The Mystery off Old Telegraph Road

a tray. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but I thought some of this chocolate cake might be in order about now.”
    “Yummy-yum!” Honey exclaimed. “That was so thoughtful of you, Miss Trask.”
    “I’ll say,” Mart agreed. “They say that confession is good for the soul, but it seems to have affected my appetite, as well.”
    “Mart, would you make a fist of the things that don’t affect your appetite?” Brian asked. “I’ll engrave it on the head of a pin.”
    As Mart put on an offended look, the others laughed, and Honey cut Mart an enormous slice of cake.
    While the young people ate their cake, they talked among themselves about schoolwork and about Sleepyside Junior-Senior High School.
    “It’s a good school,” Ben said. “I like most of my teachers, and I feel that I’m learning a lot more than I ever did at the expensive boarding schools I went to.”
    Honey nodded her agreement.
    “It’s harder to make friends, though,” Ben added. “At a boarding school, you’re with the same people twenty-four hours a day. You eat your meals with them, line up to get your mail with them. It’s just easier to get to know people in a situation like that. At Sleepyside, everyone goes home after school, and you generally don’t see your classmates until the next day. I just didn’t know how to cope.”
    “You’re living here with us, Ben,” Honey pointed out.
    “But I ’didn’t want to butt in,” Ben said defensively. “I had no idea, when you invited me to do something, whether you really wanted me along, or whether you just wanted to be polite.”
    “Well, now you know,” Jim said. “We really want to be your friends, don’t we, gang?”
    The other Bob-Whites chorused their assent, and Trixie nodded, a little bit reluctantly.
    A short time later, Brian said, “We have to be going. Tomorrow is a school day, after all. See you in the morning!”
    Trixie was as silent on the way home as she had been on the way to the Manor House, although her brothers were now discussing Ben’s change of heart.
    Something was bothering her, but she couldn’t quite put her linger on what it was.
    Ben had certainly seemed sincere, she thought. She wanted to believe him, if only for Honey’s sake. As Brian had said, it had taken a lot of courage for Ben to confront the Bob-Whites face-to-face that way and tell them he was sorry for the way he’d acted. He didn’t have to do that, Trixie reflected. He could have just told Honey and Jim. He didn’t have to tell us about sneaking into the clubhouse, either— Trixie stopped walking and stood frozen for a moment as she realized what had been bothering her.
    Then, hurrying to catch up to Mart and Brian before they noticed that she had fallen behind, she thought, Those arrows—he forged them! He did a pretty good job of it, too, since Honey and I couldn’t notice any difference between the ones he did and the ones she and I did.
    Trixie shook her head. She was being silly, she told herself. There was a big difference between forging a bunch of arrows with red poster paint and forging something as complicated as a German deutsche mark.
    Still, ever since Trixie’s bad dream, she’d had a nagging feeling that the counterfeit bank note and the threats against the people involved in the bikeathon were somehow related. She couldn’t dismiss the idea that Ben’s confession had somehow made his actions more suspicious than ever.
    Trixie heard the telephone ringing as she and her brothers entered the house.
    “I think she just walked in,” she heard her mother say. “Trixie, you have a call.”
    Trixie hesitated for a moment, worried that Honey might have called to ask why Trixie had been so quiet during the little celebration that had followed Ben’s apology.
    Finally she picked up the telephone and said, “Hello.”
    The voice on the other end of the line was not Honey Wheeler s.
    “Hello, Trixie,” the voice said. “This is Nick Roberts.”

Bob-Whites Divided! • 15

    TRIXIE WAS TOO STARTLED at hearing Nick Roberts’s voice to respond immediately. “Well, I—H-Hello,” she stammered finally.
    “Sergeant Molinson questioned me this afternoon, Nick said. “He told me about the strange things that seem to be happening concerning the bikeathon.
    I had nothing to do with any of it, except for ripping down the poster. I shouldn’t have done that, but I can’t tell you why I did.”
    Cant tell me—or wont? Trixie thought. “Anyway,”