Read Online The Case That Time Forgot by Tracy Barrett - Free Book Online Page A

man had been friendly, but he was clearly busy, and Xander’s famous charm might help if they wanted him to stay and talk for a minute.
    Xander flashed a smile at the man. “My sister and I are from the States,” he began.
    A snort. “I could tell that!”
    Xander had gotten used to people commenting on his accent. “We don’t have places like this there, at least not where we live in Florida. How old is the pub?”
    The waiter seemed pleased at their interest. “More than two hundred years. Been in the same location all this time.”
    â€œWow!” Xena was genuinely impressed.
    â€œHere, look at this.” The waiter went behindthe counter and beckoned them to follow him. “Look here.” Scratched in the wood were words, some numbers, and what looked like abbreviations. “These are the prices of things that they served here long ago.” Xena and Xander looked for something—anything—that could be a clue. There were no hieroglyphs or anything that looked Egyptian. No drawings of the sun, either.
    â€œWhere did the name come from—The Cat and Crown?” Karim asked.
    â€œI don’t rightly know.” The man rubbed his chin. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and ask Mrs. Collins? She’s here most afternoons except when she goes to visit her son, like today. Will there be anything else?”
    â€œThis case is frustrating,” Xander said as they fastened their raincoats. “Every time we get close to something, we hit a dead end.”
    â€œAll we can do is come back, like the waiter said.” Xena felt just as gloomy as her brother. They walked through the rain with Karim to the corner where his mother was going to pick him up.
    â€œThere’s something I don’t get,” Xander said as they hurried along, heads hunched against the drizzle. “Why did Amin write down theclues? Why didn’t he just tell his brother or somebody where the amulet was?”
    â€œI bet he didn’t get a chance,” Xena answered. “He was in hiding. Then, after he was caught, the brothers probably didn’t have a chance to talk again.”
    â€œPlus I don’t think he wanted his brother to have it,” Karim added. “It wasn’t until he was dying that he gave up on getting it himself and sent that clue to my great-great-great-grandfather. He must have figured it was better for someone in the family to have it than for the amulet to stay hidden forever.”
    â€œWhy didn’t he just call?” Xander asked.
    Karim shook his head. “It must have been really expensive to make a phone call from Egypt back then. He was only an archaeologist’s helper and then a guard, and he probably never got either of those jobs again after what he did in London. He must have been really poor. If he wrote a letter, it would probably get intercepted by the police, so he wrote that clue instead. The police wouldn’t think it had anything to do with the amulet, so they’d let it through.”
    â€œAnyway, I don’t believe that Amin was making up all that stuff about the amulet.” Xena was convinced of this. “He must have been angry,and he might have wanted to make Sherlock look stupid by sending him on a wild-goose chase, but Sherlock took it seriously, and he wasn’t easy to fool.”
    They rounded the corner and saw Karim’s mother waiting to pick him up. They politely refused her offer of a ride and rode home on the Tube instead, a gloomy silence between them.
    After supper and homework, Xena went to find Xander in his room. “Let’s try to get things in order,” she suggested. “We have a lot of clues—we just need to find out some answers. Maybe there’s something we missed in the casebook.”
    â€œIt’s in my locker at school,” Xander said. “I didn’t want to drag it around in my backpack in the rain. What if it got wet