The Mystery of the Headless Horseman

A Mysterious Disappearance • 1

    FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD TRIXIE BELDEN stood on the school steps, looked up at the sky, and groaned. “I knew it!” she declared to her best friend, Honey Wheeler. “It’s going to rain. There’s going to be a storm, and it’s going to ruin all our plans.”
    Honey’s hazel eyes twinkled. “It isn’t either going to rain,” she said. “The forecast for today and tomorrow is for clear skies and sunny weather. So you can relax.”
    “Is that so!” Trixie said, brushing back the unruly sandy curls from her forehead. She pointed to the fleecy white clouds floating gently above the faraway Catskill Mountains. “Then what,” she demanded, “do you call those things over there—marshmallows?”
    Honey chuckled and tucked her hand through her friend’s arm. Honey’s real name was Madeleine, though no one had called her that for a very long time. She had earned her nickname because of her golden brown hair and sweet disposition. She was the same age as Trixie, though taller and slimmer, and was Trixie’s closest friend and her partner in many adventures. Both girls loved mysteries and had solved several together. Someday they hoped to open and operate the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency.
    On this fall day, though, the only mystery on Honey’s mind was how to hurry Trixie onto the school bus that was waiting to take them home. It was Friday. All the teachers at Sleepyside Junior-Senior High School had to attend a conference that afternoon in White Plains, New York, so their students had been released from school at midday.
    “You can scowl at the sky later, Trix,” Honey coaxed. “Remember, we still have chores to do today if we want to get time off to help at the charity bazaar tomorrow. It isn’t often that school lets out early. Come on. Let’s go!”
    Trixie sighed and allowed Honey to urge her down the school steps and out to the road. “I expect you’re right about the weather,” she said slowly. “It’s just that I keep on thinking that something’s about to happen—something to do with the bazaar tomorrow.”
    Honey stopped. “A good something or a bad something?”
    Trixie’s usually merry blue eyes were troubled. “That’s just it,” she confessed. “I don’t know.”
    “Oh, what, pray tell, can be puzzling yon peabrained, tangle-haired female now?” a teasing voice from somewhere above them asked. “Can it be that she is, at this very moment, pondering the mystery of the procrastinating Bob-Whites?” It was freckle-faced Mart, Trixie’s “middle” brother. He was grinning at them through an open window of the bus.
    Trixie frowned. “I’ve told you before, Mart Belden, that my hair isn’t tangled. It’s just naturally curly like yours. And I am not a pea-brain!”
    “I should say not!” Honey exclaimed loyally. “Why, just think of all the trouble Trixie has gotten us out of. If it hadn’t been for her quick thinking, my brother Jim never would have been saved from the fire when his great-uncle’s mansion burned. And who, I’d like to know, solved the mystery of the missing grasshopper when Hoppy, the weather vane, was stolen from the roof of the Town Hall?”
    Honey paused to take a breath, but it looked as though she was all ready to go on and on.
    Trixie smiled but waved a warning hand toward the rapidly filling bus. “Hush,” she said. “We shouldn’t talk about the adventures of the Bob-Whites where everyone can hear. Although we’re not exactly a secret club, I don’t think we need to tell the whole school about the stuff we do.”
    Mart laughed and threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I was about to give up, anyway,” he said in a lower voice. “And to prove it, I won’t even mention some of the more pulchritudinous mysteries Ms. Great Brain has led us into.”
    Trixie was accustomed to Mart’s use of big words, which he loved to use but could never spell. This time she knew exactly how to put a stop to his teasing.
    “For your information, Mart Belden,” she said airily, “the word pulchritudinous means ‘endowed with physical beauty.’ I know because we had to define it in English class yesterday. So thank you for the compliment, my dear little twin brother.”
    Mart’s face reddened with irritation. If there was anything he hated, it was being called Trixie’s twin. He was fifteen, eleven months older than his sister, but enough like her in appearance to cause people to gush over him and tell him they