The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Mildred A. Wirt

  His movements betrayed a nervous fear, yet he worked rapidly. Having searched about for some time, he located a battered bucket. This he filled with water. Bringing it up, he threw the entire contents of the bucket upon the windlass. Not satisfied with this, he returned for a second bucket of water and repeated the operation.

  Satisfied at last, he drew a package wrapped in black oilcloth from beneath his coat and tossed it to the center of the dangling net. Then with great care lest the rusty windlass, for all the careful soaking he had given it, should let out a screeching complaint, he quietly lowered the net into the lake. The water had done its work; the windlass gave forth no sound.

  After this he turned and walked slowly away.

  He was some fifty feet from the windlass, busy apparently in contemplating the dark clouds that threatened to obscure the moon, when almost at the same instant two causes for disturbance entered his not uneventful life. From the direction of the lake came a faint splash. At the brow of the little ridge over which he had passed to reach this spot, two men had appeared.

  That the men were not unexpected was at once evident. He made no attempt to conceal himself. That the splash puzzled him went without question. He covered half the distance to the breakwater, then paused.

  “Poof! Nothing! Wharf rat, perhaps,” he muttered, then returned to his contemplation of the clouds. Yet, had he taken notice before of that silent figure on the rocks, he might now have discovered that it had vanished.

  The two men advanced rapidly across the stretch of sand. As they came close there was about their movements an air of caution. At last one spoke:

  “Don’t try anything, Al. We got you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. And the goods are on you!”

  “Yeah?”

  The dark, evil-eyed one who was apparently known as Al, stood his ground.

  The moon lost itself behind a cloud. The place went dark. Yet when the moon reappeared, bringing out the gleam of an officer’s star upon the breast of one of the newcomers, he stood there motionless.

  “Will you hand it over, or shall we take you in?” It was the man with the star who spoke.

  “You’ve got nothing on me!” Al threw open his coat. “Look me over.”

  “We will. And then—”

  “Yeah? And then?”

  “We’ll see.”

  At that instant, all unseen, a dripping figure emerged from the water close to the submerged fishing net. It was the figure that, but a short half hour before had rested motionless upon the rocks; a slender girl whose figure was for a second fully outlined by a distant flash of lightning. She carried some dark object beneath her right arm.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE DISAPPEARING PARCEL

  In the meantime Florence and Jeanne were making the best of their opportunity to leave the “made land.” They hoped to cross the bridge and reach the car line before the threatened storm broke. Petite Jeanne was terribly afraid of lightning. Every time it streaked across the sky she gripped her strong companion’s arm and shuddered.

  It was impossible to make rapid progress. From this point the beaten path disappeared. There were only scattered tracks where other pedestrians had picked their way through the litter of debris.

  Here Florence caught her foot in a tangled mass of wire and all but fell to the ground; there Jeanne stepped into a deep hole; and here they found their way blocked by a heap of fragments from a broken sidewalk.

  “Why did we come this way?” Petite Jeanne cried in consternation.

  “The other was longer, more dangerous. Cheer up! We’ll make it.” Florence took her arm and together they felt their way forward through the darkness that grew deeper and blacker at every step.

  Rolling up as they did at the back of a city’s skyscrapers, the mountain clouds were terrible to see.

  “The throng!” Petite Jeanne’s heart fairly stopped beating. “What must a terrific thunderstorm mean to that teaming mass of humanity?”

  Even at her own moment of distress, this unselfish child found time for a compassionate thought for those hundreds of thousands who still thronged the city streets.

  As for the crowds, not one person of them all was conscious that a catastrophe impended. Walled in on every side by skyscrapers, no slightest glance to the least of those black clouds was granted them. Their ears filled by the honk of horns, the blare of bands and the shouts of thousands, they heard not one rumble of distant thunder. So they laughed and shouted, crowded into this corner and that, to come out shaken and frightened; but never did one of them say, “It will storm.”

  Yet out of this merry-mad throng two beings were silent. A boy of sixteen and a hunchback of uncertain age, hovering in a doorway, looked, marveled a little, and appeared to wait.

  “When will it break up?” the boy asked out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Early,” was the reply. “There’s too many of ’em. They can’t have much fun. See! They’re flooding the grandstands. The bands can’t play. They’ll be going soon. And then—” The hunchback gave vent to a low chuckle.

  * * * *

  After snatching a pair of boy’s strap-overalls from the rocks the girl, who had emerged from the water beside the submerged net, with the dark package under her arm hurried away over a narrow path and lost herself at once in the tangled mass of willows and cottonwood.

  She had not gone far before a light appeared at the end of that trail.

  Seen from the blackness of night, the structure she approached took on a grotesque aspect. With two small round windows set well above the door, it seemed the face of some massive monster with a prodigious mouth and great gleaming eyes. The girl, it would seem, was not in the least frightened by the monster, for she walked right up to its mouth and, after wrapping her overalls about the black package which still dripped lake water, opened the door, which let out a flood of yellow light, and disappeared within.

  Had Florence witnessed all this, her mystification regarding this child of the island might have increased fourfold.

  As you already know, Florence was not there. She was still with Petite Jeanne on the strip of “made land” that skirted the shore. They were more than a mile from the island.

  They had come at last to a strange place. Having completely lost their way in the darkness, they found themselves of a sudden facing a blank wall.

  A strange wall it was, too. It could not be a house for, though made of wood, this wall was composed not of boards but of round posts set so close together that a hand might not be thrust between them.

  “Wh—where are we?” Jeanne cried in despair.

  “I don’t know.” Florence had fortified her mind against any emergency. “I do know this wall must have an end. We must find it.”

  She was right. The curious wall of newly hewn posts did have an end. They were not long in finding it. Coming to a corner they turned it and again followed on.

  “This is some enclosure,” Florence philosophized. “It may enclose some form of shelter. And, from the looks of the sky, shelter is what we will need very soon.”

  “Yes! Yes!” cried her companion, as a flare of lightning gave her an instant’s view of their surroundings. “There is a building looming just over there. The strangest sort of building, but a shelter all the same.”

  Ten minutes of creeping along that wall in the dark, and they came to a massive gate. This, too, was built of logs.

  “There’s a chain,” Florence breathed as she felt about. “It’s fastened, but not locked. Shall we try to go in?”

  “Yes! Yes! Let us go in!” A sharp flash of lightning had set the little French girl’s nerves all a-quiver.

  “Come on then.” There was a suggestion of mystery in Florence’s tone. “We will feel our way back to that place you saw.”

  The gate swung open a crack. They crept inside. The door swung to. The chain rattled. Then once more they moved forward in the dark.

  After a time, by the aid of a vivid flash, they mad
e out a tall, narrow structure just before them. A sudden dash, and they were inside.

  “We—we’re here,” Florence panted, “but where are we?”

  “Oo—o! How dark!” Petite Jeanne pressed close to her companion’s side. “I am sure there are no windows.”

  “The windows are above,” whispered Florence. A flash of lightning had revealed an opening far above her head.

  At the same instant she stumbled against a hard object.

  “It’s a stairway,” she announced after a brief inspection. “A curious sort of stairway, too. The steps are shaped like triangles.”

  “That means it is a spiral stairway.”

  “And each step is thick and rough as if it were hand-hewn with an axe. But who would hew planks by hand in this day of steam and great sawmills?”

  “Let’s go up. We may be able to see something from the windows.”

  Cautiously, on hands and knees, they made their way up the narrow stairway. The platform they reached and the window they looked through a moment later were quite as mysterious as the stairway. Everywhere was the mark of an axe. The window was narrow, a mere slit not over nine inches wide and quite devoid of glass.

  Yet from this window they were to witness one of God’s greatest wonders, a storm at night upon the water.

  The dark clouds had swung northward. They were now above the surface of the lake. Blackness vied with blackness as clouds loomed above the water. Like a great electric needle sewing together two curtains of purple velvet for a giant’s wardrobe, lightning darted from sky to sea and from sea to sky again.

  “How—how marvelous! How terrible!” Petite Jeanne pressed her companion’s arm hard.

  “And what a place of mystery!” Florence answered back.

  “But what place is this?” Jeanne’s voice was filled with awe. “And where are we?”

  “This,” Florence repeated, “is a place of mystery, and this is a night of adventure.

  “Adventure and mystery,” she thought to herself, even as she said the words. Once more she thought of the cameo.

  “I promised to return it tomorrow. And now it seems I am moving farther and farther from it.”

  Had she but known it, the time was not far distant when, like two bits of flotsam on a broad sea, she and the lost cameo would be drifting closer and closer together. And, strange as it may seem, the owner of the cameo, that frail, little, old lady, was to play an important part in the lives of Petite Jeanne and Florence.

  * * * *

  In the meantime the two officers and the man of the evil eye were playing a bit of drama all their own on the sand-blown desert portion of the island.

  “You’ll have to come clean!” the senior officer was saying to the man whom he addressed as Al.

  “All you got to do is search me. You’ll find nothing on me, not even a rod.” The man stood his ground.

  “Fair enough.” With a skill born of long practice, the veteran detective went through the man’s clothes.

  “You’ve cachéd it,” he grumbled, as he stood back empty-handed.

  “I’m not in on the know.” The suspicion of a smile flitted across the dark one’s face. “Whatever you’re looking for, I never had it.”

  “No? We’ll look about a bit, anyway.”

  The officers mounted the breakwater to go flashing electric lanterns into every cavity. As the boom of thunder grew louder they abandoned the search to go tramping back across the barren sand.

  Left to himself, Al made a pretense of leaving the island, but in reality lost himself from sight on the very brush-grown trail the nymph of the lake had taken a short time before.

  “Well, I’ll be—!” he muttered, as he brought up squarely before the structure that seemed a monster’s head, whose eyes by this time were quite sightless. The light had blinked off some moments before.

  After walking around the place twice, he stood before the door and lifted a hand as if to knock. Appearing to think better of this, he sank down upon the narrow doorstep, allowed his head to fall forward, and appeared to sleep.

  Not for long, however. Foxes do not sleep in the night. Having roused himself, he stole back over the trail, crept to the breakwater, lifted himself to a point of elevation, and surveyed the entire scene throughout three lightning flashes. Then, apparently satisfied, he made his way to the windlass he had left an hour or two before. He repeated the process of drowning the complaining voice of the windlass and then, turning the crank, rapidly lifted the dripping net from the bottom of the lake.

  With fingers that trembled slightly, he drew a small flashlight from his pocket to cast its light across the surface of the net.

  Muttering a curse beneath his breath, he flashed the light once again, and then stood there speechless.

  What had happened? The meshes of that net were fine, so fine that a dozen minnows not more than two inches long struggled vainly at its center. Yet the package he had thrown in this net was gone.

  “Gone!” he muttered. “It can’t have floated. Heavy. Heavy as a stone. And I had my eyes on it, every minute; all but—but the time I went down that trail.

  “They tricked me!” he growled. He was thinking now of the policemen. “But no! How could they? I saw them go, saw them on the bridge. Couldn’t have come back. Not time enough.”

  At this he thrust both hands deep in his pockets and went stumping away.

  CHAPTER XV

  STRANGE VOICES

  As for Florence and Jeanne, they were still hidden away in that riddle of a place by the lake shore on “made land.”

  A more perplexing place of refuge could not have been found. What was it? Why was it here? Were there men about the place within the palisades? These were the questions that disturbed even the stout-hearted Florence.

  They were silent for a long time, those two. When at last Jeanne spoke, Florence started as if a stranger had addressed her.

  “This place,” said Petite Jeanne, “reminds me of a story I once read before I came to America. In my native land we talked in French, of course, and studied in French. But we studied English just as you study French in America.

  “A story in my book told of early days in America. It was thrilling, oh, very thrilling indeed! There were Indians, real red men who scalped their victims and held wild war dances. There were scouts and soldiers. And there were forts all built of logs hewn in the forest. And in these forts there were—”

  “Fort,” Florence broke in, “a fort. Of course, that is what this is, a fort for protection from Indians.”

  “But, Indians!” Jeanne’s tone reflected her surprise. “Real live, wild Indians! There are none here now!”

  “Of course not!” Florence laughed a merry laugh. “This is not, after all, a real fort. It is only a reproduction of a very old fort that was destroyed many years ago, old Fort Dearborn.”

  “But I do not understand. Why did they put it here?” Petite Jeanne was perplexed.

  “It is to be part of the great Fair, the Century of Progress. It was built in order that memories of those good old frontier days might be brought back to us in the most vivid fashion.

  “Just think of being here now, just we alone!” Florence enthused. “Let us dream a little. The darkness is all about us. On the lake there is a storm. There is no city now; only a village straggling along a stagnant stream. Wild ducks have built their nests in the swamps over yonder. And in the forest there are wild deer. In the cabins by the river women and children sleep. But we, you and I, we are sentries for the night. Indians prowl through the forest. The silent dip of their paddles sends their canoes along the shallow water close to shore.

  “See! There is a flash of light. What is that on the lake? Indian canoes? Or floating logs?

  “Shall we arouse the garrison? No! No! We will wait. It may be only logs after all. And if Indians, they may be friendly, for this is supposed to be a time of peace, though dark rumors are afloat.”

  Florence’s voice trailed away. The low rumble of thund
er, the swish of water on a rocky shore, and then silence.

  Petite Jeanne shook herself. “You make it all so very real. Were those good days, better days than we are knowing now?”

  “Who can tell?” Florence sighed. “They seem very good to us now. But we must not forget that they were hard days, days of real sickness and real death. We must not forget that once the garrison of this fort marched forth with the entire population, prepared to make their way to a place of greater safety; that they were attacked and massacred by the treacherous red men.

  “We must not forget these things, nor should we cease to be thankful for the courage and devotion of those pioneers who dared to enter a wilderness and make their homes here, that we who follow after them might live in a land of liberty and peace.”

  “No,” Petite Jeanne’s tone was solemn, “we will not forget.”

  * * * *

  In the meantime the pleasure-seeking throng, all unconscious of the storm that had threatened to deluge them, still roamed the streets. Their ranks, however, were thinning. One by one the bands, which were unable to play because of the press, and might not have been heard because of the tumult, folded up their music and their stands and instruments and, like the Arabs, “silently stole away.” The radio stars who could not be seen answered other calls. Grandstands were deserted, street cars and elevated trains were packed. The great city had had one grand look at itself. It was now going home.

  And still, lurking in the doorway, the grown boy in shabby clothes and the hunchback lingered, waiting, expectant.

  “It won’t be long now,” the hunchback muttered.

  “It won’t be long,” the other echoed.

  * * * *

  Petite Jeanne, though a trifle disappointed by the dispelling of the mystery of their immediate surroundings, soon enough found herself charmed by Florence’s vivid pictures of life in those days when Chicago was a village, when the Chicago River ran north instead of south, and Indians still roamed the prairies in search of buffaloes.

  How this big, healthy, adventure-loving girl would have loved the life they lived in those half forgotten days! As it was, she could live them now only in imagination. This she did to her heart’s content.