The Mystery of the Vanishing Victim

over the phone, if you can imagine such a thing.”
    “I don’t have to imagine it,” Trixie retorted. “It hurt me to turn the pages of a storybook. Picking up a telephone must have been agony!”
    “Well, at least what we had to tell him was a balm to his troubled mind, if not to his aching muscles. It’s news you’ll be happy to hear, too,” Brian said.
    “What is it?” Trixie asked impatiently. “Oh, you’ve solved the problem of picking up the donations, haven’t you? How? I mean, where? I mean, what —what’s the solution?”
    “I’d love to tell you, but I can’t,” Brian replied. “The brainstorm was actually Mart’s, and he’s quite proud of himself for thinking of it. He’d never forgive me if he didn’t get to tell you about it himself. I promised him my lips are sealed until I get you home.”
    “Oh-h-h,” Trixie moaned, sinking back against the seat of the car. “I thought you said this news was going to make me feel better. Listening to Mart gloat is the last thing I need today. He’ll probably go right from his solution to his theory that he’s a clear winner in the contest. Just thinking about working off five hours in Mart’s service makes my muscles ache twice as much.”
    But to Trixie’s surprise, Mart was downright modest about his solution. “It was nothing, really,” he said as he helped himself to a heaping handful of potato chips to go with his mountainous sandwich. “I just reviewed the criteria in my mind: A place that was centrally located and open to the public; a place that had lots of room; and, finally, a place that was owned or operated by someone sympathetic to our cause. Naturally—”
    “The lumberyard!” Trixie shouted. “Mr. Burnside is going to let us store the rummage sale donations in one of the warehouses at the lumberyard, isn’t he?” Mart’s face immediately began to look like a thundercloud. “Must lucidity of speech result in forfeiture of the right to completion?” he asked sulkily.
    Trixie was sincerely apologetic. “It’s just that having to wait till we got home made me so curious, Mart. I’m sorry I jumped the gun. Tell me all about it.”
    “There really isn’t anything more to tell,” Mart said, refusing to be appeased. “It’s clear now that any birdbrain would have come to the conclusion I did that the lumberyard was an ideal location. We simply called Mr. Burnside and almost before we had explained the problem, he’d volunteered one of his warehouses.”
    “We spent the rest of the morning driving back around the places that still had donations to be picked up,” Brian added. “We explained that we were simply getting too many donations to handle alone and asked if they’d mind dropping their things off. Everyone who had a car and could carry things to it agreed to our plan. There were two elderly women who needed help, so we picked up their donations for them and took them over to Mr. Burnside’s.”
    “It really is the perfect solution, Mart,” Trixie said, “for now, anyway. We’ll still have to make thousands of trips from the lumberyard to the school on the morning of the sale.”
    “Mr. Burnside came through for us there, too,” Brian said. “He’s lending us two pickup trucks, complete with drivers. They’ll have everything transported in a couple of hours.”
    “It’s all settled, then,” Trixie said. “I’m glad some of the Bob-Whites managed to get problems cleared up this morning.”
    “In other words you failed to ascertain the condition of our friend the stranger,” Mart guessed eagerly, hoping to snatch Trixie’s news from her as she had just done from him.
    “He feels better physically, but he’s hos-hostile,” Trixie replied, struggling on the “Mart” word. “I talked to him for quite a while.”
    “He couldn’t have been too hostile, if he talked to you for ‘quite a while,’ ” Helen Belden pointed out.
    “He wasn’t really hostile to me. He’s angry at the world in general. He was the same way the night of the accident, helping us get the Model A started and then telling us he never gets involved with people,” Trixie explained.
    “I wonder if he isn’t just an old softy underneath,” Brian mused. “Mr. Maypenny is like that. He pretends to be so gruff, but he’d really do almost anything if someone needed his help.”
    “That’s true—about Mr. Maypenny, I mean,” Trixie said. She smiled as she thought about the Wheelers’ gamekeeper. The old