The Mystery of the Memorial Day Fire

steps and knocked on the front door.
    Celia let her in and told her that Honey was in the den. Trixie shouted another “Thanks!” and went to find her best friend.
    “Nick Roberts’s father has been arrested,” Trixie said as she burst in on Honey. “Mart and Brian and I just came from the police station.”
    “Arrested!” Honey let her sewing project drop to her lap. “Oh, Trixie, no! Can they do that?”
    “They did it,” Trixie said grimly. Briefly, she told Honey about the phone call from Nick, the conversation with Pat Murphy, and the intrusiveness of Jane Dix-Strauss. “Pat Murphy handled her beautifully, but Nick was so afraid of talking to her that he waited for us out in the rain. Poor guy - if I’d known, I never would have wasted time visiting his father’s store.”
    “You visited the store?” Honey asked. “I thought it had burned down.”
    “It did. Well, it didn’t burn down exactly. It sort of burned out. The windows and doors are all boarded over, and the alley is filled with rubble. There’s not much to see, really. Oh — except I did find this.” Trixie reached into her pocket, took out the button, and tossed it at Honey, who caught it handily.
    “JDS,” Honey read.
    “Huh-uh, it’s JSD,” Trixie corrected her.
    “No, it isn’t, Trixie. In a monogram, the last initial goes in the middle, in a larger size, and the first two initials go on either side. So the monogram on this button says, ‘JDS.’”
    “Jane Dix-Strauss!’’ Trixie exclaimed. “I’ll bet this button belongs to her.”
    “Those are her initials,” Honey agreed. “They’re probably a lot of other people’s, though.”
    “She has a blazer with gold buttons about this size. She was wearing it the night of the fire. I wasn’t close enough to see if there was a monogram, but — Oh, my gosh!” Trixie’s eyes widened. “Jane Dix-Strauss was wearing a blazer with gold buttons the night of the fire. I found this gold button with her initials on it at the scene of the fire! Honey, do you remember whether she was missing any buttons when she talked to us on Main Street?”
    “I didn’t notice. In fact, I didn’t even notice the gold buttons. I’m not as observant as you are — even if I am a lot more interested in clothes. But, Trixie, you can’t possibly think Jane Dix-Strauss started that fire! She wouldn’t have any reason to. Besides, you just said she was on Main Street when the fire started. So she couldn’t have been in a store off Main Street at the same time.”
    “Mr. Roberts has been arrested for starting that fire, and we saw him before we saw her,” Trixie pointed out.
    “All right. She could have started the fire. But why would she?” Honey asked. “If this is her button, I’m sure she lost it at the scene of the fire doing the same thing you were — investigating.” She held the button out to Trixie.
    “I suppose so,” Trixie admitted, taking the button and dropping it back into her pocket. “I know Brian and Mart would say she’s only doing her job, but she doesn’t seem to care who she hurts while she’s doing it. Well, I can’t talk any more right now. I promised Moms I’d get tons of work done today, and the morning’s already gone. Can we meet at the clubhouse tonight? All the Bob-Whites, I mean? We priced the materials for the summer repairs today, and we need to talk about what to do next.”
    “I don’t have anything planned,” Honey said. “I’m sure Jim doesn’t, either. We’ll check with Miss Trask and let you know.”
    “Super,” Trixie said. “Would you call Dan and Di, too? I’ll be in charge of the snacks, since you brought them last time.”
    With that agreed to, the girls said good-bye. Back home, Trixie quickly told her brothers about the meeting and got their mother’s permission to go. Then she pitched into work. First on the agenda was the garden, where seemingly millions of tiny weeds had poked through the earth since the previous week. Tiny as they were, they had to be pulled, since the plants in the garden were even tinier.
    After the garden was weeded, Trixie scrubbed as much of the dirt from her hands as she could, ate a quick lunch, then took the dust rags into the living room.
    As always, she paused to admire the painting her mother had done years before, of a tree-lined stream in winter. Now she paused, too, before the pen-and-ink drawing of Crabapple Farm that she had bought from Nick Roberts at the art fair. The