The Mysterious Code

thought
of the cozy Belden kitchen. Then her mind had tamed to little children in
far-off countries, little children who didn’t even have the grain and water she
and Jim and Brian had had to eat.
    “I hope with all my heart
that our UNICEF benefit is a success, Moms,” she said. “We’ll have to work
harder than ever now. I certainly do wish everyone could have breakfast like
this.”
    “Don’t everybody?”
Bobby asked, his mouth full of buttered toast and jam.
    “No, lamb,” Trixie
said.
    “Why?”
    “It’s a little hard
for you to understand, Bobby,” she said. “Someday you will. When I think,” she
said, “about all the people who don’t have enough to eat, and how hungry we
were in just the short time we were without food....”
    “I don’t even want
to think about it,” her mother said.
    “I do,” Bobby said.
“I wish I’d been there. I’d have caught that burglar who bringed back the desk.
I’ll bet it was the same one who stealed it from us, Trixie. I’ll bet it was
that big boy.”
    “What big boy?” Trixie
asked.
    “That big boy who
shoveled snow—you know, Trixie, at Mrs. Vanderpoel’s house. Brom saw him. He
runned away.”
    “Brom ran away?”
Trixie asked, puzzled. “Why would Brom want to run away?”
    “Brom didn’t run
away, stupid!” Bobby said. “Bobby!” Mrs. Belden warned.
    “It was that big boy
who runned away, Trixie,” Bobby said. “The one who asked me how much the desk
costed.”
    “What?” Trixie
asked. “What did you tell him, Bobby?”
    “I told him a
hunnerd dollars!”
    “That isn’t true. It
isn’t worth that much. That doesn’t matter, though. What did the big boy look
like?”
    “He looked like a
big boy,” Bobby said. “An’,” he boasted, “I told him Mrs. Vanderpoel had lots
and lots of other things she was goin’ to give the Bob-Whites, trillions of
dollars’ worth.”
    Trixie left the
dishes she had started to wash and went over to Bobby’s chair.
    “What did the big
boy say then?” she asked seriously.
    “He didn’t say
anything,” her little brother answered. “He just runned away, I told you.”
    “What do you think
of that, Moms?” Trixie asked.
    “I don’t think a
thing about it,” her mother answered. “And please don’t think about it
yourself. I can see that detective gleam in your eye. After all the worry I’ve
had about the blizzard, I’d appreciate a little calm and quiet. It was nothing
but idle curiosity on the boy’s part. Forget it.” That was an impossible
prescription for Trixie. Try as hard as she could, she couldn’t recall the face
of the boy shoveling Mrs. Vanderpoel’s walks the day the desk was stolen. It
was a good thing, she thought, that she had never told Mrs. Vanderpoel what
happened to her and Bobby on the way home that day. Now the desk was back, as
good as ever, and what difference did it make where it had been in the
meantime? Spider had considered it a joke. Maybe he thought Tad had taken it.
No, Tad didn’t know the woods as well as she and Brian and Jim did. He would
never have been out in that blizzard. “It’s a mystery to me,” Trixie said to
herself, “a real mystery.”
    Just then the
telephone rang. Mrs. Belden answered it.
    Now and then she
would say, “Goodness, is that so?” or “What did you do then?”
    “It was Mrs.
Vanderpoel,” Mrs. Belden said when she finally dropped the receiver into its
cradle.
    “Oh, I know,” Trixie
said, “she told me to come over and look at the George III silver things she
had taken from her grandfather’s chest. She said if I wanted to polish it, we
could show it in our antique show. I guess I’d better go over there now.”
    “That wasn’t what
she wanted, Trixie,” her mother said soberly. “Last night someone tried to
break into Mrs. Vanderpoel’s home.”
    “Oh, dear, I hope
they didn’t scare her too much.”
    “It didn’t frighten
her a bit,” Mrs. Belden said. “I think it was the other way around. She has
real Dutch courage. She said she just took down her father’s rifle and stood in
the full light of that halfglass door and shouted, ‘If you come one step
nearer, I’ll blow the top of your head off!’ ”
    “Oh, Moms, did he
scrammed then?” Bobby asked, all ears and eyes.
    “I forgot you were
here,” his mother answered. “Of course he ‘scrammed,’ as you say. Wouldn’t
you?” She ruffled the hair on Bobby’s head.
    “It’s all because of
our antique show, I know,”