The Secret of the Unseen Treasure

the shed. She found Dan kneeling beside the faded red housing of an electric water pump on a cement slab. He was frowning.
    “What’s the matter, Dan?” Trixie asked.
    Dan started, then motioned her down beside him. “Don’t let Mart squelch your imagination anymore,” he said. “This pump didn’t wear itself out. It was sabotaged!”

A Series of “Accidents” • 6

    SABOTAGED?” Trixie stared at Dan. “How can you tell?”
    She looked at the pump. It was housed in a faded red metal box with two pipe attachments, one for drawing water and the other for pumping it out At one side of the box, a cylinder with an on/off switch enclosed the electric motor. Except for its obvious age, Trixie could see nothing wrong with the pump or motor.
    “When Mart asked me to find a ladder,” Dan said, “I saw the pump here. I thought I could help Max install the new one, just like I said. I came back to see if this one was disconnected, and, well... I started wondering.”
    “About what?” Trixie asked.
    Dan pointed to the pump. “These things are really pretty simple inside. Just a few moving parts. While it’s pumping, the water that it draws helps to keep it cool. Since it hadn’t been drawing water, I wondered if maybe the well had been pumped dry. We haven’t had much rain, so I thought maybe the underground water table had dropped. I rummaged around in the station wagon until I found some fishline and a sinker.”
    “So that’s what I saw you doing,” Trixie said. “You don’t miss much, do you,” Dan acknowledged. He nodded toward the well. It wasn’t the picturesque type with a shingled roof and a wooden bucket on a rope. It was simply a cement slab surrounding a steel pipe six inches in diameter.
    “I lowered the line and sinker into it,” Dan explained. “This pump should be able to draw water up from about forty feet. So when I had about fifty feet of line down the well, I began pulling it up, about three feet at a time, feeling for the first sign of wetness.”
    Trixie nodded, understanding. “How far down was the water level?”
    Nine feet. I only pulled the line up three times before it was wet.”
    “Only nine feet!” Trixie exclaimed. “Obviously there’s plenty of water,” Dan said. So then I figured that there wasn’t any water in the suction line.”
    He pointed to a pipe about two inches in diameter that descended into the well. The pipe took a right-angled bend a few inches above the ground and then extended horizontally over toward the pump.
    “If there’s nothing wrong with the suction line,” Dan continued, “there should be water in it all the way up to the pump, higher than the water level of the well. There’s a valve at the bottom of the pipe that keeps the water from dropping back into the well when the pump isn’t running.”
    Trixie nodded again and pointed to the elbow where the pipe made a bend toward the pump. “If there’s nothing wrong with the valve at the bottom, the water should be up to here now. Right?”
    “Right,” Dan said. “And it is.”
    “But the pump still wasn’t drawing water,” Trixie said in a confused tone. “I don’t understand.”
    “I didn’t, either,” Dan admitted. “But there had to be some reason why the pump suddenly stopped drawing water and ruined itself.”
    Dan placed his hand on the underside of the pipe where it extended horizontally from the well to the pump. “Feel the pipe.”
    Trixie touched the cold smoothness of the pipe. As she slid her hand along underneath it, the tips of her fingers went into a notched opening.
    “That opening let air in,” Dan explained. “The pump was pulling air instead of water, and that’s what wrecked it.”
    “That’s not a crack,” Trixie said. “It’s too smooth.”
    “It was done with a metal file,” Dan confirmed. “I stuck my head under to have a look. Somebody filed a hole in that pipe. It was deliberately sabotaged.”
    Trixie scowled. “First the arson attempt, and now this. Someone is definitely trying to ruin Mrs. Elliot’s flower business. But who? And why?”
    “What about Max?” Dan asked.
    Trixie shook her head. “He was working in the cornfield during the arson attempt,” she reminded him.
    “That doesn’t mean he couldn’t have known about it,” Dan pointed out.
    “But he was so mad—” Trixie began.
    “Maybe he was mad at you for preventing the fire,” Dan said.
    Trixie pondered that for a moment. “Why would Max do those things