The Mystery of the Millionaire

to tuna salad. Abruptly, her depression vanished, being replaced with the satisfied feeling that came on those few occasions when she knew something that her older brothers didn’t.
    “Come on, Trixie, please tell us what happened this afternoon,” Brian coaxed. “You know you’re dying to tell us.”
    “Our secretive sibling is encouraging emulation of her own passion for sleuthing,” Mart said.
    Trixie looked at him in shock. She wasn’t surprised by the string of long words he’d just used. Those tongue twisters were Mart’s favorite form of communication. But now that he had spoken, she realized that he hadn’t spoken before, and that was rare indeed! Hiding her surprise, Trixie told her almost-twin, “You don’t need to pretend that I have to encourage you to get interested in mysteries. Everybody knows that you and Brian like solving mysteries every bit as much as Honey and I do. You just aren’t as good at finding them, that’s all.”
    Brian took a deep breath, mustering his last ounce of patience. He was the calmest and most methodical of the Belden youngsters, but those traits were strained by his sister and brother’s tendency to get sidetracked by bickering. “I, for one, will be glad to admit that I’m interested in mysteries. I’m especially interested in the mystery of where my younger sister spent the afternoon. Will you solve the mystery for me, or do I have to guess?”
    “Where I was isn’t a mystery—but there was a mystery where I was,” Trixie said enigmatically. Then, seeing the muscles in her oldest brother’s jaw begin to tense as they did on those few occasions when he was about to lose his temper, she added hurriedly, “Mr. Lytell called us to his store to meet Laura Ramsey. She’s the daughter of the owner of the wallet that Honey and I found this morning.”
    “He must have been very eager to have that wallet back, if he sent his daughter all the way to Sleepyside to fetch it,” Helen Belden said.
    Trixie shook her head vigorously, swallowing a slice of cucumber almost whole so she could hurry to explain. “That’s not it at all, Moms,” she said. “Laura Ramsey’s father doesn’t know he lost his wallet—I mean, she doesn’t know if he knows whether he lost it or not. I mean, he’s disappeared.”
    Mrs. Belden and her two sons stared at Trixie in confusion. Trixie opened her mouth to try again to explain, in a clearer way, about Anthony Ramsey, when Bobby’s piping voice interrupted her.
    “Did you see a man disappear today, Trixie?” he asked. “I saw a man disappear on television. He waved his arms, and then there was some smoke and a noise like ‘poof,’ and then he disappeared. Did you see that?”
    “No, Bobby,” Trixie said. “I mean, yes, I saw the man who disappeared on television, but I didn’t see this man disappear.”
    “Then how do you know he disappeared?” Bobby asked.
    Trixie rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I’m going to explain the whole thing, right now. Will you just stay quiet and listen?”
    “Sure,” Bobby said agreeably, as if he hadn’t interrupted in the first place.
    Trixie turned back to her parents and her two brothers. “Laura Ramsey’s father is a wealthy grocery-store owner. He built up a whole chain from just one little store. He’s been having problems with his partner, and last night he didn’t come home. Laura says that’s very unusual. She doesn’t know if her father’s been kidnapped, or if he had a nervous breakdown or something because he’s been so worried, or if his partner did away with him, or what.
    “She’s absolutely frantic with worry. That’s why she came to Sleepyside right away when Mr. Lytell called her. The wallet is the first trace of her father to turn up, and she wanted to find out as much as she could about it.”
    “I assume you announced your ability to assuage the situation in its totality,” Mart said sarcastically.
    Trixie shook her head. “I don’t know if I did or not. Translate that sentence for me and I’ll tell you.”
    “I think Mart means that the Belden-Wheeler detective agency has a new client,” Peter Belden said.
    “Oh.” Trixie paused for a moment, her forehead wrinkled in an attempt to fit Mart’s complex words to her father’s simple translation. Realizing that it was impossible, she shrugged and said, “We told her what we could about the wallet—when and where we found it, and how long we thought it might have been there. Now she’s