The Case of the Fifth Word By Donald J. Sobol
Class 08 EnglishEncyclopedia Brown is a young boy who lives in Idaville, USA. His father is the Chief of Police. In spite of being so young he often helps his father solve mysteries that even the police find difficult to solve.
Their discussions are generally held at the dining table. Read this story to find out how the boy wonder solves a case that has been troubling his father...
Encyclopedia’s father was Chief of Police. Everyone thought that he must be the smartest police chief in the country. Chief Brown was smart and quick. He didn’t sit around and worry. When he came up against a case he couldn’t solve, he acted at once. He cleared his desk, put on his hat, and went home to dinner. Encyclopedia solved the case for him before dinner was over.
Chief Brown would have liked to tell everyone about his only child. But who would believe him? Who would believe that the best detective alive was an eighth grader? So, he said nothing.
Encyclopedia never spoke of the help he gave his father. He didn’t want to seem different from other boys. But there was nothing he could do about his nickname. He was stuck with it. Only his parents and teachers called him by his real name, Leroy. Everyone else called him Encyclopedia.
An encyclopedia is a book or set of books filled with facts from A to Z. So was Encyclopedia’s head. He read more books than anyone in Idaville, and he never forgot a fact. His pals said he was like a library and computer rolled into one, and more user-friendly.
At the dinner table on Tuesday night, Chief Brown stared at his cream-of-mushroom soup. Encyclopedia and his mother knew what that meant. He had a mystery he could not solve.
“Tim Nolan died yesterday,” he announced in a matter-of-fact manner.
“That name is familiar,” Mrs. Brown said. “Wasn’t he mixed up in a jewellery robbery a few years ago?”
“Five years ago,” Chief Brown replied. “Two masked men held up the Diamond Mart on Sixth Avenue. They got away with a million dollars worth of jewellery.”
“I thought Tim Nolan was arrested,” Mrs. Brown said.
“He was questioned, not arrested,” Chief Brown corrected.
“I always believed that Nolan and a friend, a man named Daniel Davenport, pulled the hold-ups. There wasn’t any proof, though.”
Encyclopedia sat quietly. He knew his mother and father were discussing the case for his benefit.
His father filled in the facts.
“Nolan and Davenport had met,” Chief Brown said, “while both were in prison in South Carolina. They became friendly because of shared interests. Nolan was let out first. He settled in Idaville and started a small palm-tree nursery. It barely yielded him a living.”
“Davenport came to live with Nolan a week before the jewellery store hold-up. During the hold-up, one gunman’s mask slipped. A clerk thought she recognised Nolan. But she wasn’t absolutely sure.”
“I remember now,” Mrs. Brown said. “The clerk refused to testify against him, and no trace of the stolen jewellery ever turned up.”
“Davenport hasn’t been seen since the hold-up,” Chief Brown said. “My hunch is that he and Nolan decided to hide the loot until things cooled down.”
“Didn’t you search Nolan’s house, dear?”
“I got a court order this morning,” Chief Brown said. “Officers Lewis and Maloney just about took Nolan’s house apart. They didn’t find one piece of the stolen jewellery.”
“Is there some mystery about Nolan’s death yesterday?” Mrs. Brown inquired.
“Yes and no,” Chief Brown answered. “Nolan suffered from a bad heart for many years. Yesterday morning he had a stroke. He must have realised he was dying. With his last strength, he managed to put his will on the kitchen table. It leaves everything he owns, including his palm-tree nursery to Davenport.”
Part II
“What’s suspicious about that?” Mrs. Brown asked.
“Nothing about the will itself — just about a sheet from his desk calendar. It was clipped to the will,” said Chief Brown.
He took out his pocket notebook and leafed through the pages.
“I copied what Nolan wrote on the sheet,” he said. “Here it is.”
He handed the notebook to Mrs. Brown.
She read what he had copied. “It has Davenport’s name and address,” she said, “and a few words I don’t understand.”
She handed the notebook to Encyclopedia.
“What do you make of the four words, Leroy?”
Encyclopedia read the four words below Davenport’s name and address: Nom Utes Sweden Hurts.
Mrs. Brown looked at him hopefully. Usually he needed to ask only one question to solve a case before dessert.
They were still on the soup.
Encyclopedia leaned back and closed his eyes when he did his hardest thinking.
After several seconds, he opened his eyes and asked his question. “Is there a young fir tree in Mr. Nolan’s palm-tree nursery?” Chief Brown thought a moment. “Yes, there is... one. On the south side of the house. How did you know?”
“The four words say so,” Encyclopedia answered.
“They do?” said Chief Brown.
“See for yourself,” Encyclopedia urged.
Chief Brown studied the four words: Nom Utes Sweden Hurts.
He shook his head and passed the notebook to Mrs. Brown again. “Can you figure it out?”
“Nom is a shortening of nominative, a grammatical term,” stated Mrs. Brown, who had taught English and other subjects in high school. “Utes are an American Indian tribe. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Hurts is hurts.”
She lifted her gaze to Encyclopedia and shook her head.
“I can’t figure it out,” she confessed.
“Davenport disappeared right after the hold-up,” Encyclopedia reminded her.
“As Dad said, Davenport and Nolan must have hidden the stolen jewellery. Probably not a week or so ago, Nolan changed the hiding place.”
“You think that he tried to tell Davenport by phone and failed to reach him?” Mrs. Brown asked. “So he wrote the four words as he was dying?”
Chief Brown nodded. “We’ll find Davenport now that we know his address.”
“He’ll learn he has been left the palm-tree nursery,” Mrs. Brown said. “And the four words will tell him where the jewellery is hidden!”
“Right,” Encyclopedia said. “The code is simple, especially as it’s written on a sheet from a calendar. Davenport will understand it easily. Still, it wouldn’t make much sense to someone who isn’t looking for a hiding place.”
“Leroy!” Mrs. Brown exclaimed. “What do the four words mean?”
“You already guessed, Mom. They tell where the jewellery is hidden.”
Mrs. Brown looked ready to explode with impatience, “Where?”
Encyclopedia smiled.
“Why, under the fifth word,” he said.
What Was The Fifth Word?
To tell Davenport where he had hidden the stolen jewellery, Nolan wrote a four-word code.
As the key to the code, he wrote the four words on a sheet from a desk calendar.
The four words stood for days of the week.
Nolan dropped the letters d-a-y. Then he used the other letters to form words.
So, Nom = Monday, Utes = Tuesday, Sweden = Wednesday and Hurts = Thursday.
The unwritten fifth word was Fir, or Friday.
The jewellery was found inside a twenty-gallon jug of earth from which grew the young fir tree in Nolan’s nursery — just as Encyclopedia had foreseen.