Us and Uncle Fraud Read Online Free PDF Page A

around for cars. "Hurry up," he called.
    "And there's no one else here, once Mrs. Shaw has gone to Kansas City to visit her itching daughter?" Uncle Claude asked. He was looking up at the massive house.
    "No. And we can—well, wait. I'll let Marcus tell you."
    When we reached the place where Marcus stood waiting, he beckoned for us to follow and turned to head for the back of the house. I had done this with Marcus before, so I knew where he was going. But Uncle Claude held back.
    "Marcus," he said, "you are my good and trustworthy friend. But I am not going to go one step farther until you explain where you're taking me. I will plant my feet right here in this ostentatious driveway, and they will take root. I will become part of the shrubbery. They will have to prune me every fall and sprinkle bone-meal fertilizer over my shoes."
    "Me, too," Stephie said, and she planted her feet.
    Marcus sighed. "My friend from school," he explained in a loud whisper, "Kenny Stratton? His father is the Leboffs' driver. When they're here, I mean. He takes care of their cars, and he drives the
Leboffs everywhere. The cars are over there." Marcus pointed beyond the house to the side, where an extension of the driveway led to a large structure that had once been a carriage house and was now converted to a garage.
    Uncle Claude looked and nodded. "Duly noted," he said.
    "And when the Leboffs are away, like right now, Kenny Stratton's father takes care of the house. He checks it every night at six."
    "Promptly at six? You're sure of that? He doesn't sometimes lose track of the time and come at—" Uncle Claude glanced at his watch—"eleven A.M. ?"
    "No," Marcus said impatiently. "He won't be back till this evening. So in the meantime we can look around, and no one will know."
    "Well," Uncle Claude said, "I guess I could go along with that. I expect that from the back of the house you can look out over the river. We could pretend it's the Rhine. Do you feel like being a Rhine Maiden, Louisamanda?"
    I didn't know what a Rhine Maiden was. But I nodded. I waited to see if Marcus would go on to reveal the rest.
    Marcus moved ahead, through an opening in a hedge, and along a flagstone path that led into an area deeply shadowed by trees beside the towering gray walls of the house. We followed him, Stephie clinging tightly to Claude's hand and me bringing up the rear.
    When the trees and shrubbery parted to open onto the vast lawn that ended at the steep riverbank, we stopped and looked with awe at the view. In April, with the runoff from melted snow, our slow, unimpressive river was turgid, deep brown in color, and punctuated with foamy whirlpools and woody debris. By midsummer it would be listless and lethargic again. But today it roared and churned.
    Marcus didn't bother admiring the dangerous grandeur of the river. "Wait here for a minute," he commanded and disappeared.
    "Where's that small Visigoth off to now?" Claude asked.
    Well, it was Marcus's secret, but I decided that I would tell it anyway.
    "He knows where Mr. Stratton keeps the key," I whispered. "We can go inside."

4
    In a moment Marcus was back, a metal ring with a large key dangling from it in his hand. "It's always there," he announced, "on a little hook behind the third step to the back door."
    But Uncle Claude was shaking his head in a decidedly negative way. "My good man," he said to Marcus, "you've shown enormous bravery and a definite devious cunning that is to be respected. But do you know what would happen if we used that key and entered this castle?"
    "Nothing would happen," Marcus said with assurance. "I've done it before. So has Louise. And Kenny Stratton. He's the one who showed us where the key is kept, and—"
    I interrupted him. "We don't touch anything," I explained. "We just
look.
There's all this fancy furniture, and paintings, and one of those giant pianos with the top that opens up, and—well, there's just all this stuff."
    "A pool table," Marcus