The Hudson River Mystery

mouth. I promise, Honey. In the meantime—we’re not going to be belles of the ball if we don’t step on it!”
    Honey smiled back at her, and the two girls began walking toward Killifish Road. Honey was a few paces ahead of her when Trixie turned for a final glimpse of the Hudson. She froze in her tracks.
    ”H-Honey,” she whimpered.
    ”What is it—?” Honey looked over her shoulder, a smile still on her face. A frown replaced the smile as she hurried back to where Trixie stood, pointing.
    Then Honey uttered a sharp, short scream. Cutting through the blue waters of the Hudson was a triangular black fin! As the two girls, panic-stricken, clutched each other, the fin moved slowly to the right. It disappeared, then reappeared and moved to the left.
    ”You were right,” was all Honey could say at first. ”Oh, Trix, you’ve been right all along!” Trixie was much too puzzled to be happy at the sudden vote of confidence. ”I just don’t understand,” she muttered, stepping closer to the cliff.
    ”I don’t think I want to understand,” said Honey. ”Look at it move around, as if—as if it owns the river or something. It’s kind of—oh, how awful—like it’s waving to us! Oh, Trixie, what are we going to do?”
    ”Well, I think we’re safe up here,” Trixie retorted. ”I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound sarcastic. I don’t know what to do any more than you do, or don’t, I should say.” Suddenly she straightened up and threw a defiant look at Honey. ”Well, I can think of one thing to do. And that’s go back to Thea and apologize right now for doubting what she told us about sharks.”
    To Trixie’s surprise, Honey was quick to agree. ”You’re right,” she said. ”We do owe her an apology. No wonder she looked so unhappy when you told her what you’d found at the library.”
    ”Come on,” said Trixie, leading the way back down the path.
    The girls scrambled down the cliff as quickly as they could. They raced over to the rock that apparently was the writer’s favorite location for her research.
    Unexpectedly, Thea had disappeared. The girls cast their eyes in all directions, but there was no trace of her other than her red book, still lying in the weeds.
    Curious, Trixie crouched down to pick it up. A second later, she turned to Honey, a look of astonishment on her face.
    ”Gleeps, we were right, after all!” she exclaimed. ”Remember when we joked about Thea’s reading Alice In Wonderland? Do you believe it—she does!”
    ”What a coincidence,” marveled Honey, stepping closer for a look at the beautifully illustrated volume.
    Trixie was examining the page Thea had obviously been reading. A poem on the page was circled in red pencil. Scanning it, Trixie put her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. Then she read aloud, in tones of mounting horror:

”How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

”How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

    ”How strange that she’d be reading about jaws just when there’s a shark around!” Trixie darted a glance at Honey. ”Now,” she said triumphantly, ”don’t you agree with me that Thea Van Loon is mysterious?”

Growing Suspicions • 14

    HONEY WAS ABOUT TO DISAGREE, when Trixie noticed something else.
    ”And look what she was using for a bookmark! It’s a newspaper clipping from a Poughkeepsie paper.’’ Trixie ran her eyes down the short article. ”It’s about a retired couple... and how they dug up a fortune in gold in their backyard... enough to support them for the rest of their lives! Gleeps, Honey, if this isn’t the most mysterious thing—”
    Honey wavered. ”Well, a little strange, maybe” was as far as she would go. ”And I don’t know what Poughkeepsie has to do with it. Come on, Trix, we really shouldn’t be spying on her like this—”
    ”We’re not spying! Oh, woe! I just thought of something awful. Remember when Jim’s cousin, Juliana, fell down the cliff and we had to find her and rescue her? Remember—Juliana left a book behind her, too! It was a book of poems, I think, and we knew it meant that she was in some kind of trouble. Honey, do you suppose that Thea’s trying to tell us something by leaving this book behind?”
    ”I don’t think so,” Honey replied. ”Why, Thea barely knows us, and I think she wants to keep it that way.” She leaned