The Mysterious Code

Trixie said worriedly. “She’s never been bothered
before, and she’s had all those beautiful things in her house for years. Do you
mind if I go over there for a while, Moms?”
    “No, I don’t think
you’d better go just now,” her mother said.
    “Oh, Moms, we just have to have that silver ready for the show. Are you bothered about what happened
there last night?”
    “Of course I am,”
her mother answered. “But then, Mrs. Vanderpoel said she had called Spider to
tell him about it.”
    “Then you don’t need
to worry if Spider’s on the job. May I go, Moms?”
    “I guess so—yes,”
her mother said.
    “I go, too,” Bobby
said.
    “I think not... not
till you’re entirely well, Bobby. That’s what the doctor said, you know... stay
inside till you are quite well.” Mrs. Belden brought the checkerboard out and
put it on the table. “We’ll play a game, Bobby,” she said.
    “I’m well now. I
don’t want to play checkers. I want to go visiting. I want to go with Trixie.
Nobody comes and plays with me. I’m tired of staying home,” Bobby wailed.
    “I don’t blame him,”
Mrs. Belden said to Trixie. “Don’t stay too long. Maybe you can do something to
amuse him when you come back.”
    “Where are Brian and
Mart?” Trixie asked. “Mart is able to amuse Bobby sometimes when no one else
can.”
    “They went to the
clubhouse to work on the furniture Mrs. Vanderpoel gave the B.W.G.’s,” Mrs.
Belden said.
    “That’s where I
should be,” Trixie said, “but I’ll be helping the show if I go and look at the
silver.”
    “Why don’t you
polish it while you’re there?” Mrs. Belden asked.
    “That’s an idea,
Moms. I’ll call Honey and Di and ask them to go with me.”
    The girls were glad
to be asked to do something aside from making dolls and aprons. They had a gay
assortment of both now, on the shelf at the clubhouse, ready for the show. Most
of them were made from remnants donated by the stores in Sleepyside.
    It wasn’t long after
the girls came down the hill that the three of them were walking along Glen Road to the byroad that led to Mrs. Vanderpoel’s yellow brick home filled with
antiques.
    “It’s a mystery
about that desk,” Diana said. “Who could possibly have left it outside the door
at night in the middle of the blizzard?”
    “Are you sure it
wasn’t there when you went into the old schoolhouse?” Honey asked. “It was
dark, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes, but I’m
positive it wasn’t there,” Trixie declared. “As positive as I am that I’m alive.
Why, I stumbled over the desk, practically, when I went out the door in the
morning. I couldn’t have missed it the night before.”
    “I could believe you
missed it easier than I can believe that somebody knew you were in that old
schoolhouse and went through the blizzard to return the desk,” Honey said. “It
just doesn’t make sense.”
    “What happened last
night doesn’t make sense, either,” Trixie said, and she told them about the
attempted robbery at Mrs. Vanderpoel’s home.
    “That proves,” Honey
said, “that thieves are on the trail of the antiques we are trying to get
together for our show. They’re the same ones that were after the desk. But,
jeepers, who brought it back?”
    “You figure it out,”
Diana said. "We haven’t said a word to anyone about the things in Mrs.
Vander-poel’s house. Jim said we shouldn’t talk about them, and I know that not
one of the B.W.G.’s has said a word. How did the news get out?”
    “Bobby had to sound
off to a boy who was shoveling snow the day we tried to take the desk home,”
Trixie said. Then she told them of her conversation with Bobby.
    “Gleeps, then that’s
why you were hijacked,” Diana said.
    “Exactly,” Trixie
agreed. "Thank heaven Mrs. Vanderpoel told Spider about last night.”
    “Yes,” Honey said.
“It isn’t safe for her to be there alone.”
    “She surely knows
how to handle a gun,” Trixie said, laughing. “Can’t you just see her telling
that burglar she’d shoot?”
    “I still don’t think
a woman of her age should be in that house alone,” Honey said. “It’s all our
fault, too, because she wants to help us with our show.”
     
    At Mrs. Vanderpoel’s
house, the girls collected the beautiful silver coffee service, the George III
tankards, and the antique silver flatware, handmade by eighteenth-century
silversmiths. The three girls spread newspapers on the kitchen table and
carried the silver there to be