The Mystery of the Velvet Box by Scherf Margaret

Author:Scherf, Margaret [Scherf, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Young Adult
Publisher: Franklin Watts
Published: 1963-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

She stood there, her heart banging, her throat dry. Surely Aunt Grace and her mother had heard her. But there were no sounds of running feet, no cries of sympathy or alarm. Harriet took a drink of water, and tried to stop shaking. They hadn’t heard her at all. So there was no use telling them, at least not until she had thought it over calmly. The eyes looking in the window had seemed to be Mr. Shively’s. But how could they be, when he had gone off in a taxi? And anyway, why would he be looking in the cellar window?

The person in the coal bin—that might well have been imagination. Just a piece of coal settling. A mouse. One of Mr. Peel’s cats. She made her way to the little octagonal room with yellow wallpaper where Gran had taken her morning coffee and read her mail and talked on the phone to the butcher. It was a pretty room, with dainty ivory chairs and a chaise on which Gran’s chunky little figure had reposed the day she gave Harriet the puzzle regarding her last birthday present.

Harriet sat down on the chaise and looked about the room, admiring the delicate colored prints of medieval costumes. Her eyes traveled to the large green metal wastebasket, so out of place in the elegant little room, but so like Gran. When she wanted something to be useful, it was useful. Harriet looked into the wastebasket, and was surprised to see papers. Aunt Grace hadn’t got this far, evidently. She reached in and pulled out several yellowed birthday cards, and some very old bills, torn across. Perhaps Gran had been trying to weed things out before she died. She was about to drop the handful back in the basket, when she noticed a scrap of heavy blue paper with the penciled word Harriet on it. Curious, she dumped the whole basket on the floor and began to assemble the rest of the sheet that matched this scrap. She found enough pieces to see that it was the rough draft of a will. It read very much like the final draft, which Harriet had seen in Mr. Pittman’s office, except for her own legacy. In this version Gran had written in her tiny, sharp letters: “To Harriet Adams; French inlaid writing case with the key.”

“With the key” again. Gran was bound to give me a key of some kind, Harriet thought. I wonder why she changed her mind about the writing case and left me the velvet box instead?

On Sunday they had seen the writing case in one of the boxes marked for Louis Green. Maybe it was still here. She looked in the dining room, but the box was gone. She could ask Aunt Grace about it later. This would be a good time to talk to Mr. Peel, if her mother was not ready to go.

She went to the door of the parlor, heard Aunt Grace say, “And wouldn’t you think she’d

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