“Wait a minute,” Sandy said. “That brings us back to the old problem. Why did he have to look at his negative through this machine? Why project it on—?”

  Ken grabbed his arm. “Project it on what? That’s it!”

  “Huh?”

  “Two things—each of them perfectly innocent-looking. Don’t you see? When one of them is projected on the other, in here”—Ken pointed to the machine— “they give him what he wants! Suppose he takes an ordinary map of Kenshoa Park—he’d know he could always pick one up some place—and puts it down here.” He indicated the silvered surface at the base of the machine. “Then he projects his negative on it—a negative of this thing he had with him all along. Maybe it’s just a fancy necktie, but something about the design points out the spot on the map that—”

  Sandy’s voice sounded very flat after Ken’s eagerness. “He was wearing a plain black necktie.”

  “Don’t take me so literally. Besides, he could have had another one in his pocket. Or it could have been anything. A—a—”

  They stared at each other for a long startled moment.

  When they spoke, finally, it was in unison.

  “A ring!” Ken whispered it. Sandy’s voice was a thin croak.

  “The coils of the snake—” Sandy said.

  “Traced on an ordinary map—”

  Miss Bemis’ precise heels tapped into the room. “I just wanted to let you know—” she began, and stopped.

  The boys had both turned on her so swiftly that she backed away.

  “Miss Bemis,” Ken asked her, “did Fenton—that man who came in here last night—have a map with him? Or did he ask for a map? Do you remember?”

  The intensity of his voice drove her another step backward, and her round eyes declared that she thought they had both gone mad. “A map?” she repeated. “I don’t— Why?”

  “Try to remember,” Sandy pleaded. “If he didn’t ask you for it, maybe you saw him take something out of his pocket. Maybe—”

  “There was just the pamphlet,” Miss Bemis said. “The one that was lying beside the machine when I followed him in here to ask if he knew how to operate it.”

  “What kind of pamphlet?” Ken wasn’t even aware that he had rudely interrupted her.

  “Oh—just a pamphlet.” Her voice sounded vague. “I didn’t particularly notice, you know. He was rather abrupt. When I offered to help him he was almost impolite.” She took another step backward then, as if she had recovered enough to realize that Ken and Sandy were being rather impolite too.

  Ken tried to make his voice and manner calm. “But it wasn’t one of the library’s own pamphlets, was it, Miss Bemis? It wasn’t just the little leaflet”—he gestured toward the other room—“that you have out there, describing the microfilm collection?”

  “Oh, no. This one had a red-and-green cover—divided diagonally, I think. I remember it looked very familiar to me. I’ve seen pamphlets like that before. But exactly what it was—” She shook her head, and then she smiled brightly. “I’m sorry not to be able to help you. What I came to tell you was that I’ve devised a new checking system, so that these troublesome errors won’t occur again. I wouldn’t want you to think—” She broke off, looking startled again. The boys had both started for the door.

  “We’re very grateful, Miss Bemis,” Ken said. “You’ve been a great help to us.”

  “It was a wonderful error,” Sandy said. “I mean—”

  “He means it’s a wonderful department you’ve got here, Miss Bemis. Brentwood is certainly lucky to have it. Thanks very much,” Ken added, as Sandy pulled him through the door and tore for the stairs.

  At the top they slowed to a less conspicuous fast walk.

  “State colors,” Sandy was saying, slightly out of breath. “Diagonally divided. Standard design for state park information folders. He—”

  They were approaching the main desk and Miss Wakefield had looked up to smile at them.

  “Did you find what you wanted, Sandy?”

  “Oh, yes, Miss Wakefield. Miss Bemis was very helpful. Just what we wanted.” He put on his best smile. “Do you have any of the state park folders here?”

  “Right over there.” She glanced toward a rack on the far wall. “I believe we have the full collection. And they’re so attractive, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes. They certainly are.” Sandy had to raise his voice on the last words. He and Ken were already across the room.

  It took them exactly one second to find the Kenshoa Park folder among all the others. In another second they had opened it to the two maps folded inside.

  “Maps!” Sandy breathed. “Nice pretty maps!”

  One was of the entire state, indicating the location of Kenshoa Park and the roads leading to it. The other was of the park itself, and gave in detail all the roads, camping areas, streams, and other points of interest to the visitor.

  Sandy suddenly closed it and put it back on its rack. “Let’s go get our own so we can really study it. Twenty-five cents at any newsstand. Come on.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were in Sandy’s darkroom, the Kenshoa Park map from the pamphlet they had just bought spread out before them on the table. They had agreed that the second map, of the entire state, was far less likely to be of value to them.

  “What we’re looking for,” Ken said, bending over it, “is a road that resembles the twisting and turns of the cobra on the ring.”

  “Or a brook,” Sandy added. “Or a path.”

  “Check. How do we—?”

  Ken stopped as he saw that Sandy was reaching for the negative he had made the night before and was inserting it into his enlarger.

  “Might as well have this where we can see it,” Sandy said.

  The image of the cobra appeared on the easel when he turned on the light, and Sandy adjusted the machine to bring it into sharp focus. The cobra’s head stood upright above an intricate double coil—one loop smaller and slightly to one side of the other—and below the loops the rest of the body curved back and forth three times before a final small loop just short of the end.

  “I remember thinking that seemed like a funny way for a snake to be coiled,” Sandy muttered. “But I thought it was just because I don’t know much about cobras.” He took the map from the table and laid it flat on the easel, so that the image of the snake was superimposed on it, with the snake’s head touching the top margin of the map and the tip of its tail the bottom. “Now all we have to do is move the map around until the image coincides with something on it.”

  “Maybe it’ll never coincide with anything while it’s that size,” Ken suggested. “Maybe we need a small image to—”

  “We’ll start like this and work down. Once we know the snake design well enough, we may notice something that looks like it. Then we can adjust the image and see if it really does match. Let’s go.”

  But an hour later they turned the room light on and both blinked their eyes wearily. They had studied every road, path, and brook in the entire park, but none of them—in part or in entirety—resembled the particular curves and twists of the cobra.

  “We’re getting nowhere fast,” Sandy said with a sigh. “The idea sounded so good back there in the library, but—”

  Ken rubbed the back of his stiff neck. “We can’t give up yet. Maybe it is the state map, after all. Let’s try.”

  “O.K.” Sandy made the substitution and turned off the light.

  But when he turned it on the next time they were no further ahead. Not a single road, or section of road on the state map, matched the cobra’s coils.

  Ken slumped into a chair. “All right,” he said. “I’ll admit it’s not working out. Fenton just happens to like rings with snakes carved on them. Whatever he had in that envelope—and whatever he was doing in the microfile room—”

  “Oh, brother!” Sandy’s exclamation was half a groan. “If I bend way over, will you kick me—hard?” He pulled the negative out of the enlarger and stared at it.

  “It’s a welcome suggestion—but why?” Ken’s sudden new alertness contradicted the words.

  “I took a picture of the impression of the ring—not of the ring itself.”

  “I know you did. So what?”

  “So everything! So I’m a dope! Look,” Sandy went on, “the impression is backwards, so I should have reversed the negative in the enlarger to compensate. Get it?”

  “No.”

  Sandy stared at him exasperatedly. “You don’t? Now concentrate. If there’d been a number on that ring— the numeral five, for example—it would have been backwards in the mud. Right? The way you’d see a five in the mirror.”

  “O.K. Go on.”

  “So our mud impression was a reverse image. But when I photographed it and got a negative, I reversed it again. You know all negatives are reverses of the original. So—now comes the dopey part—when I put the negative in the enlarger, I put it in as I always do, to make the image come out like the original. Which means I reversed it a third time. And that makes it exactly the opposite of what Fenton would have had, if he’d photographed the ring itself instead of an impression of it!”

  Ken looked at him in silence for a moment, his mind going over the backward-forward triple-reverse reasoning Sandy had just presented to him.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” he asked finally, “that the snake’s curves, as we’ve been projecting them, are backwards?”

  “Of course! What did you think?”

  “Then why didn’t you just say so?” Ken grinned. “Come on. Turn it over!”

  Sandy grinned back, turned the negative over, and reinserted it in the enlarger.

  They put the map of Kenshoa Park back on the easel. After a fruitless half-hour they exchanged it for the map of the state.

  At the end of another half-hour their eyes were smarting and their muscles cramped. And they were utterly discouraged.

  “Backwards — forwards — upside-down — down-side-up,” Ken said bitterly. “It makes no difference. There’s no road or path or brook or anything that fits that snake.”

  “And,” Sandy added glumly, “vice versa.”

  CHAPTER XI

  WET PAINT COMES OFF

  “Let’s be sensible about this, Ken.” Sandy’s chin rested on his hand as he leaned his elbow on the counter of the little lunchroom half a block from the office. “So Fenton outsmarted us. Does that mean our lives are over? Cheer up! He seems to have outsmarted Richards too.”

  There had been no further word from the Security Indemnity detective, from which they had deduced that Richards was no nearer his goal than he had been early that morning—and that Fenton might already have picked up the money and made good his departure.

  “I notice how cheerful you are,” Ken answered, with a faint smile. He looked at the plate in front of Sandy. “I don’t ever remember seeing you leave half a piece of pie before.”

  “I just haven’t finished yet.” But Sandy didn’t pick up his fork again.

  Ken poked his own fork at a piece of piecrust. “I’m not upset at being foxed by Fenton,” he said, after a moment. “At least not so much that I can’t get over it. But if he hasn’t picked up the money yet—if he’s still stalling around, the way he’s done so far—” Ken sighed. “What really bothers me is the feeling that we are pretty close to something—and that we might as well be a million miles away. I’m still convinced that that snake ring is more than an ornament; that it’s some kind of guidepost.”

  “Sure. But what’s it guiding to?” Sandy slid off the counter stool and dug into his pocket for change. “Let’s get back to the office and do our mourning where it doesn’t interfere with Andy’s restaurant business.” He motioned toward a figure in blue denims who had just entered the door, and stood gazing around as if seeking some place to sit.

  Ken roused himself and followed Sandy slowly outside. Customers leaving the lunchroom at the same time jostled him as they moved past, and he took a few steps to bring himself out of the main stream of traffic. But on the far edge of the sidewalk Ken paused again, and leaned up against a small delivery truck parked there.

  “A snake ring,” he muttered to himself. “A snake ring. Are we absolutely on the wrong course? No, I don’t think so,” he answered himself. “I feel sure of th.it.”

  “All right,” Sandy said pacifically. “You feel sure of it. Do you also feel like standing around here all—?”

  But Ken was talking again. “If we’re right about the ring, then we’re wrong somewhere else. Let’s give ourselves the benefit of every doubt, and say we’re even right when we concluded it has something to do with a map.” He looked up suddenly. “Are those maps changed every year? Are there new editions? Because if there are—”

  “They’re not changed every year. I know that. We —the Advance, I mean—receives copies of new state publications, and I haven’t seen any of those park pamphlets around lately at all. For years, I’d say.” Then Sandy grabbed Ken’s arm and dragged him away from the truck. The slight gray-haired man in the blue denims had left the lunchroom, with a big paper sack whose open top showed the wax-paper wrappings of several sandwiches, and the boys were impeding his way into the driver’s seat. “Sorry,” Sandy told him. “We don’t seem to be able to keep out of your way.”

  ” ‘S’all right.” The man nodded and got in, started his motor, and drove off.

  “You’re sure about that?” Ken asked.

  “Yes. I’m sure.” Sandy’s impatience was growing. “Look,” he said, “can’t we—?”

  “But the roads and paths and stuff in the park must be changed sometimes,” Ken broke in persistently. “How would we go about finding out in a hurry what they used to be?”

  “State Park Commission in the state capitol,” Sandy told him.

  “I said in a hurry. To go there and back would take us a day. Isn’t there any quicker way?”

  Sandy concentrated for a moment. “Dave Green was the road supervisor up at Kenshoa Park before he retired six or seven years ago. He might know something.”

  “Good! Where could we find him?”

  “On McKinley Street—here in Brentwood.”

  “Then come on!” Ken flashed him a brief cheerful grin and turned away to start across the street. “Come on,” he called back over his shoulder. “You going to stand around there all day?”

  Sandy was laughing when he joined Ken on the far side of the street. “Hold it,” he said. “Let me see you a minute.” He took Ken’s arm and swung him around. ” ‘Hiram’s Hennery—Fresh Eggs,’” he recited slowly.

  “What? What are you—?”

  “You’ve got paint on your back—nice neat letters, backward.” Sandy laughed again. “I told you to come away from that truck. Must have had a newly painted sign on it.”

  Ken had been craning to look over his shoulder. Even at that awkward angle he could see the blur of white across the back of his leather jacket—a jacket the Allens had given him the previous Christmas.

  “Hey,” he said seriously, “will it come off?”

  “With turpentine or gasoline or something, I guess.”

  “There’s gasoline in the shop, isn’t there? Let’s go do something with it right away before it dries.”

  “I thought you were in such a hurry to see Dave Green.” Sandy had to lengthen his stride to keep up with Ken.

  “I am also in a hurry to get this clean—this is my favorite jacket. Wouldn’t you think people would keep their trucks at home until the paint dried?”

  “No one told you to lean on the truck,” Sandy said. “You know, if we’d thought of it we would have bought you a jacket with lettering on it. Looks right smart, pardner. ‘Hiram’s Hennery—Fresh Eggs.’ Yes sir, even backwards, it looks right smart.”

  “Never mind that backward routine,” Ken said. “I had enough of that this morning with the negative. Just lead me to some gasoline and Mr. Dave Green.”

  When they left the office ten minutes later Ken held his jacket in his hand, waving it gently to rid it of its penetrating gasoline odor. But by the time they pulled up in front of a small gray house on McKinley Street, the jacket was still highly aromatic. Ken left it in the car.

  “No sense in incurring Mr. Green’s irritation when we’re about to ask him a favor,” he murmured.

  “I’m not sure Dave Green can be irritated,” Sandy told him.

  A few minutes afterward Ken was inclined to agree with him. The former park road supervisor was a vigorous man in his sixties, his face leathery from years of outdoor work, his eyes suggesting an easy good humor that would be difficult to shatter.

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, when Sandy had explained their errand. He paused to tamp tobacco into his pipe. “There were some road changes during my time up there—quite a number of them.” He got the pipe going and the air of his small study turned blue with its smoke.

  “Thing was,” he said, “some of the early roads in the park were too steep, too twisty. So we did a lot of straightening and grading. But that’s about the size of it. Didn’t actually make any new roads, as I recall.”

  Ken pulled Sandy’s negative from his pocket and held it up against the light from the window, so that Green might see the image on it. “Would you remember if there was any road that looked like this—or any part of this? I mean, a road that had the same curves that this has.”

  Green smiled. “There’s no excuse for roads as twisted as that, son. Matter of fact, we don’t generally pattern our roadways after the coils of a snake.”

  “I know it sounds farfetched,” Ken told him. “But we do have a real reason for asking.”

  Green waved his apology aside. “No need to explain. Perfectly willing to tell you anything I know without that. But the truth is roads are rarely twisted like that unless they’re in high mountains, where switchbacks are needed. Of course you take a very old road, that just kind of came into being where there had been a horse track or a cattle trail—that’s likely to wander a bit. But with modern machinery we’ve mostly smoothed them down to …” He paused, and then got up suddenly and crossed to a large map of Kenshoa Park hung on one wall of the room.

 

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