The Marshland Mystery (5 page)

“Do
I? He’ll insist on my taking Susie for an extra-long run, and we’ll never get started for the marsh!”

“Stop teasing Trixie, Jim.” Honey laughed. “Don’t let him scare you, Trix. We’ve had both Starlight and Susie out for a canter already.”

“I went along,” a sharp little voice said. “I rode Lady.” Gaye, looking very neat in an expensive riding outfit, leaned in the doorway, watching them coolly.

Trixie was surprised, but Honey said promptly, “That’s right. Gaye’s a splendid rider.”

“I learned at the best school in Paris,” the little girl said grandly, “and
they
had really
fine
horses, not like these slowpokes here.”

Trixie’s face flushed with indignation, and she turned to Jim and Honey, expecting them to defend their horses. But Honey was smiling indulgently at Gaye, and Jim was chuckling as he finished with the bike.

“I imagine they did, at that,” Jim agreed blithely. He handed the bike over to Honey. “There you are, Honey. Have a grand time, and don’t fall into the swamp.” He turned to Trixie. “Did Brian give you the map?”

“He left it for me.” Trixie fished the folded map out of her pocket and handed it to him. “It’s a whiz!”

Jim glanced at it. “I’ll say! Very neat, indeed. He practically leads you by the hand and tells you what to look for when you arrive. Good old Brian!”

Gaye stepped over and thrust her head between Jim and Honey to stare at the map. “Why are you going there?”

“To pick some flowers,” Trixie answered shortly. “Very special ones that you wouldn’t know about.”

Gaye looked up at her impudently. “I think I’ll ask Aunt Della to let me go with you!” she announced.

“But it’s—” Trixie started, with a frown. She stopped as she caught Honey’s eye, and Honey shook her head warningly. Trixie finished lamely, “It’s too far for you.”

“I guess I can do it if you can.” Gaye scowled, and she turned to Honey. “May I ask her, Honey?”

“Go ahead, but hurry. We have to get started,” Honey told her hastily.

Gaye darted out of the clubhouse, and they could hear her running up the cement driveway.

“Oh, Honey!” Trixie groaned. “You know she’ll be a worse nuisance than Bobby! Besides, she doesn’t have a bike, and we’ll have to take turns letting her use ours!”

“Don’t worry,” Honey said calmly. “I heard Miss Crandall tell the governess that Gaye must start practicing the sonata by ten o’clock sharp. There’s no chance of her tagging along with us.”

“Then why do we wait? It’s getting late,” Trixie reminded her friend, “and I promised Dad that we’d be home before dark, without fail.”

Honey looked troubled. “But I practically told her we’d wait until she had asked her aunt.” She looked appealingly at her adopted brother. Whenever Honey had to make an important decision, she liked to get Jim’s advice. “What do you think we’d better do?” she asked him.

“Simple. Just go on, you kids. It’s so close to ten o’clock now that I doubt if her aunt even lets her come back here to tell you she can’t go with you. I’ll be busy here for a few minutes, and if she does show up, I’ll tell her the truth. You knew she had to practice, so you didn’t wait, but you were sorry she couldn’t go. If she gets angry, she’ll get over it.” He waved them on.

“That makes sense,” Trixie agreed with a grin. “Come on, Honey.” And she was mounted on her bike and on her way in a minute.

As they cycled, side by side, along Glen Road toward the first turnoff that Brian had marked on the map, Trixie was more silent than usual. She was wrestling with her conscience. She had promised her mother she would be kind to little Gaye, and she had meant to be. But she had an uneasy feeling that running off the way they had would show the child that they hadn’t wanted her along, or they’d have waited for her and told her they were disappointed she couldn’t come.

“There’s Old Telegraph Road just up ahead, I think,” Honey called, “where that car’s crossing. Does the map say we go east or west on it?”

“I’ll check and see.” Trixie reached into her pocket and kept on pedaling. “I don’t remember.”

“Neither do I,” Honey admitted with a giggle that broke off suddenly when she saw the look on Trixie’s face as Trixie braked her bike suddenly and felt frantically first in one pocket of her jacket and then the other. “What’s the matter?”

“The map,” Trixie told her glumly, giving up the search. “Jim didn’t give it back to me. Now what are we going to do?”

A Face at the Window ● 5

GLEEPS! I HATE to turn back now, but I suppose we’ll have to.” Trixie leaned dejectedly against her bicycle. “Without that map, we’re sunk.”

“Maybe there’s some kind of a sign up there where we’re supposed to turn. It just might say ‘Martin’s Marsh,’ in plain English,” Honey suggested. “Let’s get started again, before I notice how tired my legs are!”

“Good idea!” Trixie agreed hastily. “Mine are getting a bit wobbly, too. They’re sending distress signals to my so-called brain.” Trixie groaned as she settled herself again on the bike. “Let’s go.”

There were no signs pointing the way to Martin’s Marsh around the corner of Old Telegraph Road. As a matter of fact, there were no signs of any sort, and, except for two or three lines of tire tracks in the soft, sandy dirt, there was no indication that anyone used the old road. Old telegraph poles, some leaning well out °f line, seemed loosely held together by a few slack wires.

There wasn’t a hint in the quiet solitude of the spot that this road, not so long ago, had been a highway from the river to the rich interior valley. Only a distant humming gave evidence that, not too far away, a great concrete ribbon of throughway stretched for a hundred miles, from city to city.

“Well, here we are,” Trixie said dismally, “and I suppose that whichever way we decide to go, we’ll be going the wrong way.”

But Honey, off her bike now, was standing in the middle of the road and sniffing the air with rapturous expression. “M-m-m! I smell violets! Let’s stop right here and pick some.”

Trixie tilted her pert nose and sniffed. “Smells more like swamp to me,” she said flatly. Then, a moment later, her blue eyes sparkled. “Swamp! Wait a minute!” She ran to stand beside Honey. “Let’s see which way it’s coming from, and we’ll know which direction to go!”

“Oh, Trixie, you’re a genius!” Honey exclaimed.

They both stood still and sniffed inquiringly. It took Trixie only a moment to make up her mind. “Nothing from the east,” she announced, then sniffed inquiringly toward the west. “There! That’s it! West!”

Honey wrinkled her pretty nose and pointed it west. “You’re right! Let’s go!” she laughed.

A moment later, they were on their way.

Honey called over to Trixie as they rode. “Can you remember any of the landmarks on the map?”

“Golly, I don’t think so,” Trixie admitted mournfully. But a couple of minutes later, as they turned a corner, she gave a sudden exclamation and pointed ahead. “Look!

A big oak split by lightning. Wasn’t there something about that on the map?”

“Oak—lightning—why, of course! Now I remember!” Honey agreed excitedly. “Brian drew a tree with a big zigzag of lightning hitting it. There was a road beyond it just a little way, I think, where we turn off.”

“Let’s take a look,” Trixie said eagerly and was on her way before she had finished speaking. Honey was not far behind her as they reached the big oak and went on to look for the turnoff road.

The smell of the marsh was getting stronger every second, and the road was starting to get rougher and narrower.

Suddenly Trixie let her bike veer across the dirt toward Honey, and they almost collided. Her eyes were fixed on something deep in among the trees at the side of the road. “Honey! Look! A huge old house!”

They stopped and stared. At first sight, it had seemed like a whole house, one that a person could live in. But a closer look showed that it was only a shell. Three stories high, with part of its gambrel roof still covering the upper story, it stood in the midst of tall trees and a vast tangle of vegetation.

“Reminds me of the Frayne house after Jim’s good-for-nothing stepfather accidentally set fire to it,” Trixie said. “Fire can really wreck a place, even when it’s brick and stone.”

“It seems a shame, ” Honey sighed, “a waste of money. I suppose that’s the old Martin mansion where the partner of Captain Kidd lived.”

“Dad said that people only suspected that he was Kidd’s partner.” Then Trixie added, “But I bet he was, all right. All sorts of things could have gone on in a spot that must have been at least a day’s journey from the city. And the Hudson is only a short distance away. There’s a swamp to hide in, besides.”

Honey stole a quick look at Trixie as her friend was speaking. Trixie was getting the look that showed she was beginning to make plans. “Trixie Belden, you can just forget it,” she said, shaking a finger at her. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Huh?” Trixie looked surprised, and then she laughed. “We could just take a
little
bit of a look around in there. You know, I’ve heard about old places like that having secret passages underneath, especially when something unlawful was going on, like pirating. Suppose we just happened to find a trapdoor or a secret panel, and there was a tunnel, and—” Trixie’s vivid imagination had gone to work.

Honey interrupted hastily. “And cobwebs and spiders and rats and maybe—” she gulped—“maybe skeletons. Ugh! You’re not going to talk me into exploring that house!”

Trixie sighed. “Okay, scaredy-cat. But it would be fun to look around outside. Maybe we could even find some antique doorknobs or stuff like that and sell it to make some money for the B.W.G. treasury!”

Honey looked at her gravely. “You know you’re just making that up. If there had been anything like that left, after a big fire that did as much damage as this one did, it would have been taken years ago. But if you simply must go exploring, I’ll go with you.”

“I knew you would! Come on; let’s wheel our bikes in as far as we can and walk the rest of the way.” She started off almost at once, and Honey followed her up a narrow driveway almost overgrown with weeds.

The weeds in their path were not half as tall as they would be later in the season, and they could see well ahead, so there was little danger of suddenly encountering a snake. Overhead, brown squirrels chattered angrily at them from the branches, and birds swooped low over their heads, as if trying to scare them away from the newly filled nests. There was a chorus of twitters, chirps, and indignant songs going on all around them.

“Any minute now, that blue jay is going to land right on my head!” Trixie called back to Honey. “She missed me by inches that time!”

Now they were close to the big ruined house. It rose high above the tallest of the trees that had once marked the borders of the formal sunken garden. A tangle of vines, reaching almost three stories high, softened the blackened outlines of windows.

The two girls stood together and looked upward at the fresh green that stretched across the empty windows.

“Can’t you imagine old Ezarach Martin up there with his spyglass, looking out over the trees toward the Hudson, watching for Captain Kidd’s longboat to bring the loot from some hidden cove down the river?” Trixie spoke softly, as if someone might be up there listening.

Honey stirred uneasily. “I don’t think he could see as far as the river,” she said. As Trixie suddenly looked thoughtful and started around toward the rear of the house, Honey called after her, “But you don’t have to climb up there and find out. Please, Trixie, let’s go back to the road now.”

But Trixie had disappeared around the corner of the house, and a moment later Honey heard her calling excitedly, “Honey! Come look at what I’ve found!”

With her heart in her mouth, Honey ran as quickly as she could.

Trixie was peering over a broken wall into a small plot of ground at the rear of the big house.

“What is it?” Honey called as she ran.

“A rose garden!” Trixie said, turning wide blue eyes to her friend.

Honey slowed down to a walk, disappointed. “Oh, is that all? Gosh, Trix, you’ve seen dozens of rose gardens. What’s so remarkable about this one?”

“This one is being taken care of,” Trixie told her.

“How can it be,” Honey asked, “when nobody lives here? And why should somebody who doesn’t live here come and take care of a rose garden?”

“I dunno,” Trixie admitted, “but you just take a look yourself.”

Honey came and peered over the wall. The rose garden was very old. The main branches of the rosebushes were thick and spiny, but every one of the bushes was neatly trimmed, and the ground around them had been carefully weeded and neatly raked. “That’s strange,” Honey murmured. Then she saw Trixie lean over suddenly and study something in the soil. “What have you found now?”

“Footprints,” Trixie told her. “Small ones. Anyhow, smaller than
my
feet.” She set her foot down beside the print. “Probably a little boy’s.”

“But they’re pointed. Boys don’t wear pointed-toed shoes. It’s a girl.”