The Case of the Fifth Word

This chapter is a piece of prose — a short detective story. It is not a poem and not a play, though so much of it is spoken aloud that at times it can feel like one. The version in your book is credited to Donald J. Sobol and is marked as adapted, which tells you that the wording has been reworked a little for young readers.

The story is built to a very definite plan. A puzzle is placed in front of you, every piece of information you need is dropped somewhere into the conversation, the boy detective announces that he has solved it — and then the story deliberately stops and puts a direct question to you before giving the answer. That question is printed as a small challenge, "What Was The Fifth Word?", and the explanation is held back until after it.

This shape matters more than it might look. Most stories ask you to watch a hero do something. This one asks you to compete with him. Everything Encyclopedia knows, you have been told too: the four strange words, the calendar sheet they were written on, the dying man's plan, and the nursery full of palm trees. Nothing is hidden from you, and nothing new is invented at the last second to make the solution work. That is the promise a fair detective story makes to its reader, and this story keeps it honestly.

The telling falls into two halves. The first half is background — who Encyclopedia is, why his father brings his troubles home to the dinner table, and what happened five years ago at a jewellery shop. The second half is the puzzle itself: the four words appear, the adults fail, the boy asks one question, and the trap springs shut. Because the setting never leaves the dining table, almost the entire crime reaches us second-hand, through people talking. There are no chases and no fights anywhere in it. The action is completely mental, and the clock is measured in courses of a meal rather than in minutes.

The story opens with the narrator explaining the odd arrangement in the Brown household. Chief Brown is the head of the police, and by all accounts a capable one. But when a case defeats him, he does not sit at his desk brooding over it. He clears the desk, puts on his hat and goes home for dinner — because his son will have the answer before the meal is over.

The son's real name is Leroy, and only his parents and teachers use it. Everyone else calls him Encyclopedia, because he has read more books than anyone in his town and never forgets a fact. The narrator tells us his friends described him as "a library and computer rolled into one" — that is the friends' joke about him, not the narrator's own claim. The nickname is not something he chose or enjoys; the narrator says plainly that he was "stuck with it". His father would love to boast about him but stops himself, because nobody would believe that the finest detective around is a schoolboy in the eighth class.

One Tuesday night at dinner, Chief Brown stares at his cream-of-mushroom soup. His wife and son both know what that means: a case he cannot crack. He announces, without any drama at all, that a man named Tim Nolan died the day before.

Mrs. Brown recognises the name, and the parents begin filling in the history. Encyclopedia says nothing, because he knows perfectly well that his parents are talking the case through "for his benefit". So the background comes out as ordinary family conversation.

Five years earlier, two masked men had robbed a jewellery shop called the Diamond Mart on Sixth Avenue and escaped with jewellery worth a million dollars. Chief Brown had always believed that Nolan and a man named Daniel Davenport were the robbers, but he could never prove it. The two had met while both were in prison in South Carolina and became friendly over shared interests. Nolan was released first, settled in the town and started a small nursery growing palm trees — a business that, in Chief Brown's words, hardly earned him enough to live on. Davenport moved into Nolan's house just one week before the robbery.

During the hold-up, one gunman's mask slipped and a shop clerk thought she recognised Nolan — but she was not absolutely sure, and she later refused to give evidence in court. Nolan was questioned but never arrested. Davenport vanished immediately after the robbery and was never seen again. Not one piece of the stolen jewellery ever turned up. Chief Brown's hunch was that the two men had hidden it together and were waiting for the search to die down.

Now Nolan is dead. His heart had been weak for many years, and on the morning of his death a stroke struck him. Realising that the end had come, he used whatever strength was left to leave his will lying on the kitchen table. The will leaves everything he owned, including the palm-tree nursery, to Davenport. Chief Brown obtained a court order that morning, and Officers Lewis and Maloney went through the house. They just about took it apart and did not find one piece of the stolen jewellery.

The suspicious detail is not the will itself but a sheet from Nolan's desk calendar, clipped to it. Chief Brown had copied what was written on that sheet into his pocket notebook: Davenport's name and address, and below them four words — "Nom Utes Sweden Hurts".

Mrs. Brown cannot make sense of them and passes the notebook to her son. Encyclopedia leans back and closes his eyes, which is what he does when the thinking is hardest. After a few seconds he opens them and asks a single question: is there a young fir tree in Nolan's palm-tree nursery? His father, taken aback, says yes — one, on the south side of the house.

Nobody else can see how the four words say any such thing. Mrs. Brown, who had taught English and other subjects in a high school, offers the dictionary meanings instead: nom is a shortened form of a grammar term, Utes is the name of a Native American people, and Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Of the last word she can only say "Hurts is hurts". Then she honestly admits that she cannot work it out.

Encyclopedia reminds her that Davenport disappeared right after the hold-up, and gives his own reading of events: as his father had said, the two men must have hidden the stolen jewellery together, and probably only a week or so ago Nolan changed the hiding place. It is his mother who supplies the next step, asking whether Nolan had tried to tell Davenport by phone, failed to reach him, and so wrote the four words down as he was dying. Chief Brown nods at that, and says they will find Davenport now that they know his address. Mrs. Brown then completes the thought herself: once Davenport hears that the palm-tree nursery has been left to him, those four words will point him straight to the hiding place.

Encyclopedia agrees. He adds that the code is simple, especially because of the kind of paper it is written on, and points out that it would not make much sense to anyone who was not already looking for a hiding place. Pressed by his impatient mother to say where the jewellery is, he smiles and gives the line that closes the scene: "Why, under the fifth word".

The story then puts its challenge to the reader before explaining anything. The answer follows. The four words stand for days of the week taken in order, Monday to Thursday, with the letters d, a and y dropped and the remaining letters used to form new words. The unwritten fifth word is Fir, from Friday. The jewellery turned up in a twenty-gallon jug of earth, the very jug in which the young fir tree was growing — exactly as Encyclopedia had predicted.

The code deserves to be taken apart slowly, because the whole story rests on it and it is very easy to explain only half of it.

Start with the name of a weekday and delete the three letters d, a and y from it. Monday loses that ending and becomes Mon. Tuesday becomes Tues. Wednesday becomes Wednes. Thursday becomes Thurs. Now take the letters that are left and shuffle them into a real English word. Mon rearranges into Nom. Tues rearranges into Utes. Wednes rearranges into Sweden — the same six letters in a new order. Thurs rearranges into Hurts. That is the entire system, and it is worth checking each one letter by letter yourself, because seeing it work is more convincing than being told.

A word made by rearranging all the letters of another word is called an anagram. This chapter opens with anagram puzzles before you even begin reading, and that is not a coincidence — it is preparing your eye for exactly the trick the story turns on. The message is simply a list of four anagrams laid out in weekday order.

Once you notice the order, something clever becomes clear: the real message is not in the four words at all. It is in the gap after them. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday — the next day is obviously Friday. Strip out d, a and y and Friday leaves Fri. Rearrange those three letters and the only ordinary English word you can make is Fir, which is the name of a tree. Nolan never wrote that fifth word down anywhere. The reader is expected to supply it, and so was Davenport.

That is why the story is called the case of the fifth word, and it is why Encyclopedia's last line is a joke with two meanings running at once. Under the fifth word means underneath the word Fir in the list — and it also points at the fir tree itself, in whose jug of earth the jewellery was lying.

Two details turn this from a clever trick into good plotting. The first is the calendar sheet. Nolan did not scribble the words on any scrap of paper he happened to find. He wrote them on a page torn from a desk calendar and clipped it to his will. The paper itself is the key, because a calendar is about days of the week and nothing else. Encyclopedia says as much when he calls the code simple, given where it is written. Remove the calendar sheet and the four words really would be close to unguessable.

The second detail is the fir tree. A nursery growing palm trees, with exactly one young fir standing in it, is odd — a fir does not belong in that collection at all. That single mismatched tree is both the signpost and the hiding place. This is also why Encyclopedia asks his question before explaining anything: he has already read the message, and he only wants to confirm that the object it points to actually exists.

It is worth thinking about why the code defeated the police but not the boy. A good private code has to be hard for strangers and easy for the one person it is meant for. Davenport knew there had been a robbery and knew that jewellery was hidden somewhere, so he would have been reading those words hunting for a place. The police were reading them hunting for evidence of a crime. Encyclopedia states the principle himself: the words would not make much sense to someone who was not looking for a hiding place. In this story, what you manage to read depends on what you are expecting to find.

There is a final neat touch. Mrs. Brown fails not because she is less intelligent but because she is more literary. She reads each word for its meaning — a grammar term, a people, a country — when she needed to read them for their shape. Meaning was the disguise. The letters were the message.

Leroy Brown, called Encyclopedia. A boy in the eighth class, and the sharpest mind in the story. What makes him unusual is not cleverness by itself but the way he handles it. He listens far more than he speaks. He sits silently through his parents' conversation because he understands that they are laying the case out for him, and interrupting would only slow them down. He does not show off: the narrator tells us he never mentions the help he gives his father, because he does not want to seem different from other boys. When the thinking gets hard he leans back and shuts his eyes, closing out the room. And when he has the answer, he asks one short question instead of making a speech. Even his final line is a quiet joke rather than a lecture. He is drawn as knowledgeable, observant, patient, calm and modest, and each of those traits is shown through an action rather than announced.

Chief Brown. The father, and head of the police. The story is generous to him and honest about him at the same time, which is why he is more interesting than a simple bumbling policeman. He is described as smart and quick. He does not waste time worrying. He follows correct procedure, taking the trouble to get a court order before searching a dead man's house. His instincts are genuinely good, because his long-held suspicion about Nolan and Davenport turns out to be exactly right. His limitation is a narrow kind of attention: he carefully copied the four words into his notebook, so he certainly looked at them, but he could not see past their surface. His other difficulty is a private one. He is proud of his son and can never say so in public, because nobody would believe that a schoolboy solves his cases for him.

Mrs. Brown. Much more than a background figure. She had taught English and other subjects in a high school, and it is her questions that draw the whole history out of her husband. She is also the one who works out the purpose of the message before anybody decodes it — that Davenport will inherit the nursery, and the four words will tell him where the jewellery lies. Her failure with the code is instructive rather than foolish. Faced with four odd words, she supplies their real dictionary meanings, which is precisely what a well-read person naturally does. Her line "Hurts is hurts" is an honest surrender: that word has no interesting meaning to offer, so she has nothing to say about it. Through her, the story shows that knowing what words mean is not at all the same skill as noticing what words are made of.

Tim Nolan. Dead before the story begins, and present only in what other people say about him. He is a man with a bad heart and a struggling plant nursery who, the police believe, took part in a robbery worth a million dollars and then sat on the loot for five years without spending any of it. His last act is the most revealing thing about him. Realising that he was dying, he spent his last strength arranging his will and his coded message so that his partner would receive both the property and the jewellery hidden in it. Loyalty and criminality sit side by side in him, and the story does not tidy that away.

Daniel Davenport. He never appears at all. He met Nolan in prison, the two became friendly through shared interests, he moved in a week before the robbery and vanished immediately after it. The story uses him as an absence — he is the reason the loot was never divided, and he is the reader the code was actually written for. The whole message makes sense only because of what he already knows.

The minor figures. The shop clerk whose evidence collapsed because she was not absolutely sure, and the two officers who took the house apart and found nothing, both exist to close off the easy routes to a solution. The story deliberately removes the witness and the physical search, so that nothing is left but thinking.

Thinking beats searching. Two trained officers take an entire house apart and find nothing. A boy at a dinner table solves the same case before the soup is finished. The story is not mocking the police — it takes care to show that they did everything correctly and thoroughly. It is making a sharper point than that: some problems cannot be cracked by effort at all, only by noticing. The search was faultless and useless, because the jewellery was never inside the house to begin with.

Ordinary things carry the clue. Nothing in this mystery is exotic. A page from a desk calendar, four short words, a young tree standing in the wrong nursery, and a jug of soil. Every one of them is the sort of detail most people would walk straight past. The story quietly trains you to ask why a small thing is the way it is — why a fir tree among palms, why a calendar sheet rather than ordinary notepaper, why a will placed on a kitchen table by a dying man.

Facts and opinions are not the same thing. This idea runs right through the writing. That Chief Brown was the head of the police can be checked and proved. That he was the smartest police chief in the country is what everyone thought — a belief, not a fact. That Leroy was like a library and a computer combined is what his friends said about him. Nolan was questioned, not arrested, and Chief Brown himself admits there was no proof; he calls his own belief a hunch, using exactly the right word for it. The story keeps its evidence and its guesses in separate boxes, which is precisely the habit a careful reader needs.

Modesty. Father and son keep the same secret for opposite reasons. The father says nothing because he would not be believed. The son says nothing because he does not want to stand out among other boys. Neither of them wants credit, and the story clearly admires that.

Attention. The skill the story displays most often is not brilliant deduction — it is listening. Encyclopedia's entire contribution to the first half of the story is silence. He gathers everything before he offers anything, and that patience is what makes one question enough.

How the suspense is built. The writer holds the answer back in careful stages, and it is worth tracing them. First the four words are shown to us with no explanation. Then the boy asks about the fir tree, which tells us he has solved it but not how — suspense increases rather than releasing. Then his mother offers her wrong readings, which lets us try and fail alongside her. Then the family piece the situation together aloud — the moved loot, the phone call that never got through — while the code itself is still not explained. Then comes the pun. Then the direct challenge to the reader. Only after all of that does the answer arrive. Each step tightens the pressure without giving anything away, and none of it feels like padding.

The pun as an ending. "Why, under the fifth word" is an excellent closing line because it is three things at once: an answer, a joke, and a final clue. Read one way it is cheeky and completely unhelpful. Read the other way it is the whole solution. A pun is usually just decoration in a story; here it is the working machinery of the plot.

Why a dinner table. Setting the whole story at a family meal does a great deal of quiet work. It makes the delivery of information feel natural rather than forced. It gives the story a friendly, unfrightening tone despite the armed robbery sitting in the background. And it turns detection into something domestic and ordinary, something a child can do between courses. The tension is even measured in food — they are still on the soup, and cases are usually solved before dessert.

This is a chapter about words, so its language work is not an exercise bolted on afterwards. It practises the very skill the story is built on.

Anagrams. An anagram rearranges all the letters of a word or phrase to make another word or phrase. The entire code is built from them, and the chapter warms you up with anagram puzzles before you begin reading. Practise on short words and it becomes easy to spot: listen and silent, earth and heart, stop and pots and tops and spot, cheap and peach. The trick is to stop reading a word and start looking at its letters.

The many senses of the word case. The title plays on this. A case can be a matter taken up in court, a container such as a pencil case, a situation or state of affairs, and a way of writing, as in title case. Sorting those meanings out is the very first thing this chapter asks you to do, and the story then leans on the legal and detective sense: the case Chief Brown cannot crack. There is a quiet extra joke in it, because case is also a grammar term — and grammar is exactly where Mrs. Brown's wrong answer takes her, when she explains that nom is short for nominative.

Homophones and easily confused pairs. These are words that sound alike but are spelled differently and mean different things: week and weak, dying and dyeing, fore and four, peace and piece, break and brake. Some of them sit inside the story already — Nolan was dying, and Davenport arrived a week before the robbery. Getting the spelling right depends entirely on the meaning you want.

Phrasal verbs. A phrasal verb is a verb joined to a small word, and together they mean something you could not work out from the parts alone. This chapter is full of them. To put on a hat is to wear it. When things cooled down, they became calm and normal again. When no jewellery turned up, it means none ever appeared or was discovered. To figure out something is to solve it. To make of something is to form an understanding of it. And when the robbers got away with the jewellery, it means they escaped without being punished.

Spoonerisms. A spoonerism swaps the opening sounds of nearby words, usually by mistake and usually with funny results — long road turning into wrong load, or a mound of rice into a round of mice. Like anagrams, it is a reminder that words are made of pieces that can be shifted about.

Useful words from the chapter. A hold-up is a robbery carried out using threat or violence. Loot means stolen goods. A hunch is a strong feeling that something is true even without proof, which is exactly the word Chief Brown chooses for his own belief. To testify is to make a statement in court to prove that something is true. A stroke is a sudden serious illness that can leave a person unable to move. A will, in this sense, is a legal document saying what should happen to a person's money and property after their death. A nursery here means a place where young plants and trees are grown for sale, not a place for small children — a useful reminder that words shift meaning with context. To leaf through pages is to turn them quickly. To confess is to admit something. To foresee is to predict. And to say something in a matter-of-fact manner is to say it without showing much emotion, which is exactly how Chief Brown announces that a man has died.

Get the order of events straight. Most confusion about this chapter comes from muddling the timeline, because the crime is five years old and reaches us only through conversation. Fix this sequence in your mind: the two men meet in prison; Nolan is released and starts the palm-tree nursery; Davenport comes to live with him; a week later the Diamond Mart is robbed; Davenport disappears; the clerk refuses to testify; five years pass with no jewellery found; about a week before his death Nolan moves the loot to a new place and cannot reach Davenport by phone; he has a stroke, puts his will with the calendar sheet clipped to it on the kitchen table, and dies; the house is searched without result; the family talk it over at dinner; and the jewellery is recovered from the jug of earth in which the fir tree was growing.

Say who said what. It is easy to mix the speakers up, and a wrong attribution weakens an otherwise good answer. The narrator is the one who tells us about Leroy's reading, his nickname and his reasons for staying quiet. His friends made the comparison to a library and a computer. Chief Brown supplies the criminal history and openly calls his own belief a hunch. Mrs. Brown gives the dictionary meanings; she is also the one who suggests that Nolan had tried and failed to telephone Davenport, and the one who works out the purpose of the message. Encyclopedia asks the fir tree question and delivers the closing pun. Importantly, the step-by-step explanation of the code at the very end is not spoken by any character at all — it is given by the storyteller, after the challenge to the reader.

Explain the code completely. A common half-answer stops at saying the words are days of the week. A full explanation has four parts, and all four are needed. One: the words stand for weekdays. Two: the letters d, a and y have been removed from each. Three: the letters left over have been rearranged into new words. Four: the answer lies in the missing fifth item, Friday, which becomes Fri and then Fir. Add the calendar sheet as the key and the fir tree as the hiding place, and the answer is complete.

Back opinions with evidence. If you are asked to describe Leroy, do not simply call him clever and stop. Pair each trait with the moment that proves it. Knowledgeable, because he had read more than anyone in his town and never forgot a fact. A keen listener, because he sat silently while his parents talked. Humble, because he never spoke about the help he gave his father. Clever, because one question was enough. This pattern — trait, then evidence — turns a vague answer into a strong one.

Handle inference questions carefully. Some answers are nowhere on the page and must be worked out. Why did Nolan leave everything to Davenport? Because the property contained the hidden jewellery, so the inheritance was really a delivery. Why did Chief Brown shake his head over the words? Because he was baffled by them, not because he thought they were meaningless nonsense. Why could Mrs. Brown not solve it despite being so well-read? Because she read the words for their meanings when she needed to read them for their shape. In each case, point to the detail in the story that supports your reasoning rather than simply asserting it.