The Mystery of the Millionaire

embarrassment. At least this census taker had a sense of humor.
    “Do you have any guests staying with you at present?” he asked.
    Trixie shook her head. “Why do you need to know that? I mean, won’t you wind up counting people twice?”
    “We just want to make sure that we count everyone once,” the man said. “After all, if someone is visiting somewhere, they obviously aren’t at home, are they? So they might miss the census taker in their own area. If I can talk to them, I can get the information about their home residence and forward it to their area office. That will make the census as complete as we can make it.”
    Trixie nodded slowly, thinking about what the man had just said. “That seems very efficient,” she agreed, “but we don’t have any guests right now. Sorry.”
    “Oh, it makes no difference to me,” the man assured her. “I get paid by the hour, not by the name. Well, thank you,” he added, returning his pencil to its place above his ear.
    “You’re welcome,” Trixie said, then asked, “What’s a census for, anyway?”
    “For?” Again the man looked startled. “Oh, you mean what’s the information used for?” Seeing Trixie’s nod, he said, “Oh, all sorts of things. Planning for schools, for one thing. By knowing how many youngsters there are in an area, and their ages, school districts can tell whether they need to build more schools and hire more teachers, or start letting teachers go and closing schools down. A growing population means a need for more roads, more libraries, more swimming pools, all that sort of thing.”
    Again Trixie nodded slowly, thinking of what the man had told her. “That’s a good idea,” she said. “Thanks for explaining it.”
    Burt Anderson smiled. “No problem. As I said, I get paid by the hour. Good-bye.”
    “Good-bye,” Trixie said. She closed the door and started back upstairs to her room. Halfway up the stairs, she remembered the iced tea she’d been on her way to get when the doorbell had distracted her. She turned around and went back down the stairs and across the dining room toward the kitchen.
    As she passed the dining room window, she glanced out. She froze in her tracks as she saw the car in which the census taker was driving away—it was the same small, green car she’d seen twice before!

McGraw Asks for Help ● 10

    TRIXIE RAN toward the front door, then froze again as she realized that there was no chance of catching the green car. She looked around frantically, as if something in the house would give her a clue about what to do next.
    Finally, forcing herself to be calm, she walked to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of iced tea, and sank down at the table. She propped her elbows on the tabletop and clutched two handfuls of sandy curls. The census taker was the man in the green car. The man in the green car was, in all probability, a detective hired by Anthony Ramsey’s partner to find Laura. Those two things she knew, but she could not grasp the connection between them.
    Suddenly Trixie jumped up and slapped the tabletop with both hands. “Houseguests!” she shouted into the stillness. That was the link, she was sure. All of the other questions on the man’s list had been red herrings, meant to keep Trixie from getting suspicious when he asked the one he really wanted the answer to.
    “But what did he really expect to find out by asking, and why did he ask here?” Trixie said to herself. Surely he hadn’t thought that Trixie would say, “Laura Ramsey is staying with my friends the Wheelers at Manor House because her father has disappeared and she’s trying to find him.”
    Trixie thought for a few more moments, and then the answer came to her. “Of course!” she muttered to herself. “We started assuming, because of what Mark McGraw said, that the man in the green car had already matched Laura to her photograph. But that’s not necessarily true. At the lake, the man was far away. Laura looked different. Because her hair was wet, it was straight and seemed darker. Then, when he followed us to Sleepyside, he couldn’t have got a very good look at her, because she was on the passenger’s side of the car.
    “By posing as a census taker, he’s hoping to get somebody to mention her by name. Then he wouldn’t even need the photograph. He might not know that Laura was staying at the Wheelers’, because I’ve been along both times we saw him spying on us.”
    Trixie smiled to herself in