The Mystery Of Wandering Caveman Part 3

"Had he been ill?" asked Jupe "Somehow I had the idea that his attack in Rocky Beach was sudden."

"It was," said Eleanor, "but he'd been different for a while before that. He'd fall asleep sitting in his chair. Sometimes he'd doze off while the chimps were out of the cage, and they'd run all over and wreck the place. I went with him the day he ... he died because it didn't seem as if he should go all that way by himself."

"Why did he go to Rocky Beach that day?" Jupe asked.

The question was an idle one. Jupe asked it only to make conversation. But suddenly Eleanor flushed.

"He was ... was ... I don't know really." She looked away and abruptly went to the door.

Pete and Jupe exchanged glances as she left the room.

"Now what's the matter?" said Pete softly. "Did you say something wrong?"

Jupe frowned. "She's lying. You can tell she's lying. But why should she lie? What could she be covering up?"

Chapter 5.

A Visit with a Dead Man THE SCIENTISTS WERE GONE when Eleanor and the boys returned to the living room. A plump woman was there straightening the sofa cushions, and a dark-haired young man was washing the small-paned gla.s.s doors that led out to the terrace and the swimming pool.

"Morning, Eleanor," said the woman. "I see you've brought some friends with you. That's nice."

Jupe recognized the woman as soon as she spoke. It was Mrs. Collinwood, who had come to help Eleanor the day Dr. Birkensteen died. She now had on an ash-blond wig instead of a red one, but her eyelashes were as thick' and dark as ever. She fluttered them coyly as Eleanor introduced the boys.

"Ah, yes!" she said as she shook hands with Jupe. "I remember. You're the nice young man who was so good to Eleanor. You know, I thought at the time you're so like my dear Charles. Charles Collinwood, that is. My last husband, and really my favourite. Such a kind man, although a bit inclined to be chubby."

Mrs. Collinwood was a talker, and the boys realized quickly that she was off and running. There was little they could do except be still and let the torrent of words wash over them.

Mrs. Collinwood happily told them about her first husband, who had sold insurance, and her second husband, who had been a film editor, and about Charles, her favourite husband, who had been a veterinarian.

"Not that they weren't all all dear men," said Mrs. Collinwood. "They all died young. dear men," said Mrs. Collinwood. "They all died young.

So sad. Then I came to live here as housekeeper for the foundation. The scientists were frightening at first. So stern, and always thinking. But once you get to know them, not so different from other men. Dear Dr. Terreano always talks about how violent humans are, but he's so kind he wouldn't swat a fly. And Dr. Brandon insists we aren't violent, and yet he has such a temper. He shouldn't spend so much time with your Uncle Newt, Eleanor. It only upsets him."

"I know," said Eleanor meekly.

Mrs. Collinwood trotted away then, and the young man who was washing the windows dropped his brush into his bucket of water. "You giving your friends the ten-dollar tour?" he asked Eleanor.

She looked annoyed, but she introduced him. "This is Frank," she said. "Frank DiStefano. He helps out here at the foundation, like I do."

The young man grinned. "Hi. Glad to meet you. Ellie, I'm sorry about last night. I got a flat tyre and it held me up until ... well, it was so late I figured you wouldn't still be waiting."

"It's not important," said Eleanor, and she led the boys out through the library, which was next to the living room, and then through a little square entryway on the far side of the house.

The stable was about fifty metres from the house. Eleanor marched to it without speaking. Once she was with Blaze, the horse that had been Dr. Birkensteen's special charge, her mood changed, and again she seemed happier. She groomed the horse and talked to it and petted it, and she proudly showed the boys how it could add. She put four apples on the part.i.tion around its stall.

"How many?" she said.

The horse stamped four times.

"There you go!" Eleanor applauded and then fed the apples to the horse.

The boys left Eleanor in the stable and went back down the hill and into town for lunch. The streets were more crowded than ever. The boys decided to pa.s.s up the dinosaur burger stand, but they had to wait almost an hour before they could get their hamburgers at the Lazy Daze Cafe.

After they ate, they wandered through the town, observing the crowds and noting the measures the shopkeepers had taken to celebrate the opening of the cave the next day. Several display windows were decorated with chalky drawings of cave men dressed in animal skins and carrying clubs. In one picture the cave man dragged a delighted cave woman along by her hair. Several store fronts were decorated with red, white and blue bunting. In the little park, where the opening ceremonies for the cave man museum would take place the next day, women were hanging paper lanterns from the trees while a man put a fresh coat of white paint on the old-fashioned bandstand. An ice cream vendor did a brisk business from a truck parked near the old train station.

After a while the boys returned to the meadow behind Newt McAfee's house.

There was excitement and bustle there too. A tall, stringy man in faded work clothes was stowing a tool kit in the back of a van, muttering to himself as he worked.

"Not right," he declared. "Not right at all. They'll be sorry. You wait and see."

The boys moved closer. They saw built-in cupboards in the van, and a tiny butane stove and a very small refrigerator. There was a bed, neatly made up, and the boys wondered whether this seedy individual lived in the van.

The man scowled at them. "You wouldn't like it if it was you!" he announced.

Just then someone began to shout.

"You're a cretin!" It was James Brandon. He stood outside the little windowless redwood building that had been built against the hillside.

"You get away from here!" yelled Newt McAfee from the doorway of his museum.

He had a shotgun in his hands.

Brandon backed away from Newt, clenching his fists. "You should have been locked in a cage at birth!" he told McAfee. "Those bones aren't yours, any more than the rain is yours, or the sun. How dare you surround that hominid with your cornball props!"

"You're trespa.s.sing," McAfee said. "You get away from here, and if you want to see that cave man again, you come back tomorrow and pay five dollars, just like anybody else!"

Brandon made a strangled noise and then spun around and stamped away.

McAfee grinned. "Just a little difference of opinion," he told the boys.

"It ain't right!" grumbled the man with the van.

"Well, n.o.body asked you whether it was right or not," snapped McAfee. "It's no business of yours. Say, boys, you want to come in and have a sneak preview? See my cave man and the museum I built for him?"

He turned back into the small building, and the Three Investigators followed him eagerly. Once they had stepped across the threshold, however, they stopped and gaped.

Newt McAfee had decorated his museum with photographs enlarged into murals - photographs of bones and a skull. Between these rather grisly views were colour pictures of more attractive and familiar sights: steam coming from the ground at La.s.sen, waterfalls tumbling from the cliffs at Yosemite, waves breaking on the coast near Big Sur.

On tables in the centre of the room there were models of the California countryside at various stages in its geological history. In one display a glacier covered most of the state. In another the ice had retreated, leaving behind deep valleys and many lakes. There was a model of an Indian encampment with tiny statues of near-naked Indians crouching over fires and preparing ears of corn in various ways. There were also models of prehistoric men fighting a huge mammoth.

"Real cla.s.sy, isn't it?" said McAfee. "Course, this stuffs all window dressing. The real thing is over there."

Opposite the entrance, four steps led up to a little platform. Beyond the platform there was the bare earth of the hillside and the opening to the cave. Lights shone inside the opening.

Jupiter, Pete and Bob crossed the museum and went up the steps. They looked into the cave and saw the fossil man.

Jupe drew a quick breath and Bob shuddered.

The cave man was a partial skeleton. Most of the skull was there, brown and hideous. The empty eye sockets stared, and the upper jaw grinned a ghastly grin.

There was no lower jaw. Several ribs remained, jutting from the floor of the cave, and below these were part of a pelvis and some leg bones. The small bones of a hand were quite near the mouth of the cave. They seemed to be reaching for something.

McAfee had had lights installed in the ceiling of the cave, and on the floor near the skull an artificial campfire glowed. Beyond the bones there was a folded Navajo blanket and a basket woven in an Indian design.

The boys instantly sympathized with Brandon's rage. The silliness of the display was sad enough. But much worse, there were footprints all around the bones. The precious fossils had come close to being trampled while someone put in the lights and installed the sham fire.

"I was going to put a pair of moccasins down where his feet would be, if he had feet," said McAfee. "It could look like he'd just kicked 'em off before he laid down to sleep. But then I figured maybe that would be too much."

Bob made a choking sound.

"Probably didn't wear moccasins back in those days - or nothing else, huh?" said McAfee.

The boys didn't answer. They turned away from the cave and went out past a display of shiny key chains and small plastic cave men. These were for sale, along with T-shirts that had "Citrus Grove, Cradle of Humanity" printed on them.

"We're all set now," said Newt McAfee. He snapped off the lights and locked the door. "John the Gypsy will be on guard here tonight so n.o.body can get in and mess things up."

"John the Gypsy?" said Jupe.

McAfee nodded towards the thin man who now sat on the bed inside the van.

"That's him. We call him John the Gypsy 'cause he lives in that van, 'stead of having a real home."

McAfee stalked off to his house, and John the Gypsy got out of the van.

"Okay," he said. "He wants me to keep watch, I'll keep watch. But that dead one in there ain't going to like it. I sure wouldn't like it if they was coming in to look at me lying there in my bones."

"But he won't know," Pete pointed out. "He's dead, isn't he? Dead people don't know when somebody's looking at them."

"You sure of that?" said John the Gypsy.

Chapter 6.

A Disturbance in the Night DINNER THAT NIGHT was more hamburgers at the Lazy Daze Cafe. Afterwards the boys bought ice cream from the van near the depot. Then they went back to their loft and lay watching through the window as the sun went down and the moon came up.

There was a chill in the air. Wisps of fog floated above the meadow, and the stars winked out. At last the boys pulled their sleeping bags around them and dozed off.

Sometime in the cold dark of the night, Jupe woke to hear the sound of a door opening. Someone had come into the barn - someone who whimpered like a frightened animal.

Jupe sat up and listened.

The whimpering ceased for a moment, then began again.

Pete stirred and sat up. "What's that?" he whispered.

Jupe crept to the top of the ladder and peered down into the blackness below.

"You boys?" croaked a hoa.r.s.e voice. "Is that you?"

It was John the Gypsy. No sooner had he spoken than he fell, crashing over something in the dark.

Bob yelped with fright, and Pete groped for the torch he had left next to his sleeping bag. When he found it, he scrambled to the ladder and flashed the beam down at the barn floor.

John the Gypsy had stumbled into a carton of empty tin cans. Now he lurched to his feet and squinted up at the light. "Is that you?" he cried with panic in his voice.

"Answer me, why don't you?"

"It's us," said Jupe. He and Bob and Pete went down the ladder, and John the Gypsy leaned on the fender of Newt's pickup truck and trembled.

"What's the matter?" said Jupe.

"That ... that dead one!" said John the Gypsy. "I told you he wasn't going to like all this staring! I told you! Didn't I tell you?"

"What about it?" said Pete. "What happened?"

"He got up and left, that's what he did," John the Gypsy declared. "Serve old Newt right when tomorrow comes and there ain't no bones there! He'll say I took 'em, but he'll be wrong. That one walked away by himself! I seen him go!"

The barn door was open, and the boys looked out and up the slope to the little museum. It was just visible in the moonlight. Its door seemed to be firmly closed.

"You must have had a dream," said Bob gently.

"No." The man shook his head. "I was in my van and I heard a door open. I looked out and there was that cave man. He had a fur over him like the skin off something he killed. I could see his eyes. They was terrible - staring straight ahead, and they had a kind of fire in them. And his hair - it was long and raggedy. He went past me and ran straight away across the meadow."

John the Gypsy closed his eyes as if to blot out the memory of the fearful sight.

"We'll go and look," said Jupe.

They walked close together, as if they feared that it was possible for the prehistoric being in the cave to have got up, clothed itself again in flesh and animal skins, and fled across the fields.

But the museum door was locked. When Jupe rattled the k.n.o.b, Newt McAfee appeared on the porch of his house.

"What's going on there?" cried McAfee. "What you boys been doing?"

"Just investigating," Jupe called. "There was some disturbance and your ... your watchman saw somebody going away across the meadow."

Thalia McAfee appeared on the porch, and Newt stamped down the steps and trudged across the meadow to the museum.