The Mystery of the Queen's Necklace Read online

  Your TRIXIE BELDEN Library

  1

  The Secret of the Mansion

  2

  The Red Trailer Mystery

  3

  The Gatehouse Mystery

  4

  The Mysterious Visitor

  5

  The Mystery Off Glen Road

  6

  Mystery in Arizona

  7

  The Mysterious Code

  8

  The Black Jacket Mystery

  • 9

  The Happy Valley Mystery

  10

  The Marshland Mystery

  11

  The Mystery at Bob-White Cave

  12

  The Mystery of the Blinking Eye

  13

  The Mystery on Cobbett’s Island

  14

  The Mystery of the Emeralds

  15

  Mystery on the Mississippi

  16

  The Mystery of the Missing Heiress

  17

  The Mystery of the Uninvited Guest

  18

  The Mystery of the Phantom Grasshopper

  19

  The Secret of the Unseen Treasure

  20

  The Mystery Off Old Telegraph Road

  21

  The Mystery of the Castaway Children

  22

  Mystery at Mead’s Mountain

  23

  The Mystery of the Queen’s Necklace

  24

  Mystery at Saratoga

  25

  The Sasquatçh Mystery

  26

  The Mystery of the Headless Horseman

  27

  The Mystery of the Ghostly Galleon

  28

  The Hudson River Mystery

  29

  The Mystery of the Velvet Gown (new)

  30

  The Mystery of the Midnight Marauder (new)

  31

  Mystery at Maypenny’s (new)

  © 1979 by Western Publishing Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Produced in U.S.A.

  GOLDEN®, GOLDEN PRESS®, and TRIXIE BELDEN® are registered trademarks of Western Publishing Company, Inc.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  0-307-21594-6

  All names, characters, and events in this story are entirely fictitious.

  Honeys Inheritance ● 1

  TRIXIE BELDEN’S blue eyes were stormy. She and her family were assembled around the kitchen table at Crabapple Farm, having what Trixie called a council of war. Her parents and her older brothers, Brian and Mart, were present—everyone except six-year-old Bobby.

  “I want to play war, too,” he had insisted.

  “Not as long as you’re the interrupting-est little boy in Westchester County, New York!” Trixie had told him, too upset to be more tactful. “Why don’t you go outside and play with Reddy? He could certainly use the exercise.”

  Fortunately, that suggestion had appealed to him, which meant that Trixie was free, she hoped, to present her arguments in relative peace and quiet.

  “Now, what’s this all about?” her father wanted to know, looking up from the newspaper.

  Trixie took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts. A trip to England—that was what it was all about! The parents of Trixie’s best friend, Honey Wheeler, had offered to take the Bob-Whites of the Glen with them on their trip to England the following week. Besides Trixie and Honey, the Bob-Whites included Brian, Mart, Diana Lynch, Dan Mangan, and Honey’s adoptive brother, Jim Frayne. The semisecret club had shared many good times together all over the United States, but never before had they been across the ocean. So far, however, Trixie’s parents had maintained that such an expensive trip was out of the question for the Belden young people. But Trixie Belden was not one to give up an argument that easily.

  “Well,” she said finally, “I just don’t think it’s fair for you and Moms to say that Brian and Mart and I can’t go to England, till you hear all the reasons.” Like the fact that Honey will be crushed if Fm not allowed to go, Trixie thought to herself. And the fact that Jim is going, and it’ll be so much fun....

  “Let’s hear your reasons,” Peter Belden said in his most businesslike voice.

  “For one thing,” Trixie began, and then she noticed that her father was sneaking a look at the newspaper! “Mo-oms,” Trixie protested, and Helen Belden reached over and gently removed his reading glasses.

  “I’m listening,” he said with a grin. “But, as I told you before, there’s no way you kids can afford a trip abroad, and the Wheelers have done too much for this family already.”

  “But, Dad,” Trixie pleaded, “Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler have tons of money, and they’re going on business anyway and taking their own private plane, like when they took us to St. Louis and when they sent us to Vermont, so it wouldn’t cost all that much, and besides, Honey says her parents are always saying that they’ll never be able to do enough for the Beldens, because when Honey first moved here, she was so lonesome and sickly and scared of practically everything, and now she’s so healthy and has so many friends, and—”

  “Whoa!” chuckled Mr. Belden. “How many reasons was that?”

  “ ‘I would my horse had the speed of your tongue,’ ” Mart quoted dryly. He had recently written a paper for his English class on Much Ado About Nothing, and ever since then he’d considered himself the ultimate expert on Shakespeare, especially on quotations of his work.

  “My tongue happens to be speaking for you, too, you know,” Trixie told her brother indignantly.

  Always ready for an argument, Trixie and Mart were almost the same age. At fifteen, he was eleven months older. They looked very much alike, too, with their mother’s sandy blond hair and bright blue eyes, and their own personal freckles. People who didn’t know them often thought they were twins. Lately, with Mart letting his short hair grow out, the resemblance was even closer, much to Mart’s dismay. Deep down he was one of Trixie’s staunchest supporters, but he did enjoy needling her. One of the ways Trixie got back at him was to tease him about being her almost-twin.

  “You don’t have to speak for me, Trix,” said Brian as he selected an apple from a big bowl of fruit on the red-checked tablecloth. “I already told you, I’ve got to stay home and work.” Brian was seventeen, with dark hair and eyes like his father’s, and he was more serious than the “almost-twins.” He was planning to be a doctor, and he needed every cent he could earn for medical school.

  “I almost forgot,” sighed Trixie. “But just because you have to work, and Dan has to work, and Di has to go to Milwaukee with her parents doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t get to see the world until—until I’m old and stodgy!”

  “Brian has a point, though,” said Mrs. Belden. “You all do have responsibilities here at home.”

  “I know, Moms,” Trixie said quickly. “But Mrs. Wheeler really wants us to be with Honey and Jim while she and Mr. Wheeler tend to their business.

  Sure, they’ve taken us on trips before, but we took Honey and Jim to Uncle Andrew’s lodge in the Ozarks and the sheep farm in Iowa, and it was Di Lynch’s family that took us all to Washington, D.C., and Williamsburg and Arizona. And you know how the Bob-Whites always help a lot of people on our trips—”

  “Not to mention, Schoolgirl Shamus,” Mart interrupted her breathless recital, “how you always manage to fathom all those unfathomable mysteries.”

  “It isn’t just me,” Trixie said. “It’s me and Honey and all the Bob-Whites.” She didn’t add that she and Honey were going to establish their own detective agency when they got out
of school, because everybody knew that.

  Mrs. Belden shook her head regretfully as she got up to take a batch of brownies out of the oven. Mr. Belden reached for the newspaper.

  “Wait!” Trixie protested. “I’m not finished yet!” Her war council was turning into a total fiasco. Apparently, her parents had never had any intention of changing their minds.

  Trixie looked ready to explode, and Brian nudged her under the table.

  “Douse the dynamite,” he said softly. “It won’t do any good to blow up.”

  “I’m afraid the subject is closed,” Mr. Belden said, and Trixie could almost hear the definite click of a vault door swinging shut in the First National Bank of Sleepyside, where her father worked.

  “I’m sure you’ll get to England sometime,” Mrs. Belden said, her blue eyes warm with sympathy. “But in the meantime, how about some brownies?”

  One whiff of the fudgy brownies was enough to make Mart forget everything else, and Brian was already cutting his first serving. But Trixie felt that what she needed at the moment was cool air, not hot brownies.

  “I’m going over to Honey’s for a while,” she mumbled. “Okay?”

  “I’ll be over in a few minutes,” promised Mart in between bites.

  “All right,” their mother said. “But be home early.”

  Trixie fairly flew up the footpath that led from Crabapple Farm to the Manor House, high on the hill. Every minute that she and Honey had left was precious. She had so many questions. When were they leaving? How long were they going to stay? Not all summer, she hoped. That would be awful!

  As Trixie neared the top of the hill, Honey came flying down to meet her. Her honey-blond hair streamed out behind her, and her hazel eyes were enormous.

  “Trixie!” she cried. “Just wait till you see what I’ve got!”

  “Why do I have to see it?” demanded Trixie breathlessly. “Just tell me!”

  “You’d never believe me, that’s why,” said Honey, leading the way up to the white mansion on the Hudson River hilltop.

  “I’ll die if you don’t tell me right this minute,” Trixie threatened as they hurried up the steps of the veranda that encircled the house.

  “Oh, Trixie, you’re always dying,” Honey laughed. “I’ll give you some clues, though. It’s all different colors, and it’s very, very old.”

  The girls rushed inside and almost bumped into Mrs. Wheeler, who was in the reception hall talking to one of the maids. Uh-oh, Trixie thought to herself. Slow down. Honey’s mother was very nice, but Trixie couldn’t help feeling a little in awe of her. She never had a hair out of place, it seemed, and she was always dressed up, even for riding. She came from a socially prominent family, and she always looked as perfect as she did in the oil portrait of her in the Wheeler living room.

  Trixie felt different toward Honey’s redheaded father. He was a millionaire in his own right and had built up a far-flung business empire, but somehow all the Bob-Whites felt as comfortable with him as they did with their own fathers. Or maybe more so, Trixie thought grumpily. She wasn’t too comfortable with her own father at the moment.

  “Good evening, Trixie,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “I suppose you have come to see Honey’s—”

  “Don’t tell,” Honey said. “I want to surprise her.”

  “Very well, dear.” Mrs. Wheeler smiled at them.

  “Why don’t you take her up to your room? The—that is, it—has come back from the jeweler’s, and I left it in your top dresser drawer. They did a beautiful job of cleaning and polish—”

  “Mo-therrr,” Honey warned, pulling Trixie after her up the broad, crimson-carpeted stairway. The carpet was new—Mrs. Wheeler loved to redecorate— but the gleaming cherry wood banisters would never change. The Manor House was modeled after the Dutch settlements that had been built on the Hudson before the American Revolution. It was certainly magnificent, but Trixie never dreamed of trading it for her own small farmhouse in the hollow below. Everybody loved Crabapple Farm.

  Honey’s room was done in white, with a ruffled organdy bedspread and curtains to match. Trixie had been a little in awe of it, too, at first, but no more.

  “Now,” Trixie demanded, plopping down on the bed, “if you don’t show me whatever-it-is right this minute, I’ll—I’ll—” Not being able to think of anything worse than her usual death scene, she subsided. Besides, Honey was already opening her bureau drawer and taking out a moth-eaten purple velvet box.

  “It’s something I just inherited,” said Honey. “From my great-great-aunt Priscilla, whom I never even knew. Mother just faintly remembers her, from when she was a little girl and went to visit her in New England. My great-great-aunt was terribly old even then. She’s been in a rest home, and she just died last spring—at the age of ninety-nine.”

  “Gleeps,” Trixie said. “That’s ancient. It’s too bad she didn’t make it to a hundred so she could be a centennial.”

  “I think you mean a centenarian,” Honey said. “You and your near-miss vocabulary.”

  “Whatever,” Trixie said hastily. “Just tell me— what did you inherit?”

  “This!” Honey snapped open the old box with a flourish and spilled its contents out onto the bed. Huge sapphires, emeralds, and rubies sparkled against the snow-white bedspread. They were set in a thick gold chain encrusted with diamonds and pearls. “Yipes!” Trixie whispered. “Are they real?”

  “Mother had them appraised,” Honey said. “She didn’t think they were, but she wasn’t sure, because they were all gucked up before she had them cleaned. She said if they were real, they ought to be locked up in the Tower of London with the crown jewels. Nobody but kings and queens would wear something like this.”

  “Fortunately,” Mrs. Wheeler said from the open doorway, “they turned out to be only imitations.”

  “Fortunately?” Trixie gasped. “You mean they’re fake? And you’re glad of it?”

  Honey slipped the heavy, glittering necklace over her head. It hung in a wide circle almost to her waist. “Doesn’t look much like junk jewelry, does it?” she said. She struck a pose for Trixie’s benefit.

  Mrs. Wheeler sat down in a white-ruffled rocker. “The stones are not real, but the piece still may be valuable, particularly if it turns out to have any special historical interest. The appraiser assures us that it is very old.”

  “As old as your aunt Priscilla?” Trixie asked. “Older than that,” Mrs. Wheeler said.

  “It might go back to the days of Queen Elizabeth,” Honey said. “Queen Elizabeth the First, that is. That’s over four hundred years.”

  Trixie gulped.

  “That remains to be seen,” Mrs. Wheeler said, smiling at their excitement.

  “That’s what I was just coming down to Crabapple Farm to tell you.” Honey’s eyes glowed. “Now you just have to come to England with us, Trix—you and Mart, even if Brian can’t come. Because we have to trace the necklace, and we already know that it comes from England! Miss Trask will come with us— she used to teach history as well as math before she came to be my governess—and there are a lot of old libraries where we can look up stuff, like my mother’s ancestors, and the jewelry of different periods, and all. Besides, my dad says that if we’re going to solve a mystery, there’s nobody who can do that better than Trixie Belden.”

  “Our supersleuth!” came a cheerful voice from Honey’s open door.

  It was Jim, and right behind him, in the hall, was Mart. Trixie was about to burst already, from all sorts of mixed-up emotions, and the sight of Jim’s friendly face and tousled red hair was almost too much.

  “But we can’t go with you,” she wailed. “My parents say it’s absolutely out of the qu-question.” She blinked back tears, determined not to cry in front of Jim, who was always saying how spunky she was.

  “Perhaps Matthew and I could pay a little call on your parents,” Mrs. Wheeler suggested. “We could explain how much we need the, er, the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency, to trace the origin of the
necklace.” Trixie could have sworn she saw a twinkle in Mrs. Wheeler’s eyes. “And it would mean a great deal to me to find out more about my ancestors, too.”

  “You mean like a job? For the agency?” Honey-cried. “Oh, Trixie, wouldn’t that be fabulous? A real assignment!”

  “Your others have certainly been unreal,” Mart commented.

  Trixie was speechless. The Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency was so far just a dream, for when she and Honey grew up. Of course, they had solved quite a few mysteries already, with the help of all the Bob-Whites, but those had been mostly accidental....

  “I suppose this would be an all-expenses-paid assignment?” Jim drawled, still leaning against the doorjamb.

  “Expenses!” Trixie gasped. “Oh, my sainted aunt!”

  “That’s my sainted aunt,” Honey put in.

  “All expenses would be paid,” Mrs. Wheeler assured them. “Keep a record of them.”

  “Pinch me,” Trixie said dreamily. “Nope—on second thought, don’t pinch me. I might wake up.”

  “What’s the name of the family you want us to trace?” Mart asked, curious. “Is it Wheeler?”

  “No, it’s my family,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “My maiden name is Hart. H-a-r-t. I believe there’s a connection with the Shakespeares, way back.”

  “You’re kidding!” exclaimed Mart.

  “You like Shakespeare?” Mrs. Wheeler asked. “I’m glad. I expect you’ll be staying in Stratford-on-Avon, his birthplace, for at least a few days. We’ll arrange for you to see one or two of his plays at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.” She stood up. “I’m going to go hunt up Matthew right now.”

  Mrs. Wheeler hurried out of the room, and Trixie let out a sigh. “Oh, Honey, your mom is absolutely super,” she said. “Do you really think they can talk my parents into it?”