steps, the footboard of the brass bed balanced on his head.
“That will be a stinker to put up,” said Tom Dobson.
It was. It took the combined efforts of Tom, Jupiter and Hans to get the big bed firmly erect on its four legs. Then springs and mattress were carried in from the back room and put in place, and Aunt Mathilda began unfolding sheets.
“Oh, the groceries!” she said suddenly. “They’re still in the back of the truck.”
“Groceries?” said Mrs Dobson. “Mrs Jones, you shouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t,” Aunt Mathilda informed her. “Your father bought enough food to take Sherman’s Army clear to the sea. I had it in my freezer so that it wouldn’t spoil.”
Eloise Dobson looked perplexed. “Father certainly seems prepared for us. So why did he run off? . . . Well, I’ll get the groceries,” she said quickly, and went out of the room and down the stairs.
“Jupiter, give her a hand,” ordered Aunt Mathilda.
Jupiter was halfway down the stairs when Mrs Dobson came in, brown paper bags in her arms. “We won’t go hungry, anyway,” she announced, and marched towards the kitchen.
Jupiter was close behind her when she suddenly stopped dead. Her arms went limp, and the bags thumped to the floor.
Then Eloise Dobson screamed.
Jupiter pushed her to one side and stared past her into the kitchen. Near the pantry door, three weird, eerie green flames leaped and flickered.
“What is it?” Aunt Mathilda and Tom thundered down the stairs. Hans came behind them.
Jupiter and Mrs Dobson were immobile, staring at those tongues of ghostly green fire.
“Gracious to heavens!” gasped Aunt Mathilda.
The flames sputtered and sank, then died, leaving not a wisp of smoke.
“What the heck?” said Tom Dobson.
Jupiter, Hans and Tom shoved forward into the kitchen. For almost a minute they looked at the linoleum–at the places where the flames had danced. Then Hans said it. “The Potter! He came back! He came back to haunt the house!”
“Impossible!” said Jupiter Jones.
But he could not deny that there, charred into the linoleum, were three footprints–and they were the prints of naked feet.
6
The Investigators Have a Client
HANS was immediately sent to the telephone box on the main road to summon the police, who appeared within minutes and searched the house from attic to cellar and found nothing–nothing but the strange, charred footprints in the kitchen.
Officer Haines sniffed at the footprints, measured them, dug a few bits of burned linoleum out of the floor and put them into an envelope. He gave Jupiter a cool look. “If you know anything about this, and you’re holding out on us–” he began.
“Ridiculous!” snapped Aunt Mathilda. “How could Jupiter know anything we don’t know? He has been with me all day, and he was just going downstairs to help Mrs Dobson with the groceries when those–those footprints appeared.”
“Okay. Okay,” said the officer. “Only he has this habit, Mrs Jones. He’s always around when trouble happens.”
Haines put the envelope with the burned bits of linoleum in his pocket. “If I were you, Mrs Dobson,” he said, “I’d get out of here and go back to the inn.”
Eloise Dobson sat down and began to cry, and Aunt Mathilda angrily ran water into a kettle and set about making a heartening cup of tea. Aunt Mathilda believed there were few crises in life which could not be eased by a good hot cup of tea.
The police departed for headquarters. Tom and Jupiter went quietly out into the big front yard and sat on the steps between the two huge urns.
“I’m almost ready to think Hans was right,” said Tom. “Suppose my grandfather is dead, and . . .”
“I do not believe in ghosts,” said Jupiter firmly. “What’s more, I don’t think you believe in them, either. And The Potter made great preparations for your visit. Why should he return and frighten your mother that way?”
“I’m scared, too,” Tom admitted, “and if my grandfather isn’t dead, where is he?”
“The last we knew, he was up in the hills,” said Jupiter.
“But why?” demanded Tom.
“That may depend on a great many things,” Jupiter said. “How much do you really know about your grandfather?”
“Not much,” admitted young Tom. “Just what I’ve heard my mother say. And she doesn’t know much herself. One thing, his name wasn’t always Potter.”
“Oh?” said Jupiter. “I have always wondered about that. It seemed too coincidental.”
“He came to the United States a long time ago,” Tom said. “About 1931 or so. He was a Ukrainian and he had a name that was so full of c’s and z’s that nobody could pronounce it. He was taking ceramics at a night school in New York when he met my grandmother, and she didn’t want to be Mrs . . . Mrs . . . well, whatever it was, so he changed his name to Potter.”
“Your grandmother was a New Yorker?” asked Jupiter.
“Not really,” said Tom. “She was born in Belleview, just like us. She went to New York to design clothes or something. Then she met this Alexander Whosis and she married him. I don’t suppose he wore a long white robe in those days. She wouldn’t have gone for that. She was pretty square.”
“You remember her?”
“A little. She died a long time ago. I was only a kid. Pneumonia. From what I’ve heard, in the family you know, she and my grandfather didn’t hit it off from the beginning. He was real good at ceramics, and he had a little shop, but she said he was awfully nervous, and had three locks on every door. And she said she could not stand the continual smell of wet clay. So when my mother was going to be born, she came back to Belleview, and she stayed.”
“She never returned to her husband?”
“Nope. I think he came to see her once, when my mother was a baby, but she never went back to him.”
Jupiter pulled at his lip and thought of The Potter, so alone in his house by the sea.
“He never gave up on her,” said young Tom. “He sent money every month–for my mother, you know. And when my folks were married, he sent them a terrific tea set. And he never stopped writing. Even after my grandmother died, he wrote to my mother. Still does.”
“And your father?” asked Jupiter.
“Oh, he’s a great guy,” said Tom happily. “He runs the hardware store in Belleview. He didn’t exactly go into fits of joy when Mum decided to come out here and see Grandfather, but she argued him round to it.”
“I don’t suppose you know why your grandfather came to California,” said Jupiter.
“The weather, I suppose,” said Tom. “Isn’t that why most people come?”
“There are other reasons,” Jupiter told him. His eyes were on the path to the beach. The two dark-clad men came floundering up the path, crossed the main road, and started to walk up the lane to Hilltop House.
Jupiter stood up and leaned against one of the urns, tracing the pattern of the screaming scarlet eagles with a forefinger. “An interesting series of puzzles,” he remarked. “First, why did The Potter choose to disappear? Second, who searched his office yesterday? Also, who, or what, caused those flaming footprints in the kitchen? And why? And isn’t it curious that no one in Rocky Beach even knew you existed?”
“But if he was a hermit?” said young Tom. “I mean, a guy who only has one chair in his house isn’t exactly running a social club.”