The Mystery of the Whispering Witch

know.”
    “To say nothing about throwing pebbles up at our window,” Mart added. “You nearly scared us out of half a year’s growth.”
    Trixie glared at him. “It would take a lot to scare you out of any growth, Mart Belden,” she retorted, “especially out this way.” She made a large circle of her arms and then extended them noutward beyond the region of her stomach.
    Brian chuckled. “She’s got you there, Mart. If you don’t stop eating, one of these days we’ll be calling you Mr. Five-by-Five.”
    “I’d rather be called Five-by-Five than Two-by-Four,” Mart answered blandly. As his brother and sister raised their eyebrows, puzzled, he added, “That’s the size of Trixie’s brain—in centimeters, that is.”
    Furious, Trixie was about to snap back at him, when she remembered her resolution of the night before. Instead, she contented herself with giving him a superior, tolerant look. “At the height of last night’s—uh—confusion,” she said at last, “I made up my mind that the next time you called me a pea-brain, Mart, I would agree with you.”
    “Such humility is astonishing!” Mart declared at once. “And to what circumstance do we owe such an astounding reversal of your self-esteem?” Trixie looked down at her hands. “I was wondering if Fay had locked up the house,” she said, her voice low. “She had.”
    Mart pushed back his chair and stood up. “That seems to settle that, then,” he said, the teasing note gone from his voice. “If no one could get into the house, Trix, then it had to be either Fay or Honey perpetrating a particularly putrid practical joke. We’ve already agreed that Honey wouldn’t do such a thing. So guess which one that leaves.”
    “Oh, Mart, I’m sure Fay wouldn’t do such a thing,” Trixie said slowly, but she didn’t sound as certain as she had before.
    Mart pushed back his chair and strolled to the refrigerator. He paused with his hand on the door. “Mind you, I’m not saying Fay did do the dirty deed. Never let it be said that I’d think evil of an honored houseguest, but—” he paused—“we don’t know that much about her, you know. She might be playing some game we know nothing about. I’d be careful if I were you. And I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near that spooky old house again, if I could help it.”
    Trixie didn’t look at him. “Umm—that’s the next thing I was going to tell you. We—that is, Fay and I—have to go back there sometime today.”
    Brian stared at her. “Trixie! What on earth for?”
    “We—umm—that is, we left in such a hurry last night,” Trixie said quickly, “that we weren’t looking when we grabbed some clothes and flung them into a suitcase. We thought we’d packed what Fay would need for her stay here, but when we put everything away this morning, we—we discovered that we had grabbed all the wrong things for Fay to wear.”
    Trixie could tell that her brothers had already guessed what she was about to ask next. Brian’s next words proved it.
    “And so you want us to come with you to pack the right things?” he asked, sounding annoyed.
    “Can’t you make do with what you’ve got?” Mart asked. “For crying out loud, what does she need? A couple pairs of jeans, a shirt or two? What did you pack?”
    “Bathing suits,” Trixie said and looked up at last at her almost-twin. “Why, Mart, what’s the matter? Don’t you want to visit the haunted house? Are you afraid that Sarah Sligo will turn you into a little green frog and that you will go ribbit, ribbit, ribbit forevermore?”
    Brian sighed. “Okay, Trix. We’ll come with you after I’ve taken Fay to visit her mother in the hospital. We’ve called Dr. Ferris, and he said Mrs. Franklin was doing fine, by the way. I told Fay we’d be ready to leave in an hour.”
    Trixie felt more relieved than she was ready to admit. Although she had been prepared to go with Fay to collect her clothes, she hadn’t been looking forward to it one bit. She knew that Honey felt the same way. Perhaps, too, Fay would feel better about explaining her problem to them once she had seen that her mother was really all right.
    Only once that morning had Trixie tried to ask about what Fay had wanted to tell them the previous night. But when Trixie mentioned the subject, Fay hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
    She had merely squeezed Trixie’s hand and said, “I’ll tell you later, Trixie, honestly I will. But let’s just leave it for a