Discovery of the Carpathian Hound in the pool

The discovery of the Carpathian Hound in the pool turns an apparent absence into a question of concealment: the crystal object has not vanished but has been placed where its transparency and the pool’s patterned floor make it difficult to see. Jupiter Jones connects the hiding place to earlier threats involving the pool, locates the Hound on its tiled bottom, and explains how the burglar lowered it there without getting into the water. Later evidence shows that Sonny Elmquist recovered the object, but Jupiter distinguishes him from the burglar: Sonny had encountered the scene in a dream and did not know about the ransom money.

Clues and the Pool

Before the object is found, Jupiter asks Fenton Prentice why anyone would poison Gwen Chalmers, beyond the fact that she swam in the pool every night. He then turns to Mrs Bortz. Although she is a snoop, Jupiter observes that nobody had tried to harm her until she said she would have the pool drained and cleaned. The two questions place the pool at the center of several otherwise separate dangers. They do not, by themselves, establish who was responsible for the threats or poisoning, but they focus attention on what might be exposed if the water were removed.

Jupiter links that line of thought to the transparent Hound and to the idea of an object concealed in plain sight. He compares the hiding place to the glass knife in the water pitcher: transparency can defeat a search when the object sits in an ordinary setting that makes it hard to distinguish. Bob Andrews immediately understands the implication and identifies the pool. The discovery is therefore not a lucky sighting alone; it follows from Jupiter’s connection between the proposed cleaning, the threats, and the Hound’s unusual appearance.

Retrieval from the Tiled Bottom

Jupiter tests the deduction directly. He wades toward the deep end, scanning the blue and gold tiles on the pool floor. When the water reaches his chin, he ducks beneath the surface, sinks, and kicks forward just above the bottom. The search is carefully directed at the floor’s tile pattern, the very surface that the hiding method has made relevant. The scene turns the abstract idea of concealment into a physical search: the Hound is in the water, but its transparency prevents its location from being obvious.

Jupiter then rises holding an object with a string dangling from it. He paddles to the edge and offers the find to Fenton Prentice. That visible cord is the first concrete sign of how the object was placed. The Hound has been recovered from the pool itself, rather than discovered elsewhere and merely associated with it. The movement from a conjecture voiced by Bob to Jupiter’s retrieval gives the deduction a material confirmation.

How the Hound Was Hidden

Jupiter explains that the burglar did not need to enter the pool. The Hound had been lowered by a cord until it touched the bottom, after which the burglar let it go. The gold cord blended with the random blue-and-gold tile pattern, making the means of concealment difficult to distinguish from the pool floor. The method depends on two features working together: the Hound is transparent, and the cord is visually lost among the tiles. The pool is not simply a place where the object happens to be; its appearance helps disguise both the Hound and the means used to position it.

That explanation makes sense of the earlier emphasis on draining and cleaning the pool. If the object lies among the floor tiles, removing the water would make the hiding place newly accessible to inspection. The episode thus recasts the pool from an everyday amenity into part of the burglar’s concealment method. Yet Jupiter’s account also sets a limit on what the recovered cord proves: it explains how the Hound could be deposited without a swimmer carrying it down, but the recovery itself does not identify the person who lowered it.

Sonny Elmquist and the Dream

A later observation supplies a separate piece of the Hound’s history. At midnight, the gate clicks open and Sonny Elmquist enters his apartment. A light briefly shines from his windows and then goes out. In the beam, a hand reaches down and closes around the transparent Hound. This establishes that Sonny retrieves the object, but it does not show that he originally hid it or that he knows why it was placed there.

When the Hound is later found in an oven, Sonny says he had intended to return it to Fenton Prentice. Jupiter argues that Sonny is not the burglar and does not know about the money; he is a wanderer who happened to see something while asleep. Sonny describes dreaming about a glass dog and someone arriving in the dark late at night to put it into the water, without being able to see who the person was. The dream accounts for his knowledge of the Hound’s location while preserving the distinction between witnessing its concealment and carrying out the burglary.

Significance of the Discovery

The event resolves the central question of where the supposedly invisible Hound has been hidden, while opening a more precise distinction between possession, observation, and responsibility. Jupiter’s retrieval confirms that the pool was the hiding place; the cord and tiles explain the practical trick; Sonny’s later recovery and dream clarify how a person could encounter the secret without being the burglar. Those pieces do not collapse into a single explanation of every danger surrounding the pool. Instead, they show why the pool mattered to the investigation and how a transparent object could remain undiscovered in an exposed, ordinary setting.