The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

be able to find us a laundress.”
    “Which reminds me,” Ricky took a crumpled piece of white cloth from her pocket, “if this is yours, Rupert, you deserve to do your own washing. I don’t know what you’ve got on it; looks like oil.”
    He took it from her and straightened out a handkerchief.
    “Not guilty this time. Ask little brother here.” He passed over the dirty linen square. It was plain white—or it had been white before three large black splotches had colored it—without an initial or colored edge.
    “I think he’s prevaricating, Ricky,” Val protested. “This isn’t mine. I’m down to one thin dozen and those are the ones you gave me last Christmas. They have my initials on.”
    Ricky took back the disputed square. “That’s funny. It certainly isn’t mine. I’m sure one of you must be mistaken.”
    “Why?” asked Rupert.
    “Because I found it on the hearth-stone in the hall this morning. It wasn’t there last night or one of us would have seen it and picked it up, ’cause it was right there in plain sight.”
    “Sure it isn’t yours, Val?”
    He shook his head. “Positive.”
    “Queer,” murmured Rupert and reached for it again. “It’s a good quality of linen and it’s almost new.” He held it to his nose. “That’s oil on it. But how—?”
    “I wonder—” Val mused.
    “What do you know?” asked Ricky.
    “Well—Oh, it isn’t possible. He wouldn’t carry a handkerchief,” her brother said half to himself.
    “Who wouldn’t?” asked Rupert. Then Val told them of his meeting with the boy Jeems and what Sam had had to say of him.
    “Don’t know whether I exactly like this.” Rupert folded the mysterious square of stained linen. “As you say, Val, a boy like that would hardly carry a handkerchief. Also, you met him in the garden, while—”
    “The person who left that was in this house last night!” finished Ricky. “And I don’t like that!”
    “The door was locked and bolted when I came down this morning,” Val observed.
    Rupert nodded. “Yes, I distinctly remember doing that before I went up to bed last night. But when I was going around the house this morning I discovered that there are French doors opening from the old ball-room to the terrace, and I didn’t inspect their fastening last night.”
    “But who would want to come in here? There are no valuables left except furniture. And it would take three or four men and a truck to collect that. I don’t see what he was after,” puzzled Ricky.
    Rupert arose from the table. “We have, it seems, a mystery on our hands. If you want to amuse yourselves, my children, here’s the first clue. I’ve got to get back to the carriage house and my labors there.”
    He dropped the handkerchief on the table and left. Ricky reached for the “clue.” “Awfully casual about it, isn’t he?” she said. “Just the same, I believe that this is a clue and I know what our visitor was after, too,” she finished triumphantly.
    “What?”
    “The treasure Richard Ralestone hid when the Yankee raiders came.”
    “Well, if our unknown visitor has as little in the way of clues as we have, he’ll be a long time finding it.”
    “And we’re going to beat him to it! It’s somewhere in the Hall, and the secret—”
    “See here,” Val interrupted her, “what were you about to tell me when Rupert came in?”
    She put the handkerchief in the breast pocket of her sport dress, buttoning the flap over it.
    “Rupert’s got a secret.”
    “What kind?”
    “It has to do with those two brief-cases of his. You know, the ones he was so particular about all the way down here?”
    Val nodded. Those bulging brief-cases had apparently contained the dearest of his roving brother’s possessions, judging from the way Rupert had fussed if they were a second out of his sight.
    “This morning when I came downstairs,” Ricky continued, “he was sneaking them into that little side room off the dining-room corridor, the one which used to be the old plantation office. And when he came out and saw me standing there, he deliberately turned around and locked the door!”
    “Whew!” Val commented.
    “Yes, I felt that way too. So I simply asked him what he was doing and he made some silly remark about Bluebeard’s chamber. He means to keep his old secret, too, ’cause he put the key on his key-ring when he didn’t know I was watching him.”
    “This is not the place for a rest cure,” her brother observed as he started