The Mystery on the Mississippi Read online

  “If you were asking me, I’d say to take it back and give it to the man you saw,” Brian said.

  Jim agreed. “I don’t see any reason to be worked up over these papers. You’d better do as Brian suggested. Give ’em back.”

  Trixie frowned. “Do you think so, Dan?”

  “I’m not too sure. I didn’t see the man, and you and Honey did. You’re usually right when you think something odd is going on.”

  “Don’t let Brian and me influence you, Trix,” Jim told her.

  “I won’t. Maybe I should just take them back. He’s probably miles away by this time, though. He seemed to be in a hurry. Oh, well, forget it for now, anyway.” Trixie put the papers back into her purse. “Let’s get going to wherever you want to go.”

  “We want to try to get on the next steamboat that docks in St. Louis,” Mart said.

  “That sure won’t be today. Things just don’t work out that fast,” Brian said. “Anyway, Trix, while we were waiting for you and Honey, we asked at the motel desk, and the man there didn’t know anything about steamboats. He had some vague idea that there’s one steamboat still cruising up and down the Mississippi. I asked him when it would stop at St. Louis, and he didn’t know.”

  “He told us we could ask at the Jefferson Memorial in Forest Park,” Jim added. “That’s where they have all kinds of historical stuff—model rooms from old steamboats and other things about the river. I’d sort of like to go there this afternoon. We could explore the rest of Forest Park, too—the zoo and the model railroad. Dad told us all about the place when he came back from one of his trips here. Forest Park is supposed to be almost as exciting as Central Park in New York City. Do you have your camera, Trixie?” Trixie’s hand went to her mouth in dismay. “I forgot it. I was so confused by the way that man acted. I’ll run and get it. I won’t be a second.”

  Back at her room, Trixie found the door open. The maid was still working there. “I’ve almost finished now,” she told Trixie. Then her voice fell to a whisper. “That man outside in the utility area wanted to

  get in here to see if he’d left anything. See him?” The dark-haired man had his back to Trixie and was rifling through papers in a big trash basket. He turned, started to speak to her, then seemed to change his mind.

  “What’s he doing?” Trixie whispered quietly to the maid.

  “Hunting for some papers I must have emptied from the basket in your room. That’s what he told me. If you ask me, I think he’s a little bit....” She pointed to her temple and shook her head. . “Why?”

  “He raised the roof when I said he couldn’t go inside your room. He made such a fuss, I had to let him go in, but I went along, too, to see that he didn’t touch any of your things. He’s a queer one.” The man seemed to sense that they were talking about him. He looked at the maid viciously. Visibly frightened, she raised her voice to throw him off the track. “Where’s the first place you’re going sightseeing, Miss Belden?”

  “We’re all just crazy to take a ride on a steamboat,” Trixie answered. “I guess we’ll go to the Jefferson Memorial first, to see the exhibit of old steamboats there. Someone there surely will know about present traffic on the river.”

  “Sure they will. I’ll be through here in just a few minutes.”

  Trixie hesitated at the door. Maybe I'd better do exactly what Brian told me to do, she thought. Maybe I should give the papers back. She started to open her purse, then reconsidered. I think I’ll just hold on to them for a while. A person doesn't get as angry as he did unless he’s doing something shady. I’d like to know who he is. Guess I'll ask at the desk.

  As Trixie left, the man stood up, cursed under his breath, and said hoarsely to the maid, “Why did you have to wait around forever? Now it’s too late.”

  Trixie wasn’t quite sure she had understood what he had said. She stopped, perplexed, then went on to the desk.

  In answer to her inquiry, the clerk pointed to the register. It read: “Pierre Lontard, General Delivery, New Orleans, Louisiana.”

  “Boy, did you take your time!” Mart greeted her. “The camera must have been buried in the bottom of a trunk.”

  Trixie paid no attention to him. “Guess what that man’s name is,” she said mysteriously.

  “What man?” Brian asked.

  “The one I told you about, the one who grabbed the briefcase in our room. His name is Pierre Lontard. He’s from New Orleans!”

  “So what?” Mart looked disgusted. “New Orleans is a big city, Trix. Boy, are you hard up for a mystery if you have to make something out of the fact that a guy lives in New Orleans!”

  “It isn’t just that. He is mysterious. His address is just ‘General Delivery.’ If a person can’t give a street address, there’s something strange about him.”

  “Oh, for pete’s sake, Trix, forget him!” Brian took his sister’s arm to hurry her on toward the parking lot. “Give you a little time, and you’ll come up with a better mystery than that. Let’s get the show on the road.”

  “All right. You can make fun of me if you want to.”

  “I’m not making fun of you, Trixie,” Honey said as she hurried to catch up. “There’s that man now, over there near our car. See him? He’s the one just getting into that black Mercedes. He’s having some trouble unlocking his car.”

  “I’m having some trouble myself,” Jim said, “but it’s not with the lock. It’s getting you girls into the car and on the way. Crowd in. Here we go.”

  The car turned sharply and sped down the road leading to the main highway.

  Trixie, still skeptical, turned her head. “He’s right behind us now!” she exclaimed.

  “Give him a run for his money!” Mart cried. Jim stepped on the accelerator. At a stop sign, the big black car crowded close. It seemed to be trying to sideswipe the small car. Inside, the man sat low, watching for the light to change.

  As the signal turned green, the Bob-Whites’ car shot ahead into a free lane.

  From the rear window, Trixie, Mart, and Honey watched the Mercedes as it disappeared behind a huge truck.

  “FI bet he’s spitting fire!” Trixie cried exultantly. “I’ll bet a cookie he doesn’t know we’re alive,” Mart insisted.

  “We’ll see. Just you wait and see. Of course he knows we’re alive. You know what Mr. Wheeler told us. This whole area for miles around could just be alive with spies. Lots of people want to know what’s going on in those airplane factories.”

  Mart exploded, laughing. “Do you think for a minute any spy would think a bunch of teen-age kids would know anything about plans our government might have?”

  Trixie bristled. “Pierre Lontard did see us arriving with a big executive of one of the companies, didn’t he? That is, he could have seen us if he’d wanted to. I think he wanted to, so there!”

  “I do, too,” Honey said loyally, “else why did he act so funny about those papers in his briefcase?”

  “She has something there,” Jim told the other boys soberly. “You have to admit that.”

  Mart was unconvinced. “All coincidence. Simply just happened. Let’s skip Trix and her suspicions for a while. That’s the Memorial over there, where you turn off to Lindell Boulevard, isn’t it, Jim?”

  Jim rounded the curve when-the light changed, then headed the car into a parking space. “Everybody out!” he ordered.

  “Let’s stop at the office first,” Brian suggested. “Maybe we can find out when the next steamboat leaves from the waterfront.”

  “Two bits says it’ll be tomorrow!” Mart shouted hopefully. “Brian, you ask. There’s the office.”

  They crowded around the desk, and they all spoke at once. Just past them lay the glamorous steamboat room.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Slow down there! One at a time,” the gray-haired man at the desk said with a smile. “What’s that? Next steamboat? What one are you talking about? There’s only one left on the Mississippi that takes trips of any consequence. She’s the Delta Queen.”

 
; “That’s our boat!” Mart shouted. “When does she depart?”

  “A couple of months from now.”

  “What?” the Bob-Whites chorused.

  “I said a couple of months from now—more or less. She only makes one trip a year. She leaves Cincinnati and runs down the Ohio to Cairo, Illinois, around two hundred miles south of here. That’s where the Ohio joins the Mississippi. Then she goes on to New

  Orleans and back up the river to St. Paul. She stops here going and coming—only twice a year.”

  “And we’ve missed her?” Trixie asked. The faces of the Bob-Whites fell in discouragement. “Not another steamboat of any kind?”

  “Not a single one. There’s an old one going to pieces down at the wharf. You can go and see her. There’s another one made into a showboat. You can see a melodrama aboard her any night in the week.”

  “Not anything that travels on the river?” Jim asked. “There’s the Admiral. It’s an excursion boat. It’s nothing like an old-time steamboat. It’s just for dancing and picnicking. Only cruises around about a ten-mile circle. She leaves several times a day.”

  “Not that!” Mart said in disgust. “Come on, gang. We can at least go and see what real steamboats used to look like.”

  The huge exhibit included authentic reproductions of several steamboat rooms typical of those on the mammoth paddle-wheelers found on the Mississippi a century before.

  The pilothouse stood several steps above the floor, its huge wheel more than a man’s height in diameter. In a tall chair, a dummy pilot sat gazing through the glass window. At his side, a bench sprawled—just such a bench as the cub pilot Samuel Clemens occupied as he watched his hero swing the big wheel to outguess the hazardous, swirling current.

  “Golly!” Mart exclaimed. “It’s no wonder a guy wanted to be a pilot in those days. It’s really neat! Look at the murals all around us. Seems almost like being on the river!”

  “If you think it seems real over there in the pilothouse, just come over here.” Trixie beckoned from where she and Honey stood, hands tightly clasped, noses pressed against the glass windows of the lady’s lounge. “Heavens, it’s all red velvet! Look at that chandelier! Crystal and spangles and paintings and—”

  “I’m liable to bust right open and die if we don’t get to take some kind of a ride on that river!” Jim spoke with real feeling.

  “It’ll have to be the excursion boat Admiral, then,” Trixie said sadly.

  “I’ll never settle for that. There must be something else. If we can get Dan away from that display of old guns up there on the balcony, we can go and ask that man at the office again. Dan!” Jim’s voice echoed through the big room.

  “Let him stay there. The rest of us can go ask,” Mart said. “You’ll never get a future New York policeman away from Kentucky rifles and dueling pistols. Right through this arch, Jim; there’s the office. I don’t know what earthly good it’ll do to ask again. I can’t stand it, though, if we don’t get on that river somehow!”

  “Hi, there!” the man back of the desk called as the Bob-Whites crowded through the door. “I’ve been keeping my eye out for you. There is a chance you can go on the river.”

  “No kidding?” Trixie asked. “On a real steamboat?”

  “Did they rustle up an extra?” Mart asked.

  “No steamboat. No extra. Something else, though. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. A man was in here shortly after you left, and he reminded me of it.”

  “For heaven’s sake, tell us!” Trixie insisted.

  “I’m trying to, honey,” the old gentleman said. “This man—he wanted to know if I could tell him where he could buy a steamboat—”

  “And you knew, and you told him, and he said we could take a ride—” Trixie burst out.

  “Hey, not so fast. Not so fast. No, sirree, but he did want to buy a steamboat. There’s some of them tied up and rotting here and there between St. Louis and New Orleans—north on the river, too, for that matter. Yes, sir, though I doubt if any of them would float. He wants to make one of them watertight, float it down to New Orleans, use it for a showboat, and—”

  “For pete’s sake, how does that get us on the river?” Mart cried, forgetting his manners.

  “I’m coming to that right now, if you’ll just listen. Towboat. That’s the answer. Think you’d like to take

  a trip down the river on one of them?”

  “A towboat? You mean a tugboat?” Trixie’s eyes were wide with wonder, remembering the puffing little harbor boats that are used to swing huge ocean liners into the channel.

  “No, I don’t mean a tugboat. I mean a towboat. There’s a mighty big difference. It pushes barges. It doesn’t pull them.”

  “I’d just as soon paddle an old scow,” Brian said sadly. “What we wanted to do was to live on a steamboat for at least a couple of days.”

  “You can do that,” the man answered. “At least, you may be able to. It’s a matter of invitation. Tow-boats don’t take passengers, but they do take guests. This man said there’s one, the Catfish Princess, due to head south in a day or two. He seemed certain you could get aboard her.”

  “Are there living quarters on a towboat?” Trixie wanted to know.

  “I’ll say there are—as fine as any you’ll find on an ocean liner. Well, maybe that’s talking them up a little too much, but they’re clean and neat. Food’s good, too. Extra good. That’s what the deckhands look forward to mostly—food. The towboats are actually run in much the same spirit as the old steamboats. The captains and pilots have wanted to be captains and pilots from the time they were little—”

  “Holy cow!” Mart said and jumped into the air.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “A little information about how to get on board,” Jim answered quietly.

  “Whom do you know in the city?” the man asked. Dismayed, the Bob-Whites looked from one to another.

  “Mr. Brandio!” Honey exclaimed suddenly. “Don’t know the name,” the man replied. “Who is he?”

  “The president, I think,” Mart began. The man raised his eyebrows. “President of the Clear Meadow Aircraft Corporation, I mean.”

  The man whistled. “Well! He should be able to get you aboard. A man like that would have his hands in half a dozen enterprises. Ask him, anyway. By the way, that dark-haired man who just looked in here is the one trying to buy a steamboat. He’s the one who made me think of a towboat for your trip. Hope you can make it. Come back and see us again.”

  “Thank you, sir, we surely will be back!” Jim said politely. “It’s a swell place you have here!”

  Outside, Trixie pointed over to the parking lot. “There he is, the man we saw at the motel, just getting into that Mercedes! It’s the same man.”

  “Yeah.” Mart put his two fingers to his head in a salute. “I don’t think much of your manners on the highway, fella, but thanks for the tip about the Catfish Princess!”

  Good News • 3

  AS THE CAR SPED through the city and eventually onto the busy road leading to the airport, Dan was very quiet.

  “Take a look back of you, Dan,” Jim said over his shoulder. “Do you see anything of our friend in the Mercedes?”

  Dan didn’t answer.

  “What’s biting you?” Mart asked, concern shadowing his face.

  “That bozo from New Orleans.” Dan’s face was red. “Maybe he did give us a good steer about the river, but why do you suppose he nearly wrecked us on the way into the city?”

  Mart leaned forward to gaze at Dan. “Boy, are you slow to burn! Why didn’t you say anything about that before?”

  “I’ve just been doing a little thinking. It wasn’t just happenstance, either, that took him to the Jefferson Memorial. I don’t like the whole business.”

  Jim laughed. “Do you want to join the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency, Dan? Didn’t you ever have anyone try to crowd you out of a traffic lane before?”

  “Sure. But why does he keep popp
ing up all the time?”

  “It’s my guess we’ve seen the last of him,” Jim said. “You forget that he was checking out of the motel when we checked in. That means he won’t be around Vacation Inn, at least.”

  “He wasn’t checking out,” Trixie interrupted. “When I found out about his name, he was just changing to another room. He said it was too noisy by the pool. The clerk told me that because he wanted to know if I thought it would be too noisy for us.”

  “Now you tell us,” Jim said patiently. “Say, Trixie, how about, from now on, our minding our own business and letting the Frenchman from New Orleans mind his?”

  Dan still looked puzzled. “Then you don’t think,

  Jim, that he followed us to Jefferson Memorial?”

  “For cat’s sake, no. The man there told us he wanted to see if he could buy an old steamboat, didn’t he?”

  Dan’s face colored. “Yeah, he did. I forgot about that, I guess. Count me out of your detective agency, Trixie.”

  “No, sirree! We need your help, Honey and I do. What would we have done without you when those jewel thieves kidnapped me in New York? You just keep on helping, Dan. Maybe Jim and Brian and Mart think there’s nothing mysterious about Mr. Pierre Lontard, but I’m going to keep my eyes open, just the same.”

  “You do that, Trix,” Jim told her. “In the meantime, I’ll keep my eyes on this traffic. Did you ever see anything like it?”

  “It’s all going back and forth to those airplane factories.” Trixie’s face was very thoughtful. “That Lontard man will need a lot of watching, Honey.” Honey, wedged in between Jim and Brian in the front seat, nodded emphatically. “I’ll help you all I can. You know that. Only, honestly, Trixie, I can’t see anything very suspicious yet.”

  “You didn’t look very closely at those odd papers in that briefcase, then, if you didn’t see anything that was suspicious.”

  “I didn’t. Neither did you. You didn’t have any more idea of what you were looking at than I did. You don’t know what those papers in your purse are all about, either. I still think he may have been sketching and writing for his children.”