The Mystery of the Headless Horseman

by Campbell, Julie

  Brian broke in to change the subject. “I’ve been thinking about that cellar door, and I think maybe Mrs. Ward was right. It was a practical joke.”

  “Some joke!” Trixie exclaimed. “Harrison could have been badly hurt in that cellar.”

  “But the person who locked him in wasn’t to know that, Trixie,” Brian pointed out. “I’m not trying to make any excuses for whoever it was. It was a really dumb thing to do. But when Harrison fell and hit his head, he did that himself.” Trixie yawned. “Well, I think there’s something going on that we don’t know anything about. Anyway, Honey said she’ll have Jim stop by here in the station wagon early tomorrow to take me back to Sleepyside Hollow.”

  “But the bazaar is tomorrow,” Brian objected. “We’ve still got plenty to do, you know, without you dashing off after unsolved mysteries.”

  “Jim and I won’t be long,” Trixie said, “and the bazaar doesn’t start till one o’clock. Besides, we’ll be picking up more donations from two of our good friends. Moms just told me that Mrs. Vanderpoel has baked twelve dozen cookies for us, and Mrs. Elliott is donating some flowers. Isn’t that nice?”

  “It sounds great,” Mart said, returning what was left of his “snack” ingredients to the refrigerator. He poured himself a tall glass of milk. “And it just so happens that both of those people live not too far away from Sleepyside Hollow.”

  “But we really do need to pick up our bikes,” Trixie cried, glaring at him.

  “And while you’re there, are you also going to see if you can find another ghost?” Mart teased. “There is one thing that bothers me,” Trixie admitted. “Why did Harrison go down into that cellar in the first place?”

  “There’s nothing mysterious about that.” Mart wiped a milk moustache from his face with the back of his hand. “He said he heard a noise down there.”

  “But what noise?” Trixie asked. “And who made it? The practical joker couldn’t have been in two places at the same time. He couldn’t have been downstairs in the cellar thumping around— or whatever he did—and the next moment, be in the kitchen to slam the door shut. There has to be an explanation, and I intend to find out what it is.”

  “Maybe it was your headless horseman in the cellar.” Mart looked pleased that he’d thought of a possible solution. “Ghosts can walk through walls, you know. He’s already disappeared into thin air. You saw him do it.”

  “But I still don’t believe it,” Trixie replied. “That ghost and his horse both looked pretty solid to me. And here’s something else to puzzle out in your dreams tonight. I keep coming back to it. Why didn’t Harrison tell us he wasn’t alone in that house?”

  It was Mart’s turn to yawn. “I’ll think about it,” he said, “but not tonight. Right now, I’m going to bed.”

  “And I’ll think about it, too,” Brian said.

  “Well, I won’t think about it,” Trixie said. “I know I’m going to dream about that awful headless horseman instead—all night.”

  But she didn’t. She fell into a dreamless sleep almost before her head hit the pillow.

  The next day dawned bright and clear. Trixie could tell at once that they were going to have beautiful weather for the bazaar.

  Soon after breakfast, Jim called for Trixie, as promised. She watched the big station wagon swing into the Belden driveway, and she felt again a special rush of pride when she saw the bright red enamel lettering on the door: BOB-WHITES OF THE GLEN.

  Even now, she could hardly believe that the station wagon really belonged to all of them. Each of the Bob-Whites owned one seventh of it. Honey’s father had donated it to their club when he bought himself a new car.

  “I’ve already been up to Di’s,” Jim said. “All the others are up there now. This is going to be a great day, Madam President, so where to first?”

  “Mrs. Elliott’s, I think, Mr. Copresident,” Trixie answered, laughing.

  “Then on to Mrs. Vanderpoel’s?”

  “I think so,” Trixie said. “That way we can see if we’re still going to have room for the bikes. If not,” she sighed regretfully, “I suppose we’ll have to leave them till another time.”

  “We’re going to have to make the trip to Sleepyside Hollow anyway,” Jim answered, grinning at her. “Mrs. Crandall phoned Honey bright and early this morning. She’s donating some of her jams and jellies to the bazaar. Isn’t that great?”

  Trixie smiled happily and watched the scenery flashing by. After a while, she glanced at Jim. She thought he looked handsome in his smart red Bob-White jacket. Trixie was wearing hers, too, as would all the club members that day. After all, the bazaar was a club project.

  Jim chuckled. “We’re carrying one item that is not for sale at the bazaar. It’s Harrison’s hat. Di called me on the telephone about it last night. Somehow it got left behind in the stables yesterday.”

  “Gleeps! That was my fault!”

  “Di was quite insistent that I should run and get it at once,” Jim said, “so, of course, I had to.” Trixie glanced behind her. Harrison’s derby hat sat neatly in the exact middle of the backseat. It looked as dignified and as correct as its owner. “Why was Di so anxious about it?” she asked. “Oh, you know Di,” Jim answered vaguely. “I think she just wanted to show the rest of the staff that she was able to look after everything. I can understand it.”

  Trixie frowned. “Well, I don’t understand it at all. It’s not like Di to be so bossy.”

  “Maybe, Trix,” Jim said gently, “it’s because you’re so used to running things yourself.”

  “But I’m not bossy,” Trixie cried.

  Jim grinned at her to take the sting out of his words. “Oh, sometimes you are. Just a little bit, maybe. But then, I guess someone’s got to be the boss.”

  Trixie wasn’t sure she liked this thought at all.

  “I thought we were all bosses,” she said slowly.

  Jim decided to drop the subject. “Getting back to Harrison’s hat, I promised Di this morning that we’d drive on to the hospital if we had time. I’d like to get rid of the derby problem once and for all.”

  Trixie said nothing, but she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. It sounded as though Di was still in the same peculiar mood that she’d been in the day before.

  And if that’s the case, Trixie thought, that could mean trouble for all of us.

  Derby Surprise • 10

  IT WASN’T LONG before the station wagon was the most fragrant vehicle on wheels.

  At Mrs. Elliott’s, they were presented with several huge bunches of late-blooming sweet peas.

  “To thank you for all your help in finding my ‘hidden treasure,’ ” Mrs. Elliott said. Her eyes, as blue as delphiniums, twinkled at them both.

  “Oh, how lovely!” Trixie exclaimed. “These will sell immediately, I know. How kind everyone has been.”

  “That’s because you’re such a kind person yourself,” Mrs. Elliott answered.

  The remark made Trixie feel a little better.

  At Mrs. Vanderpoel’s, they loaded boxes of mouth-watering windmill cookies into the station wagon’s spacious interior.

  “People will be able to smell you coming from miles away,” Mrs. Vanderpoel said, wiping her hands on her blue-checked apron. “But what could be nicer than cookies and flowers. Delightful!”

  As they drove away, Trixie said to Jim, “Next stop, Sleepyside Hollow.”

  “Honey told me all about last night,” he said. “She’s over her fright now, I think.” He shot Trixie a puzzled glance. “What do you make of it?”

  They were still talking about the events of the previous evening when they found the entrance to Sleepyside Hollow Lane. They followed its twists and turns and, at last, arrived at the clearing outside Mrs. Crandall’s white frame house.

  It was Polly Ward who hurried out to greet them. “Rose couldn’t be here,” she said. “She had to pick up some groceries at Mr. Lytell’s. Then, I think, she’s going on to the hospital to see Mr. Harrison. Ever
ything’s ready, though. The jams and jellies are in the kitchen.”

  Jim moved toward the house at once, but Trixie’s eyes searched the ground for the strange hoofprint she’d seen the night before.

  She couldn’t find it. She couldn’t even remember exactly where it had been. Somehow, everything looked different in the daylight.

  “Come on, slowpoke!” Jim called from the front porch. “Are you going to stay out there all day?”

  “Jim! I’ve found something!” Trixie exclaimed.

  But Jim didn’t hear. He had turned and gone into the house.

  Trixie moved quickly to one of the lilac bushes that grew in the tiny front yard. She might not have found the hoofprint, but her sharp eyes had spotted something else—a small scrap of black material fluttering from a high twig.

  Trixie stared. It looked as if it had been torn from an article of clothing. Could it possibly have come from a ghostly cloak?

  Quickly, Trixie reached up and disentangled it from the bush. “It may have been torn from a cloak,” she muttered to herself, “but a ghostly cloak? Never!”

  She stuffed the tiny piece of material into the pocket of her jeans and went to find Jim. He was in the kitchen with Mrs. Ward. They were just fitting the last jar of jam into a large cardboard carton.

  Jim grinned at Trixie. “I thought for a moment I’d lost you,” he said. “Were you trying to figure out the meaning of the alphabet trees?”

  Mrs. Ward looked startled. “The alphabet trees?” Puzzled, she glanced out of the kitchen window. Then she shook with laughter. “Ah, yes, I see what you mean. Those fruit trees do look peculiar, don’t they? Come and see them close up. Really, I can’t wait to see how they turned out myself.”

  Still talking, she led the way out through the kitchen door and into the small backyard.

  Trixie had been on the point of telling Jim quietly about her latest discovery. But when she caught sight of the little garden, she promptly forgot all about ghostly cloaks.

  Brilliantly colored fall flowers grew around a tiny green lawn. Behind it stood the fruit trees, each with its own series of white letters painted on its trunk.

  “Gleeps!” Trixie breathed. “That tree looks like it has different kinds of leaves on different branches. So does that one over there! What’s going on?”

  Mrs. Ward chuckled. “This is Jonathan’s doing. He was a great one for gardening. It was one of his hobbies. He did all this,” she said, waving a hand around.

  “But what about the trees?” Trixie asked.

  “Jonathan was in the process of experimenting with them. He was trying to grow three different kinds of fruit on one tree, you see.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Trixie said.

  “But I do!” Jim exclaimed suddenly. “I’ve just remembered. I read an article about it once, Trix. If you cut a bud from one tree—let’s say you take it from a cherry tree, for instance—you can graft that bud, called a scion, onto another tree.”

  Trixie frowned. “Do you have to graft it to another cherry tree?”

  “No, that’s just the point. You can graft it to a peach tree, or an apple tree, or certain other species of fruit trees. Some work together better than others, of course.”

  “So when you’ve finished, you’ve got an apple-and-cherry tree? Or a peach-and-plum?”

  Mrs. Ward nodded. “That’s right, Trixie. Some gardeners do it to conserve space. I suspect that Jonathan tried it just to see if it would work.”

  “But what about the green bandages?” Trixie asked.

  Mrs. Ward laughed. “I don’t think they’re really bandages, Trixie. It’s some special sort of waxed twine Jonathan used every time he made a graft. It held the scion in place, I think, until

  the graft started to take hold.”

  “And I’ll bet I’ve figured out what those letters on the tree trunks mean!” Jim exclaimed. “They were painted there to help Mr. Crandall keep track of which species of fruits he had growing on which trees. Is that right?”

  “You’re quite right,” Mrs. Ward answered.

  “So there’s another mystery cleared up,” Jim teased Trixie.

  Trixie wandered over to the trees and touched their trunks lightly with her fingertips. “You know,” she called absently over her shoulder, “I’ll bet Moms has heard of these kinds of experiments. I should have thought to ask her.” She touched a gnarled trunk. “Hey, this old grand-daddy of an apple tree is marked with the letters LMN, yet it doesn’t have any grafts at all. I wonder why?”

  “I think Jonathan must have decided to leave that one alone,” Mrs. Ward said, on her way into the house with Jim at her heels. “It’s pretty ancient, and maybe it couldn’t stand the shock of grafting. There’s no way of finding out for sure, though. I’m afraid Rose threw away all the tree records long ago.”

  Trixie paused to look at the back of the little house. From where she was standing, she could see the two barred cellar windows. They were set level with the ground, and something lay on the neat flagged path in front of the windows. Trixie hurried across to investigate.

  It was nothing startling, but suddenly Trixie had no doubt in her mind that she had found the answer to one of her many questions.

  “Pebbles!” she muttered. “Just a handful of small pebbles thrown at the windowpane brought Harrison hurrying to the cellar. Then the practical joker dashed indoors and locked him in.”

  Slowly she wandered back into the kitchen, deep in thought. She was just in time to hear Jim grunt as he lifted the heavy carton filled with jars.

  “Hold on, Jim, and I’ll help,” Trixie said. She hurried to his side.

  Together they carried the jams and jellies out to the station wagon, then turned to load the bicycles. Mrs. Ward was there to help them.

  They had to put down the backseat to make room for the bikes, and moving the derby hat to a safe spot on top of the jam carton reminded Trixie of the butler. “Maybe we ought to take Harrison’s bike as well,” Trixie said, thinking of what Di might say if they didn’t.

  “No,” Jim said. “We’ll leave it here if Mrs. Crandall doesn’t mind. We haven’t really got room for it, and Harrison did say he wanted to pick it up himself.”

  Trixie slipped into the station wagon’s front seat. “I’m so glad you solved the mystery of those alphabet trees for me,” she told Mrs. Ward.

  “And the card,” Jim said, who had heard all about it. “Don’t forget the Halloween card.”

  “There’s another card around here somewhere,” Mrs. Ward said. “At least, we’re pretty sure there is. A birthday card and a birthday present. You see, Rose’s birthday comes soon after Halloween. She knew Jonathan had bought her a gift because he told her so. But he hid it. He always did.”

  Trixie was interested. “Where did he hide it?”

  “That’s just it. Rose has never found it. Oh, Jonathan did give her a clue. He liked to make a little game out of it, you see. He kept on saying over and over, ‘It’s simple.’ ”

  ‘It’s simple,’ ” Jim repeated. “What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Polly Ward said. “I wish I did.”

  “But why didn’t Mrs. Crandall give up when she couldn’t find her present?” Trixie asked. “He would have given it to her then, surely.”

  Mrs. Ward’s usually cheerful face saddened. “By then it was too late, my dear. Jonathan died very suddenly the weekend before her birthday. She’s looked for that gift everywhere. They were a very devoted couple, and it would have been nice for Rose to have that one last gift from him.” She sighed. “Poor Rose. So many strange things have happened since Jonathan died. Even his raincoat has been missing for many months. Rose thinks someone must have stolen it, though I can’t imagine why.”

  “Won’t you and Mrs. Crandall come to the bazaar this afternoon?” Jim asked.

  “Oh, yes! Please do!” Trixie urged.

  But Mrs. Ward shook her head. “No, we’d better not. There was a lot of bad feeling among some
of the townsfolk over that missing vase. Seeing Rose at the bazaar might set some folks’ tongues wagging again. But there! I’m a fine one to talk, standing here gossiping away like this!” Trixie was quiet all the way to the hospital. They were just pulling into the parking lot when she said suddenly, “Wasn’t that a sad story, Jim? I wish we could do something to help.”

  She stared out of her window at Sleepyside’s small Fine Arts Museum on the other side of the street. Built at approximately the same time as Sleepyside’s white frame town hall, the museum, too, was housed in one of the area’s older buildings.

  Trixie thought again of Jonathan Crandall, the former curator who was now regarded as a thief. She sighed and wondered what he had looked like. Had he been tall and thin, like the well-dressed man who was standing in the museum’s doorway? Or had he been short and muscular, like the bald-headed policeman who was hurrying into the hospital’s side entrance?

  “I wish we could figure out where Mr. Crandall hid his wife’s birthday present,” Trixie said thoughtfully.

  Jim groaned and turned off the engine. “As fast as we think we’ve solved one mystery, you go and dig up another. But, yes,” he added, nodding his red head, “it would be very nice to try to help. Do you think we will?”

  Suddenly remembering their earlier conversation, Trixie said icily, “Why ask me? If I tell you, you’ll say I’m being bossy!”

  “Who’s being bossy?” someone asked.

  The voice was familiar. Trixie looked up quickly and saw Dr. Ferris’s kindly face smiling at her through the window.

  “If it’s either one of you who’s doing the bossing, you’re just the person I want to see,” Dr. Ferris said. “Do you have a minute? I’d like to talk to both of you. It’s about your friend Mr. Harrison. If anyone needs bossing, that man does.”

  Trixie and Jim followed the doctor to a bench under the tall maple trees.

  When they were seated, Trixie said anxiously, “How is Harrison? Is he badly hurt? I know Brian’s been keeping in touch with you about him.”