Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

“I’m okay,” I told him. “Just been fishing around a dirty fireplace. I found two more clues, Jake, the ones that follow Dan Church’s. I think his was the first, not the fourth.”

It took a while to convince him I was all right. I put on water for tea, and he sent Abe Andersen home. Abe had been parked outside in the driveway, incidentally, while I slept in the front room. Jake had asked him to stay until I wanted to go home, and without any entertainment in the house for Abe, he’d gone out to sit in his patrol car and listen to the radio, which is where he’d promptly fallen asleep.

But then, once we got past all that, I showed Jake what I’d found and explained that Dan Church, Sophie Carter, or both, had made a mistake in figuring out that the clue had read SHED CELLAR. They were supposed to go to the salt cellar, left forgotten in a cabinet with other equally useless culinary items.

The next clue had been a snap to decipher: “O. SC’s greatest classic.”

“Tom Sawyer?” Jake said swiftly. He was actually pretty good at this.

“No,” I told Jake, “Huckleberry Finn. There’s a copy in the trophy room. The next clue was tucked in the frontispiece. And here’s where I get stumped.” I showed it to him. And so maybe we don’t solve who killed Dan Church, if anyone did, or absolve either Sophie or Frances of complicity in his death, but with this I’d thought I could figure it out. But I hadn’t. Either I’d deciphered it incorrectly, or the next clue had been found, destroyed, lost, or just burned up in a fireplace twenty years ago.

“RY. Where SC comes down,” Jake read, immediately coming to the same conclusion that I had. “Santa Claus? A fireplace?”

“There’s a fireplace in the trophy room, but no luck, Jake. Though I have to talk to Frances about getting a chimney sweep in here. Thing is filthy. Looks like it has an old bird’s nest stuck in it and...”

“You looked already.”

“Yeah, I could have waited for you, but I couldn’t sleep.” I shrugged. “Where’ve you been?”

“At the station talking to an overseas operator and a lieutenant in the Paris Sûreté.” He watched me, waiting for this choice piece of news to sink in. “We found Frances Carter — with her fiancé in Paris. She’s honeymooning in Europe.”

So sometimes you can look for evil intent — and find none. It now seemed fairly obvious that Dan Church’s death, though tragic, had been accidental, happening because he had been on a little treasure hunt when he died.

Because a lot of the rest was done by Jake. The friend Dan Church had contacted, with the truck he’d wanted to borrow, was turned up. Seems Dan had told this friend he’d soon have a “load of merchandise,” which he needed “help to move.” Phone records also revealed that Dan had contacted a Japanese auction site the week prior to his death.

When Frances Carter finally made her reappearance, a week before Christmas, and was shown the clues of the unfinished treasure hunt game, she looked at me and shook her head.

“You checked the fireplace?” she asked, but she knew I had. “My goodness, though...” She sank down on the faded sofa in the front room. “Thirty years ago.” She looked up at Jake and me, then at the clues spread on the worn hassock before her. “Yes, this is my father’s handwriting, which can be verified if you...”

“We’ve already done so, using some old bank drafts,” Jake told her.

“It must be the last game he made for us, but it’s so foolish, so silly. Why would Sophie, if she were involved, or Dan care about a box of old candy and some chocolate coins?”

“Put the letters together, Miss Carter,” Jake said, rearranging the clues in front of her. “IV, O, and RY. That plus the key chain.”

She turned to looked out the windows. Their panes, uninsulated from the cold, were covered with frost patterns. “If you’d known all this would happen, Herbie, would you still have climbed up that tree and got Sammy down for me?”

I didn’t even hesitate: “Yes.”

She turned back to me. “So... how many fireplaces did you check?”

“Just... the one in the trophy room.”

There were five, including the central chimney which came right down straight into the front room. And so, with Frances’s permission, Jake and I got a crowbar and a hammer, then broke and peeled away the paneling which had covered it. Then we went upstairs and did the same to the three in the upstairs bedrooms.