The Dinosaur Mystery Read online

  “I know you are patient,” Mrs. Diggs began. “Let me talk to Titus privately. I’ll tell him about all the experience you children have had working with valuable things. He’s so upset right now. Maybe this morning would be a good time to get the posters up now that the planetarium is straightened out. Archie left them on the table next to the sky show programs.”

  “We’ll go get them and start right away, Mrs. Diggs,” Henry said as they headed toward the planetarium. “Maybe Dr. Pettibone will be glad for some helping hands when we’re done.”

  Dr. Skyler spotted the Aldens right away. “You’re late,” she said. “I suppose you couldn’t wait to get to Dino World. As you can see, there’s a huge crowd waiting to get into the planetarium. All the silly ruckus at Dino World made people want to come here instead.”

  Henry shifted from one foot to the other. “We didn’t know you wanted us to work at the planetarium this morning. We finished the cleanup job last night, but if you need us in here, here we are!”

  “I’ve already made other arrangements,” Dr. Skyler snapped.

  “Where are the Dino World posters Mr. Diggs left here yesterday?” Jessie asked. “I’m positive I saw them when we left.”

  Dr. Skyler came over to Jessie. “What are you talking about? Only my sky show programs were here when I arrived this morning. Perhaps you mislaid them when you were working here. That’s just the problem with letting children do an adult’s job.”

  The Aldens didn’t know what to say. Hadn’t they done a good job? Wasn’t the planetarium sparkling clean now and open for business?

  The children went out to the lobby and watched the planetarium line get longer.

  “Why isn’t she happy about all these customers?” Violet asked Henry and Jessie. “More people came here because of the news about the dinosaur bones.”

  Henry and Jessie looked at each other. They were thinking the same thing. Did Dr. Skyler have something to do with the missing bones?

  “Let’s track down Mr. Diggs,” Henry said. “Maybe he came back for the posters.”

  The children made their way past the construction area when a workman called out: “Watch your back! Watch your back!”

  The Aldens turned around. The man was pushing an oversized garbage can filled with trash.

  “Wait a minute,” Henry said when he saw what was inside the can. “It’s a whole bunch of the Dino World posters! Hey, mister, is it okay if I take these?”

  “Sure thing, fella,” the man said. “It’s less for me to haul out.”

  Henry reached in and took out a thick stack of posters. “Where did these come from?” he asked.

  The man shrugged. “Beats me. I just take the stuff out, I don’t look at it.”

  “Well, we need these,” Jessie explained. She ran off to tell Mrs. Diggs they would be putting up the posters.

  “Now we have a job to do,” Henry said. “Let’s get these up around the area. Maybe if we do that, Dr. Pettibone will change his mind about us.”

  The Aldens enjoyed being out and about in the city. When people saw the children putting up the Dino World posters on bulletin boards and telephone poles and store windows around the area, all they could talk about was the disappearance of the T. rex bones so close to the opening.

  “We almost didn’t need to put up these posters,” Jessie said when they ran out of them a couple of hours later. “Everybody already knows about the show thanks to the news reports.”

  “Like grandfather always says,” Violet began, “sometimes something good comes out of something bad.”

  The dinosaur hall was still roped off when the children returned. A guard unlocked a door to the passageway so they could take the shortcut back to the apartment. They had just gotten to the ground level when Mr. Diggs stepped off the service elevator.

  “Why children!” Mr. Diggs said when he saw the Aldens. “I was going back to the apartment to get you some lunch. And tell you the good news, too.”

  “I like good news,” Benny said.

  “Well, the good news is that Titus agreed to have some of you children help him out,” Mr. Diggs said. “Emma told him about how you put up the posters for his exhibit, so he changed his mind.”

  “Now that we know the good news, what’s the news about lunch?” Benny asked.

  Mr. Diggs smiled. “Well, Benny, we have some tuna sandwiches and chips and our secret brownies. In fact, I need a couple of helpers, so maybe you and Soo Lee can give me a hand. We’ll send something down to Titus while he’s showing the older children the ropes.”

  “What kind of ropes?” Soo Lee wanted to know.

  Jessie laughed. “Not real ropes, Soo Lee. That’s just a saying people use when they want to show somebody how to do something new.” Turning to Mr. Diggs, she added: “Does that mean we should go back to the dinosaur hall now?”

  “I think so, before Titus changes his mind. I’ve never seen him so mixed up.” Mr. Diggs unlocked the elevator for the older children. Before the doors closed, he pulled Henry aside. “Right now, Titus is a little nervous about the younger children working with the fossils. Emma and I will keep Benny and Soo Lee busy this afternoon. See you later.”

  “I feel bad for Benny and Soo Lee,” Henry said to his sisters as the elevator went up. “They wanted to be near that dinosaur more than anybody.”

  “Henry, do you think there’s another reason Dr. Pettibone doesn’t want them around?” Violet asked.

  Henry shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe he really does think they’re too young.”

  When the elevator doors opened, the children found themselves inside a cluttered office right behind the dinosaur hall. No one was there.

  “I wonder if Dr. Pettibone knew we’d be coming this early,” Henry said. “Maybe we should go back out and come in through the main entrance.”

  Jessie noticed a light coming from under a door marked Fossil Lab. She knocked, but there was no answer. She turned the doorknob, and slowly pushed the door open a crack. The children saw Dr. Pettibone stuffing straw inside a wooden crate.

  Jessie gave a louder knock to get his attention. Dr. Pettibone jumped back.

  “It’s the Aldens,” Jessie announced. She didn’t want to upset him by barging into the lab. “Is it okay to come in?”

  Dr. Pettibone quickly covered the crate with a lid, even though there was straw sticking out all over.

  “Stay out there,” Dr. Pettibone called back. “I have a lot of unmarked fossils in here, and we’ve had enough disturbances already.”

  Finally Dr. Pettibone joined the children in the outside office. He quickly brushed off his white lab coat then locked the door behind him. “I wasn’t expecting you until after lunch.”

  “We finished putting up all your posters early,” Violet said. “So we came here right away. What happened to your dinosaur was so terrible.”

  Violet’s sweet voice had an odd effect on Dr. Pettibone. For a second he looked friendly. But then he got gruff all over again.

  “Now that you’re here,” he said, “I need you to answer the phones and sort out this paperwork that piled up while I was away.”

  The children tried not to look disappointed. Answering phones and sorting papers wasn’t exactly what they had hoped to be doing — not when there were dinosaur bones missing!

  “Of course, whatever you need,” Jessie said politely.

  “Good.” Dr. Pettibone handed Jessie a piece of paper. “Now here, I’ve written down the facts about the missing bones, so you can report them to any curious callers. If anyone from the newspapers or television and radio stations call, please be sure to mention the Dino World opening next week. You can also file the papers in this folder.”

  Dr. Pettibone turned to Henry. “As for you, young man, you can clear some of that rubbish outside the hall. The janitor opened up an empty room just down the way. Everything can go in there.”

  Dr. Pettibone looked at Violet. “I understand, young lady, that you have very nice prin
ting. Here are some blank labels for each of my new fossils and the list to copy. Can you do that while I’m working in the other room?”

  “I’ll write very neatly,” Violet said. “If you need anything else done, just ask me. I like to draw, too. I read in a book that sometimes fossil scientists need sketches of what they find.”

  Dr. Pettibone took a long look at this serious girl. “The labels will be plenty. I need all my concentration when I work on my fossils. No distractions.”

  With that, Dr. Pettibone unlocked the fossil lab door, went in, and relocked it from the inside.

  The three children set to work without another word.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Aldens Keep a Secret

  “No, the dinosaur bones are still missing, but come to the Dino World opening next Tuesday,” Jessie told a caller. She put down the phone. “Whew, that phone hasn’t stopped ringing for an hour. I know it’s awful about the theft, but now people are so curious about Dino World. More people than ever will come.”

  “I hope the police and the security guards find the bones soon,” Violet said. “It would be terrible if the dinosaur wasn’t all put together by next week.”

  Working together, the girls quickly finished filing Dr. Pettibone’s bills, letters, and receipts. When they were nearly done, Violet spotted an envelope marked: “Montana Fossil Conference — travel receipts.”

  “I wonder if Dr. Pettibone wanted us to file these, too,” Jessie said. She opened the envelope and several pieces of paper fell out.

  “What’s the matter, Jessie?” Violet asked.

  “Look at this. It’s a hotel receipt from the Hotel Warwick right here in town. And this taxi slip shows that Dr. Pettibone took a taxi ride from the hotel to here Sunday night. I thought that was when he was in Montana at the fossil conference! There’s no airline ticket receipt either.”

  Henry and Violet rushed over to see what Jessie was reading.

  “Didn’t Pete say he just got back?” Henry asked in a quiet voice.

  “According to this,” Jessie whispered, “Dr. Pettibone stayed at the hotel for three days and checked out Sunday evening.”

  “What should we do with these receipts, Jessie?” Violet asked.

  “Nothing,” Jessie answered. “I’ll just leave this envelope here. I don’t want Dr. Pettibone to think we were snooping. He won’t let us work here anymore if we upset him.” She put the envelope back where she had found it, then knocked on the fossil lab door. “We’re going to lunch, Dr. Pettibone,” she called.

  The door opened, and Dr. Pettibone stepped out.

  “Here are your messages.” Jessie handed Dr. Pettibone the list of phone calls she had answered. “And we did your filing, too.”

  Dr. Pettibone looked pleased when he saw how much work the Aldens had finished. When he spotted the envelope of travel receipts, he walked over, picked it up, and stuffed it into his lab coat pocket.

  “Good, good,” he said, smiling a little for the first time. He looked over Violet’s neat list of fossil labels. “I couldn’t have done this better myself. Maybe this afternoon you can help me put them on my specimens. Now off you go.”

  The children were nearly out the door when Henry called out to Dr. Pettibone. “Could you use Benny and Soo Lee this afternoon, too? They’re awfully good at sorting out things. Or whatever else you need.” Dr. Pettibone’s smile disappeared. “No! They’re much too young. Some of these fossil bones can shatter just by being touched.”

  Soo Lee and Benny were eating lunch with Mr. Diggs when the older children arrived.

  “What have you been up to?” Henry asked.

  Benny took a big gulp of milk before he answered Henry. “We saw every kind of bug in the whole wide world.”

  “Even bugs from Korea,” Soo Lee said proudly. “Butterflies, too.”

  “And what have you folks been up to?” Mr. Diggs wanted to know. “Did Dr. Pettibone teach you a lot about fossils this morning?”

  Henry shook his head. “I learned a lot about how to dump things in the construction Dumpster.”

  Mr. Diggs looked at Jessie and Violet. “That’s too bad. I’d hoped Titus would give you something more interesting to do.”

  Violet shook her head. “I wrote fossil labels. Dr. Pettibone said maybe we could put my labels on some fossils this afternoon. I can’t wait to see them.”

  Mr. Diggs looked puzzled. “You mean you didn’t see any fossils in the lab?”

  “Why, no, not yet,” Violet answered. “We stayed in the outside office, not in the fossil lab.”

  Jessie broke in. “Dr. Pettibone worked in there by himself with the door locked. Violet wrote up labels, and I filed and answered the phone.”

  Now Mr. Diggs looked upset. “Goodness, that’s not what Emma and I had in mind when we invited you for a visit. We thought you could work with some of the specimens and have some fun at the same time.”

  Jessie shrugged. “We did give Dr. Pettibone a hand, but it’s not exactly fun yet. Not that we mind. We like helping someone important like Dr. Pettibone.” Jessie stopped talking and took a deep breath. “I guess a lot of work piled up while he was in Montana at his fossil conference. Did he have a good time there?”

  Mr. Diggs smiled. “I imagine he did, though there hasn’t been a minute to discuss the conference with Titus what with all the excitement about the missing bones.”

  Benny noticed Henry, Jessie, and Violet all looking at each other in an odd way. “What’s the matter, Jessie? You’ve got a funny look on your face.”

  “Nothing,” Jessie said. “I guess I’ll have my sandwich now.”

  “Me, too,” Violet said quietly.

  “Me, three,” Henry added without looking directly at Benny or Soo Lee or Mr. Diggs.

  An hour later, the older Aldens headed back to Dr. Pettibone’s office.

  “I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about the hotel receipts we found,” Jessie said, “I didn’t want to make trouble for Dr. Pettibone or upset Mr. Diggs. Now I’m not sure if we did the right thing.”

  The children were just about to unlock the elevator doors with Mr. Diggs’s key when the doors opened. Mrs. Diggs stepped out, carrying two bags of groceries.

  “Hi, Mrs. Diggs,” Jessie said. “We’re just on our way up to see Dr. Pettibone. He said maybe this afternoon he’ll let us help him label some of his fossils for the opening.”

  Mrs. Diggs stopped. “Well, I do hope you get a chance. Why, I was ten years old, Violet’s exact age, when I started my fossil collection. My first one was a small snail shell fossil. I still have it.” Mrs. Diggs suddenly got an odd expression on her face, as if she was about to say something but wasn’t sure whether she should.

  “Is everything okay, Mrs. Diggs?” Henry asked. “Let us give you a hand with these groceries.”

  Mrs. Diggs shook her head. “No. I just have some lightweight things in the bags. I was just wondering about something. I’ve been out in the neighborhood running a lot of errands. And do you know, I didn’t see a single Dino World poster, not even on the public events bulletin board right outside the museum?”

  “What?” the three Aldens said at the same time.

  “We put up dozens of posters all over,” Jessie explained. “On poles, on the grocery store bulletin board, in store windows — every space we could find.”

  “Well, I looked but didn’t see a single one,” Mrs. Diggs said. “It’s just the oddest thing. The grocery store manager, then the woman who runs the laundromat, both told me a woman came in and said she wanted the poster as a souvenir. I didn’t have time to look anyplace else since I didn’t know exactly where you had put up the posters.”

  “That’s awful,” Jessie said. “Here’s another strange thing. All those posters Mr. Diggs left in the planetarium for us wound up in a trash can.”

  “A trash can!” Mrs. Diggs cried.

  “Luckily I spotted them before they went into the Dumpster,” Henry explained. “Nobody seemed to know how t
hey got mixed up in the trash.”

  Mrs. Diggs picked up the groceries. “Everything is so topsy-turvy, I must say. I’ll be so glad when we find those bones and when Dino World finally opens. Usually the Pickering Museum is as quiet as the library.”

  “Whoa!” Henry suddenly cried out when he felt the elevator doors move when he was leaning against one of them. “Somebody must be getting off.”

  When Henry stepped away, the doors slid open. There was Dr. Pettibone, huddled over a large wooden crate. With his back to the doors, he was trying to pull the heavy crate out of the elevator with one hand while holding down the “Open” door button with the other.

  “Titus!” Mrs. Diggs cried.

  Dr. Pettibone turned around to face Mrs. Diggs and the Aldens. Before he could answer Mrs. Diggs, the elevator shut. The next thing everyone saw was the elevator arrow change from “Down” to “Up.”

  Dr. Pettibone and his crate were gone.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dig Those Bones

  The children pressed the elevator button over and over, but nothing happened.

  “Of all times for this elevator to act up,” Mrs. Diggs said. “What on earth was Titus doing with that big crate anyway?”

  After about five minutes, everyone gave up on the elevator.

  Mrs. Diggs turned to the Aldens. “Perhaps I will have you carry these bags up after all.”

  The Aldens walked Mrs. Diggs down the passageway and up the back stairs.

  “Thanks so much,” Mrs. Diggs said as she put her groceries down on the counter. “Here, bring this lunch bag to Titus.”

  The children raced down the stairs and out to the street.

  “I want to see what Dr. Pettibone is up to, don’t you?” Henry said as he and his sisters rushed along.

  “I couldn’t tell if the elevator doors closed by accident or if he wanted them to close on purpose when he saw us,” Jessie said.

  By the time the children made their way up to Dr. Pettibone’s office, they were completely out of breath. Again, they saw a light under the door of the fossil lab.