The Corbin Necklace

"How much do you suppose it's really worth?" Punch wants to know, and the family friend who tells this story tries to give his grandmother's pearls an answer that is not a typical adult's: sell them, invest the money even conservatively, and you could live on the income. Punch has already worked out that a fence would pay far less, and that it was horribly silly of somebody to put the necklace in the paper.

Then the pearls are gone. Punch wants the police. Judy and her mother seem to know more than they are saying, and the narrator can feel wheels turning behind every polite conversation. Henry Kitchell Webster sets an ingenious theft inside a household of sharp family tensions, and lets a boy notice what the adults would rather not.