Three Cousins Detective Club

#30 The Mystery of the Golden Reindeer by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 2000.

Titus doesn’t really like to go Christmas shopping. The department store is always crowded around Christmastime, and he’d really rather just stay home, where it’s comfortable and quiet, and eat popcorn and watch videos. However, his mother really wants to go to the department store and so do his cousins, so they persuade him to come along. The three cousins are allowed to browse in the toys without adult supervision, as long as they stay together. They make arrangements to meet Titus’s mother for lunch in the store’s restaurant.

When they get to the toy department, they hear an announcement about a lost child, and to their surprise, their younger cousin, Patience, suddenly appears. She had been shopping with her grandmother when she spotted her cousins and started following them. As far as Patience is concerned, she wasn’t lost because she knew where she was. It was her grandmother who was lost, and she points out that she found her cousins instead of them finding her. The cousins manage to find Patience’s grandmother and reunite the two of them, and they invite them to come to the restaurant with them for lunch.

When they meet up with Titus’s mother, they all are surprised when she tells off Titus for wandering around the department store by himself when he was supposed to stay with his cousins. They all insist that Titus was with them the entire time. Titus’s mother was sure that she saw him riding the escalator alone, but none of them were on the escalator because Patience is afraid of escalators. Patience suddenly speaks up and says that she must have seen the “other Titus”, not the “real Titus.”

They enjoy the restaurant, which has a large Christmas tree, decorated with golden reindeer. During lunch, Patience tries to point out the “other Titus” to them, but nobody else spots who she’s pointing to. Patience is known for having an imaginary friend named Amy and for making up tall tales. She sometimes mixed up things she’s imagined with things that are real, so they’re not sure if she really saw the “other Titus” or not. (Personally, I thought this was silly on their part because they already know that Titus’s mother saw someone who looked a lot like him. Titus is wearing a distinctive black-and-white scarf, so I figured at this point that there’s someone wearing a scarf that’s also black-and-white.) Titus feels a little uneasy that there might be another him wandering around.

Titus’s mother wants to look at some furniture after lunch, and she asks Patience’s grandmother if she could come with her and give her opinion. The three cousins would rather go look at store windows instead of furniture, and Patience insists that they take her with them. The older cousins know that Patience can be a handful to look after, but Sarah-Jane knows that she would feel badly if they didn’t take Patience somewhere where she would have more fun than she would have looking at furniture. Patience promises that she’ll stay with her cousins and not run off anywhere, so the adults agree to let her go with them.

While Titus and Patience are looking at the Christmas tree together, Titus is surprised by a teenage boy who comes up to him and starts talking to him as if he knows him. The teenager says that he has a message for him and tells him, “Happy Birthday. The golden reindeer. Dish towels. Christmas tree.” Titus asks him what he’s talking about, and the teenager says that he was paid to deliver that message to him and that he must have been expecting him. When the other cousins come back from the restrooms, Titus and Patience tells them what happened, and they’re equally confused. All they can think is that this bizarre message was meant for the “other Titus.” But, who is the “other Titus”, and what does the message mean?

Theme of the Story:

“What you get from wisdom is better than the finest gold.”

Proverbs 8:19

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

This mystery does involve a lookalike for Titus. However, the mystery doesn’t quite end when they meet the other boy. He tells them that he got a phone call telling him to come to the department store for a special message about something that belongs to his family that was stolen. When the other kids tell him the message that was given to Titus, he finds it just as confusing as they do.

It’s Patience who really solves the mystery of what the clues in the message mean, and that’s both because she is nosy and because, as a young child, she doesn’t take certain things for granted, the way an adult or older child would. Sometimes, people see not what’s actually there but what they expect to see. Titus’s mother didn’t really see him on the escalator alone; she saw the other boy, who happened to be wearing a different black-and-white scarf. She just figured it was Titus because she expected the boy with the black-and-white scarf would be her son, and she didn’t look closer to notice that it wasn’t the same boy and that the scarf actually had a different pattern. It was the same with the teenager who was looking for the other boy. In the case of the clues, all of the older kids assume that the packages underneath the decorative Christmas trees in the department store are just empty boxes, wrapped up for decoration. Because Patience wants to check to see if they’re all empty, she’s the one who realizes that one of the packages isn’t like the others.

We never learn who stole the object that the other boy was looking for, but he does get it back. Also, Patience learns to get over her fear of the escalator.