CHAPTER I
An Unsolved Mystery
“Tell Judy about it,” begged Lois. “Please, Lorraine, it can’t be asbad as it appears. There isn’t anything that Judy can’t solve.”
Lorraine tilted her head disdainfully. “We’re sisters now. We’re bothFarringdon-Petts and should be loyal to each other. But you always didtake Judy’s part. She was the one who nearly spoiled our double weddingtrying to solve a mystery. I don’t believe she’d understand—understandany better than I do. Everyone has problems, and I’m sure Judy is noexception.”
“You’re right, Lorraine,” announced Judy, coming in to serve dessert tothe two friends she had invited for lunch at Peter’s suggestion. “I dohave problems, and there are plenty of mysteries I can’t solve.”
“Name one,” charged Lois. “Just mention one single spooky thing youcouldn’t explain, and I’ll believe you. I’ve seen you in action, JudyBolton—”
“Judy Dobbs, remember?”
“Well, you were Judy Bolton when you solved all those mysteries. I metyou when the whole valley below the big Roulsville dam was threatenedby flood and you solved that—”
“That,” declared Judy, “was my brother Horace, not me. He was the herowithout even meaning to be. He was the one who rode through town andwarned people that the flood was coming. I was off chasing a shadow.”
“A vanishing shadow,” Lois said with a sigh. “What you did wasn’t easy,Judy.”
“It didn’t need to be as hard as it was,” Judy confessed. “I know nowthat keeping that promise not to talk about the dam was a great bigmistake and could have cost lives. I should have told Arthur.”
“Please,” Lorraine said, a pained expression clouding her pretty face,“let’s not talk about him now.”
“Very well,” Judy agreed. “What shall we talk about?”
“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve solved. Maybe you weremistaken about a thing or two before the flood, but what about thehaunted house you moved into? You were the one who tracked down theghosts in the attic and the cellar and goodness knows where all. You’vebeen chasing ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did youfail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”
“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back, “there were plenty ofthem I couldn’t explain. There was one I used to call the spirit of thefountain, but what she was or how she spoke to me is more than I know.If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling. And now they’re bothdead and I can’t ask them. They left me a lot of unsolved mysteriesalong with this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of them whenI finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re stored in one end of theattic.”
“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed Lois. “Why don’t youhave another ghost party and show up the spooks?”
“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”
Judy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She wasn’t in the mood fordigging up old mysteries, but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began,she finally told them, the summer before they met. Horace had juststarted working on the paper. Judy remembered that it was Lorraine’sfather, Richard Thornton Lee, who gave him his job with the _FarringdonDaily Herald_. He had turned in some interesting church news,convincing Mr. Lee that he had in him the makings of a good reporter.And so it was that he spent the summer Judy was remembering inFarringdon where the Farringdon-Petts had their turreted mansion, whileshe had to suffer the heat and loneliness of Dry Brook Hollow.
Her thoughts were what had made it so hard, she confessed now as shereviewed everything that had happened. She just couldn’t help resentingthe fact that her parents left her every summer while they went off ona vacation by themselves. What did they think she would do?
“You’ll have plenty to read,” her father had told her. “I bought yousix new books in that mystery series you like. When they’re finishedthere are plenty of short stories around. Your grandmother never throwsanything away. She has magazines she’s saved since your mother was agirl. If you ask for them she’ll let you have the whole stack. I knowhow you love to read.”
“I do, Dad, but if the magazines are that old—”
Judy had stopped. She had seen her father’s tired eyes and had realizedthat a busy doctor needed a vacation much more than a schoolgirl whohad too little to do. He and Judy’s mother usually went to the beachhotel where they had honeymooned. It was a precious memory. Everysummer Dr. Bolton and his wife relived it. And every summer Judy wentto stay with her grandmother Smeed, who scolded and fussed and tried topretend she wasn’t glad to have her.
“You here again?” she had greeted her that summer, and Judy hadn’tnoticed her old eyes twinkling behind her glasses. “What do you proposeto do with yourself this time?”
“Read,” Judy had told her. “Mom and Dad say you have a whole stack ofold magazines—”
“In the attic. Go up and look them over if you can stand the heat.”
Judy went, not to look over the old magazines so much as to escape to aplace where she could have a good cry. It was the summer before herfifteenth birthday. In another year she would have outgrown herchildish resentment of her parents’ vacation or be grown up enough toask them to let her have a vacation of her own. In another year shewould be summering among the beautiful Thousand Islands and solving amystery to be known as the _Ghost Parade_.
“A whole parade of ghosts,” Lois would be telling her, “and you solvedeverything.”
But then she didn’t even know Lois. She had no idea so many thrillingadventures awaited her. There seemed to be nothing—nothing—and so thetears came and spilled over on one of the magazines. As Judy wiped itaway she noticed that it had fallen on a picture of a fountain.
“A fountain with tears for water. How strange!” she remembered sayingaloud.
Judy had never seen a real fountain. The thrill of walking up to thedoor of the palatial Farringdon-Pett mansion was still ahead of her. Onthe lawn a fountain still caught and held rainbows like those she wasto see on her honeymoon at Niagara Falls. But all that was in thefuture. If anyone had told the freckled-faced, pigtailed girl that shewould one day marry Peter Dobbs, she would have laughed in their faces.
“That tease!”
For then she knew Peter only as an older boy who used to tease her andcall her carrot-top until one day she yelled back at him, “Carrot-topsare green and so are you!”
Peter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a kitten and suggestedthe name Blackberry for him. The kitten was now a dignified family cat.But the summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and spilled tearson it she had no kitten. She had nothing, she confessed, not even afriend. It had helped to pretend the fountain in the picture was filledwith all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.
“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly exclaimed. “If Icould find it I’d wish—”
A step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered it distinctly. Shehad turned to see her grandmother and to hear her say in her usualabrupt fashion, “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people knowyour wishes instead of muttering them to yourself, most of them aren’tso impossible.”
“Were they?” asked Lois.
She and Lorraine had listened to this much of what Judy was tellingthem without interruption.
“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied. “There weren’t any of themimpossible.”
And she went on to tell them how, the very next day, her grandparentshad taken her to a fountain exactly like the one in the picture. It wasin the center of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it.Beside the steps were smaller fountains with the water spurting fromthe mouths of stone lions. Judy had stared at them a moment and thenclimbed the steps to the pool.
“Am I dreaming?” she remembered saying aloud. “Is this beautifulfountain real?”
A voice had answered, although she could see no one.
&nb
sp; “Make your wishes, Judy. Wish wisely. If you shed a tear in thefountain your wishes will surely come true.”
“A tear?” Judy had asked. “How can I shed a tear when I’m happy? Thisis a wonderful place.”
“Shed a tear in the fountain and your wishes will surely come true,”the voice had repeated.
“But what is there to cry about?”
“You found plenty to cry about back at your grandmother’s house,” themysterious voice had reminded her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture upthere in the attic?”
“Then you—you _are_ the fountain!” Judy remembered exclaiming. “But afountain doesn’t speak. It doesn’t have a voice.”
“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had said in a mysteriouswhisper.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Haunted Fountain Page 2
