“The meeting will come to order,” Jupiter Jones said, rapping on the desk. The other three boys in the tiny office of Headquarters quieted. It was the afternoon following their discovery of the screaming clock and Mr. Jeeters’s attempt to get it away from them. They had been busy, and now they were conferring to see what progress they had made, if any.

Jupiter had phoned Harry Smith at his home that morning. As Harry had recently got his driver’s licence and could drive the old car that had belonged to his father, he had driven down to The Jones Salvage Yard at Rocky Beach to join them.

“Bob, give us your report,” Jupiter said. Bob had been the busiest of them all. That morning he had driven into Los Angeles with his father, who was a feature writer for a big Los Angeles newspaper. His father had introduced him to the man in charge of the records room, called “the morgue” in newspaper slang. Here were hundreds of filing cabinets containing clippings of all the stories that had been in the newspaper, arranged both by subject matter and by name of the person involved.

Bob’s job had been to look up first anything he could learn about Harry’s father, Ralph Smith, and his trial, then about A. Clock or Mr. Hadley, then about thefts of valuable paintings in general.

Bob was armed with a sheaf of notes. He had a lot of information to pass on to the others, but he made it as brief as possible.

There wasn’t much to tell about Ralph Smith’s trial that they didn’t know already. The evidence was circumstantial, but strong enough to convince the police that they had their man. They had tried to get Mr. Smith to admit he had been the art thief who had been operating around Hollywood and Los Angeles for some ten years, but Harry’s father had stoutly maintained his innocence.

“Some of the thefts happened while you were still living in San Francisco, didn’t they, Harry?” Bob asked.

“Yes, that’s right. We only moved down to Hollywood about six years ago,” Harry answered. “So you see, my dad has to be innocent. He couldn’t have been involved in any of those first thefts.”

“If the same ring was guilty all along, he couldn’t,” Jupiter put in. “Tell us about the series of art thefts in this city, Bob.”

Bob obliged. There had been at least a dozen major robberies of valuable paintings in the last ten years, approximately at the rate of one a year. As Mr. Hitchcock had said, many wealthy film actors and directors collected art, and they had some immensely valuable paintings in their homes. Naturally, these weren’t guarded as well as pictures in a museum would be. In every case the thieves had got in through a window or by picking the lock of a door, had cut the paintings out of their frames, and had vanished without leaving a trace.

“The police theory has been that these paintings were sold to wealthy South American collectors who would keep them hidden in their own private collections for their own enjoyment,” Bob said. “Valuable paintings are known to just about everybody in the art world, so they couldn’t have been sold legitimately. They must have been sold to people who wouldn’t ever show them.”

“And none of them were ever recovered?” Jupiter asked.

“None of them. Not until the three were found in Harry’s house,” Bob answered. He went on to tell them about the biggest theft, some two years before. Many rare paintings had been loaned to a gallery for a special exhibit. Before the exhibit even opened, the thieves had broken in and stolen five paintings, with a total value of half a million dollars.

“This wasn’t a record, though,” Bob added. “Not long ago someone cut out a door panel in an English museum and stole eight pictures valued at between four and eight million dollars. They were later recovered, but that’s the record for an art theft so far.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Pete. “That’s a lot of money for paintings.”

“Right,” Bob agreed. “Anyway a lot of very valuable art has been stolen in this city, so smoothly that the police have been baffled every time. Apparently they now believe that Harry’s father had a hand in most of the thefts, but they wouldn’t even have suspected him if he hadn’t been in the house trying to sell life insurance a few days before. So — ”

“Now wait a minute!” Harry burst out angrily. “I tell you my father didn’t do it. If you’re trying to say that just because he sold insurance and got around to a lot of big houses — ”

“Take it easy, Harry,” Jupiter said quietly. “We don’t believe your father did it. The question of how those pictures got under the linoleum in your kitchen is another mystery. We seem to have a lot of them. One: who stole the pictures? Two: how did they get where they were found? Three: why did Mr. Hadley, or Mr. Clock, which seems to be his real name, go on a trip and disappear? Four: where did the clock actually come from, and what does it mean?”

He touched the clock, which stood on the desk in front of him.

“This clock certainly means something,” he said. “Mr. Jeeters was mighty anxious to get it away from us yesterday. That means it has to be important somehow.”

“I’m sorry I told Mr. Jeeters about you and the clock,” Harry apologized. “But after you left he started asking me questions about you, and — well, he frightened my mother. So I told him you’d been there to ask about one of Mr. Hadley’s screaming clocks you had found, and that seemed to set him off. He grabbed your card away from me and left in a hurry.”

“Fortunately, Hans was here to render us assistance,” Jupiter said. “Tell me, Harry, has Mr. Jeeters acted suspiciously in any way while he’s been living in the house?”

“He wanders round the house a lot at night!” Harry blurted out. “He claims he’s a writer and can’t sleep. One night I heard him tapping on walls like he was hunting for something.”

“Mmmm.” Jupiter pinched his lip and looked thoughtful. “I have an idea, but it may be all wrong. Let’s get back to business. I don’t see how we can solve the art thefts if the police can’t. But we still have the mystery of the clock to investigate. We haven’t puzzled out where it came from yet. Let’s tackle that next.”

“What good will that do my father?” Harry flared up. “He’s in jail and you go around investigating an old clock!”

“We have to start someplace,” Jupiter told him. “We have several mysteries here and I think the clock is a link between them somehow.”

“Well, okay,” Harry grumbled. “But how can you trace the clock if it was thrown out in someone’s rubbish?”

“We have a message that was pasted on the bottom of it,” Jupiter said. He opened a secret drawer in the desk, used for keeping small objects safe, and took out the paper they had found with the clock. He read the message out loud again:

Dear Rex:

Ask Imogene.

Ask Gerald.

Ask Martha.

Then act! The result will surprise even you.

“I still say, who are these characters?” Pete said. “How can we ever locate them and what do we ask them if we find them?”

“One thing at a time,” Jupiter said. “It seems the message is addressed to Rex. So I deduce that the clock containing the message must have been sent to this Rex. Let’s locate Rex.”

“As Pete says, how?” Bob put in.

“We must be logical,” Jupiter said. “Rex must be a friend of Mr. Clock, or Mr. Hadley — let’s all call him Mr. Clock from now on for the sake of clarity. Anyway, Rex must be a friend to be addressed by his first name. Harry, did you bring Mr. Clock’s address book?”

“I couldn’t find one,” Harry said, beginning to get interested. “But I did find a list of people he used to send Christmas cards to, stuffed in the back of a drawer.”

He brought out a folded sheet of paper. Jupiter smoothed it out.

“Good,” he said. “Mr. Clock’s friends should be on a Christmas card list. There are about a hundred names here, and addresses too, all typed out. Now first let’s find Rex.”