The Mystery of the Vanishing Victim

awakened her had been replaced by a pall of silence. Brian and Mart sat tensely at the dining room table.
    Trixie slipped noiselessly into a chair across from her brothers.
    “Sergeant Molinson is on his way over,” Brian told her.
    Trixie nodded her head to let her brother know she’d heard him, but she said nothing.
    The sound of the sergeant’s car coming up the drive finally broke the stillness, and the three Bob-Whites went out to the driveway to meet him.
    The sergeant was already inspecting the damage to the Model A. “Not as bad as it might have been,” he said.
    “Bad enough,” Brian answered glumly.
    “Can you check the car for fingerprints?” Trixie said. “There must be some way of finding out who did this.”
    “Oh, I think I already know who did it,” Sergeant Molinson said, stepping back from the car.
    The three Beldens stared at him in disbelief. “You do?” Trixie asked.
    “It was your hit-and-run victim,” the sergeant said. Then he snorted contemptuously.
    Trixie stared at Sergeant Molinson as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “But he’s in the hospital!” she said.
    “Not anymore, he’s not,” the sergeant told her. “He sneaked out during the night. Nobody noticed he was gone until I went over early this morning to arrest him.”
    “Arrest him?” Trixie exclaimed. She looked from the sergeant to Brian to Mart, too confused even to ask questions.
    “Could you tell us what’s going on?” Brian asked.. “Let’s go inside.”
    Once again the three Beldens gathered around the dining room table. Sergeant Molinson began to speak as he sat down. “The FBI report came in first thing this morning. The victim’s name is Henry Meiser. He escaped last week from a state prison. He was serving a six-month sentence for assault with a deadly weapon.” The sergeant stopped to let his words sink in.
    Trixie stared at him and asked, “His name is MiserP When he was hit by the van, was he talking about finding himself?”
    “I can’t answer that,” Sergeant Molinson said after a thoughtful pause. “His name is spelled M-E-I-S-E-R, and he may have meant anything, I guess. It seems that Meiser is the classic eccentric inventor. He’s always working on some weird contraption or other. He was harmless enough, though, until a few years ago. Then he claimed he’d had an invention stolen from him. After that, he got more and more secretive. He didn’t trust anyone except his secretary, a young widow who had worked for him for a number of years. He wouldn’t even patent his inventions, because he was sure that the patent officers were idea thieves.”
    “That explains it!” Trixie exclaimed.
    “Explains what?” Molinson asked sharply.
    “When I visited him in the hospital yesterday, he told me about the Stanley brothers—the inventors of the Stanley Steamer. He told how they’d lost control of the rights to their cars. I thought at the time that it sounded as though he was talking about himself. And he was—sort of, at least.”
    “But what about the assault?” Brian asked. “Meiser finally went off his rocker completely, I guess,” Sergeant Molinson replied. “As I said before, the only person he’d trust was his secretary. He had a janitor, too, who cleaned up the workroom and helped him move heavy things around. One night the janitor was mopping up the floor, when Meiser suddenly flew into a rage. He pulled a gun on the man and accused him of trying to steal his most recent invention.”
    “What was the invention?” Trixie asked.
    The sergeant shrugged. “Nobody knows. Certainly not the janitor. Meiser kept everything in his head and didn’t talk to anyone. The janitor testified in court that he didn’t know what Meiser was working on, and he didn’t care. He just mopped the floors and cashed his paycheck every week.”
    “Did Mr. Meiser shoot the janitor?” Trixie asked. “No. As I said, he threatened to. The janitor testified that he threw down his mop and raised his hands. He turned to leave, and Meiser struck him from behind with the butt of his gun. When the janitor came to, he was lying in the alley behind the workshop. The lights in the shop were off, and the door was locked,” Sergeant Molinson concluded.
    “You keep talking about the janitor’s testimony in court,” Trixie pointed out. “Did Mr. Meiser admit that it happened the way the janitor said it did?”
    “Of course not,” the sergeant said. “Meiser stuck to his original story,