The Mystery Off Glen Road (7 page)

Mrs. Belden hastily went out into the kitchen and came back with a large wooden bowl of tossed green salad. “Yes, Trixie,” she said in a strange voice, “you’re quite right. That ring is yours, you earned it, and if you really want to wear it while Ben Riker is visiting the Wheelers during the Thanksgiving holidays, there is no
reason why you shouldn’t. That is, of course, if your father has no objections.”

Trixie’s father, who was serving the fried chicken, said nothing. He merely nodded, but Brian spoke up:

“Well, I have some objections,” he said staunchly. “Ben Riker is a creep of the first water. Because he goes to a private boarding school, his vacation begins next weekend. It’s going to be bad enough to have him and his practical jokes interfering with our work on the clubhouse. But if Trixie is going to swoon around flashing diamond rings in that goon’s face, well, I—I quit!”

Trixie clenched her fists in her lap, yearning to say, “Oh, Brian, I’m only doing it for your sake. I despise Ben Riker as much as you do.” Aloud, she finally managed to say, “Naturally, Brian, because you and Mart are so uncouth, you don’t appreciate Ben. He is, well, I might as well confess it—my very own ideal.”

Mart emitted another feeble yelp, and then silence reigned again. They were all looking at Trixie with expressions on their faces which said plainly that they thought she had lost her mind. All of them except Bobby, who was one of the few young people who had never been a victim of Ben’s practical jokes. “I adore Ben,” Bobby said complacently. “He’s one of my very best friends. He holps me catch frogs.”

Mart said to Brian in a loud aside, “He sure does. And what does he do with said frogs? He puts ’em in the cook’s bed. So the cook leaves and Miss Trask has to cope until she can lure another one out to the Manor House. Oh, fine! Ben is
such
a jolly fellow!”

“Oh, veddy, veddy jolly,” Brian agreed in a very British tone of voice. “What ho, and all that sort of thing.”

“I like crabapple jolly,” Bobby announced. “And so does Ben.”

“That’s just it,” Mrs. Belden said hastily. “Ben is really a very nice boy.” She reached over to pat Trixie’s hand. “A very nice boy. He’s just young for his age, that’s all.”

“So is Trixie,” Brian said in a very older-brother tone of voice. “For
her
age, I mean. And just because she’s temporarily insane, Dad, doesn’t mean you should let her have that diamond ring so Bobby can plant it under a barberry bush.”

It went on like that all week. Trixie, acting on advice she received from Di Lynch and Honey, did everything she could to convince her parents that she was now ladylike enough to wear the ring Jim had given her. She wore sloppy clothes only when she exercised
the horses and did her chores. She wrote:

Trixie Belden loves Benjamin Riker

on scraps of paper and left them in strategic spots all over the house. Di and Honey donated to the cause all kinds of costume jewelry which Trixie wore every evening at dinner. By Thursday night, Brian and Mart, worn out by the work they had to do on the clubhouse during the few hours of daylight after school, stopped making comments. She appeared at the table wearing six bracelets on each arm, earrings, and ropes of cheap pearls around her neck. Nobody, not even Bobby, said a word. Trixie sank into her chair and said dramatically:

“My hands—they feel so naked. If only I had just one teeny-weeny diamond ring.”

Mr. Belden groaned. “Very well, Trixie,” he said. “I’ll bring your ring home from the bank tomorrow afternoon. You may keep it until you go back to school on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Then
it
goes back into our safety deposit box, do you understand?”

Trixie jumped up and raced around the table to throw her arms around her father. “Oh, Dad,” she cried, “you don’t know what this means to me. You’ll never,
never
know.”

Brian and Mart said tiredly to each other in unison: “Ugh! How sedimental can our squaw get?”

“She’ll drop that ring down the kitchen drain first time she washes a dish,” Brian predicted.

“I don’t think so,” Mart argued. “She’ll lose it in the chicken-feed bin, with all that that entails.
We
will have to sift the grain and mash in order to retrieve it.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Brian said sarcastically. “Too easy, much too simple. She’ll wear it when she goes swimming in the lake, and then we’ll have to use grappling irons, or maybe drain the lake. That would mean damming up all the brooks and streams around here. But Trixie wouldn’t care. What’s a few thousand dead fish to a girl’s whim?”

Bobby chimed in, beating on his plate with a spoon to attract attention. “You better not lose that ring, Trixie. It must be worth a zillion dollars.”

Trixie ignored them all. She had won the battle. On Saturday morning when she and Honey exercised the horses, they would ride to Mr. Lytell’s little store. She would give him the ring as security so then he would have no excuse for selling Brian’s jalopy.

“It’s not as simple as you think,” Honey argued on Saturday morning as they trotted their horses through the woods on the other side of Glen Road. “You’ve got the ring, yes, but you know how peculiar Mr. Lytell is. He’s an old gossip, and he’s always very suspicious even when there’s nothing to be suspicious about. What makes you think he won’t tell your father that you gave him the ring as security for Brian’s jalopy?” She reined in Strawberry because just ahead of them on the narrow path was a fallen tree. “Now what?” she demanded over her shoulder.

Trixie, who was riding Mrs. Wheeler’s gentle little mare, Lady, stopped, too. “Umm,” Trixie said, peering at the debris. “I guess we’ll have to get off, tie our horses to a tree, and move that stuff, Honey.”

“We can’t,” Honey wailed. “We’re not strong enough. It would take a bulldozer, Trixie Belden, and you know it.”

“I thought a bulldozer had already cleared all of these paths,” Trixie said. “Isn’t this part of your father’s game preserve, Honey?”

Honey nodded. “I guess the crew Regan hired skipped this path. We’ll have to go back to the fork and take the other one. This is just a short cut to Mr. Lytell’s land, you know.”

“Umm,” Trixie said again. “Short cut is right. That other trail winds all over the place. It’s positively labyrinthine, as Mart would say. We’ll be sure to get lost, Honey. You know how dumb we both are about where the points of the compass are.”

Honey giggled. “Jim says we were both born without a sense of direction. Maybe we’d better go back to Glen Road and ride to Mr. Lytell’s store that way. It’s much longer and we can only walk the horses, but it’ll probably save time in the end.”

“No,” Trixie said soberly. “Let’s don’t do that. Let’s make up our minds that we
won’t
get lost. I have a feeling that pretty soon it’s going to be important for us to know how to find our way around your father’s game preserve.” She turned Lady around and started back toward the fork.

Honey followed suit with Strawberry. “I don’t know what you mean, Trixie,” she complained. “Why should we worry about this labyrinth? Even if we knew how to shoot a gun we’d never kill any kind of bird, and certainly not a deer.”

“You can’t shoot deer with a gun,” Trixie informed her. “It’s against the law in Westchester County. You have to use a longbow. The laws are very strict. This year, for instance, you can only hunt deer during the last two weeks in November and the first two weeks in December.”

“I didn’t know that,” Honey admitted. “But what difference does it make? Why should we care? The only longbows I ever saw were pictures of them in
Robin Hood
and books like that.”

“Don’t be silly,” Trixie said. “Your father must have a longbow. Otherwise, why did he stock his preserve with deer and have Fleagle build feeding stations for them and all?”

“I don’t think Daddy knew about the laws when he stocked the preserve,” Honey said. “Anyway, he won’t be able to do much hunting this year because he won’t be back until a week from tomorrow which is the twenty-ninth of the month.” They had reached the fork now and stopped their horses. “The path on your left,” Honey said, “
I
think goes east and we want to go west, don’t we?”

“Do we?” Trixie asked. “Yes, we do,” she answered her own question. “The sun sets in the west and I’ve often seen it dropping down into the Hudson River
behind Mr. Lytell’s store. Anyway, the path on my left is only a path and probably doesn’t lead anywhere. What we want to do is follow the
trails.
”

“I don’t know how you can tell the difference,” Honey said. “They all look the same to me. But, as Mart would say, by the process of elimination, if one of these things is a path, then the other must be a trail. So let’s go.” She nudged Strawberry into a trot and led the way westward. Over her shoulder she said, “I wish you wouldn’t be so mysterious, Trixie. Why do you think we should try to solve the mystery of this labyrinth?”

“Because,” Trixie said, “this weekend we’ve got to talk Miss Trask and Regan into letting us have the gamekeeper job. Nobody’s answered the ads they’ve put into all of the newspapers. And we’ve just got to earn fifty dollars during the next week. If we don’t, how can I get my ring from Mr. Lytell so Dad can put it back into the bank on the Monday after Thanksgiving?”

“Oh, oh,” Honey moaned. “It’s all so complicated. You haven’t even
given
the ring to Mr. Lytell yet, and now you’re worrying about getting it back.” She chuckled. “Aren’t you sort of putting the cart before the horse? Or should I say, the ring before the jalopy? Oh,
oh!
What
am
I trying to say?”

“Whatever it is,” Trixie chortled, “it makes no
sense. The problem is this: I
have
to make Mr. Lytell accept the ring today, and I also
have
to get it back a week from tomorrow. So we
have
to get the gamekeeper’s job so we’ll have fifty dollars by next Saturday.”

They had reached a small clearing now and were riding abreast instead of single file. “You’re right,” Honey cried enthusiastically. “But we’ve got to sell Regan on the idea. The trouble is that the boys won’t be able to help us much. They’re so busy fixing up the clubhouse.”

“That’s the point,” Trixie agreed. “So it’s up to us, Honey. We can patrol the preserve just as well as the boys, so long as we don’t get lost every single time we go into it.”

“I’m lost right now,” Honey said with a nervous laugh. “This clearing doesn’t look familiar.”

“They look different in the fall,” Trixie said, feeling a little nervous herself. “I mean, we might have had a picnic here last summer but wouldn’t recognize the same spot now.”

“I wish we’d left behind a Coke bottle or something,” Honey said. “Any kind of bottle with a map or a compass in it would come in handy now. There are three paths leading out of this clearing, Trixie. Which one shall we take? Or is one of them a trail? What
is
the
difference, anyway? I know Indians used to blaze trails by leaving all sorts of signs on trees, but there haven’t been any Indians around here for ages.”

“Somebody’s been around here recently,” Trixie said as she swung out of the saddle. “And whoever it was couldn’t have been Fleagle because he left Sunday night before it rained.” She pointed to a large footprint in the small section of the clearing where there were no pine needles. “It wasn’t an Indian, either. It was somebody who was wearing hunting boots, and since all of this property is posted, he was trespassing.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “In other words, Honey, that footprint probably belongs to a
poacher!”

Honey sighed. “I don’t think that footprints belong to people. I mean, after all, you leave them behind and don’t feel possessive about them. Anyway, that footprint probably belongs to Mr. Lytell, and I’m very glad to see it because it must mean that we’re very near his store.”

“Don’t be silly,” Trixie cried. “He’s not a poacher.”

“I didn’t say he was,” Honey said with another sigh. “Oh, why must you always be such a detective, Trixie? Mr. Lytell is a nosy old gossip, but he wouldn’t harm a fly. So you just can’t call him a poacher. Besides, I don’t think there
are
any poachers any more. They only lived in very olden times in England. And even then, like
Robin Hood, they were very good things. The kings had no business not letting their starving subjects kill deer.”