As promised, here’s a post of Selections from Book 3, Chapters 7-9. For those of you who are proceeding with the books one a month, here are the direct links to this one:
THE MYSTERY OF THE CHIMERIC CORNUCOPIA
CHAPTER 7 SELECTION 1 (BOB)
It was ten minutes later, and Bob was still stunned by what they'd discovered. The previous morning his father had told him the stark details of a true-crime story that had happened twenty-five years before, and now that story had come to vivid life.
The murdering counterfeiter, who had fled Massachusetts and wound up in Jackson, had brought his expertise with him and had used it in this very cave. Had he worked alone? That seemed unlikely, when you considered how difficult it would have been to get the tables and press, the supplies and equipment into place.
Once the bats had settled back to sleep, Jupiter and Bob had explained to Branko what they'd stumbled on, then methodically searched the chamber and found a large brown suitcase and a smaller black one tucked under one of the wooden tables.
Now Branko and Pete were lifting them out and placing them on the tabletop. Bob watched as Jupiter opened the large one, then took out several stacks of paper. The paper was a creamy white, but also a little faded. The edges were crisply cut and the stack was exactly the size of paper money.
"Was he going to print on this?" Branko asked Jupiter.
"Counterfeiters are usually caught because the paper isn't right," Jupiter said. "Real greenbacks are printed on special cotton-rag paper, so expert counterfeiters like André Laurent sometimes get authentic paper by buying bundles of one-dollar bills, then bleaching all the dye out. That seems to be what has been done in the present instance.
“Quite wonderfully," he added, lifting up a single piece of paper and feeling it. He handed the paper around.
Bob fingered it; it was thicker and heavier than most paper and felt substantial in his hand.
"What about this box?" asked Pete as he tried to flip the latches.
To everyone's surprise, the latches snapped open and when Jupiter raised the lid and shone his flashlight inside, it illuminated a number of engraved metal plates. From his backpack, Jupiter pulled the firm's magnifying glass, tucked into a leather pouch.
"You think of everything!" Pete said.
"One must be ready for all eventualities," Jupiter said. "Although, as we are discovering, life is full of surprises."
He adjusted his headlamp so that the line shone in the right direction and began examining one of the engraved plates, then another. Bending over them, with the others redirecting their lights to reduce the reflection, Jupiter looked to Bob a bit like a scientist hunched over a microscope.
"Just as I suspected," Jupiter said. "Each one of these plates is different. But if each engraving is printed, one on top of another, you'd get - "
"Lots and lots of hundred dollar bills!" Pete exclaimed.
"Impressive ones," said Jupiter. "Look at the circular lines around the portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Bob."
He passed the plate and the magnifying glass to Bob. Around Franklin's face a series of concentric lines, each perfectly spaced, gave depth and texture to the image.
Suddenly Bob felt strangely uneasy.
"I think we should take this stuff and go," he said.
"I agree," said Jupiter. "But let's be sure we haven't missed anything. We don't know when we'll be getting back."
"Hopefully never," Pete said. "Or at least not until we know where that Laurent guy is. Bob, didn't you say he got away before they could put him in jail?"
"That's what the article said," Bob told them. "He jumped bail."
"So he's on the loose," Pete said, nervously.
"I wouldn't be worried," Jupiter said. "We are clearly the first people in this room in many years. As for the man who lit the campfire, he's long gone."
He shone his flashlight into every corner, raking the walls and ceiling with its beam. He pointed out that the corroded batteries had been used to light the lights, and wondered if the generator would also be corroded. Finally he said, "All right. Let's go. I want to put the false wall back in place. Bob, you take the case with the paper, and Pete, you take the case with the engraving plates."
It took a bit of doing, but, together, the four of them were able to push the fake rock back into position and get its clips to click into place. In the cavern, they looked around one last time for further evidence about the identity of the man who had made such distinctive marks with his cowboy boots, and when they didn't find any, they headed for the cavern entrance.
CHAPTER 7 SELECTION 2 (BOB)
Back at the vineyard, they checked in with Branko's parents, to let them know they'd gotten back and to tell them they'd be spending the rest of the afternoon at the grape pickers' shed. In the shed, Bob got to work. He began by searching through his computer's history to pull up the articles he'd discovered the morning before. They confirmed that in the mid-1990s the F.B.I. had shown up in Jackson to arrest a French-Canadian man named André Laurent. The authorities had never found the offset printing press he had used to print his counterfeit money.
Bob saw he needed to look farther and wider in order to find out more about Laurent himself. He began by typing "André Laurent," "counterfeiting," "Amador County," and "1995" into the search box. It turned out these were good choices.
He quickly found a number of articles from newspapers both in the Bay Area and in southern California, some more detailed than others. Most were datelined 1995. Bob was happy to see that more and more major papers had managed to digitize their archives, and he even found an article from the Los Angeles Sun, his father's paper. Before Bob got too far into any of this, he decided it would be good if Jupiter joined him. He walked into the small room where Jupiter lay on his bunk, his eyes closed.
"Jupe?" he said quietly.
Jupiter's eyes opened. He smiled. "Hello, Bob."
"Were you falling asleep?"
"No," Jupiter said. "I was just pondering. One would like to think the best of one's forebears, but if the man who originally owned Dragutin Wines was, indeed, my grandfather, then we have to wonder if he knew about the counterfeiting operation on his land. Perhaps he was even actively involved in it."
"Oh, I doubt that," Bob said - though he had actually already thought the same thing. "Anyway, I'm sure there's an explanation," he added, hoping that there was. "Come out and see what I've been finding."
With Jupiter sitting beside him, Bob read the articles he had bookmarked. He also showed Jupe the obituary he had found for Spiridon Markovic; it said that the owner of Dragutin Wines in Jackson, California had died suddenly in March of 1995 from a heart attack at the age of 50. Funeral services had been held at St. Sava's Eastern Orthodox Church in Jackson. Interment had followed in the church's cemetery. Bob also pointed out that Spiridon Markovic had died over a month before André Laurent had been arrested.
"See?" Bob said. "Chances are he knew nothing at all."
"It's too early to conclude that," Jupiter said. "But I must say that information comes as a relief. Perhaps you could also show me the family tree you constructed three or four days ago."
Bob hadn't yet had a chance to show Jupiter this half-factual half-fictional construction, but now he got onto the genealogy website and showed Jupiter the light blue box containing a slightly darker blue male profile with the black words "Jupiter Jones" in a white band at the bottom.
Above this was another blue box which read Claudius Jones, and a peach-colored box with a female profile which read Aleksandrina Markovic. Bob clicked on the box, then clicked again where it read "Profile" and found the following life story:
"Aleksandrina Markovic was born on April 12, in Jackson, California, the daughter of Nadja and Spiridon. She had one son with Claudius Jones. She died as a young mother in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at the age of 23."
Bob had never clicked on the second box before and was amazed at how real this simple computer-generated biography seemed. It made the situation real for Jupiter, too, Bob could see; in fact, Jupiter looked stunned as he heard the words "young mother."
"Of course," Bob said, "we still don't have any reasonable explanation as to why Xandra would have changed her name to Amanda Morris - and even more important, as to why the only Amanda Morris I could find who matches what you know about your mother seems to have died at the age of five."
"Actually, I do have a reasonable explanation for the second point," Jupiter said hesitantly. "And maybe even for the first one. But I'd like to get Pete and Branko over here before we go any further."
"Pete! Branko!" Bob called. "Jupe wants us to do this together."
When the four of them were gathered around the laptop, Bob did his best to explain the way he'd constructed the half-factual half-fictional family tree.
He showed the others that Xandra's mother had been a woman named Nadja Dimitrijevic, and that her father was Spiridon Markovic.
Since Xandra's mother's father - one of Jupiter's great-grandparents - had been a man named Dranko Dimitrijevic who'd been born in 1897 in what was now Serbia - though he'd emigrated to the United States after the First World War - Xandra had had Serbian bloodlines through both of her parents.
"That's strange," Branko said. "Dimitrijevic was the name of the leader of a secret military group that assassinated the king and queen of Serbia in 1903."
"The Black Hand," Jupiter said.
"Yes!" Branko said. "You know of this?"
"I only know that a lot of people think the Black Hand was responsible for starting World War I when they assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary," Jupiter said.
Bob plugged 'Dimitrijevic' and 'Black Hand' into his search engine, and the name Dragutin Dimitrijevic popped up, along with an encyclopedia article.
"Dragutin?" Pete exclaimed.
"Yes, that's right," said Branko. "His first name was Dragutin. I'd forgotten that."
Bob and the others stared at him in amazement.
"What?" Branko said. "Dragutin is a very common Serbian name. It just means 'precious.' Dimitrijevic is rarer."
CHAPTER 8 SELECTION 1 (JUPITER)
It was half an hour later, and Jupiter had finally finished explaining his current theory to Pete, Bob, and Branko. He'd actually found himself getting more excited the longer he'd talked; only then had he fully realized everything he'd come to understand.
Of course, even before Bob had found the article in the Auburn Journal, Jupiter had thought he knew why Aleksandrina Markovic might have changed her name - and why the only Amanda Morris Bob could find, with the proper birthday, had died at the young age of five.
After all, Jupiter had long known that one of the best ways to erase your old identity and create a new one was to get your hands on detailed information about a baby who'd been born on the same approximate date that you had, but who had died quite young.
But he hadn't known until Bob found the article in the Auburn Journal why Xandra Markovic might have wanted to disappear. Now he did know. Or at least he thought he did. Of course, it hadn't been Xandra herself who had wanted to disappear. She had only been twelve years old at the time. No, it must have been her mother, Nadja, who'd felt that she and her daughter needed to disappear together.
To Jupiter's mind, the fact that the counterfeiting equipment had been hidden in the cave at the the back of the Dragutin Vineyard made it almost certain that the unnamed widow referred to in the article had been Xandra's mother, Nadja.
In addition, the way the article had been written - no mention of the name of either the witness or the vineyard - strongly suggested that Nadja had been put into the federal witness protection program in exchange for testifying against André Laurent and Mihailo Ivanisevic.
If that was true, it was also almost certain that Aleksandrina Markovic had been Jupiter's mother, and that the Jones Family Tree which Bob had created on the genealogy website was a lot more factual than fictional.
Granted, it still had large gaps in its branches, and Jupiter wished he knew whether either of Xandra's parents had had brothers or sisters. As it was, the family tree grew up more than it grew out.
Still, unsettled as he was by the discoveries of the afternoon, Jupiter knew he had to put them out of his mind for the time being. The Petrovics had been kind to invite The Three Investigators up to Jackson, and he wanted to be an appreciative guest. It would be difficult - once he started thinking about something, his obsessive nature took over - but he would, at the least, need to pretend that his mind was solely on the cookout.
Branko had gone to the main house to check on everything, saying he'd be back to get his friends at 5. Jupiter, Pete, and Bob would each have time to take a shower and change into their best clothes. As always, it was important that they make a good impression.
As Jupiter stood with the hot water pounding on his shoulders, he thought again about what he had learned. The unnamed widow who had testified against Mihailo Ivanisevic had to have been Xandra Markovic's mother - a woman who was almost certainly Jupiter's grandmother. Presumably when she and her daughter had been put into the witness protection program, she had had to sell the vineyard.
As for the offset press, the engraving plates, and the bleached dollar bills, he thought that The Three Investigators had learned all they could about them. What still needed to be discovered about the present situation was who had been camping in the cave, and whether or not that person had, indeed, been the person who had broken into the wine cave at Dragutin.
Jupiter had dried himself off and dressed and was still thinking about these questions when Branko reappeared.
"Come, my friends," he said. "It is time now for the picnic."
CHAPTER 8 SELECTION 2 (JUPITER)
Jupiter's mind was whirring. He thought he had come to Jackson to find out more about his family, but suddenly there were more mysteries and investigations than he could count. What did Mr. Pelletier want The Three Investigators to investigate? And who had lit the fire in the cave? Who had broken into the Dragutin wine cave, and why?
Jupiter knew he would have to sort these things out later. Keeping in mind his decision to be a good guest, he went over to Harper who was standing talking with Bob and Pete, a serious expression on her face. When Jupiter arrived, Pete was asking, "Are goats a lot of work?"
Harper looked at him earnestly. "I think of work as something you have to do that you don't really want to do."
"That's an interesting distinction," Jupiter said.
Harper glanced at him and added, in an explanatory tone, "They're a lot of responsibility. Luke and I have to feed and water them twice a day and keep their pen clean. And since they're dairy goats we need to milk them, and sell the milk at the farmer's market."
Jupiter was impressed by her matter-of-fact tone. She seemed very mature for an eleven-year-old - though no more mature than he had been when he was eleven, he thought.
"You said earlier that you kept records. Is that what you have in your shoulder pouch?" he asked.
Harper looked down at the pouch and then up at Jupiter. "Oh, no," she said. "All my records are on my computer. I just have a pad in there to keep track of what I see - especially when I'm around the goats. I write down observations and questions so I can do research later."
Jupiter could see that Harper had a natural curiosity about the world and an interest in finding out why it worked the way it did. This was something they had in common.
"Goats are very inquisitive," Harper added, "and they can get into all sorts of trouble. They'll eat just about anything if you let them. Both Penny and Zoey ate a bunch of paper yesterday."
"Paper?" Bob said. "Where did they get paper?"
"They like to walk around the wire fence at the edge of our property," Harper said, "and sometimes they stick their heads through and eat what's on the other side. Yesterday they found a bunch of paper, and they would probably have eaten all of it if our neighbor's bull hadn't scared them away."
"There's a bull?" Pete asked.
"The neighbors run a grass-fed beef operation," Jupiter explained to his friends. "The Pelletiers live across from Dragutin Wines - just below what must be a sort of mini-ranch. Mr. Pelletier has just asked us to investigate something for him, so unless Branko has other plans, we'll be seeing both places tomorrow."
"I don't plan on seeing that bull, if I can help it," said Pete emphatically.
"Actually, he's usually pretty gentle," Harper said. "But he doesn't like strange people, and he gets irritated at the sight of goats. When he saw Penny and Zoey sticking their heads through the fence, he charged them - which turned out to be a good thing, because they stopped eating the paper."
"Was it newspaper?" Jupiter asked. "Were you worried about them ingesting the ink?"
"Oh, no," Harper said. "Newspaper is all wood pulp, but this was much thicker and heavier. My father said he thought it was cotton bond. It was white, anyway. And since it was cellulose, the goats could digest it pretty well. They have bacteria in their rumens - that's the first chamber of their stomachs - which break down the cellulose and let them digest it. Anyway, luckily, it was cut into little pieces. There was a leather carrying bag next to it. My father recovered the uneaten paper and the bag so that Penny and Zoey couldn't get at any of it again."
Jupiter found he was suddenly paying closer attention. Lots of little pieces of white paper that Mr. Pelletier thought might be cotton bond sounded a lot like a bunch of one-dollar bills that had been bleached of all ink, he thought.
"When did this happen?" he asked. "And how big were the little pieces?"
"If you want to see the paper, I have a piece of it in my notebook. I put it there yesterday morning," Harper answered.
Jupiter felt a jolt of excitement.
"I'd be very interested to see it," he said.
Harper opened the flap of her small leather bag, then drew out a black notebook with a rubber band holding it closed. She took off the rubber band, opened the notebook, and drew out from the space between the back cover and the final page a small white folded wad.
"If Penny and Zoey had gotten sick, I was going to give the paper to the vet to have it chemically analyzed," she said, unfolding it carefully, then proffering the result.
So much for putting the discoveries of the afternoon out of his mind, Jupiter thought, as Pete and Bob both exclaimed "Yikes!" He looked at them in warning, then took the paper, examined it, and handed it back.
"I wish all the people we deal with in our investigations were as careful in their observations and record-keeping as you are," he said.
Harper smiled in apparent agreement as she refolded the paper, then tucked it back into her notebook.
"I like being careful about things," she said.
Just then, Zivko and Milena and Luke appeared to say that their mothers wanted some help. Harper walked off with them, while Bob and Pete looked at Jupiter with a combination of excitement and alarm.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Pete asked.
"If you're thinking that the man who took refuge in the cave last night was almost certainly the man who dropped the satchel of paper in the bull's field, then yes," Jupiter said. "I surmise that the bleached bills we found next to the propane tanks had fallen out of the carrying bag Harper described."
"I'm also thinking that the reason he dropped the bag was that he had to run for his life when he found himself in a pasture with an angry bull," Pete said.
"I'd say that's a good deduction," Jupiter said.
CHAPTER 9 SELECTION 1 (PETE)
The living room was spacious, with a bay window overlooking the yard, and as Pete and the others entered, a woman rose from a desk tucked into a corner. Pete couldn't tell how old she was, but she didn't seem old. Her gestures as she shook their hands were emphatic and she bristled with energy. Her hair was still dark, with streaks of gray, and cropped short - a no-nonsense cut that suggested she had more important things to worry about than her hair. Her eyes and smile were bright.
"This is my mother Dora," Mr. Pelletier said. "And please, call me John."
Dora greeted them with nods and hellos, then followed as her son herded the boys into his study, where everyone sat down.
"I might as well get right to it," John said. "I know from my experience with the twins that adults are constantly underrating the capacities of young people, and, as you will quickly come to understand, this is something I don't want to involve the police in at the moment."
From under his desk he pulled a worn leather satchel with two handles that came together when it was zipped. On its side, Pete could see two faded gold embossed letters - A.L. Was there a chill in the air suddenly? Pete looked at his friends as John Pelletier took out several piles of bleached paper.
Then, as the boys peered closer, he opened the satchel wide and showed them its rigid bottom. It didn't look like a false bottom, but John Pelletier retrieved a small assortment of papers from underneath it. He set the papers on the desk, then extracted a somewhat crumpled photograph which he handed to Jupiter to study.
"I told Jupiter my father was French-Canadian," he said, "and you'll notice that under the photo are the names of the students of the 1965 graduating class of St. John's Academy in Montreal. Robert Pelletier was my father, but until I discovered what was hidden in this satchel, I had no idea - none whatever - that he had gone to school with a man named André Laurent. I was just a boy when Laurent was arrested, but my father never mentioned to either my mother or me that he had ever known him."
"What else was in the satchel?" Jupiter asked, handing the photograph to the others.
John lifted an index card and silently handed it to Jupiter, who shortly passed it on to the other boys. It was faded, but it had the name, phone number, and address of one Robert Pelletier written in a blunt strong hand, in ink. Pete saw that the address was the address of the house they were currently visiting.
"Also, there was this."
This time Pete found himself holding an article from the Boston Globe about the murder of Laurent's partner. It had a picture of the counterfeiter in which he looked hard and angry. Last - but not least, in Pete's opinion - were five $100 bills.
Jupiter held the bills in his hand a long time before he passed them on. Then he said, "I appreciate your trust in us, Mr. Pelletier, and wish to reciprocate. For reasons I don't entirely understand, I feel confident I can entrust the two of you with the information I'm about to give you."
"Of course," John Pelletier said, and his mother nodded vigorously.
"As I'm sure you recollect," Jupiter said, "André Laurent jumped bail before he could go to trial. Where he's been for the past twenty-five years is a mystery, but logic suggests that he is now back in Jackson."
Pete watched as expressions of dismay settled on the Pelletiers' faces.
"I was afraid of that," John said.
"Pete, Bob, Branko, and I discovered his old lair behind a false rock wall in a cave that connects Cornucopia Wines with Dragutin Wines," Jupiter said. "We found the offset printing press he used, the engraving plates for printing $100 bills like the ones you discovered, and a suitcase of paper like the paper Penny and Zoey ate."
"Those $100 bills look like the real thing," Dora Pelletier said. Jupiter nodded in agreement. "But more importantly, we also found the remains of a fire in that cave, and footprints both inside and outside the cave - near a hidden generator that powered the printing press and where I think Laurent had stowed that satchel many years ago. My guess is that he's the one who broke into the wine cave at Dragutin, looking for something else he left behind. But we don't yet understand why he waited so long to come back here."
CHAPTER 9 SELECTION 2 (PETE)
"This is amazing," Dora Pelletier said. "It seems you've discovered more in a few days than law enforcement found out in a quarter century."
"Where do you think Laurent has been?" John Pelletier asked.
"That's a good question," Jupiter said. "It makes little sense that he stayed away so long - and equally little sense that he's come back now."
"A guy like him is a criminal," Pete said, "and criminals have a hard time staying out of jail. Maybe he's been locked up all these years for another crime and he's just been released."
"But if that's true," John Pelletier said, "surely there would be an article about it on the Internet. The authorities would have connected him to the earlier crimes. It would have been a big story."
"It would seem so," Jupiter agreed, "but the trail goes cold in 1995 when Laurent vanished after jumping bail."
"Maybe he used a false name. Maybe he had a fake ID," Pete suggested.
"I'm afraid that wouldn't work," Jupiter said. "His name might change, but his fingerprints would stay the same. Fingerprints have been used for over a hundred twenty-five years to identify people. So though it's a tempting theory, it simply can't be true."
"I cannot believe my husband knew this man," Dora Pelletier said, shaking her head.
"I wouldn't worry about it, Mrs. Pelletier," Jupiter said. "I expect your husband's only crime was going to high school with André Laurent. When the authorities almost caught him for counterfeiting in Massachusetts, he had to run. But before he left, he stabbed his partner in the heart and took his engraving plates.
"He had to find somewhere to go - and quickly - and he remembered his old friend from Montreal. He wrote down his name and address on an index card and made his way out west. I think he came to Jackson hoping to convince your husband to go into counterfeiting with him, and to find a place to set up shop. The newspaper article about the murder was a threat; the five hundred dollar bills were proof of his artistry; and the picture from St. John's Academy was to remind your husband of what good friends they'd been. And they were both French-Canadian."
"That is nothing to base a friendship or anything else on," Mrs. Pelletier said.
"I agree," Jupiter said. "Nevertheless, André Laurent seems drawn to old acquaintances. Since Spiridon Marcovic is dead, perhaps Laurent is now looking for his co-conspirator, the banker. It's too bad we have no idea where he is."
"But we do know where he is," Dora Pelletier said.
"What?" Pete said.
"Yes, indeed," John Pelletier said. "He's no longer a banker, of course, but he's still a prominent member of the community. After he was acquitted, he changed his name from Mihailo Ivanisevic and, five or six years later, he bought a number of vineyards that border each other. In fact, he's our next-door neighbor. His name is now Michael Ivan and he owns Dragutin Wines."
"What?" Pete exploded. "Then the man who laundered André Laurent's counterfeit cash has invited Branko's family to a Fourth of July celebration tonight! We're all going to be there!"
"We're going to be there, too," Dora said.
Just at that moment, Luke and Harper came running inside, fast.
"I think we saw him!" cried Harper. "The man who dropped the bag with the paper in it!"
"He wasn't looking for water this time," Luke added. "He was in our field, not our neighbor's, and when we looked out to see where Penny and Zoey were, he was standing right next to them."
"We didn't know who he was right away, of course," clarified Harper. "But we went out to see what he wanted, and when we got closer, we saw that he was rubbing Penny's ear."
"When he saw us, he just asked if we'd found a bag with some paper in it," Luke added.
"We told him we hadn't seen it, and he walked away, waving," Harper said. "But he was wearing a really big hunting knife in a sheath on his right leg!"
© Elizabeth Arthur and Steven Bauer 2025
Cover Art By Pashur House