“Is that all?”

“Nothing much else happened, Dad. The other kids were afraid to open the display case so we drew straws and I wouldn’t have ever taken it if I hadn’t drawed the shortest straw.”

“Drawn.”

“What?”

“To draw straws. Past participle ‘drawn.’ I draw, I drew, I have drawn, I had drawn.”

“Oh, yeah. So I drew the shortest straw and there was now way I could go back on my word to the other kids. All the more so since no one was going to miss that piece it just sat and sat in the museum…”

“And then?”

“And then we took it to Alesha Naumov, who got a laser and cut the darned gold nugget into lots of small pieces. And then we went to the Ikshinsky reservoir and the pike took our bait.”

Alice thought it over a moment, and she added:

“Or maybe it wasn’t the giant pike. Maybe it was a snag on a dead tree. The lure we made was very heavy. We searched for it and we never found it. We all took turns diving for it.”

“And your crime was discovered?

“Yes, because Zvansky was a liar. He brought a handful of diamonds from home and said there wasn’t a bit of gold to be had. We sent him back home with his diamonds. As if we needed diamonds! And when Elena Alexandrovna came by and said: ‘Kids, open up the museum; I’ll be taking the first graders on their tour. Talk about bad timing! So everything was discovered. And she went running to the headmistress: “Danger,” she says (we were listening under the door) “The past has come alive in someone’s blood!” Alesha Naumov did promise to take all the blame on himself, but I didn’t let him. I drew the straw, so they hang me. And that’s everything.”

“And that’s all?” I was amazed. “And you’ve `fessed up to it?”