The Mystery of the Uninvited Ghost

in people-watching. She stopped at the first information booth she saw and asked, “Where do I pick up freight from Idaho?”
    A perfectly groomed clerk told her, “Ramp four. Trixie lagged behind Jim and Hallie. A family moved ahead of her. At that moment, she faced the traveler at the nearest ticket window. She stopped in her tracks, letting Jim and Hallie go on without her. There was something so intriguingly familiar about the man that she crowded closer till she almost jostled his elbow. He was asking about an upstate flight schedule of the locally owned airline, known as the milk run because it hopped from one small airport to another. The clerk reached for a ticket and prepared to fill in the blanks where information was needed. Just then, the man looked back into Trixie’s face. It was Miss Ryks’s nephew.
    “I’ve changed my mind,” he told the clerk abruptly and quickly moved away, disappearing into a stream of people arriving from a north-south flight.
    Taking care not to call attention to herself, Trixie moved away from the ticket window. She stationed herself on the far side of the flow of travelers to watch for Jim and Hallie. Even so, they startled her by returning from an unexpected direction. Jim carried a large brown cowhide suitcase exactly like the one Bobby had opened. Hallie was birthday-morning excited. “Clothes 1” she cried. “Clothes that fit me!”
    Jim grinned at this tall girl who could look him nearly straight in the eye.
    “Good,” said Trixie absentmindedly, still thinking about the man she’d just seen. All the way to the car, she kept a sharp lookout for Miss Ryks’s nephew. Why had he changed his plans when he saw her? He’d never seen her before—she’d seen him.
    Without being reminded, Jim turned at the Crabapple Farm mailbox. He stopped the station wagon about halfway up the lane. “Is this spot okay?”
    “I think,” Trixie told him, “that this is just about the place where Reddy left the lane and dashed into the bushes. Were looking for any sign that something as heavy as a human being ran through here.” For some time, Jim, Hallie, and Trixie moved in and out of little cleared areas in the “wild garden” that hid the Belden lawn and flower gardens from Glen Road. At last, Trixie found a few wilted leaves on some twigs.
    The three followed a trail of wilted and broken vegetation. Because of the time that had passed, some of the bushes had begun to revive, and the clues were hard to follow. Trixie’s stubborn determination drove them on. It was Hallie who found a clear footprint on the soft shoulder of the road.
    “Well,” Trixie said, “now we know that Reddy chased a person, and it wasn’t a girl.”
    “Unless she had very big feet,” Jim said. “See? The shoe size is bigger than mine, so the man’s probably taller than I am.”
    “Heavier, too,” Trixie said.
    “Let’s check,” Jim said. He walked several yards away from the road, then made a headlong dash across the shoulder. He left a print near the one that Hallie had found. Trixie sat on her heels to measure the depths of the two prints with a weed stem. The stem bent, but her eyes told her that the first print was deeper than the one Jim had made.
    Several yards up the road, they found a place where the man might have stepped out of the lane of traffic to let a car pass. He had walked toward the Wheeler mailbox while Jim had driven in the opposite direction. Hallie decided he must have known the area.
    “Not necessarily,” Jim returned. “He could have hidden after Reddy quit barking. That would have given him a chance to see which way we were going.” As they walked back to the house to drop off the suitcase, Hallie reminded Trixie and Jim that Dan had been in the wagon and not in the bushes. “Thank goodness,” Trixie answered, sounding prayerful.
    On the way back to Manor House, Trixie fretted, “I wish we knew why Dan ran away and where he is.” Jim was sensible. “Whatever his reason, he’s one worried young man. He knows that somebody took that ring from the desk and that he’s under suspicion. It looks like the Belden-Wheeler partnership and the Bob-Whites have a job to do.”
    “I suppose that lets me out,” Hallie sighed.
    Trixie knew that Hallie liked Dan and wanted to help. “Of course it doesn’t let you out,” she declared. “The Bob-Whites will issue you a guest card the way they do at the country club.” Jim, the Bob-White copresident,