The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 5

  “How did she find out about them?” inquired Mary Louise. “You didn’t show them to her, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. She found them while she was searching through my things this morning, to see whether I had her money hidden anywhere.”

  “That’s terrible!” exclaimed Jane. “Oh, how dreadful it must be to be all alone in the world, without anybody who trusts you!” Something of the same thought ran through Mary Louise’s brain at the same time.

  “Tell us just what has happened today, since we left,” urged Mary Louise. “Has anybody been here?”

  “No. Not a soul. But Aunt Mattie put me through a lot more questions at lunch, and afterward she gave my room a thorough search. When she found my new clothes, she was more sure than ever that I was the thief. She told me if I didn’t confess everything right away she’d have to change her mind and call the police.”

  “Did she call them?” demanded Jane.

  “Not yet. It’s lucky for me that she hasn’t a telephone. She said she guessed she’d send William after supper. So you can see how much it meant to me for you girls to come over now!”

  Mary Louise nodded gravely, and Jane blushed at her reluctance in wanting to come. If Elsie had gone to jail, it would have been their fault for giving her the clothing!

  “When can we see your aunt?” inquired Mary Louise.

  “Right now. I’ll go in and tell her. She’s out on the front porch, I think.”

  Elsie handed her pan to Hannah and went through the kitchen to the front of the house. She was back again in a moment, telling the girls to come with her.

  They found the old lady in her favorite rocking chair, with her knitting in her lap. But she was not working—just scowling at the world in general, and when Elsie came out on the dilapidated porch an expression of pain crossed her wrinkled brows. Whether it was real pain from that trouble in her side which she had mentioned, or whether it was only a miserly grief over the loss of her money, Mary Louise had no way of telling.

  “Good-afternoon, Miss Grant,” she said pleasantly. “How is your kitten today?”

  A smile crept over the woman’s face, making her much more pleasant to look at.

  “She’s fine,” she replied. “Come here, Puffy, and speak to the kind girls who rescued you yesterday!”

  The kitten ran over and jumped into Miss Grant’s lap.

  “She certainly is sweet,” said Mary Louise. She cleared her throat: why couldn’t the old lady help her out by asking her a question about the clothing?

  But Elsie, nervously impatient, brought up the subject they were all waiting for.

  “Tell Aunt Mattie about the dresses and the coat,” she urged.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mary Louise hastily. “Your niece told us, Miss Grant, that she never gets to Riverside to buy any new clothes, so when I noticed we were all three about the same size, Jane and I asked our mothers whether we couldn’t give her some of ours. They were willing, and so we brought them over this morning.”

  “Humph!” was the only comment Miss Grant made to this explanation. Mary Louise could not tell whether she believed her or not and whether she was pleased or angry.

  “You didn’t mind, did you, Miss Grant?” she inquired nervously.

  “No, of course not. Elsie’s mighty lucky.… I only hope when she’s working as somebody’s maid that they’ll be as nice to her. It helps out, when wages are small. For nobody wants to pay servants much these days.”

  A lump came into Mary Louise’s throat at the thought of Elsie’s future, which Miss Grant had just pictured for them. She longed to plead the girl’s cause, but she knew it would do no good. Especially at the present time, with Miss Grant poorer than she had ever been in her life.

  The old lady’s eyes suddenly narrowed, and she looked sharply at Mary Louise.

  “See here!” she said abruptly. “You two girls are the only people besides those living in this house who know about this robbery, and I don’t want you to say a word of it to anybody! Understand? I don’t want the police in on this until I am ready to tell them. Or my other relatives, either. I expect to get that money back myself!”

  All three girls breathed a sigh of relief: it was evident that the police would not be summoned that evening. And both Mary Louise and Jane gave their promise of utmost secrecy.

  “But we’d like to help discover the thief, if we can,” added Mary Louise. “You don’t mind if we try, do you, Miss Grant—if it’s all on the quiet?”

  “No, I don’t mind. But I don’t see what you can do.” Miss Grant looked sharply at Elsie, as if she thought maybe her niece might confess to these girls while she stubbornly refused to tell her aunt anything. “Yes,” she added, “you might succeed where I failed.… Yes, I’ll pay ten dollars’ reward if you get my money back for me.”

  “We think it might have been a robber,” remarked Mary Louise, to try to divert Miss Grant’s suspicious eyes from her niece. “He could have slipped in while you were at supper.”

  “It wasn’t a robber,” announced Miss Grant, with conviction. “If it had been, he’d have taken everything. The most valuable things were left in the safe. My bonds. They’re government bonds, too, so anybody could see the value of them—except a child! No, it was somebody right in this house!”

  And she laughed with that nasty cackle which made Jane so angry, that, she said afterward, if Miss Grant hadn’t been an old lady, she would have slapped her then and there in the face.

  “Or maybe it was one of your other relations,” said Mary Louise evenly.

  “Possibly. I wouldn’t trust Harry Grant or Corinne Pearson. Or Corinne’s mother, either, for that matter!”

  “How about Mrs. Grant?”

  “My sister-in-law? No, I don’t think she’d take anything. And I know it wasn’t John—or either of the servants.… No.” She looked at Elsie again. “There’s your culprit. Make her confess—and you get ten dollars!”

  She paused, while everybody looked embarrassed. But she was enjoying the situation. “I’ll make it ten dollars apiece!” she added.

  “It isn’t the money we want, Miss Grant,” said Mary Louise stiffly. “It’s to clear Elsie of suspicion.”

  “Nonsense! Everybody wants money!”

  Mary Louise took her notebook out of her pocket.

  “Would you tell us just how much money was taken, Miss Grant?” she asked. “And—all about it?”

  “Yes, of course I will. There was a metal box in the safe with five hundred dollars in gold—”

  “Gold!” exclaimed Jane. “I thought you were supposed to turn that in to the government!”

  “You mind your business!” snapped Miss Grant.

  “We will—We will!” said Mary Louise hastily. “Please go on, Miss Grant!”

  “Five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar gold pieces,” she repeated. “Then there was eight hundred and fifty dollars in bills—all in fifty-dollar notes. I have the numbers of the bills written down in a book upstairs. Would you like to copy them down, Mary Louise?”

  “Yes, indeed!” cried the latter rapturously. Miss Grant was treating her just like a real detective!

  “Come upstairs, then, with me, and you can see the safe and my room at the same time.” The old lady turned to her niece, who was still waiting nervously beside the door. “Go back to your work, Elsie,” she commanded. “Hannah will be wanting you.”

  The girl nodded obediently, but before she disappeared she softly asked Mary Louise, “Will you and Jane be back again tomorrow?”

  “Yes, of course,” was the reply. “You can count on us.”

  Miss Grant gathered up her knitting and picked up her kitten from the porch floor, where it had been rolling about with a ball of its mistress’s wool.

  “I may want you girls to walk over to the bank with me tomorrow,” she remarked. “Unless John happens to come here in his car. I’ve about decided to put my bonds into a safe-deposit box at the bank.”

  “We’ll be glad to go
with you,” Mary Louise assured her.

  The old lady struggled painfully to her feet and led the way through the house, up the stairs to her room. Both girls noticed the ominous creak which these gave when anything touched them, and Jane shuddered. It must be awful to live in a tumble-down place like this!

  Miss Grant’s room on the second floor was at the front of the house, just as Elsie had said, and one window overlooked the porch. It was furnished with ugly, heavy wooden furniture, and a rug that was almost threadbare. Along one wall, opposite the bed, was a huge closet, in which, no doubt, Miss Grant kept those old dresses which she had offered to Corinne Pearson. And the most astonishing thing about the bedroom was the fact that it contained not a single mirror!

  (“But, of course,” Jane remarked afterward, “you wouldn’t want to see yourself if you looked like that old maid!”)

  Off in the corner was the iron safe, with the only comfortable chair in the room beside it. Here, evidently, Miss Grant spent most of her time, rocking in the old-fashioned chair and gloating over her money.

  Now she hobbled directly to the safe and opened the door for the girls to look into it. “You can see how the lock has been picked,” she pointed out. “It’s broken now, of course.” She suddenly eyed the girls suspiciously, as if they were not to be trusted either, and added, “The bonds aren’t in there now! I hid them somewhere else.”

  Mary Louise nodded solemnly.

  “Yes, that was wise, Miss Grant.… Now, may I write down the numbers of the bills that were stolen?”

  After she had concluded this little task, she went to examine the windows. They were both large—plenty big enough for a person to step through without any difficulty. But the one over the porch proved disappointing, for the roof of the porch was crumbling so badly and the posts were so rotted that anyone who attempted to climb in by that method would be taking his life in his hands.

  “I always keep that window locked,” said Miss Grant, following Mary Louise. “So you see why I don’t think it was a burglar who took my money. Locked—day and night!”

  Mary Louise nodded and examined the other window. It was high from the ground; there was a tree growing near it, but not near enough to make it possible for a human being to jump from a branch to the window sill. Only a monkey could perform a trick like that!

  Mary Louise turned away with a sigh. She was almost ready to admit that the robbery was an inside job, as Miss Grant insisted.

  “May we see inside the closet before we go?” she asked as an afterthought.

  Miss Grant nodded and opened the door, disclosing a space as large as the kitchenettes in some of the modern apartments. Miss Grant herself used it as a small storeroom for the things that she did not want to put up in the attic.

  “Anybody could hide here for hours,” Jane remarked, “without being suffocated.”

  “Which is just what I believe Elsie did!” returned Miss Grant, with a smirk.

  And the girls, unhappy and more baffled than ever, went home to their suppers.

  CHAPTER VI

  A Wild Ride

  “One of the best points in this case,” Mary Louise observed, in her most professional tone, “is its secrecy.”

  “Why do you say that?” questioned Jane.

  The girls were returning from their second visit that day to Dark Cedars and were walking as fast as they could towards home. It was almost six o’clock, and Mary Louise usually helped her mother a little with the supper. But Freckles was there; she knew he would offer his services.

  “What I mean is, since the robbery hasn’t been talked about, nobody is on guard,” she explained. “If any of those relatives did take the money, probably they think the theft hasn’t been discovered yet, or Miss Grant would have called them over to see her. In a way, it’s pretty tricky of her.”

  “But, do you know, I can hardly believe any of them stole all that gold,” returned Jane. “Because, what would they do with it? Nobody is supposed to use gold nowadays, and it would arouse all sorts of suspicions.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But then, they might want to hoard it, the same as Miss Grant did.”

  “A man like Harry Grant wouldn’t want to hoard any! From what I hear of him, he spends money before he even gets it.”

  “True. But there are other relatives. And somebody did steal it!”

  “Yes, somebody stole it, all right. Only, the fact that a lot of it was gold makes Elsie look guilty. She probably wouldn’t know about the new law.”

  Mary Louise frowned: she didn’t like that thought. “Well, I’m not going to suspect Elsie till I’ve investigated everybody else. Every one of those five relations—Mrs. Grant, John Grant, Harry Grant, Mrs. Pearson, and her daughter Corinne!”

  “Have you any plan at all?” inquired Jane.

  “Yes, I’d like to do a little snooping tonight.”

  “Snooping? Where? How?”

  “Sneak around those two houses in Riverside—the Grants’, where John and Harry live with their mother, and the Pearsons’! It’s such a warm evening they’ll probably be on their porches, and we might overhear something to our advantage.”

  “But suppose we were arrested for prowling?”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t arrest two respectable-looking girls like us! Besides, if they did, Daddy could easily get us out.”

  “Is he home?”

  “No, he isn’t. But he’ll be back in a day or two.”

  “A day or two in the county jail wouldn’t be so good!”

  “Nonsense, Jane! Nothing will happen,” Mary Louise assured her. “We’ve got to take some chances if we’re going to be detectives. Daddy takes terrible ones sometimes.”

  “Do you know where these people live?” inquired her chum. “The Grants and the Pearsons, I mean?”

  “I know where the Grants live: in that big red brick house on Green Street. Old-fashioned, set back from the street. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, I guess I do.”

  “We can pass it on our way home, if we go one block farther down before we turn in at our street.”

  “How about the Pearsons?” asked Jane.

  “I don’t know where they live. But I think we can get the address from the phone book.”

  The girls stepped along at a rapid rate, entirely forgetful of the tennis which had tired Jane so completely a couple of hours ago. In a minute or so they came in sight of the red brick house. It was an ugly place, but it was not run down or dilapidated like Miss Mattie Grant’s. John Grant evidently believed in keeping things in repair.

  The house stood next to a vacant lot, and it was enclosed by a wooden fence, which was overgrown with honeysuckle vines. A gravel drive led from the front to the back yard, alongside of this fence, and there were half a dozen large old trees on the lawn.

  “We could easily hide there after dark,” muttered Mary Louise. “Climb over that fence back by the garage and sneak up behind those trees to a spot within hearing distance of the porch.”

  “I don’t see what good it would do us,” objected Jane.

  “It might do us lots of good! Look at that car! That must be Harry Grant’s, judging from Elsie’s description. If his car’s there, he must be home. And if we hear him say anything about spending money, then we can be suspicious. Because, where would he get the money unless he stole his aunt’s?”

  Jane nodded her head.

  “Yes, I see your logic,” she agreed. “But there isn’t a soul around now, and likely as not there won’t be all evening.”

  “They’re probably eating supper. Come on, let’s hurry and get ours over. And meet me as soon as you can afterwards.”

  The girls separated at their gates, and Mary Louise ran inside quickly to be on hand to help her mother.

  “Daddy isn’t home yet?” she asked, as she carried a plate of hot biscuits to the table.

  “No, dear,” answered her mother. “He’s in Chicago—I had a special-delivery letter from him today. He can’t be back before th
e weekend—Saturday or Sunday.”

  Mary Louise sighed. She had been hoping that perhaps she could get some advice from him without giving away any names or places.

  Freckles dashed into the room, with Silky close at his heels.

  “Where have you been, Sis?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you take Silky with you? He’s been fussing for you.”

  “Jane and I had an errand to go,” the girl explained. “And we couldn’t take him along. But we’ll take him with us for a walk after supper.”

  “Walk again?” repeated Mrs. Gay, her forehead wrinkled in disapproval. “Mary Louise, you’re doing too much! You must get some rest!”

  “We shan’t be out long, Mother. It isn’t a date or anything. Jane and I want to take a little stroll, with Silky, after supper. Isn’t it all right if I promise to go to bed very early?”

  “I suppose so. If you get in by nine-thirty—”

  “I promise!” replied Mary Louise, little thinking how impossible it was going to be for her to keep her word.

  She did not start upon her project until she had finished washing the dishes for her mother. Then, slipping upstairs, she changed into a dark green sweater dress and brown shoes and stockings. Through the window of her bedroom she signaled to her chum to make a similar change.

  “Might as well make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible,” she explained, as the two girls, followed by Silky, walked down the street ten minutes later. “Did you have any trouble getting away, Jane? I mean, without giving any explanation?”

  “Yes, a little. Mother can’t understand all this sudden passion for walking, when I used to have to ride everywhere in Norman’s or Max’s car. I really think she believes I have a new boy-friend and that I meet him somewhere so as not to make Norman jealous. As if I’d go to all that trouble!”

  Mary Louise nodded.

  “A little jealousy does ’em good,” she remarked. “Of course, Mother doesn’t think it’s so queer for me, because I always did have to take Silky for walks. And he’s a good excuse now.”

  “Oh, well, we’ll be home early tonight,” concluded Jane. “So there won’t be any cause for worry.”