The Case That Time Forgot by Tracy Barrett

Author:Tracy Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780805080469
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

CHAPTER NINE

Anything else, kids?” The waiter had come back with three mugs of steaming cocoa while they were talking. Xena looked at Xander as though to say, You’re on! The man had been friendly, but he was clearly busy, and Xander’s famous charm might help if they wanted him to stay and talk for a minute.

Xander flashed a smile at the man. “My sister and I are from the States,” he began.

A snort. “I could tell that!”

Xander had gotten used to people commenting on his accent. “We don’t have places like this there, at least not where we live in Florida. How old is the pub?”

The waiter seemed pleased at their interest. “More than two hundred years. Been in the same location all this time.”

“Wow!” Xena was genuinely impressed.

“Here, look at this.” The waiter went behind the counter and beckoned them to follow him. “Look here.” Scratched in the wood were words, some numbers, and what looked like abbreviations. “These are the prices of things that they served here long ago.” Xena and Xander looked for something—anything—that could be a clue. There were no hieroglyphs or anything that looked Egyptian. No drawings of the sun, either.

“Where did the name come from—The Cat and Crown?” Karim asked.

“I don’t rightly know.” The man rubbed his chin. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and ask Mrs. Collins? She’s here most afternoons except when she goes to visit her son, like today. Will there be anything else?”

“This case is frustrating,” Xander said as they fastened their raincoats. “Every time we get close to something, we hit a dead end.”

“All we can do is come back, like the waiter said.” Xena felt just as gloomy as her brother. They walked through the rain with Karim to the corner where his mother was going to pick him up.

“There’s something I don’t get,” Xander said as they hurried along, heads hunched against the drizzle. “Why did Amin write down the clues? Why didn’t he just tell his brother or somebody where the amulet was?”

“I bet he didn’t get a chance,” Xena answered. “He was in hiding. Then, after he was caught, the brothers probably didn’t have a chance to talk again.”

“Plus I don’t think he wanted his brother to have it,” Karim added. “It wasn’t until he was dying that he gave up on getting it himself and sent that clue to my great-great-great-grandfather. He must have figured it was better for someone in the family to have it than for the amulet to stay hidden forever.”

“Why didn’t he just call?” Xander asked.

Karim shook his head. “It must have been really expensive to make a phone call from Egypt back then. He was only an archaeologist’s helper and then a guard, and he probably never got either of those jobs again after what he did in London. He must have been really poor. If he wrote a letter, it would probably get intercepted by the police, so he wrote that clue instead. The police wouldn’t think it had anything to do with the amulet, so they’d let it through.

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