The Mystery of the Missing Heiress (2 page)

Diana didn’t move. “I just can’t believe it!” she gasped. “It’s too—too—too super! Why, even the Sleepyside Turf Club doesn’t own a car!”

“Why speak of that unimportant organization in the same breath with the Bob-Whites of the Glen?” Mart asked. “Gol, when I think of all that’s happened to us in the past year or so....”

“Ever since Honey’s family moved to Manor House,” Trixie added, “and Di’s family moved here —and Dan!”

“We have the best dub in the United States of America,” Honey said. “I
always
wanted to belong to a club like ours.”

Trixie nodded her head. “Now all seven of us belong.”

“With a clubhouse thrown in,” Brian reminded her.

“Which we broke our backs mending and rebuilding and furnishing—” Mart stopped when he saw Trixie’s face.

“Mart Belden! Were the luckiest people in the whole world! Just think of it—the Wheeler gatehouse for our dub!”

“It’s true, what Mart said,” Honey said quietly. “It looked terrible, all choked with vines and so dilapidated. Daddy’s so proud of the way we fixed it up without any help from anyone. That’s one reason that he gave us the station wagon. He likes the things the Bob-Whites do.”

“Trixie didn’t give me half a chance to finish what I started to say— Oh, stand still a minute, can’t you?” Mart said to Strawberry, who was pawing the ground, eager to get going. “I liked the work we did on the clubhouse. I was just trying to be a little bit funny. There’s no end to the things Mr. Wheeler does to help our dub—Di’s dad, too, and our own mom and dad.”

Honey shook her blond head. “There’s more to it than that, Mart. When I think of the crazy, dressed-up kid I was before I met Trixie and the rest of you.... Heavens, I never even owned a pair of jeans before. I never had one day s fun in all my life till....”

“Poor little rich girl!” Mart dried imaginary tears. “It’s true. Jim and I practically
live
at Crabapple Farm now... picnics and barbecues... your mother’s cooking. It’s a lot easier to give things to people when you have too much yourself. It’s better to
do
things with and for other people. The Bob-Whites have taught us that, haven’t they, Jim?”

“Sure! Of course, I’m a Johnny-come-lately—just since your family took pity on a down-and-out orphan, Honey, and adopted me. I sure think I fell into a great life with some great friends. It took a punk like that stepfather of mine to make me realize this.”

“Ho-hum!” Mart broke in, pretending to stifle a yawn. “Is this a love-in, or are we going to ride?”

“Ride!” Trixie said briskly. “It doesn’t hurt anyone, though, to stop now and then and think about good things people do. Too many people are running down our country and everyone in it, with a special hate for teen-agers. I like us. I like all of us.” She turned Susie sharply, urged her into a trot, and called back over her shoulder, “You have to remember that Dan doesn’t know about the car. Let’s turn into the woods here.”

They left Glen Road for a world of tangy spruce and pine as the intriguing shade of the trail closed around them.

Reddy and Patch spread out, barking deliriously as they caught the pungent scent of damp pine needles, spongy leaf mold, and elusive cottontails.

The surefooted horses picked their way, sniffing the fresh air, Jupiter snorting and shaking his black head, restive under Jim’s tight control.

Ahead of them, at the edge of the clearing, they could see the rustic old cottage of Mr. Maypenny, the Wheeler gamekeeper. Nearby, Dan Mangan

was cutting up a fallen tree.

When he heard the Bob-White whistle, he shouted a welcome they couldn’t quite hear, but he grinned a greeting they couldn’t mistake.

When they neared and called out the news, his grin broke into a whoop of joy.

“One-seventh of the car is yours,” Mart added as he dismounted and dropped his reins to ground-tie Strawberry. “Jim and Brian will give you a driving lesson right away.”

“How about that?A station wagon of our own!” Dan shouted to Mr. Maypenny, who had come out of his house when he heard Dan’s whoop.

“It’s no more than you all deserve,” the gamekeeper said. His eyes twinkled as Mart and Dan, irrepressible, went into an Indian war dance. It stopped abruptly, though, when Jupiter reared, exciting the gentler horses.

Mart raced to pick up Strawberry’s reins, while the girls calmed their mounts.

The elderly man watched thoughtfully. Trixie wondered if he was thinking how miraculously Regan’s rebellious nephew Dan had changed from a wild member of a tough New York City gang into the hardworking, happy lad he now was! It pleased her to think that the Bob-Whites had had something to do with that change.

“Dan, can we pick you up on the way back?” Jim called over his shoulder. “Were riding the horses

into the woods for exercise.”

“Go along with them,” Mr. Maypenny told Dan. “Lay down the saw—the wood can wait—and saddle old Spartan. It’ll do him good to get a little trail riding, too.”

With a shout, Trixie held up her hand, fingers crossed. “I was hoping and wishing Dan could come!”

Dan rested his saw against the trunk of a tree and grinned his thanks to Mr. Maypenny. It didn’t take him long to saddle Spartan and fall in behind the other Bob-Whites.

Single file, they rode on. Through heavy, overhanging branches they could glimpse the blue of the sky and feel the soft touch of late summer wind on their tanned faces.

Stirred by the sound of their voices and the yammering of the excited dogs, flocks of scolding birds rose. Little ground squirrels and cottontail rabbits skittered for refuge.

At the end of the woods trail, Jim, who was leading, held up his arm to signal the others to stop. From now on, the ground was barred to horses. Signs proclaimed this order.

The Bob-Whites tied their horses. Farther on, afoot, they came to other notices forbidding
any
further progress.

“I wish Dad owned this part between here and the bluff,” Jim said. “He’d do more than warn people. He’d fence off this part. He may do it yet, if the county will let him.”

Erosion had undermined the lip of the bluff so that only a dangerously thin shelf remained, ready to crumble and fall without warning.

Carefully the Bob-Whites circled the area till they stood on higher and firmer ground. Here, in a clump of pines, they would eat their sandwiches.

Beneath them the mighty Hudson flowed. Flat ferries, heavy with beetle-sized cars, churned trails that rocked tiny, white-sailed pleasure craft in their wake. Gulls wheeled, dipping and soaring to the tempo of tugboat whistles.

Immediately below the Bob-Whites lay their objective: a strip of marshy land to be reached by a worn and precipitous footpath. Swampy, of little use to industry, it fascinated the young people. In late fall it was a resting place for fowl on their north-south flight. Even when the Beldens’ grandfather had been a boy, botany classes from Sleepy-side schools had hunted there to fill herbariums with specimens.

Diana, shading her eyes to look far up the river, walked, unthinking, into the forbidden area, only to be jerked back by Jim with such force that she sprawled on the ground.

“Can’t you read?” he asked, fright hoarsening his voice. “That shelf of earth is so thin that a rabbit’s whisper might break it off. Don’t do that again,

Diana!” He helped her to her feet.

“That was a close call,” Mart said seriously. “Girls! They have to be watched just like babies! Let’s go back.”

“We will not, Mart.” Trixie’s voice was impatient. “You’re a fine one to talk! You’d have drowned half a dozen times in the Wheeler lake if a girl—Honey— hadn’t pulled you out when you were learning to dive off the high board. And we’re
not
going back till we see what those men down there are doing to the marsh.”

“I’m sorry,” Mart said, shamefaced. “When I get scared, I.... Let’s go find out what’s up.” Carefully they inched their way down, chain-fashion, hand in hand, loosening outcropping pebbles, and rejoicing in the thrill of this lesser danger.

Near the water’s edge, men busy with sump pumps seemed to be drawing up samples of sand and vegetation for testing.

“What goes on?” Jim asked.

“Some outfit from Canada is going to build a factory here,” one of the men said. “They’re going to drain the swamp.”

“That’s been tried many times before,” Jim said. The listening Bob-Whites nodded.

“It wouldn’t work,” Brian asserted. “There’s no bottom to the marsh.”

“They’ve found one now, kid,” the man answered. “Some engineers came up with a new way of doing it. There’s been enough publicity about the project. If you’d read the papers, you wouldn’t have to ask so many questions and interrupt our work—you and a dozen others.”

“Gosh! What’ll we do for stuff for botany?” Mart wondered. “Where will the migrating birds light?”

“Questions! Questions! Questions!” the man snorted. “You’d better get out of our way... go back up to where you came from. Read the answers to your questions in the newspapers. Say,” he added as they quickly crossed the road to the path, “aren’t you going to take the old guy with you?” Mart turned. “What old guy?”

“That old guy there. He asked more questions than you kids. Isn’t he with you?”

Mart shook his head. “There’s no old guy with us.

Trixie, though, had trained her keen eyes to hunt out details other people missed. She had to, to be a good detective.

Far up the road she saw a man fade into the shrubbery and out of sight.

A sense of something evil, something frightening, set her to shivering, though the day was warm and sunny.

A Mysterious Phone Call • 2

TRIXIE AND HONEY lingered, whispering, as the boys began the climb back up the path.

“You looked scared to death,” Honey said under her breath. “What happened?”

“It was that man - the old man - didn't you see him?”

“No. I thought that workman was seeing things. Did you see someone?”

Trixie gave Honey a little shove to start her up the path. “Gleeps, if you’d only keep your eyes open! I was sure you saw him, too, and maybe could tell me who he was.”

She had raised her voice, and Jim, trudging ahead, overheard. “I saw him just as he disappeared, but, gosh, Trixie, he gave me a funny feeling—as if there were something I should know about him.”

“Forget the spooky guy,” Brian said. “The only thing that gives me the heebies is that I’m just in the middle of a study of herbs. I’ve never found any of them outside that marsh—tansy, boneset, bergamot, pennyroyal.”

“I never even heard of them,” Jim said.

“Not many people have today,” Brian explained, puffing as they neared the top. “They were used by our great-grandmothers for medicine. I think they’re pretty neat today. I want to do some research with them. I’ll bet it’s the only place in the United States where you can find them still growing wild.”

Jim laughed. “I’ll take that bet. There’s plenty of marshland left, even here around Sleepyside. If you keep on this way, Brian, you’ll get your M.D. before you even start pre-med.”

“Then I can be the doctor in residence in your home for orphan boys.”

I wish I had some sort of career to work toward all the time,” Diana sighed, her lovely face worried and a little red from climbing. “Honey and Trixie are so sure they want to be detectives. Mart’s so sure he wants to be a farmer, Brian a doctor, and Dan a New York policeman. Jim has had his mind set on that home for orphan boys ever since his great-uncle left him that money. I used to think I wanted to be a stewardess, but now I’m not sure I want to be anything—except a mother, maybe.”

“We all want to be that,” Honey was quick to say. “That’s a career. Look at Trixie’s mother. She mothers all of us. She’s super!”

Trixie saw Honey’s face sadden. Her own mother was away so much of the time on business trips with her father. There
was
Miss Trask, of course. She had been Honey’s teacher at Briar Hall, before Honey came to Sleepyside and enrolled in public school. Now Miss Trask did a wonderful job as housekeeper at Manor House and of pinch-hitting as mother for Honey and Jim. All the Bob-Whites were devoted to her. She disciplined, but she didn’t snoop. She listened but found little fault. Why, she made
almost
as good a mother as Trixie’s own.

At the top of the cliff, Trixie and Honey stood looking back down below. The men were still busy dredging and sampling. Trixie’s face clouded as the Bob-Whites started back to the horses and Manor House. That man—what was it about him that....

“Stay with me tonight,” Honey begged. “My mom is away, as usual, and we have so much to talk over.”

“I shouldn’t,” Trixie said, hesitating. “I’m always getting out of chores at home. Mom never says a thing, but she does depend on me to watch Bobby. He can get into more mischief.”

“It won t be quite so much work for her if you and Brian and Mart stay for dinner at our house. Stay, please. Miss Trask will call your mother.”

“And Moms will say yes. She never thinks about herself. No, Honey, I have a better idea. Moms has to get dinner for Bobby and Daddy, anyway. She doesn’t mind more people. You and Jim come to dinner at our house. Before we left tins morning, Brian and Mart and I gathered the eggs and brought in vegetables from the garden—tomatoes, green beans, green cabbage, and some late lettuce. If I run on home now and help, we’ll have a sort of picnic supper.”