The Mystery of the Castaway Children

a grown man,” Trixie countered. “Besides, don’t you remember? Eileen said Davy broke some piggy banks. Dimes and pennies are piggy-bank food!”
    “But the kidnap note,” Honey said earnestly. “We might be trailing a grown man, and a dangerous one at that.”
    Trixie gulped. “Well, let’s take these things to Sergeant Molinson,” she said, dropping the coins into the bottle. “He beat us to the horseshoe, but these discoveries should even the score.”
    “Oh, Trixie, you talk like this is a basketball game. This could be a life-and-death matter!”
    “I know, I know,” replied her friend. “That’s why it’s so important that we don’t blow it by missing clues or something.” Then she scowled with exasperation. “Now, how am I going to swim with this bottle?”
    “Carry it in one hand and swim with the other,” Honey said.
    “And make the sergeant go purple with rage? No, I’m sure I’ve ruined some fingerprints already. I’ll have to make a raft.”
    Trixie searched through the ground duff—the leaves, twigs, needles, dried grass, and fallen branches—until she came across a scrap of the blade of an oar, dry and white with age. “Instant raft,” she announced.
    Honey had waded back into the lake, and Trixie soon followed, carefully pushing the oar with its cargo.
    Once back at the boathouse, they decided to examine it. Honey unlocked the door, and together they stood just inside it. The shelves were stocked with summer sports equipment and various hardware items. Nothing seemed out of place. There were no tracks on the floor, and the locked windows didn’t seem to have been tampered with.
    Trixie let out a sigh. Half of her was relieved that the Wheeler property hadn’t been invaded and that no one was likely to jump out of hiding. However, the sight of Davy Dodge in the boathouse would have been welcome.
    Honey locked up the boathouse, and both girls put on their sneakers and started pedaling toward Crabapple Farm. Trixie carried the bottle and coins in her basket. She glanced back and noticed that Jim’s huge beach towel was draped on the towel line. “We should have put that inside,” she commented.
    “Next time,” Honey said. “It’s okay where ... it is.”
    As they rode, the girls kept their eyes open and were soon rewarded by the sight of a pile of branches, leaves wilted, in the shape of a lopsided tepee. With a surge of excitement, Trixie flipped down the kickstand of her borrowed bicycle and ran across a glade sheltered by a great oak. Something white was visible underneath those branches. She bent down and yanked it out.
    “Aw, just an old rag—” she began, then looked more closely. “Why, it’s part of a T-shirt. It’s the half that matches Dodgy’s diaper!”
    Honey caught up to her and agreed. “If we are following a kidnapper, he’s the oddest one I ever heard of,” Honey sighed as the two of them scouted the area around the oak tree. “You’d think he’d have stayed in a place where he could take care of a baby, instead of wandering around in the forest with a pony and no diapers.”
    “ ‘Wandering’ is right,” affirmed Trixie. “From the clues we’re finding, it seems like whoever we’re following is traveling around in circles— no direction whatsoever. This tepee is the weirdest clue yet. It’s too small for Davy—or even for Dodgy.”
    “I don’t know about that,” said Honey, shuddering. “All I can think about is germs. How on earth could Dodgy have survived ?”
    “He must be a stronger baby than he seems,” Trixie said.
    “How could someone expect Dodgy to survive without supplies and without care?” Honey fretted.
    “He didn’t think,” Trixie said, then flushed. The words were all too familiar. She heard variations of them practically every day of her life from her parents and her brothers. She even heard them from her friends if she plunged in over her head while working on a mystery. Was she looking for someone like herself, someone who acted first, then did the best he could to patch things up?
    Or was she looking for a hardened criminal, someone vicious enough to abuse a tiny baby, kidnap a boy and his pony, and terrorize two young parents?

Twenty Thousand Dollars • 9

    AFTER THEIR SEARCH had revealed no recognizable prints around the oak, the two girls stood close together, listening to the lazy midday sounds of insects, birds, and creaks of the forest as it shifted its weight in millions of