Page 6 - Lulu and Bob in Verbo City

Lulu got there first.
“Nothing but a blank page on this note pad.” She fumbled in the
single drawer of the telephone stand. “And nothing else here.”
“Let me see that pad,” said Bob. “Aha! See, Lulu, if you read more
spy stories and detective novels you’d know that an impression may
be left on a sheet of paper of what was written on the page above it.
When I hold this up almost parallel to a light source I can see some
indentations: Uncle really bears down when he writes. That’s why he
has to use a 2.5 pencil.”
“Everybody knows that,” sniffed Lulu. “I was just about to look
for a transferred intaglio palimpsest, myself. But I had to exhaust the
other possibilities first.”
“While you’re smirking, I’m working,” replied Bob, hitting several
notes of a triumphant chord. “Uncle’s pencil will show us what it
originally wrote. All I have to do is lightly shade the surface with it—
like so—and there it is: Uncle’s shopping list.”
“What’s it say?” Lulu resisted the temptation to appropriate the
document by force.
Bob slowly read the top line. “Looks like ‘A Scribbler’s Score of
Sesquipedalians. $39.95 with preferred customer volume discount at
Watt A. Wordsworth.’ Then the list—let me count them. Yes, twenty
words. The longest has twenty-three letters. Now we know what to
look for and how many there are.”
“Whew! It’s getting warm in here,” said Lulu, wiping her brow.
“Not a moment to lose—Uncle could be back any minute! I hope the
waiting room of that language disorders clinic was full when he got
there. You take the list and I’ll carry the bag—and I won’t leave it
open! We’ll have to roam all over the house: they’ve had plenty of
time to scuttle and scamper and float and fly into all the rooms in
both hemispheres.”
Bob gripped the pencil and the sheet of graphite-smudged note
paper. “I’m ready. But we have to be efficient. Let’s start here, go
through the left hemisphere, and then back to the right. Uncle’s got
dictionaries in every room, so we won’t be stuck for definitions.”

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