The Mystery of the Uninvited Ghost

We ought to have some plan before we knock on the door.”
    “I’ll think of something,” Trixie promised.
    As it happened, Trixie wasn’t forced to invent a reason for calling. No one answered the door. Trixie and Honey walked back to the desk. Business was slow, and having solved his puzzle, the desk clerk had plenty of time to talk. “How was Miss Ryks?”
    “She wasn’t,” Trixie replied in a frustrated tone of voice. “She didn’t answer her door.”
    After a bike ride on the twenty-first of July, it was easy to look tired enough to be invited to rest in the lobby, and Trixie and Honey managed it. They sat side by side on chairs near the desk and waited for the Teed deliveryman.
    “What do you expect to find out, Trixie?” Honey whispered.
    “I don’t know,” Trixie said softly. “It just seems to me that this is our last chance to check on that wheelchair before it drops out of sight like that Oliver Tolliver. There’s something fishy about an empty wheelchair and a stolen wedding invitation. I have a funny feeling!”
    Honey knew about Trixie’s feelings and respected them. They weren’t strange intuitions or wild hunches. Trixie was a down-to-earth person, keenly aware of information gathered by all of her five senses—plus that extra sense called horse sense. When Trixie had a feeling, it meant that her brain hadn’t finished running all the information through its mental computer.
    Honey rubbed the carpet with one foot. She tried to think of some plausible reason why a stranger would take a wedding invitation from a mailbox and push an empty wheelchair down Glen Road on a hot July afternoon. Trixie was right. There was something fishy about the combination.
    Suddenly Honey clutched Trixie’s arm. “Miss Ryks!”
    “Who?Where?” Trixie stared about the lobby.
    “The name!” Honey said excitedly. “Miss Ryks! That’s the person who called Hans and asked to be included on the guest list. Remember?”
    “You’re right,” Trixie gasped. “Her wheelchair’s missing—and she needs a wedding invitation.” That was too much of a coincidence for Trixie, and she said so.
    Honey argued, “We’ve worked together long enough to know coincidence plays a big part in solving a mystery, Trixie Belden.”
    “Gleeps, Honey! Coincidence usually takes us down a dead-end street.” Trixie’s attention bounced in another direction. “Wasn’t Miss Trask to call Miss Ryks? What did she find out? Is Miss Ryks a friend of the Maasdens or the Vorwalds?”
    “Miss Trask tried to call her, but she wasn’t in.”
    “Well, that solves one problem,” Trixie said cheerfully. “Now we know what we can say if she does answer that door. We can say we have mutual friends —Juliana Maasden and Hans Vorwald.”
    “Yes-s,” Honey breathed. “That’ll work.”
    The air conditioner was on, but in the lobby, it managed only to move hot air from one place and deposit it in another. Trixie pushed her short mop of curls up from the nape of her neck and sighed. “I wish that deliveryman would come before my brains melt.”
    They didn’t have long to wait. The man came through the door, notebook in hand. At the desk, he thumbed his visored cap back from his brow and asked, “Ya got a Miss Ryks here, room two-fourteen? Well, I got this wheelchair, see, and I don’t want no mix-up. If it ain’t too much bother, I’d kinda like you to witness that I delivered this pesky contraption. Okay?”
    “Okay with me,” the desk clerk said. “Side door.” With no loss of time, the talkative young driver appeared at the service entrance, pushing a wheelchair. The clerk left the desk and took him down the intersecting hall to room 214. Trixie started to follow, but Honey held her back. “We can’t snoop, Trixie.”
    “Who’s snooping?” Trixie argued. “Anybody can walk down a hall! Besides, the clerk knows we tried to see Miss Ryks. Come on. We’ll stay out of sight.”
    “We know the wheelchair is being delivered. Isn’t that enough?” Honey begged.
    “I want to see it with my own eyes,” Trixie said with finality, and Honey gave in. Both girls stationed themselves in the service hall within sight and hearing of room 214.

Bare Cupboards • 8

    THERE WAS A WAIT at the door of room 214. The clerk knocked several times while the driver fluttered pages of his notebook. The door was opened by a barefoot young man wearing hiphugger jeans and a stretched-out T-shirt. Stringy brass-colored hair hung