Whodunit: The Secret Letters

The following is a Whodunit by Hy Conrad featuring Jonah Bixby, a twelve-year-old crime solver and son of a police detective. Can you solve the crime?

"Mom, please, I want to go," Jonah insisted. "We must have something up here that's old and interesting."

Jonah and his mother were in the attic, searching through the piles of clothes and knickknacks and discarded furniture. Carol Bixby sighed as she dusted away a layer of cobwebs. "I don't think Traveling Treasures is going to be interested in your father's moldy neckties," she said, moving aside a box.

"How about these bookends?" Jonah held up a pair of small iron roosters. "They're old and ugly, so they must be valuable." He dusted them off. "What do you say?"

Every Sunday night, Jonah and his mother sat down and watched Traveling Treasures, where hundreds of people brought in their family heirlooms and had them appraised by a platoon of experts. This week, the TV show was filming in Indianapolis, just an hour's drive away. From the minute Jonah saw the announcement on the news, he'd been bugging his mother to go.

"All right," Carol conceded. "It'll be a nice day trip. But you can't be disappointed."

Jonah promised. He really just wanted to do it for the fun and the experience. But by Saturday afternoon, after driving to the Convention Center and waiting in four different lines, it was a major letdown when an antiques dealer from New York evaluated his rooster bookends. The pieces were late Victorian, mass-produced, and worth about ten dollars each.

"There weren't even any cameras around," Jonah sulked.

"They save the cameras for the good stuff," Carol said with a smile. "Come on. Let's see who got lucky."

For the rest of the day, they wandered the hall, looking on as the resident experts appraised everything from baseball cards to gold chandeliers. Carol and Jonah were just approaching the exit when one particular item caught Carol's eye. "Oh, look," she said. "There's a terrific desk. Let's see what it's worth."

They stopped and watched as the furniture expert spoke to the desk's owner, a young woman. "It's an Edwardian piece," he explained somewhat pompously. "Made in England. Fairly common." He ran a hand under the front of the huge wooden desk. "I think it has a hidden drawer."

"Really?" the young owner said. "The desk belonged to my great grandmother, and I never..."

She stopped in mid-sentence, surprised, as the appraiser lifted a small section of molding and a secret drawer eased open. He reached deep inside and pulled out what looked like a steel cigar box, secured with a rusty clasp.

"Oh, my," the desk's owner said. "It must have been in there forever and no one knew."

Up until this moment, the expert had been looking bored. Now he was beginning to get excited. "Do you mind if I open it?" Without even waiting for an answer, he gently turned the clasp and lifted the box's tight-fitting lid.

Jonah and his mother had a good view. Inside the small steel box, under a layer of dust, they saw a stack of letters tied with a red ribbon. "Love letters?" the expert joked. "Was your great grandmother involved in some secret romance?"

"Well..." The young woman seemed a little sheepish. "There is a family story that before she married my great grandfather, she was friends with the young Winston Churchill, but..."

Even as she said it, the expert was holding the pack of letters under a light and squinting at a handwritten signature. He gasped and nearly choked on the dust. Seconds later, he was squawking into his cell phone. "Get a camera crew over here. Station 16. We're going to need a documents expert, too. This is big."

"Love letters from Churchill," whispered Carol. "Wow. Can you believe it?"

"No, I can't," said Jonah. "It's a fake."

"What do you mean, fake?"

"I mean that woman planted the letters in that box and tried to make them look old. I'll bet you anything they're forgeries."

HOW DID JONAH KNOW THE LETTERS WERE PLANTED?

Show Answer

The whodunit above was provided by American mystery fiction author Hy Conrad.

In addition to his work in mystery and crime puzzles, Hy was also one of the original writers for the groundbreaking TV series Monk.

Currently, Hy is working on mystery novel series "Abel Adventures" as well as the Monk series of novels, starting with Mr. Monk Helps Himself (published by Penguin, order from Amazon here)

Check out Hy's official website and Facebook page - and stay tuned for more whodunits puzzlers on Neatorama from the master of whodunit mysteries himself!