The Mystery off Old Telegraph Road

board.
    “Oh, woe,” she said finally. “This isn’t doing a thing to get my mind off my problems—or to find a solution for them. Indoor work never was my style. I guess I’ll go home and get my bike. A little workout will do me good.”
    As soon as Trixie began pedaling down the Belden driveway, she felt better. The day was one of the best that spring had yet offered. The air was that perfect temperature that felt like no temperature at all, and the hint of breeze was enough to feel good on Trixie’s face as she rode, without being hard to pedal against.
    Trixie looked at the trees, which had tiny light green leaves beginning to show on the branches.
    Spring is finally here, Trixie thought. Soon it’ll be summer, and then we’ll — Trixie’s thoughts broke off as she remembered her quarrel with Honey.
    What would the summer bring? More adventures, like the ones they’d had sailing off Cobbett’s Island or finding the missing emeralds in Williamsburg? Or were those wonderful summers over for the Bob-Whites?
    Feeling the lump begin to rise in her throat once again at the thought of losing Honey’s friendship forever, Trixie leaned over the handlebars and began to pedal as fast and as hard as she could.
    When she was totally out of breath, she began to coast and raised her head to look around her. To her surprise, she found that she was approaching the deserted house on Old Telegraph Road.

A Piece of Charred Paper • 6

    TRIXIE TURNED onto the gravel drive, got off the bike, and pushed the kickstand down with her foot.
    For a few moments, she stood still, leaning on the bike seat with one hand while she caught her breath after her wild ride. When she was finally breathing easily again, she began to walk around the clearing.
    She paced off the distances and discovered that the clearing was almost one hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep, plenty of room for as many cyclists as would probably be there at one time.
    Then Trixie scouted around the clearing, looking at the ground for any pieces of broken glass or rusty nails that could puncture a bike tire—or a bare knee.
    There was so little debris on the ground that Trixie decided Mr. Wheeler must have hired someone to come over to the deserted house occasionally and check on it and clean up the grounds.
    “There are just too many vandals in the world these days who have nothing better to do than wreck abandoned houses, or at the very least clean out their cars on the front lawns,” Trixie muttered.
    After Trixie had finished cleaning up the yard and had put what little trash she found in piles to be picked up later, she decided to do a little exploring.
    The two-story frame house had once been white, but most of the paint had peeled away years before, leaving the boards underneath to weather. There was a small brick stoop on the front of the house, and on the stoop sat an old concrete urn that was filled with caked and lumpy dirt and a few dried stems of long-dead plants.
    As Trixie walked around to the back of the house, she saw that all of these windows had been covered with sheets of plywood and crisscrossed with two-by-fours, like those in the front.
    “When Mr. Wheeler wants to protect an abandoned house, he goes all the way,” Trixie said aloud. “It’d take more than a casual vandal to break into this place. A person would have to have a lot of determination even to try.”
    In the back, Trixie discovered that the house had an old-fashioned cellar, with the heavy wood doors to the outside built parallel to the ground. The wood was weathered and splintered from being covered with snow and rain, but the sturdy brass hinges still looked shiny. “I bet they’d turn without so much as a squeak if someone pulled open that door,” Trixie said to herself. “It’s too bad there’s no way to find out.” The doors were locked with a massive padlock.
    When she’d seen what little there was to see around the house, Trixie turned her attention to the backyard. The outlines of the dilapidated picket fence indicated that it had been a huge yard —although now it was difficult to distinguish the yard from the game preserve beyond it, since both were covered with rough grass and weeds.
    In one comer of the yard, an area surrounded by wire fence indicated what had once been the garden. Trixie wandered over to it to see if anything had come up “volunteer” this spring, but so far only a few small weeds and the first sprigs of spreading grass had