The Mystery of the Blinking Eye

A Strange Beginning ● 1

    TRIXIE BELDEN, fourteen, hurried from the taxicab that had taken her and her friends to Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Her sandy curls, damp from the heat of midsummer, clung tightly to her head, like a cap.
    “I’m just sure I heard the flight from Chicago announced,” she called back to her older brother Brian. “Hurry and pay the driver, please?”
    “I’ve already charged the cab to Daddy,” Trixie’s best friend Honey Wheeler said. “Daddy gave Jim and me a credit card. You don’t need to be in such a hurry, Trixie. Wait for the rest of us! It’ll take half an hour for the passengers to get up here after the plane has landed.”
    “Gosh, yes,” Trixie’s other brother, Mart, added. “The way you’re rushing, Trixie, anyone’d think some alien creatures had just landed from another planet.”
    “You know Bob and Barbara and Ned have never been in New York before,” Trixie said, but she slowed down. “I don’t want them to be worried if they don’t find us. Kennedy International Airport is acres bigger than the Des Moines airport, and it’s almost as busy as the one in Chicago, where they made connections.”
    “You seem to forget that Ned is the same age as Brian and I,” Honey’s adopted brother, Jim, said, laughing indulgently. He never really seemed upset at anything Trixie did or said. “A person that old can take care of himself.”
    “Yeah,” Mart said. “Bob and Barbara are my age, so they’re not babies, either.”
    “I suppose you’re right,” Trixie admitted a little shamefacedly, “but anyway, I want to be right on hand to welcome them. Isn’t it wonderful that they are finally coming to visit here?”
    “I’ll say it is,” Dan Mangan said. He was the only member of their club, Bob-Whites of the Glen, who hadn’t gone to Happy Valley Farm in Iowa at Easter time, so he didn’t know the Hubbell twins, Barbara and Bob, or Ned Schulz. “I’m glad I’m finally going to have a chance to meet them. Don’t think I wasn’t envious of the good times you had there when I was studying hard back in Sleepyside. Even if I did make up my grades so I could stay in the same class with Jim and Brian, the two brains, I still wish I could have been with you. Say, look at the bulletin board! You didn't hear the announcement of the plane’s arrival, Trixie. It’s going to be an hour late.” Dan settled on a bench and panted exaggeratedly. “You and all your hurrying, Trix!”
    “Boy, do we always follow Trixie like a flock of geese!” Mart said and plopped down beside Dan. “Why do we always pirouette to her peremptory Pied Piper piping?”
    “Just listen to him!” Diana Lynch said, her violet eyes widening. “Isn’t he smart?”
    Mart loved to use big words. He usually knew what he was saying, too. Trixie was proud of his knowledge, though she didn’t often let him know it.
    All of the group were pupils at Sleepyside Junior-Senior High, and their club, the Bob-Whites of the Glen, had been formed primarily to help with fundraising for various projects—UNICEF, disabled children, earthquake sufferers, and many private charities. The fact that these activities always seemed to go hand in hand with mysterious happenings was quite by accident. The same mysterious happenings offered Trixie and Honey an opportunity to get in some good practice for what they hoped would be their careers someday, the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency.
    Just now, though, with their friends from Iowa expected momentarily, the Bob-Whites had no objective in mind for the next few days other than to have a wonderful time together exploring in the big city of New York.
    The Iowans expected, after a few days in New York, to go on to Maine to visit relatives, then to stay awhile in Sleepyside.
    Mr. Wheeler, Honey and Jim’s father, was very wealthy and commuted daily to his business from their home, Manor House, in Sleepyside. He kept a large apartment in New York to entertain business friends and so he and Mrs. Wheeler could stay overnight when attending the theater or opera.
    Now he had turned the apartment over to the young people. Because there would be ten of them, he had arranged for additional quarters across the hall. Miss Trask, the Wheeler housekeeper, would stay in the apartment with the dual purpose of acting as chaperon and visiting her sister, who was an invalid in a New York hospital.
    “I wish we were going to be in Sleepyside instead of