The Mystery of the Missing Heiress

board. And we’re not going back till we see what those men down there are doing to the marsh.”
    “I’m sorry,” Mart said, shamefaced. “When I get scared, I.... Let’s go find out what’s up.” Carefully they inched their way down, chain-fashion, hand in hand, loosening outcropping pebbles, and rejoicing in the thrill of this lesser danger.
    Near the water’s edge, men busy with sump pumps seemed to be drawing up samples of sand and vegetation for testing.
    “What goes on?” Jim asked.
    “Some outfit from Canada is going to build a factory here,” one of the men said. “They’re going to drain the swamp.”
    “That’s been tried many times before,” Jim said. The listening Bob-Whites nodded.
    “It wouldn’t work,” Brian asserted. “There’s no bottom to the marsh.”
    “They’ve found one now, kid,” the man answered. “Some engineers came up with a new way of doing it. There’s been enough publicity about the project. If you’d read the papers, you wouldn’t have to ask so many questions and interrupt our work—you and a dozen others.”
    “Gosh! What’ll we do for stuff for botany?” Mart wondered. “Where will the migrating birds light?”
    “Questions! Questions! Questions!” the man snorted. “You’d better get out of our way... go back up to where you came from. Read the answers to your questions in the newspapers. Say,” he added as they quickly crossed the road to the path, “aren’t you going to take the old guy with you?” Mart turned. “What old guy?”
    “That old guy there. He asked more questions than you kids. Isn’t he with you?”
    Mart shook his head. “There’s no old guy with us.
    Trixie, though, had trained her keen eyes to hunt out details other people missed. She had to, to be a good detective.
    Far up the road she saw a man fade into the shrubbery and out of sight.
    A sense of something evil, something frightening, set her to shivering, though the day was warm and sunny.

A Mysterious Phone Call • 2

    TRIXIE AND HONEY lingered, whispering, as the boys began the climb back up the path.
    “You looked scared to death,” Honey said under her breath. “What happened?”
    “It was that man - the old man - didn't you see him?”
    “No. I thought that workman was seeing things. Did you see someone?”
    Trixie gave Honey a little shove to start her up the path. “Gleeps, if you’d only keep your eyes open! I was sure you saw him, too, and maybe could tell me who he was.”
    She had raised her voice, and Jim, trudging ahead, overheard. “I saw him just as he disappeared, but, gosh, Trixie, he gave me a funny feeling—as if there were something I should know about him.”
    “Forget the spooky guy,” Brian said. “The only thing that gives me the heebies is that I’m just in the middle of a study of herbs. I’ve never found any of them outside that marsh—tansy, boneset, bergamot, pennyroyal.”
    “I never even heard of them,” Jim said.
    “Not many people have today,” Brian explained, puffing as they neared the top. “They were used by our great-grandmothers for medicine. I think they’re pretty neat today. I want to do some research with them. I’ll bet it’s the only place in the United States where you can find them still growing wild.”
    Jim laughed. “I’ll take that bet. There’s plenty of marshland left, even here around Sleepyside. If you keep on this way, Brian, you’ll get your M.D. before you even start pre-med.”
    “Then I can be the doctor in residence in your home for orphan boys.”
    I wish I had some sort of career to work toward all the time,” Diana sighed, her lovely face worried and a little red from climbing. “Honey and Trixie are so sure they want to be detectives. Mart’s so sure he wants to be a farmer, Brian a doctor, and Dan a New York policeman. Jim has had his mind set on that home for orphan boys ever since his great-uncle left him that money. I used to think I wanted to be a stewardess, but now I’m not sure I want to be anything—except a mother, maybe.”
    “We all want to be that,” Honey was quick to say. “That’s a career. Look at Trixie’s mother. She mothers all of us. She’s super!”
    Trixie saw Honey’s face sadden. Her own mother was away so much of the time on business trips with her father. There was Miss Trask, of course. She had been Honey’s teacher at Briar Hall, before Honey came to Sleepyside and enrolled in public school. Now Miss Trask did a wonderful job