The Mystery off Glen Road

Blowingfor Trouble ● 1

    IT’S SUPER-GLAMOROUS perfect, Honey,” Trixie said with satisfaction. “I never thought we’d get it all done before Thanksgiving, did you?”
    “It seemed to take forever,” Honey Wheeler agreed.
    The two girls were surveying the interior of their newly finished clubhouse. They belonged to a teenage group and called themselves the B.W.G.’s—short for the Bob-Whites of the Glen. Other members were Trixie’s brothers, Brian and Mart; Honey’s adopted brother, Jim Frayne; and pretty Di Lynch.
    In the days of carriages and sleighs, the small cottage had been the gatehouse of the huge estate that now belonged to the Wheelers. The Manor House, as it was called, formed the western boundary of Crabapple Farm, the Beldens’ property. Both homes faced Glen Road and were about two miles from the village of Sleepyside, a small Westchester town that nestled among the rolling hills on the east bank of the Hudson River.
    All of the B.W.G.’s attended the junior-senior high school in town, where Mr. Belden worked in the bank. Trixie and Honey were both thirteen, but they didn’t look at all alike. Trixie was small and sturdily built, with round blue eyes and short sandy curls. Her best friend was tall and slim with enormous hazel eyes. She had shoulder-length golden brown hair, which had earned for her the nickname Honey. She loved to sew, and it was she who had made the attractive curtains that Trixie had just helped her hang at the windows.
    The boys had recently put a new roof on the clubhouse, painted it both inside and out, and partitioned off one section of the interior, which they had lined with shelves. Here the boys and girls kept their winter and summer sports equipment: skis, skates, hockey sticks, sleds, pup tents, tennis rackets, and the like. Brian and Jim, who were older and good at carpentry, had made a big table and benches for the conference room, using odds and ends of pine that they bought very cheaply at the Sleepyside lumberyard. Mart, who was eleven months older than Trixie, was not as handy with carpentry tools as the other boys were, but he had done his share by sanding and staining the furniture.
    The cottage had a dirt floor, which they hoped to cover someday with wide boards, but right now there remained not a cent in the treasury. A rule of the club was that no member could contribute money that she or he had not earned. Although Honey’s father was very rich, she had earned her share of what was needed for the necessary repairs through mending jobs. Jim, who had inherited half a million dollars from a great-uncle, had worked as hard as the Belden boys, serving as a handyman after school and on weekends. Earning the money themselves had meant, of course, that there was very little time left for work on the clubhouse, but at last it was finished.
    Trixie had put into the treasury every week the five dollars that her father gave her for doing household chores and helping her mother take care of mischievous six-year-old Bobby Belden. Because she hated any kind of indoor work and was very apt to lose patience if Bobby were left in her care for too long, Trixie sometimes felt that she had worked harder than anyone else. But it had been worth all of their efforts because the clubhouse was now a “dream cottage.”
    “Only one thing is lacking,” Trixie said to Honey. “Heat. Now that Indian summer is over, it’s going to be so cold in the evenings that we’ll have to wear fur coats when we hold meetings.”
    Honey giggled. “Not that any of us has a fur coat! But the boys are wonderful trappers. Maybe they’ll catch a couple of million mink for us. The streams on our property are filled with mink. Daddy hates them because they eat up all his trout.” She backed out of the cottage and stared at it speculatively. “The evergreens protect it from the wind, but you’re right, Trixie. It will soon be too cold for us to sit around. Up until now, we’ve all been working so hard we haven’t noticed how chilly it gets after sundown.” She shivered and slipped her arms into the sleeves of the sweater she had been wearing over her slim shoulders. “B-r-r. This wind is an icy blast.” Trixie nodded. “It was a gentle zephyr when we went inside early this morning.” She closed the clubhouse door and slipped on her own sweater. “Wow! It’s eleven o’clock, Honey. If this wind keeps up, it means we’re in for a hurricane.”
    Honey sighed. “And only