The Mystery of the Uninvited Ghost

The Suitcase Mix-Up • 1

    NEITHER OF HER TEENAGE BROTHERS saw the flash of light at the end of the lane, but Trixie Belden did. She suddenly wailed, “She’s here! She’s in my room, and she’s doing it again. She’s spying on me!”
    “Huh?”
    “Who?”
    The boys’ muttered questions blended with the grumbling motor of Brian’s old car. Brian steered a careful course around the scooter Bobby had left near a lilac bush at the edge of the road. He flicked an anxious glance toward Trixie, who sat beside him. In the backseat, Mart strack a wooden Indian pose. He propped his chin on Trixie’s shoulder. Shading his eyes, he lowered his voice to its rock-bottom level. “If Belden maiden in distress show light to heap brave brothers—”
    “Aw, cut it out, Mart,” Brian said good-naturedly. “Can’t you see that Trix is about to blow her stack? And since Moms has been with Bobby all day, she needs peace and quiet, not another fight to referee.”
    “Who’s fighting?” Mart asked with a teasing grin, and his face could easily have been a reflection of Trixie’s, so alike were they in coloring, features, and bone structure.
    “I am!” Trixie snapped. In frustration, she pounded her knees with both fists, causing her short sandy curls to bounce against Mart’s nose. His loud sneeze wasn’t make-believe. “Now you’re covering me with germs I” she yelled. “What chance do I have?”
    “I know,” Brian interrupted in his best doctor-to-be manner. “You’re spied upon, teased, and completely unappreciated. But whom are you accusing of spying? Moms?”
    “Moms!” Trixie’s round blue eyes widened with shock. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t even suggest it! Why—why—Moms wouldn’t—I mean she couldn’t—”
    “Then who?” Brian asked. He stopped the car in a graveled drive that led to the door of a comfortable farmhouse—the house in which Beldens had lived for three generations. The lawns, flower and vegetable gardens, orchards, and fields of Crabapple Farm dozed in the summer sun. Reddy, the Irish setter, had raised his head from a nest of cool grass at the sound of the car. He woofed sleepily, subdued proof that Bobby, an energetic first grader, was not outside. Trixie herself was the only discordant element in the whole pleasant scene.
    Before answering Brian’s question, Trixie craned her neck to peer at the second-story windows of her room. Her eyes darkened as she pressed her lips in an angry line. “She’s up there,” Trixie declared. “I saw the curtains move!” With her best friend, Honey Wheeler, Trixie planned to become a detective and had already solved a number of baffling mysteries. When a curtain moved, she saw it. And when light reflected off a pair of binoculars pushed between those same curtains, she saw that, too.
    “Hallie Belden! That’s who!” Trixie declared, finally answering Brian.
    “Hallie?” both boys asked in one voice.
    Mart jumped out onto the gravel. The greeting forming on his lips was never given because Trixie delivered a sharp kick to his ankle that sent him hopping toward the back porch. “Must you resort to violence?” he asked plaintively as he rubbed his ankle. “I was only—”
    “I know what you were only,” Trixie retorted. “Before we do all the meeting and greeting that’s expected of us, we’ve got to have a plan of action. Trouble on two feet—that’s Hallie Belden!”
    “Since when?” Brian asked. Pocketing his ignition key, he walked past Trixie for a quick look at Mart’s ankle. “You’ll live” was his professional opinion. Then he faced Trixie, waiting to hear an explanation of her accusation.
    Trixie gulped down a lump of misery. All the memories she had ever registered of her cousin from Idaho tumbled through her head like marbles in a tin can. Mr. Belden and his brother insisted that their daughters were too much alike to ever be friends. But Trixie was equally sure they were “not one smidgen alike!”
    If Trixie couldn’t sort out her own feelings about Hallie, how could she explain them to her brothers? She hadn’t even told them Hallie was coming, though she’d known it since the afternoon a week ago when she’d overheard her mother talking longdistance with Hallie’s mother.
    Dangerously close to tears, Trixie said stiffly, “Let’s go meet her.” There was some resentment in her voice. After all, Brian and Mart weren’t just her brothers; they were fellow members of a very select