The Third Girl Detective

by Margaret Sutton

  Jannet listened. Yes, it did sound more like a voice now. How scarey it did make a body feel! Anyhow it wasn’t in the room. Jannet sat up in bed, determined not to be frightened as she had been before. If there were anything going on, she was going to see it, come what might! She wished again for the flashlight that she had forgotten and left at school. Nell gained courage and sat up, too.

  Now there was an odd light from somewhere. Why—there was a dim veiled light on the wall, as if shining through! What in the world! There, it was gone. But some one was moaning—no, sobbing!

  Next the sound, tap, tap, tap. Jannet again thought of Paulina’s expression: “I suppose that’s ‘Her’ coming down some stairs somewhere,” she whispered to Nell, who still clutched her hand.

  “Let’s put on the light and run to Paulina’s room,” Nell whispered, trying to pierce the darkness, and looking in the direction of the wall where the light had appeared. There it was for a moment again! Now it faded; then it came more strongly and went out again.

  “It looks as if somebody were passing back and forth behind a screen, Nell,” whispered Jannet. “Come on.” But just then there came that clicking sound that Jannet had heard on that other night. “Wait, Nell,” she whispered. “I’ll get to the door, and if nothing gets me, come, too.”

  “No,” again said Nell, holding Jannet as if to keep her in bed. There was somebody—something—in the room! A cover of the bed began to be drawn off, as before. Gently it moved. Jannet, ready for an experiment to find out if this were a person or a ghost that entered her room so mysteriously, reached for the slowly moving cover and gave it a jerk back toward her. She met with no resistance at all, and pulled the cover in a little heap around her by the force of her own effort.

  This was too much! Jannet leaped out of bed, seized Nell by the arm, and ran in the direction of the electric button and the door. As she pushed the button, she was sure that she heard a similar sound behind her, but she only glanced behind to see that no one was after them, as she pulled out the little bolt and pushed Nell into the hall ahead of her.

  Barefooted and breathless, the girls stood in the hall a moment, listening. Nothing followed them. They peeped back into the room after a few minutes. It was not cold, but both girls were shivering.

  “Do you suppose that the boys could fool us in some way?” asked Nell, who remembered her brother’s tricks.

  “Perhaps one of them hid somewhere,” said Jannet. “But how did he get out? This business of pulling a cover off happened once before, Nell. Perhaps there is a way of getting into the room. The windows were ’way up to-night, too.”

  “Let’s run down and see if the boys are in their room,” suggested Nell.

  “All right, but the other time was before Jan got home.”

  Back the girls went, somewhat timorously, to be sure, to put on slippers and kimonos. Thus clad, they slipped quietly down the back stairs, and Nell stepped close to the door to listen. A heavy pin, with which she had fastened her kimono, fell out at this juncture and in the stillness of the hall it made quite a little noise.

  “What’s that?” they heard Chick say, and presently a low grunt answered him. The bed creaked and the girls flew upstairs as fast as they could, Nell retrieving her pin first.

  “Well,” said Jannet, as they entered the room again, “shall we wake up Paulina and get things stirred up? You will be afraid to go to sleep again, won’t you?”

  “I g-guess not,” shivered Nell. “Put down the windows and leave the light on.”

  “We’d smother, child,” said Jannet.

  “Look under the bed, then. I refuse to get into it unless that is done.” Nell tried to be jolly with poor success.

  “Perhaps that is where—It—was. Say, that was a funny feeling, Nell, to jerk that coverlid and find it come just too easy!”

  As before, Jannet went all over to see what she could see. There was no sign of any one’s having been in the closets or in the bath room. The vines on the porch looked undisturbed. Jannet put the windows down to a point where they would have to be raised to admit anyone. Again she went over the paneled wall to see if there were a hidden door between her room and the next one. “But that light was too near the big chimney,” she said. “Perhaps there might be an opening of some sort there.”

  The girls looked up into the chimney with its bricks discolored by many a fire. “What’s on the other side of the chimney?” Nell asked.

  “That other room just like this—are you afraid to go in there?”

  “No,” answered Nell, beginning to get over her scare. But they found the door of the other room locked and looked at each other as much as to say, “Perhaps the mystery lies here.”

  “Nothing hurt us anyhow, Nell, as I thought before. We’ll leave the side lights on and put that little screen I have up on a chair to keep the light out of our eyes. I haven’t heard another sound, have you?”

  “No, I guess the ghosts have gotten through. What time is it, Jannet?”

  Jannet looked at her wrist watch but it had stopped. “The ghosts were too much for my timepiece, Nell, but it must be ’most morning. It is about the same time, I think, that the comforter went off my bed and never did come back. I’ve always wanted to ask Paulina about it, but someway, she is so sure about ghosts that I hated to stir her up, or draw any questions. I declare, Nell, I’m different here. It’s so different!”

  “I should say it is—and yet you like this room.”

  “Yes, Nell, I do, and I’m going to find out what or who does this. Maybe it’s Paulina.”

  “For half a cent I’d like to see if she is in her room. Don’t you suppose she heard that moaning?”

  “I don’t see how she could help it, and with our putting on and off lights all around, too.”

  Jannet had scarcely stopped speaking when there was the sound of an opening door. The light went on in the hall again. “Girls,” said Paulina, “did you hear it?”

  Jannet almost laughed out, for Paulina in her long muslin gown looked so funny. She had thrust her feet into immense woolen slippers, wore the little shoulder shawl, and—of all things—a night-cap—over her hair!

  “Yes, Paulina, and we almost lost the coverlid, as I lost the blue comforter one night.”

  “What?” asked Paulina, “that blue comforter that I put on your bed?”

  “Yes. I’ve never seen it since.”

  “It’s in the closet. I thought that you put it there.”

  Jannet and Paulina eyed each other. Nell laughed. “It was us in the hall, with the lights on, Paulina.”

  “I thought so. It was Her in your room, then, I suppose.”

  “Who is she, Paulina?” asked Jannet. “Not Mother, of course.”

  “No. Ask your Uncle Pieter who cries and sobs and goes through walls. Go to bed. There’ll be nothing more to-night. I’ll not call you early.”

  “Thank you, Paulina. I’m going to leave on one little light.”

  Paulina made no reply to this remark, but went off in the sudden fashion she had, and the girls heard her door open and close.

  The human contact, and the assurance of “Old P’lina” that there would be no further disturbance, relieved the situation for the girls. Nell, with a sigh of relief, crawled between the sheets. “Ghost or no ghost, I’m going to sleep, Jannet.”

  “So am I. But the next time, I’m going to ‘yell’ for Paulina, and not try to see it through myself. Who do you suppose she meant when she told me to ask Uncle Pieter?”

  “His wife, I suppose. But there is a lots older ghost than she is, and I ’spect P’lina’s mad at your Uncle Pieter about something. She’s terribly queer herself, you know.”

  “I’m going to get acquainted with Paulina and find out all about the family history. I’ve been afraid to ask her so far. I’m so sorry, Nell, for all this. I hope that you will sleep now.�
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  “I will. Don’t worry. Some day I’ll tell of this to my grandchildren and you will see their little eyes bulge out if you are around.”

  Jannet laughed, as she arranged the screen and shook off her slippers to hop into bed. “Perhaps in time I’ll get so used to our ghost,” she said, “that I’ll miss her if she does not perform every so often.”

  “Sh-sh, Jannet! You might get her mad at you!”

  Jannet thought this so funny that she laughed till the bed shook, and Nell giggled with her. But both girls within were really rather serious over the affair, wondering and thinking for some time, Jannet’s mind dwelling on the pearls as well. “Nell,” she said, sleepily, after a little, “perhaps the ghost has my pearls. I’ve thought up a name for them—Phantom Treasure. Now it’s there, and now it isn’t, but the ghost that has it had better beware!”

  CHAPTER X

  JANNET GATHERS HER IMPRESSIONS

  I am so ashamed, Lina, not to have written you a long letter before this. You are good to have sent me a letter in reply to those few cards. I had to write to Miss Hilliard, you know, and some way, I haven’t felt like writing about some things that I have really wanted to tell you, like how I felt to be in my mother’s room and all. I’ll wait until I see you, I think. I am going to ask Uncle Pieter, when I know him better, if I can not have a little company this summer. I feel pretty sure that he will let me ask you for a visit, so please keep it in mind before you fill up the summer with other things. Then I can show you everything and tell you all about the mysteries here, for there are some that I do not understand.

  I meant to have a long talk with my uncle right away, yet I have been here for several weeks and I have not talked to him alone. I’ve been too timid to ask, for one thing; then he is busy about the place, and then I don’t feel that I can go to him as I can to Miss Hilliard. He lets Cousin Di, or Mrs. Holt, look after my wants.

  Please, by the way, keep what I tell you to yourself, except what anybody might know. You will “use judgment” what to report to the girls that know you have had a letter from me.

  Your namesake is here, for one, in our family—“Old P’lina,” they call her and she is so odd. You will have to see her to appreciate her. She is the real housekeeper and just about owns the place. But while you are Adeline, she is Paulina, the i long.

  Mrs. Holt is a rather distant cousin who knows Uncle Pieter very well and was a much younger friend of his wife, who is dead. Her mother, Mrs. Perry, will be here pretty soon, they say. She went on a little visit and keeps staying. Cousin Di worries about it, though I’m sure I don’t know why. Two of her friends from Albany have been here this week and they have had a fine time. Uncle Pieter likes to have company, Cousin Andy says, though he doesn’t pay much attention to anybody, I must say. I suppose he just likes to have the big place full of people, not to be lonesome.

  Cousin Di is kind and easy-going. My lessons are a myth, for which I am not sorry. I don’t see how I could have studied so far. Uncle Pieter looked at me one time, at dinner, and said, “You need not hurry about lessons, Diana. Jannet looks as if she has had about enough of school. I suppose, Jannet, that you have been trained to think that school hours are the only thing in the world worth keeping?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Aren’t they? Most of the girls I know that amount to anything get their lessons.”

  For once Uncle Pieter laughed out. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I suppose that is so. Whatever you have to do, keep at it, if you want to put it through. But we shall change matters a little, with the permission of your guardian, of course.”

  I did not like the way he said that, but then he does not know how fine Miss Hilliard is. I looked straight at him, but not saucily, and then I said, “Miss Hilliard is the one who has taken good care of me for all these years.” I did not mean it for a “dig” at him, since of course he did not know that I existed. But I’m sure that he took it that way. He froze right up, and I wished that I had not said anything.

  “I must see Miss Hilliard very soon,” he answered, “and relieve her of her charge.”

  That scared me so that I sat right down at my lovely desk with the secret drawers, as soon as I reached my room, and wrote the conversation to Miss Hilliard. And I’ve wished ever since that I hadn’t. I’m always doing something that I wish afterwards I hadn’t—but you know me, Lina!

  So you see that I don’t know whether I like my uncle very much or not, though I am grateful to him for hunting me up and that ought to make up for everything else. I think that Cousin Andy knows that his father is a little queer, for he makes it up to me by being extra nice. He is Andrew Van Meter and is somewhere around thirty years old, perhaps older, and was in the war. He was shell-shocked and wounded, but won’t talk about it. He has some trouble with his back and there are days when he does not come to meals. I wanted to do something for him, read to him, or anything, but Cousin Di said not to, that Andrew wanted to be by himself at those times.

  But other times he is just as friendly as can be. He said that his father “is a very scholarly man,” and Uncle Pieter does read in his library till all hours of the night, Cousin Di says. She told me that it was my great-grandfather who made all the first money in the family. My grandfather was a sort of “gentleman farmer” and had “investments;” and Uncle Pieter got through college early and lived in Albany with his family until his father wanted him to come out and run this place—and, oh, Lina, it is a beautiful place! There is a big orchard and a wonderful woods. I don’t know anything about what kind of land it is, but there is money enough somewhere to fix the house up and have everything the way Uncle Pieter wants it.

  I think that I mentioned Cousin Di’s son in one of my cards. We are “Jannet and Jan,” though Jan is called John at school. He is jolly and a little careless sometimes and carries his fun too far, Miss Hilliard would say, but I like him and his friend, “Chick” Clyde. I am getting well acquainted with Nell Clyde, who lives nearest of any of the young folks around here. Oh, it’s so different, Lina, and I haven’t begun to tell you the half! We have a family ghost, two or three of them, perhaps, and whatever it is, I’ve already had a queer experience or two that I’m not very keen on thinking about. My room seems to be the “haunted room,” but I can’t help but feel that somebody is responsible for these odd happenings and I’m going to find out about it just as soon as I can.

  You would think that I’d have loads of time, wouldn’t you? There are no lessons and no recitation hours. But for some reason, I don’t get half as much done. Perhaps I was a little tired, and then it has been so exciting to find my family and learn so many different things.

  Commencement will be here pretty soon. There is no chance of my going to Philadelphia for it, and really, Lina, I could not bring myself to leave right now. Don’t say that to Miss Hilliard, though. She might think that I have lost interest, and I haven’t a bit.

  Now you are saying that I might tell you more about the mysteries, but this letter is too long now. You can tell the girls that I’m in one of the fine old Dutch houses, with a ghost and everything, and that I’ve been having a great time, riding all over the place, and the country, and getting acquainted with people. I’ll write you again after you are home. Do write again, though, and tell me all the news about the seniors and the play and how everything goes off. Give dear Miss Marcy a big hug for me. Aren’t you lucky to have an aunt on the faculty!

  So Jannet wrote to her chum and room-mate. Meanwhile Miss Hilliard and her friend Jannet’s lawyer, had been making further inquiries about Pieter Van Meter, without discovering anything particularly to his credit. Miss Hilliard, busy with the last days of school, was relieved to find that there was no need to worry about the environment of her young protegée. Matters could rest where they were for the present. She had received no further suggestion from Mr. Van Meter in regard to a change in guardianship. This she did not intend to relinquish wit
hout being very sure that it was to Jannet’s advantage. Of Jannet’s first impressions, she thought little.

  Miss Hilliard’s errand in Albany, upon that day when she put Jannet in charge of Mrs. Holt and Andrew Van Meter, was to the office of a lawyer in Albany, a gentleman of whom she had been told, prominent in the place and of a wide acquaintance. Briefly she related the object of her visit, when, fortunately for her limited time, she was able to have an immediate interview.

  “I want to make some inquiry about Mr. Pieter Van Meter and his family,” she said, “and I was told that you would be a sincere source of information. I am the head of a school in Philadelphia, as you note by my card, and a young ward of mine, who knew nothing of this family, has just been discovered to be Mr. Van Meter’s niece. There is some suggestion of a change of guardianship, to which I will not agree unless it is for the good of my ward. I rather think that the family must be of some standing, but the personality of Mr. Van Meter is unknown to me.” Miss Hilliard paused, and looked inquiringly at the lawyer, a serious gentleman, who was listening to what she said with sober attention.

  “You are right in regard to the standing of the family. I should say that Mr. Van Meter’s wealth would clear him from any suspicion of being concerned financially in a desire to become the guardian of his niece. I know him, but not intimately. He is regarded as peculiar, is close at a bargain, looking out for himself, but that can be said of many businessmen. I have never heard of anything dishonorable in connection with his transactions. To tell the truth, he seems to me like a disappointed and unhappy man. What there is back of that I do not know, unless it is the health of his son who is one of the war victims. Yet Andy, as we know him, is one of the finest lads, and his father may be glad to have him back at all. I understand, too, that there was serious difficulty between Mr. Van Meter and his second wife. At any rate she is not there any more. Indeed, she may not be living.”

  “I know nothing about Mr. Van Meter’s family, and only just met his son and the cousin who is practically in charge of Jannet, Mrs. Holt.”