The Mystery of the Queen's Necklace

ready on the second story, and then there’s a twin bedroom opening off the rose garden.”
    “Oh, Miss Trask, could Honey and I have that one?” cried Trixie. “It sounds fantastic!”
    “What do you think?” Miss Trask asked McDuff, who had joined them in the driveway. “Should we go ahead and look at the rooms?”
    “Anything ye say, Marge,” he told her.
    Anne showed them the rooms herself. Andrew Hart and the gloomy woman in black were nowhere to be / seen.
    The bedrooms turned out to be as colorful as the entrance area. It was hard to believe that their forbidding host had authorized this imaginative interior decoration. The dormer rooms were done in different color schemes—a blue and gray one for Miss Trask, green and gold for McDuff, and a medley of reds for the boys.
    “When Mother sees how gorgeous this place is, she’ll probably go home and redo our entire house,” said Honey with a little sigh. Manor House could be hard to live in when Mrs. Wheeler was on one of her redecorating sprees.
    The loveliest room of all was the Rose Room. It had its own separate entrance from the large garden behind the mansion—a garden with pebbled paths and vine-covered bowers, a maze of hedges, and roses, roses, roses! The room was mostly white, with white furniture and white-canopied beds, but the wallpaper was covered with pink roses, and there were bowls full of pink blossoms fresh-picked from the garden outside.
    “You’re our first guests,” Anne said, “although we do have a number of bookings for next week.”
    “Then you can practice on us,” Trixie laughed, and Anne smiled back at her. She had a lovely smile.
    “We’ll run back to town now and get our things,” Miss Trask said.
    “Would you like dinner tonight?” Anne asked. “I’m afraid my father won’t be here. He’s off to the theater.”
    “Oh, no,” Miss Trask assured her. “We’ll eat in Stratford tonight. And we’re hoping to attend the play tomorrow night.”
    “Jolly good,” said Anne. “We serve dinner at six for the theatergoers. As you probably know, the price of the room includes dinner and breakfast.”
    And the prices Anne quoted, agreed the group once they were back in the Maroon Saloon, were so reasonable that they would have been foolish to stay anywhere else.
    Overjoyed, Trixie slouched down in the backseat. Not only are we staying in what is probably the prettiest house in the whole country , she thought, suppressing a howl of glee, but we're also in a perfect position to really get cracking on our case. Now , if we could just do something about McDuff....

    Immediately after breakfast the following morning, Trixie called an emergency meeting of the Bob-Whites.
    “We’re all chiefs and no Indians at this meeting,” commented Jim. He and Trixie were copresidents of the club; Honey was vice-president, and Mart was secretary-treasurer. “Too bad Brian, Di, and Dan can’t be here. Anyway, what’s this all about, Trix? I understand we’re here to save Miss Trask from a fate worse than death.”
    “This is no time for jokes,” said Trixie, her blue eyes flashing. “I wish the others could be here, too, but we can tell them everything when we get home. We have to act fast! Did you hear McDuff at breakfast this morning? Can you believe all those icky things he says to Miss Trask? I told you, I just don’t trust that man!”
    “You were worried he was going to steal our money,” Mart said lightly, “and now you’re worried he’s going to steal our chaperon.”
    “It’s not funny,” Trixie insisted. “Maybe it’s not so bad for you, Mart, but what about Honey and Jim? And what about Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler? What are they all going to do without Miss Trask? How can we sit back and let this happen? After all they’ve done for us!”
    “Are you saying she’s going to elope with Mr. McDuff to Scotland at the end of the week?” Jim asked. “That’s pretty fast work, even for a con man— if in fact that’s what he is. And besides, Miss Trask isn’t the type to get conned that easily.”
    “She’s only having a little fun for a change,” Mart added. “And who are we to stop her? What do you think, Honey?”
    “I don’t know what to think.” Honey was almost in tears. “She isn’t acting a bit like herself, and I don’t want her going off to Scotland or wherever. But I don’t want to be selfish, either. I—I guess we ought to be happy for her.”
    “Honey, you’re being so romantic,”