The Mystery of the Uninvited Ghost Page 9

  “Yep, here it is. Give me a minute while I write a note to Mr. Maypenny, will you?” Regan reached into a slot for paper but pulled out a folded handkerchief instead. “Now, how’d that get in there?”

  Regan was a careful housekeeper. In his stable, all must be in order, even notepaper.

  “That’s Dan’s handkerchief,” Honey said. “I embroidered those initials when I gave him a set of handkerchiefs for his birthday.”

  Regan thrust it forward. “Take it back to him and tell him to put it in his pocket, where it belongs, and not in my—” Regan’s words ran down. Slowly he unfolded the linen square. “There’s something here.” Trixie caught the glint of tiny rainbows. Then Regan exposed a golden tulip whose fluted throat was filled with diamonds!

  Honey clasped hands under her chin and squealed, “Juliana’s ring!” Trixie stared silently at her, and Honey finished slowly, “But—D-Dan said—”

  Trixie swallowed hard. “I know. We heard him tell Mr. Maypenny that the ring hadn’t been found yet.”

  “Yet?” Regan repeated. In the cup of his hand, the diamonds glinted like accusing eyes.

  “When he found it, why didn’t he tell us?” Honey asked. “He knows how upset Juliana is. He knows we’re all worried.”

  For a long moment, the three stared at the ring. Then Regan pushed it down on the tip of the little finger of his right hand. Anxiously Honey asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I must give this ring to your mother, so she can return it to Juliana,” Regan said.

  “Regan, you can’t do that till we’ve talked to Dan,” Trixie argued. “Just because he—he—” Trixie couldn’t say “lied,” since she had no clue as to how that ring got into Dan Mangan’s handkerchief. Instead she pleaded, “Dan’s your nephew, Regan. You have to wait and hear his side of the story.”

  “I’ll return the ring, then talk to Dan,” Regan decided. He strode up the graveled path that led to the house.

  “Regan, please!” Trixie begged.

  Honey put a hand on Trixie’s arm to keep her from following. “It’ll be all right, Trixie. Miss Trask’ll take care of it.” Together, Miss Trask and Regan managed the estate, even to the point of advising or disciplining the young people when necessary. They were respected and trusted by family, friends, and employees.

  “Miss Trask isn’t home,” Trixie reminded Honey. "Regan said he’s going to your mother.”

  “Oh.”

  The girls gaped at each other while possible consequences of Regan’s conversation with Mrs. Wheeler flashed through their minds.

  “I could bite my tongue off for what I said,” Trixie lamented. “Now it sounds like Dan lied to Mr. Maypenny within our hearing, and that makes it sound like he lied to us. If he did lie, it means that he knew the ring was in his handkerchief, and if he knew it and didn’t say so, then it looks like he-”

  “No!” Honey said positively. “Dan wouldn’t steal.” She gulped. “Trixie, a Bob-White of the Glen is in trouble.” She didn’t have to add that this particular Bob-White had been in lots of trouble not long ago and had been put under his uncle’s supervision to rehabilitate himself. Because of Dan s past, it was easy to let the blame fall on his shoulders when something went wrong—something serious like a missing diamond ring wrapped in his handkerchief.

  With nothing but blind loyalty to go on, Trixie said, “Okay, Dan didn’t steal that ring.”

  Tears rolled down Honey’s cheeks. “I agree. But how are we going to prove it?”

  “We will,” Trixie said firmly.

  Dan’s whole life might be altered when Regan placed that ring in Mrs. Wheeler’s hand. The society woman wasn’t used to accepting personal responsibility, even for her own children. Her usual answer to all questions was, “Ask Miss Trask.” At the end of the path, Regan had disappeared into the house through the servants’ entrance. Right this minute, Dan’s reputation was being put on a seesaw. Was Mrs. Wheeler telling Regan, “Ask Miss Trask”? Or was she calling the police?

  “Mother likes Dan,” Honey whispered.

  Trixie added, “So does Regan.”

  “But—” Honey let that one word drift like a feather in the wind.

  “Dan has a right to be heard,” Trixie declared, and having made up her mind to take some action, she hurried to mount Starlight.

  The horse and rider left the stable at a brisk trot, and Honey followed on Lady. As the girls approached the cottage in the woods, they could smell onions.

  Mr. Maypenny was making lunch. He came to the door wiping his hands on a towel.

  “Dan? No, he isn’t here. Fact is, I thought he was up at the stable. He lit out of here so fast that I just figured he’d forgotten something and was going to catch up with you to take care of it.”

  Trixie listened to his cheerful speech. She couldn’t tell Mr. Maypenny about the ring. However the matter turned out, it would be better if he heard the story from Dan. “Is Dan riding Spartan?” she asked the gamekeeper.

  “No. That’s the odd part of it. He’s afoot.”

  “We brought Dan’s wallet with your note,” Honey said.

  As they left the clearing, both girls waved and tried to smile. “Shall we look for Dan or go back to Manor House?” Trixie asked.

  Honey waved a hand at the forest, where trees marched endlessly toward an unseen horizon. “Where would we look? Let’s go see what happened at home.” Trixie nodded.

  Regan met the girls at the stable and guessed where they’d been. While he helped cool their mounts, he asked, “Did you talk to Dan?” When Trixie explained that Dan wasn’t at the cottage and that Mr. Maypenny didn’t know where he was, Regan scowled. He said bleakly, “When I came outside, I saw Dan here, but he didn’t seem to notice me. He ran.”

  “R-Ran?” Honey’s lips quivered. “No!”

  Staunchly Trixie insisted, “I’m sure that he was looking for his wallet. That’s all.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Regan agreed.

  “To give Juliana the ring, too,” Trixie went on stubbornly.

  “Well—I don’t know about that,” Regan said. “I’ve seen him hanging around lately with a couple of toughs from his old street gang. Once when I asked him about it, he clammed up.”

  Hotly Trixie said, “You know he didn’t steal that ring! You know there has to be some explanation.”

  “I don’t know a thing until I talk to Dan,” Regan said. He turned away with such an air of finality that Trixie and Honey could do nothing but stare at each other helplessly.

  The Footprint • 10

  SILENTLY, THE TWO GIRLS left the stable and returned to the house. At last Trixie exploded. “Sometimes I wish Regan wasn’t so pigheadedly loyal to the Wheelers!” She was concentrating so much on Dan’s predicament at the moment that she forgot that Honey was a Wheeler.

  Sounding like a lost child, Honey said, “Me, too.” Trixie turned to hug her friend. “Oh, I didn’t mean you, Honey. I just meant-oh, I don’t know what I meant! Of course I want Regan to be loyal.” Luncheon that day was one of the few uncomfortable meals Trixie had ever eaten at Manor House. Juliana was jubilant about the return of her ring. She flashed it in the face of each person she met and cried, “Isn’t it beautiful! Oh, isn’t it beautiful!”

  Hans hovered close to her. He reassured each guest, “I’ll have the ring made smaller, I promise!”

  “What happened?” Trixie whispered to Honey. “Do you think Miss Trask knows?”

  “No,” Honey answered. “I saw Juliana show Miss Trask her ring. She would never have done that if Miss Trask had given it to her.”

  “Your mother must have delivered it to her personally,” Trixie said. “Do you think she called you-know-who?”

  “You know my mother,” Honey said with a sigh. She called down the table, “Miss Trask, is Mother having lunch in her room?”

  Jim answered the question, with a little nod of apology to Miss Trask for his interruption. “Mother got a phone call from Dad. She’s hav
ing lunch with him in White Plains, and then they may go on to New York tonight. In fact, they may be gone several days.”

  Honey and Trixie looked blankly at each other. Where did that leave Dan?

  Celia was serving. She came to the table to tell Hallie that she had a telephone call.

  “Knut!” Hallie exclaimed. But when she came back to the table, she announced, “It wasn’t my brother after all. The call was from Auntie, and she says my bag has arrived at the airport.”

  “I’ll pick it up,” Jim offered. “Any tagalongs?”

  Each girl at the table cried, “Yes!”

  Miss Trask asked Di and Honey if they’d mind staying behind. “I need some help to get these dresses started.”

  “I'll help the minute I get back,” Hallie promised.

  Quite pointedly, no one asked Trixie to help with the sewing. Jim commented on it and then looked puzzled when Trixie didn’t respond.

  On the drive to the airport, Trixie reported the latest part of the story of the missing ring. Jim scowled as he listened. “You don’t suspect Dan, do you, Trix?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “But—” The word hung in the air till it seemed to echo inside her skull.

  “I see what you mean,” Jim admitted reluctantly. “Dan was there. He had the opportunity to get hold of that ring, even if only to pick it up when it slid off Juliana’s finger. I wish he hadn’t said not yet/ ”

  ‘And I wish those creeps from the city weren’t hanging around again,” Trixie said bitterly.

  “It’ll take a miracle to help him if Mother called the sergeant and Dan ran away,” Jim said.

  “Not a miracle,” Trixie said, “but Reddy maybe.”

  “Reddy!” Jim exclaimed.

  “You mean your dog?” Hallie asked.

  “Reddy. Our dog,” Trixie said. “Remember when we were getting into the wagon last night and we heard Reddy chase something into the bushes?”

  “It could have been a cat or a stray calf,” Jim said.

  “But I felt crowded,” Trixie said. “I know in my very bones that there were too many people out there under the oak tree. Remember when Juliana said Hans was rushing her when she couldn’t see and he said that he hadn’t taken her hand? Well, nobody else confessed to touching her.” Trixie fell silent for a moment, then voiced another thought. “Oh. Dan was there, too. I almost forgot. Just because he didn’t confess doesn’t mean that he didn’t grab her hand and slide off the ring.”

  They were almost at the airport parking lot when Trixie said, “J™, on our way back, will you drop me off about halfway up our lane?”

  “Whatever for?” Hallie blurted. “I promised to help Miss Trask.”

  “You help me,” Trixie bargained, “and I’ll help you.”

  Jim grinned. “Okay. I'll help both of you.”

  There was a between-flights lull at the airport. A number of people checked arrival and departure times, bought tickets, or confirmed reservations. Others sought the vending machines dispensing coffee or cold drinks. Some aimlessly examined papers and magazines, used the public telephones, hunted for taxis or rental cars, or simply stood in front of the huge windows to watch the runways.

  Hallie wasn’t interested in people-watching. She stopped at the first information booth she saw and asked, “Where do I pick up freight from Idaho?”

  A perfectly groomed clerk told her, “Ramp four. Trixie lagged behind Jim and Hallie. A family moved ahead of her. At that moment, she faced the traveler at the nearest ticket window. She stopped in her tracks, letting Jim and Hallie go on without her. There was something so intriguingly familiar about the man that she crowded closer till she almost jostled his elbow. He was asking about an upstate flight schedule of the locally owned airline, known as the milk run because it hopped from one small airport to another. The clerk reached for a ticket and prepared to fill in the blanks where information was needed. Just then, the man looked back into Trixie’s face. It was Miss Ryks’s nephew.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he told the clerk abruptly and quickly moved away, disappearing into a stream of people arriving from a north-south flight.

  Taking care not to call attention to herself, Trixie moved away from the ticket window. She stationed herself on the far side of the flow of travelers to watch for Jim and Hallie. Even so, they startled her by returning from an unexpected direction. Jim carried a large brown cowhide suitcase exactly like the one Bobby had opened. Hallie was birthday-morning excited. “Clothes 1” she cried. “Clothes that fit me!”

  Jim grinned at this tall girl who could look him nearly straight in the eye.

  “Good,” said Trixie absentmindedly, still thinking about the man she’d just seen. All the way to the car, she kept a sharp lookout for Miss Ryks’s nephew. Why had he changed his plans when he saw her? He’d never seen her before—she’d seen him.

  Without being reminded, Jim turned at the Crabapple Farm mailbox. He stopped the station wagon about halfway up the lane. “Is this spot okay?”

  “I think,” Trixie told him, “that this is just about the place where Reddy left the lane and dashed into the bushes. Were looking for any sign that something as heavy as a human being ran through here.” For some time, Jim, Hallie, and Trixie moved in and out of little cleared areas in the “wild garden” that hid the Belden lawn and flower gardens from Glen Road. At last, Trixie found a few wilted leaves on some twigs.

  The three followed a trail of wilted and broken vegetation. Because of the time that had passed, some of the bushes had begun to revive, and the clues were hard to follow. Trixie’s stubborn determination drove them on. It was Hallie who found a clear footprint on the soft shoulder of the road.

  “Well,” Trixie said, “now we know that Reddy chased a person, and it wasn’t a girl.”

  “Unless she had very big feet,” Jim said. “See? The shoe size is bigger than mine, so the man’s probably taller than I am.”

  “Heavier, too,” Trixie said.

  “Let’s check,” Jim said. He walked several yards away from the road, then made a headlong dash across the shoulder. He left a print near the one that Hallie had found. Trixie sat on her heels to measure the depths of the two prints with a weed stem. The stem bent, but her eyes told her that the first print was deeper than the one Jim had made.

  Several yards up the road, they found a place where the man might have stepped out of the lane of traffic to let a car pass. He had walked toward the Wheeler mailbox while Jim had driven in the opposite direction. Hallie decided he must have known the area.

  “Not necessarily,” Jim returned. “He could have hidden after Reddy quit barking. That would have given him a chance to see which way we were going.” As they walked back to the house to drop off the suitcase, Hallie reminded Trixie and Jim that Dan had been in the wagon and not in the bushes. “Thank goodness,” Trixie answered, sounding prayerful.

  On the way back to Manor House, Trixie fretted, “I wish we knew why Dan ran away and where he is.” Jim was sensible. “Whatever his reason, he’s one worried young man. He knows that somebody took that ring from the desk and that he’s under suspicion. It looks like the Belden-Wheeler partnership and the Bob-Whites have a job to do.”

  “I suppose that lets me out,” Hallie sighed.

  Trixie knew that Hallie liked Dan and wanted to help. “Of course it doesn’t let you out,” she declared. “The Bob-Whites will issue you a guest card the way they do at the country club.” Jim, the Bob-White copresident, agreed.

  “Well, then, when do we start?” Hallie asked. “We’ve already started,” Trixie answered. “We’ve proved that someone else could have taken Juliana’s ring. Now, we have to find out how Dan got hold of it.”

  “I'll call Mart and Brian when we get home,” Jim decided. “We’d better start a search for Dan.”

  When Jim drove into the porte cochère, Di and Honey whizzed alongside on bicycles. Honey shouted, “Miss Trask says all work and no play does you-know-what! Grab a bike and f
ollow the leader!”

  The bicycle rack stood near the servants’ entrance. Trixie and Hallie scrambled out of the car and raced around the house. Hallie’s legs were longer, and she was the first to reach the rack.

  The only bicycle left for Trixie was Jim’s ten-speed. She mounted it and caught up easily with the rest of the girls. Di was “it” and led the romp that ended at the clubhouse. As she dropped the kickstand of Jim’s bicycle, Trixie was reminded of the similar blue bike at the inn.

  Uh-oh. Had Jim gone to the inn that night, too? No. He’d been waiting at the lake. Di hadn’t shared the evening swim, and neither had Dan. With a curl-bouncing shake of her blond head to clear her brain, Trixie hurried inside to join the fun of planning a shower for Juliana. With the mishmash of the Lynch robbery, Di’s missing invitation, that aggravating wheelchair, Juliana’s ring, and now Dan’s disappearance, Trixie felt that she needed something calm and orderly to think about.

  It had been Di’s idea to give the party, so Trixie made her head of the planning committee, handing her the gavel. Honey began writing down names on an invitation list. Hallie didn’t know anybody, so she just listened. Trixie found that she couldn’t concentrate on the party plans after all. She turned to Honey and asked softly, “Who uses the bikes in the rack?”

  Honey looked blank for an instant. “Lots of people —Jim, I, the maids, Regan—even Dad, if he wants to get somewhere in a hurry. There’s lots of ground to cover when you run errands around here.”

  “Thanks. May I be excused for a few minutes?” Di looked startled but gave permission.

  Trixie lost no time returning to the house. In the kitchen, she helped herself to a glass of milk as an excuse for being there. Trying to make her conversation about the bicycles sound casual was hopeless. The staff was familiar with the detective work by Honey and Trixie. Celia told her, “Maybe you’d best save your questions for Miss Trask.” Trixie decided that she was right and returned to the clubhouse.

  “Remember, not a word to Juliana!” Di warned when they had finished their plans. They rode back to the house. As Honey put her own bicycle in the rack, she said, “That’s funny. The bicycle Dad usually rides is still missing.”