The Mystery of the Queen's Necklace

riffled through the wallet and came up with a snapshot. He held it out to Trixie. “Is that the guy?” he asked her.
    Trixie couldn’t believe her eyes. There he was, that creepy little gray man, half hidden in the crowd around the American Fountain.
    “Mart,” she squealed. “That’s him!”
    “He,” Mart corrected mechanically. “I was planning to surprise you all at dinner, but you’d better see it now. I saw him a few minutes after you did, Trix, and got a pretty good shot. Should we show it to the police?”
    “You’re darn tootin’!” Trixie’s blue eyes sparkled. “Oh, Mart, you’re wonderful. Come on!”
    Trixie led the charge down the stairs to the kitchen.
    “Anne! Anne!” Trixie yelled in the little hallway that led to the kitchen.
    The swinging door opened, but it was Andrew, not Anne, Hart who stood there, glaring at them. “Yes?” he said curtly.
    “Oh, Mr. Hart, we’ve been robbed,” Trixie blurted, while Jim was saying, “We’d like to call the police, sir,” and Mart was delivering a lengthy explanation of how he took his picture. Honey was too upset to say a word.
    “Indeed?” Andrew Hart’s black eyes snapped, and his nostrils were white with anger. “Anne?” he called, turning his back on them. When she came hurrying out, he disappeared into the kitchen, leaving the Bob-Whites to tell her all over again about the robbery.
    “Oh, dear, I’m most frightfully sorry. We must ring up the constable immediately,” she said. “Poor Father! He must have been terribly upset. We’ve never been burglarized, you know.”
    Before the local police had time to arrive, the Maroon Saloon drove up in the gravel crescent, and McDuff handed Miss Trask out with a flourish. The Bob-Whites and Anne were all waiting at the door.
    “She looks like she had a wonderful time,” Honey murmured to Trixie. “She’s positively glowing!”
    “All the worse for her when McDuff takes off for Scotland,” Trixie muttered, “if that’s where he’s
    really going. I’ll believe that when I see it.”
    “Well, even if he isn’t a real Scotsman, he hasn’t done us any harm,” Honey said. “He certainly couldn’t have taken my necklace—he was in Oxford all day.”
    “True,” Trixie admitted reluctantly. “I guess he couldn’t. But anyhow, we know who the thief was.” The constable arrived while McDuff and Miss Trask were dressing for dinner. The young fellow in blue went over the Rose Room thoroughly without coming up with a single clue, but he promised to do more investigating.
    At dinner, the girls went over the whole story again.
    “It could have been a pickpocket who ransacked the Rose Room, but,” Miss Trask said crisply, “he didn’t get Honey’s necklace!”
    “Didn’t get it?” Anne, Honey, and Trixie said in one breath.
    “I asked Gregory to put it in the safe before I left this morning,” Miss Trask explained. “Didn’t he tell you?”
    “He’s been at the theater,” Anne said weakly. “He doesn’t know anything about all this.”
    “Oh, Miss Trask!” Honey said gratefully. “I’ve been feeling so awful.”
    “I knew you took it out last night, and I just thought I'd better check to be sure it got put back,” their chaperon said.
    “I forgot,” Honey confessed miserably.
    “Well, no harm done.” Miss Trask’s blue eyes were sympathetic. “It’s easy to forget things when you’re excited, even important things. Actually, I’ve been wondering about something myself. You say the door of your room was open when you got back? I got Gregory to open it for me with the master key, but I can’t remember for the life of me if I latched it when I left.”
    The Bob-Whites stared at each other in amazement. Their Miss Trask—the embodiment of efficiency —forgetting something?
    After dinner, Trixie and Honey straightened up the Rose Room. “I bet that constable never catches up with Gray Cap,” Trixie said.
    “Do you think he’ll try again?” Honey asked anxiously. “Gray Cap, I mean?”
    “Sure to,” Trixie replied. “But that’s when we’ll catch him.”
    The Bob-Whites were traveling light, and it didn’t take the girls long to put things back in the drawers and hang clothes up in the closet.
    “I can hardly wait to go to the castle tomorrow,” Honey said. “I’ve never seen a real castle, have you?”
    “Nope. But what I can’t wait to see is whatever-it-was Anne was talking about—you know, in the Great Hall.”
    “What if