The Marshland Mystery (6 page)

“And they’ve been made since last night’s rain,” Trixie decided. “Maybe we scared her away.” She straightened up and stared all around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious gardener.

“Trixie, I think we’d better get out of here. We’re really trespassing, you know.” Honey clutched Trixie’s arm nervously and looked about. “Whoever has been taking care of this garden may come after us with a shotgun if she sees us snooping!”

“Huh!” Trixie’s eye measured the small footprint again. “Nobody would be silly enough to let a little girl have a shotgun.” She frowned. “Wonder why she comes here?”

“Maybe her people have a trailer back in the woods somewhere. Dad says he’s seen lots of campers around lately. It’s the spring weather that brings them.”

“But why should she work around a garden that doesn’t belong to her?” Trixie persisted.

“Maybe she happens to like roses,” Honey guessed. “But they won’t bloom for another month or so,” Trixie objected. “If her people are just camping, they’ll probably be gone by then. It’s certainly mysterious.”

“Well, we aren’t getting any nearer to the swamp while we stand here guessing about her. Hadn’t we better go look for those flowers and plants we set out to get for Miss Bennett?” Honey asked matter-of-factly.

“Right, as usual,” Trixie said cheerfully. “Let’s be on our merry way.”

But they were due for another surprise. They had pedaled along the lonely road for only a few hundred feet, when they went around a bend and found themselves practically in front of another house.

This house stood, small and neat, behind a whitewashed picket fence. And it quite obviously was occupied, for the brick walk to the front door was swept clean, and the plots of bright-colored spring flowers were carefully set out and well cared for. Tall maples stood stiffly like soldiers along either side of the walk.

“How darling!” Honey said, slowing down to admire the cottage. “Look at the spring beauties. Don’t you love them, Trix? They’re such a heavenly shade of pink.” But Trixie, who had stopped also, was more interested in taking a close look at the mailbox that stood on its pedestal at one side of the gate. Much to her disappointment, there was no name on the metal box, only a number.

“Isn’t it the cutest ever?” Honey asked with an admiring sigh. “I always wanted to live in a cottage just like this!”

“Not me,” said her more practical-minded friend. “That well back there near the barn looks as if it were very much in use even today! The tin cup is shiny, and the bucket is still wet from being dipped. I’ll take my plumbing up-to-date!”

“But it’s so—so charming and—away from things.”

“You said it. Too far away,” Trixie retorted with a grimace. “But the well reminds me that I’m awfully thirsty. Why don’t we go in and knock and ask politely if we may have a drink of water?”

“I’m sure it would be all right,” Honey agreed.

They carefully propped their bikes against a roadside tree and opened the gate. It squeaked loudly, startling them both into giggles.

“There’s nothing like announcing yourself with a squeaky gate.” Trixie grinned, but the grin disappeared a second later. She gripped Honey’s arm and held her back. “Look at the window!” she said in a strange voice.

Honey looked and felt a little shiver go down her spine. A bony hand was gesturing from between the curtains of the window next to the door. And, quite unmistakably, the hand was warning them to go.

Then, as they stood staring, wide-eyed, the hand disappeared, and for a flash they saw a small white face with wide-set dark eyes, framed by smooth white hair parted in the middle. Then the face disappeared into the shadows of the room, and the curtains fell.

Without a word, both girls turned and fled through the gate. It took all of Trixie’s courage to stop long enough to latch the gate after them and leave it as they had found it.

Then she hurried after Honey to their bikes. Mounting quickly, they pedaled off as fast as they could go, without so much as a backward glance.

Martin’s Marsh ● 6

IT WAS ANOTHER quarter of a mile to the edge of the swamp, but Trixie and Honey kept pedaling hard until they came to the broken fence that marked the edge of soft ground.

Trixie glanced back before she braked her bike to a stop, but the cottage was no longer in view. “This looks like it!” she called to Honey, who was close behind her.

Honey wobbled to a stop, dismounted, and sank down on the grass under a white-blossomed dogwood tree. “Thank goodness! I was about to collapse!”

Trixie threw herself down beside Honey, groaning. “I couldn’t have gone much farther!” she admitted.

Honey laughed suddenly. Trixie looked at her in surprise. “Now what’s so funny?” Trixie demanded.

“Us!” Honey gave a giggle. “Getting panicky and running as if a pack of wolves were after us! Why did we do such a silly thing?”

“I was scared,” Trixie admitted a bit sheepishly. She clasped her knees and rested her chin on them. “I suppose it was that spooky hand waving us away and then that white face staring at us—just staring!”

Honey nodded. “It
was
weird. All I wanted to do was to get away as fast as I could. I was all shivery.”

“Now I suppose she’ll think we had guilty consciences because we had come to steal her flowers! Maybe we should go back and explain that all we wanted was a drink of water.”

“Not me!” Honey assured her promptly. “I got over being thirsty.”

“I suppose the little girl who tends the rosebushes lives there with the old lady,” Trixie said suddenly. “It’s close enough. And maybe the old lady likes roses, and her dear little granddaughter brings them to her in June, and—” Trixie was off on a flight of fancy.

“And we’ll still be here in June ourselves if we don’t get busy looking for wood sorrel and spearmint and the rest of those plants Brian wrote on the map.”

“The only one I remember is tansy,” Trixie said with a grin, “and that’s because I remember a very old herb book of my grandmother’s that had a recipe for tansy cakes that were eaten at Easter.”

“Wonder what they tasted like.” Honey grimaced. “Bitter, sort of,” Trixie told her. “At least, I think that’s what it said. They were taken as a tonic. And the fresh tansy leaves were soaked in buttermilk for nine days, and then the buttermilk was used to bleach freckles.”

“Ugh! I’d rather have the freckles.” Honey laughed. Trixie sighed. “That’s what you think, because you don’t happen to have any.” Trixie’s freckles, though not nearly so numerous as Mart’s, were an annoyance to her. Her mother always told her they would disappear when she was older, and her father said he thought they were cute, but Trixie had her doubts about both opinions.

“Anyhow, we’ll gather some violets. I can see oodles of them from here. And look, over there in the distance; aren’t those blue flags?” Honey pointed eagerly.

“And I see some yellow lady’s slippers over that way.” Trixie nodded in the other direction. She got to her feet and extended a hand to Honey. “Come on, and bring the trowel and the basket from your bike. We’ll get samples of all of them and then have lunch.”

And a moment later, they were picking their way carefully along a faint path that seemed to lead along the very edge of the swamp.

But the splashes of color were somewhat farther in than they had seemed from the edge of the swamp. And even when Trixie and Honey reached them and began to choose the strongest and most beautiful of the flowering plants, they saw still others, deeper in the swamp, that promised to be much more spectacular. So they continued to follow a winding path for quite a distance, always led on by the distant sight of more beautiful specimens.

They both had muddy feet, and the wire basket they had brought was heaped high with many kinds of plants before they decided to stop and check over what they had found.

“I love these bloodroots,” Honey said. “Do you know that they close when the sun sets and that they’re very delicate, in spite of their big leaves?”

“Miss Bennett says the Indians used the red sap of the bloodroot to decorate their faces and tomahawks.” Trixie carefully enclosed the wet plant with its fragile white flower in a length of plastic wrapping material that would keep it fresh until they could get the specimen safely into water at home.

They worked busily for a few minutes and soon had all the specimens neatly stowed away in the wire basket.

It was a longer hike back to their bikes than they had realized, and Trixie hurried Honey along. She had noticed that the sky overhead was getting dark and the clouds were scurrying past over the tops of the tall trees that ringed the marsh.

“Let’s eat some lunch and then get started home,” she suggested when they were back at the edge of the swamp. “It’s going to sprinkle, I’m afraid.”

The lunch that Mrs. Belden had packed was full of pleasant surprises, and the girls did full justice to it, down to the last stuffed date and rosy-cheeked apple.

Trixie snapped the lid down on the empty basket and moaned. “I’m simply stuffed. I know I’ll never pedal all that way home now.”

“Why don’t we walk our bikes partway, till the fried chicken is settled down for the ride?” Honey laughed.

Before Trixie could reply, a light spatter of rain answered for her.

They mounted their bikes and headed for home, but the sprinkle turned into a steady spring rain before they had even reached the small white cottage.

Trixie, with rain streaming down her face, called to Honey, “Why don’t we stop at the old witch’s house and ask her to let us come in till the shower’s over?”

“I’d rather keep going,” Honey called back, with a shiver.

“I know, you’re afraid she’ll turn us into gingerbread dolls! Or is that the way the story goes in ‘Hansel and Gretel’?” Trixie was never sure of her facts about fairy tales.

Honey laughed. “Worse than that! She fattened ’em up and ate ’em. It was her house that was gingerbread!”

They both stared hard at the small cottage as they went past, but no one came to the window. The door of the small barn in the rear was partly open, as it had been when they first went by, but there was no one in sight.

Trixie was riding ahead now, against pelting rain. She stared suddenly at something lying partly in the ditch a few yards beyond the last pickets of the white fence. The object was a small child’s bicycle. It was lying on its side, half-covered with muddy water as the rain splashed down on it. But in spite of the mud and water that hid it, Trixie could see that it wasn’t a rusty old machine that somebody had discarded but a shiny, almost new one.

“Pretty careless,” she reflected, riding on through the pelting rain. And she thought with a shudder of what her parents would say to her or the boys if they; treated their bicycles like that. All four had them, and because they knew that their father had paid a good price for the bikes, they were careful of them.

Honey caught up with her, and they rode side by side on the slippery, muddy road. She called over to Trixie. “Did you see the bike in the ditch back there?”

Trixie nodded vigorously. “I guess it belongs to the little girl who takes care of the rose garden,” she said. “She ought to be spanked.”

“It was a boy’s bike, I’m sure,” Honey informed her. “Then either she rides a boy’s bike or she’s a he, even if she or he wears pointed shoes.” Trixie laughed. “I hope whichever one it is didn’t hurt himself-herself when he-she fell into that ditch!”

“Maybe we should go back and see if there’s anything we can do, like going for a doctor.”

Trixie hesitated, then grinned over at Honey. “That was a pretty neat little cottage. Maybe they even have one of them there newfangled things called tellyphones!” Honey giggled. “You would have to be sensible when I wanted to be a hero-een!”

So they rode on through the rain and were glad to turn back onto .Glen Road a few minutes later. Even though Glen Road was called a country road, it was well surfaced, and they no longer had to plow through inches of mud. They pedaled along as fast as they could.

They had almost reached the foot of the Wheeler driveway, when someone close behind them tooted an auto horn loudly. It scared Honey so that she nearly fell off her bike and into the path of the car. Brakes squealed, and Brian, at the wheel of his jalopy, barely managed to stop it a few feet from the wobbling bicycle.

Brian climbed out and ran to Honey as she dismounted unsteadily. Mart, in the front seat, sat looking scared and sheepish as Jim swung out of the rear seat and rushed to his adopted sister.

“Gosh, I’m sorry, Honey!” Brian exclaimed. “My moron brother, here, thought he was being funny!”

“I—I didn’t mean to—” Mart’s face was crimson as he climbed out of the car and came to them. “I was just—”

“Just being a clown, which comes naturally!” Trixie snapped angrily. “Don’t bother apologizing. We know that little children must play!”

“Aw, Trix!” Mart mumbled.

“Oh, stop making a fuss,” Honey said, laughing. “I didn’t take a tumble, did I? That’s pretty good for a gal who didn’t know one end of a bicycle from the other at one time!”

“It wasn’t his fault you didn’t fall!” Trixie cast a withering glance at Mart.