The Mystery of the Vanishing Victim

back his chair.
    “Why don’t you four go into the den?” Mrs. Belden said. “Your father and I will clear the dishes.”
    “Can I go to the den, too?” Bobby Belden asked.
    “No, Bobby, I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Honey said. “Why don’t you go up to your room and decide which two stories you want me to read to you after the sergeant leaves?”
    Bobby frowned for a moment, but he found it hard to be stubborn in the face of Honey’s promise. “Okay,” he said, his frown turning to a broad smile.
    “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?” Trixie said as she and Honey walked to the den. “If you give him that much time to pick out two stories, he’s going to find at least a dozen that he ‘really, really’ wants to hear.”
    “I’ll gladly read him a dozen stories, if I have time,” Honey said.
    Trixie shook her head. “It doesn’t seem fair that I, instead of you, wound up with a little brother. You’re so much better with Bobby than I am.”
    “Well, that’s at least partly because I don’t see him every single day,” Honey reminded her.
    In the den, Mart and Brian had already taken their places on the couch. Sergeant Molinson was standing in front of the fireplace. For a moment, Trixie wondered if he was going to remain standing while he questioned them, like a detective in a mystery novel. But the sergeant sat down right after Trixie and Honey did.
    “My first question,” the sergeant began, “is whether anything ever happens in this town that you young people aren’t involved in.”
    Trixie felt herself beginning to blush, and she stared down at her shoes. It was true that, time after time, when Sergeant Molinson was finishing unraveling a case, he found the Bob-Whites ahead of him. “At least this time you can’t accuse us of trying to keep anything from you,” Trixie pointed out. “We called the police station immediately after the accident.”
    “I’m very grateful,” the sergeant said wryly. “It was nice of you to want to share this case with my humble department. Now, would you mind repeating your story about what happened last night?” Brian, grinning at the sergeant’s gibe, began the story. He sobered as he described the green van. “It plowed right into the stranger and kept right on going,” he concluded.
    “About the van,” Sergeant Molinson said. “Did you get a license number?”
    Brian shook his head. “I’m sorry. It all happened too fast.”
    “I understand,” said the sergeant. “What about the driver?”
    Brian looked at Mart, Trixie, and Honey, who all shook their heads. “We can’t help you there, either,” he told the sergeant. “It was fairly dark, and the headlights blinded us.”
    Sergeant Molinson sighed heavily. “All right. Let’s back up to the victim. What can you tell me about him?”
    “He obviously knew a lot about cars,” Brian said. “In fact, he told us he did. He said they’d been his livelihood, so I guess we can assume he’d been a mechanic or an automotive engineer at some time.”
    “But he didn’t tell you his name,” the sergeant stated in a tone of frustration.
    “No,” Brian said.
    “Did he have any sort of accent that would tell us where he came from?”
    “No,” Brian replied helplessly.
    Once again the sergeant sighed.
    “He told us where he was going, though,” Trixie said. “That is, he asked us for directions to Glen-wood Avenue.”
    “There are a lot of houses on Glenwood Avenue,”
    Sergeant Molinson said. “There are also two restaurants, a laundromat, and a drugstore, as I recall. He could just have been going to one of those places to meet someone.”
    “Well, it’s something,” Trixie told him.
    “Yeah, it’s something. It’s a lot of work for my men if I decide to have them check out every place on Glenwood. Well, I’ve made a note of it, anyway. Anything else?”
    “After the man was knocked down, and while we were waiting for the ambulance, he said something. He said, ‘Can’t. Can’t... stop. Find. Find the... miser.’ ” Trixie repeated the words exactly as the man had said them.
    “Find the miser?” Sergeant Molinson repeated.
    “We think that’s what it was, but we’re not sure,” Honey said. “There was that pause between ‘find the’ and ‘miser.’ He might have meant it all to go together, or he might not have.”
    Sergeant Molinson nodded and jotted something in his notebook. “Well, that might be something we can use.