The Third Girl Detective

by Margaret Sutton

  Greta came running forward to meet the man who drove up, turned his wheel and clambered heavily out of the buggy. Jean happened to stand nearest and heard the most of the low conversation that took place, though she stepped back a little.

  “I’m sorry to tell you, Greta, that your pa was took sudden last night and your ma was sent fur. She got up an’ took the little ones an’ why she didn’t wake you up I don’t know. Mebbe she isn’t quite right, fur she says that you ain’t her child an’ she’s terrible upset becuz he wuz gone when she got there. The children wuzn’t half dressed an’ she wants their clothes.”

  “Does she want me to come?”

  “No, but I would. That woman she stays with says to bring you.”

  Greta turned to Jean. Her face was white, but her lips were set firmly. “I’ll have to go. Did you hear what happened to Jacob Klein, Jean?”

  “Yes. Go and get ready and I’ll tell the rest.”

  Grace, however, stepped up to the messenger and asked what his news was about Mrs. Klein. “We are friends of Greta’s from a couple of camps on the lake. She took breakfast with us this morning and was kept by the storm.”

  “Oh, she did. Well, all I have to say is that it’s a good thing she has friends. If you know anything about Klein you’ll know that what happened was likely to happen to a man with his habits. There was a terrible quarrel where he was drinking and Klein was hurt. That’s all I know except his wife’s ravings. She’s got the hysterics, I think.”

  “Is she likely to hurt Greta?”

  “Oh, no. But she seems to have took a dislike to Greta, they say.”

  “I see.” Grace went into the house to see if she could help Greta in any way. Greta was trying to find the children’s clothes in the midst of the destruction wrought by the fallen ceiling, and hearing Grace’s footsteps, she looked out of the door.

  “Don’t try to come up, Miss French. I’m finding their clothes and we can clean them up when I get into town.”

  “Well, I just want to tell you, Greta, to come right to us at the camp if you need a place to go. I don’t quite understand what the man told me but it is clear that things are strange.”

  “Yes, they are. Ask Molly and Jean and Nan to tell you what they know. And after I help Mother through this, I’ll be glad to come. I want to find a place to work and the girls thought they could help me.”

  “We all can, Greta. Don’t worry.”

  It was not long before Greta had been driven away. She had locked the door and taken a bundle of clothing with her. Cheerful waves from the girls saw her off and Jean told her not to forget to come to the camp as soon as she could.

  There was another long tramp back to camp, for there was no boat to take them over, but Grace invited the boys to stay for as big a meal as they could get up on short notice. “Open some cans of beans, Grace,” suggested Jimmy, “and heat ’em up.”

  “Beans it shall be,” laughed Grace, “but we’ll have some other things, too. Think it up, girls, on the way.”

  Camp, however, afforded a pleasant surprise. There stood Mr. Standish and Mr. Lockhart in front of the house, drawn there by the sounds of arrival, and while Nan and Fran rushed “madly on,” as Jean said, Mr. Standish came from the house. “Oh, there you are!” she exclaimed in relief. “We just got here and while we saw that the cottage is all right, we were worried to death for fear something had happened to you. Your father and Mr. Lockhart were just starting to the boys’ camp to see if they were all right.”

  “Here are Jimmy and Billy and Dan to tell you all about the time they had,” said Nan, hugging her mother. “We weren’t very scared, Mother—‘sans peur,’ you know, but we have a lot to tell you about Greta Klein, a girl that lives near here.”

  “Got a big description of the storm for the paper, Dad,” Jimmy informed Mr. Standish.

  “All right. Write it up for me. I heard about the storm up here and we had the edge of it at home. Wires were down, so I thought we’d better drive up. Such roads. We came over the shaky bridge and may have to swim back.”

  “In that case, I’ll stay with the girls,” suggested Mrs. Standish, laughing. “It was an awful ride, but I was thinking of you and the girls and could not get here fast enough, Jimmy. Where are the rest of the boys?”

  “Back at camp, I suppose. We came up here to see if the girls had escaped.”

  Further explanations followed. Mrs. Lockhart was found inside, where she had been setting forth fruit and baked things of all sorts, gathered up hastily when they decided to come. Part of it was saved for the Wizards who were at their camp, but the rest, with what the girls had, made a great dinner that was eaten merrily, though Mr. Standish offered a fervent grace of gratitude at its beginning.

  Jean and Molly gave a partial account of the mystery about Greta. “She isn’t their child at all,” said Jean. “It’s dreadfully sad, of course, but not so bad for Greta as if they were her parents and had been good to her. Greta is a fine girl all right. She’s going to do everything she can for them, I know.”

  “Perhaps Mother could train her to help us and she could go to school,” said Leigh. “I’m glad that my father and mother are away, not to be worried about the storm.”

  “Me, too,” said Jean, “but the folks will be back next week, I think.”

  “We shall take good word to every one at home,” said Mrs. Standish, “and if we can help that poor child get a start, we will. There is something for the S. P.’s to do.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE MYSTERIES DISCLOSED

  That Jean Gordon would have any personal interest in the mystery connected with Greta was the last thing she would have guessed until Greta came back two weeks later and appeared at the door of “Sans Souci,” as the name over the cottage door now announced.

  Gently Greta knocked. Hesitantly she came in, when several girls, who were doing the morning work after what was a late breakfast, called a happy, “Come in Greta! Glad you’re back.” Molly ran up and took from Greta’s hand a suitbox which she was carrying, probably her substitute for a grip, Molly thought. Impulsive Jean did more, running up and throwing her arms around Greta. “Why, you look like a twin sister to the S. P.’s now,” she exclaimed. “Who fixed your hair that pretty way? My, I wish I had curly hair!”

  Greta laughed at this. “I fixed it, as much like yours as I could,” she replied.

  Grace, who had frowned at Jean’s too frank comments, now joined in the general smiles and added her greeting. “Of course you have come to stay a while with us, Greta?”

  “Just a few days, Miss French, if you haven’t already found some place for me to start working.”

  “There will be no hurry, Greta. You need a little vacation. The boys say that some one else is moving into your house.”

  “And we have seen from the lake that the house is being repaired,” Nan added.

  It took some time for all the explanations. The Klein place had been taken over by the man who had bought the rest of the farm land originally attached to the few acres left. It was rented now. Mrs. Klein and the two children were starting for Idaho, where a sister lived. “I am free,” said Greta, “though it was a hard way for it to happen.”

  To Molly and Jean alone Greta told the details of her mother’s revelations. “She was hysterical, as I was told, but by the time I got there she was glad to have me take care of the children. I think that she told them I wasn’t her child so that I would have no share in the little bit of property. She was that way. She did not realize that all I wanted was to get away!

  “Of course, she did not say a word about how her Greta died and I didn’t tell her what Molly heard. There was no use in making her feel worse than she did. She said that the night Greta died there was a dreadful lake storm and more than one boat went down on Lake Michigan. Jacob Klein felt so terrible about losing Greta that he walked and walked and w
alked through the woods and clear across to Lake Michigan before he knew it. I suppose he did, for it’s only thirty miles or so, and he may have had the horse or a boat at that. He never told her the truth about anything. He wanted to get away, and he could have taken one of the boats and gone out by the river.”

  “I think that it’s farther than you think, Greta,” said Molly. “Were you ever there?”

  “No. I wasn’t anywhere! But however that was, he found me out in Lake Michigan, lashed to something and unconscious. Isn’t it queer that none of my dreams or flashes of remembering had a boat in them? But I was afraid of the water at first, till Jacob Klein made me fish and told me to learn to swim. I found that I did already know how to swim, when I made up my mind to go into the water.

  “We must have come part way through the woods, for I partly remember being made to walk and it seemed dark, though it must have been just before daylight, from what Mother said. I shall call her Mother till I get away from here, Jean.

  “Then Jacob told his wife that they would take me in the place of Greta and that no one would know the difference, even if I did not look like Greta, for scarcely any one ever came by; and if I didn’t go to school and they kept me at home to work, nobody would know.

  “I think that Mother expected me to ask some questions there, for she hurried along and made up a lot of things that couldn’t be so, only that I was sick and they had a doctor come from Milwaukee, instead of one from the town. Jacob must have been good and scared to do that; but even then I don’t see how it was managed. If they had had any friends it couldn’t have been. But it was no wonder people kept away!

  “She said that I might be able to find out who my folks were, but she didn’t know and Jacob tore up the paper that had the names of the boats lost in the storm. She made over my clothes for the children and I could wear Greta’s then, but there were some coral beads that she found inside of my clothes. The string must have broken, she said, but a few beads were down my neck, and there was a handkerchief in my coat pocket that she kept. She told me where to find it and I went right back home to get it. There is E. G. in indelible ink on the handkerchief. It is a man’s handkerchief, though.”

  “G stands for Gordon,” said Jean, who had been looking sober ever since the story of Greta’s being found in Lake Michigan had been mentioned. “I’m going to see if my father can not find out something for you, Greta. It surely will not be hard to find out what boats went down in that storm. If you were lashed to something it would mean that you were in some wreck, you see.”

  “I wish you had lost a sister, Jean,” smiled Greta, “but I do hope that there will be somebody. Still a whole family could be lost on a pleasure boat, you know, and if I can work and learn something along as I can, I shall be happy. Can’t you learn without going to school, Molly?”

  “Of course you can, Greta. Oh, we ought to give you a new name!”

  “An S. P. name,” laughed Jean. “Say, Greta, would you mind? Wouldn’t it be fun to make up a name for you?”

  “I’m sure I don’t mind.”

  “Sally, Stella, Serena, Sophia, Sophy, Sophronia, Sara, Sidney,” began Jean. “Oh, for a dictionary! We forgot to bring one out.”

  “Think up a good one, Jean,” said Molly. “It’s funny that she does look a little like you with her hair parted on the side, the way you have yours now.”

  “But I’ll never have those natural curls, Molly. It isn’t fair!”

  “I’ll give you my hair any time you want it,” asserted Greta, and although she smiled as she said this, the girls knew that she would gladly exchange any of her advantages for Jean’s.

  “I have it,” said Jean, suddenly, “Sybil, of course. She will be our S. P. sibyl. It was stupendous stupidity in me not to think of that at once.” Nan and Phoebe, who had just joined the group of three, agreed at once with the fact of Jean’s stupidity and Jean pretended to be deeply offended. But they were interested at once when Jean said that this sibyl would find her own fates instead of telling other people theirs.

  The story of Greta’s substitution for the real Greta was soon told to them all, disagreeable facts like those Molly had overheard all omitted. “He probably worked over me when he found me half drowned in Lake Michigan, girls,” said Greta, anxious to do justice to poor Jacob Klein. “So I do owe my life to him, and it was probably the liquor that made him—the way he was.”

  Greta was a happy girl to sleep on an extra cot kept for guests and to have her sharing in the gay doings taken as a matter of course. She so insisted upon doing more than her share of little tasks that Jean dubbed her the “Relief Corps” and told Grace that she might just as well let Greta help whoever had charge of meals for the week. But they began to call her Sybil until she said that she knew that magic had been worked and that she was a different person altogether. “Well,” said Nan, “since you are really not Greta at all, Sybil is as much your name as that. You are probably a sort of nice pixy. And that makes me think, Jean, the boys are now calling us the Sibyl Pixies!”

  With the rest Sybil went to a great picnic celebration gotten up by the boys, and Billy asked Jean what the girls had done to her to make her look so different.

  “We have not done anything, Billy, except to make her have happy times. It’s that she has some respectable clothes now and doesn’t have to kill herself working. The village women must have shamed Mrs. Klein into getting her a decent dress for the funeral and the neat skirt and middy and sweater that she has for every day is as good as anything we are wearing out here. She told me that she borrowed the money for those, but that they didn’t cost much in the little town.”

  “Poor kid! Isn’t it awful what some are up against?”

  “Yes; and I never thought about it before. I’m always going to think more about other girls and not take everything for granted after this. By the way, Billy, I’ve a lot to tell you some time.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because we have to play games and things. Wait till we get home. I have something on hand now that is very exciting. Could you keep a secret?” Jean’s eyes were dancing and the dimple was in evidence.

  “Try me.”

  “I haven’t said a word to Molly or Nan or any of the girls, for fear Sybil might get a hint and then have her heart broken.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Right away, Billy, as soon as Sybil said that Jacob Klein took her out of Lake Michigan, I thought of that awful summer when my uncle’s whole family were in a dreadful storm and wreck. They were going to visit us and they never came at all. Don’t you remember about it? Mr. Standish had a piece in his paper about it. Uncle Everett and Aunt Fanny were saved and the two little twin boys, but a girl about my age, mind you, Billy, and a baby, were just swallowed up some way, though they found the little baby. Wouldn’t it be strange if Sybil were Uncle Everett’s child? If she is, her name is Ann Gordon.”

  “Say! But things don’t happen that way, Jean.”

  “Why don’t they? She has to be somebody, doesn’t she? And maybe I was sent up here to find my cousin. I wrote a letter to Daddy right away, all about it and when it happened, as nearly as Sybil could tell from what Mrs. Klein said. I’ll let you know when I hear. Perhaps,” Jean added impressively, “everybody will know very soon, if it turns out that way!”

  But Jean herself was surprised when, before she thought her uncle could possibly have heard from her father, out came the Gordon car with a lady and gentleman whom she had never seen, her uncle and his wife. Sybil was not there, but Jean was, almost afraid that she had done something she should not when she finally realized who had come. “Oh, perhaps I’ve made a big mistake,” she cried, “and then you will be so terribly disappointed!”

  “Jean,” said the quiet gentleman who was Uncle Everett, “for four years I have gone to every place where I heard of a child’s having been found and adopted. You w
ould be surprised to know that there have been several children saved from wrecks on the big lake. This is only another chance, though, more likely, for we were not so far from that shore, but there was no report of anything but wreckage found there. Your father telegraphed. Fanny wanted to come with me, to see if she knew the beads you mentioned, and here we are.”

  There was a little time of waiting before Sybil, the unknown, came in from the woods with the other girls, all laughing and happy. Never did she look more like Jean than when with eyes alight, she handed Jean a branch which held a little humming-bird’s nest, like a lichen-covered cup. “It was broken off by the storm, Jean,” she said; and then she saw that they had company. “Oh, excuse me,” she said, stepping back.

  But “Greta Klein” had not changed so much in four years that her own mother did not know her. “Ann—Ann-girl,” said Mrs. Everett Gordon, rising at once from her chair and walking across the big room as if there were no one there but herself and the girl who was staring at her with startled eyes. “Oh, what have they done to my little girl all this while! Don’t you remember, Ann?”

  One by one the girls began to slip out of the room. It was very confusing to the girl who had been Greta Klein as she thought. Even Jean deserted her, and here were a gentle lady and a kind man, who held her close by turns and scarcely said more than her new name, Ann, Ann and Ann again. Best of all she knew them for her own. “Oh, yes, it’s you, Mother! I know! Please take me home, Father!”

  It was not necessary to look for the identifying beads and handkerchief. Ann had changed very much, her mother said, in height and expression, but the face could not be mistaken. Nothing but some disfigurement could have made her hard to recognize at once. Mr. and Mrs. Gordon could scarcely bear to have her out of their sight. Jean protested against her being taken away at once, but Ann drew Jean’s arm within her own as she said, “Suppose you had just found your father and mother again, Jean, wouldn’t you want to see home with your own eyes? I’ll never forget what you girls have done for me and my father says I may come back; but I have two little brothers, Jean. Think of it! I will write you all about it.”