The Red Trailer Mystery

by Julie Campbell

  So, she thought excitedly, you can see it from here too. Then she turned around and stared in the opposite direction, and what she saw made her scream at the top of her lungs to Honey. The rise of ground she was standing on, dropped down sharply on the west side to another hollow, and, parked in a small cleared space between tall evergreens, was the missing red trailer!

  “Honey, Honey,” she yelled. “We’ve found it at last.” And as Honey hurried to join her she added breathlessly, “At least, Bud did. See, Sally’s playing on the step. That’s where your little black puppy spent the night.”

  Honey was too thrilled to do anything but stare for a minute. “You knew it all along,” she got out finally in an accusing voice. “That’s why you’ve been so cheerful all morning.”

  “I only guessed,” Trixie told her. “If I’d been wrong, you would have died of disappointment. Come on! Let’s go make a nice neighborly call on the Darnells.”

  Trixie was already slipping and sliding down the steep side of the hill, but Honey hung back. “They won’t be at all glad to see us,” she objected. “They’ll be furious that we discovered their hiding place.”

  Trixie tripped on a stone and sat down suddenly, clutching at the branches of a scrub pine tree to keep from skidding all the way to the bottom. But the branches slipped through her fingers and, a second later, Trixie was sprawling on her back at the foot of the hill.

  “Oh, oh,” Honey cried, thinking Trixie must be hurt. And she stumbled headlong down to help her to her feet.

  Both of Trixie’s elbows were skinned but otherwise she was all right, and she stood up, brushing the dirt from the seat of her dungarees. “That’s one way of getting someplace quickly,” she began with a rueful chuckle, and stopped with her mouth open as she saw Mrs. Darnell hurrying toward them under the cedar trees in the dense woods of the hollow.

  “Oh, please go away,” she sobbed when she came closer. “Please! Don’t you think you’ve caused us enough trouble already?”

  Trixie stared at her, tongue-tied, but Honey said quickly, “We haven’t meant to cause you any trouble, Mrs. Darnell. We only—”

  The woman covered her tired face with her thin, work-worn hands and burst into tears. “So you know our name now,” she groaned. “Darney said you’d never give up until you tracked us down. I’ve been a fool. I thought you were kind. I even hoped Joeanne might be with you. She said you were nice girls, and we’ve never laid eyes on her since she took back your puppy. I’ve prayed every night since she ran away that she had hidden in your trailer and that she was safe in your care.”

  Impulsively, Honey put her arms around the woman’s shaking shoulders. “Don’t cry, Mrs. Darnell,” she begged. “We are your friends, really and truly we are.”

  The frail woman pulled away from her. “Friends!” she repeated hoarsely. “You’ve been spying on us from the beginning and setting your dog on us. You knew how my little Sally loved him. You knew he would lead you to our hiding place. I should have shut him out last night and left him to shift for himself in the woods. He’s been the cause of all our troubles.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Honey cried, on the verge of tears herself now. “We never meant to spy on you. And we’ve been trying to find Joeanne ever since she ran away.”

  “It was your dog that made her do it,” Mrs. Darnell sobbed. “ ‘It’s bad enough to have a thief for a father,’ she told me, my oldest girl, and my only comfort. ‘But when my little sister starts taking after her father and stealing too, I can’t bear it.’ And those were the last words she spoke.”

  Trixie found her voice at last. “You mustn’t worry about Joeanne any more, Mrs. Darnell,” she got out. “She’s perfectly safe and a friend of ours has been taking good care of her.”

  Mrs. Darnell stopped crying and hope gleamed in her reddened eyes. “Are you telling me the truth?” she demanded. “How can I trust you? Darney had a fine job with a good home for us at the Smith farm, and then you girls turned up. He was going to return the trailer to Mr. Lynch just as soon as the beans were picked, but when Sally told us she had seen you from the upstairs window, Darney wouldn’t stay at the Smiths’ another night. Oh, why did you have to ruin everything?”

  She began to weep again but stopped abruptly as Trixie suddenly shouted. “Lynch! Oh, now I remember where I saw the Robin before. It belongs to Diana Lynch’s father. They have a big place just outside of Sleepyside on the river,” she explained to Honey in a rush of words. “Diana was in my class at school last year and invited me for lunch one Saturday. She showed me inside their trailer, but I’d forgotten all about it until this minute.”

  Mrs. Darnell wiped her eyes with a corner of her apron and set her thin shoulders. “There’s no use pretending any more,” she told Trixie. “Darney should never have done it, but what else could he do with four children and me so sick I could hardly move from room to room? The landlord said we’d have to get out the first of August if we didn’t pay the rent. There were doctor bills and hospital bills and Darney barely on his feet again after the operation on his eye. And the farm not producing anything, what with him too sick to do the spring planting.” She looked at them, imploring for sympathy. “Then Mr. Lynch stopped by one morning and asked Darney to keep an eye on his house while he and his family were away on vacation. He was our nearest neighbor, you see, and very friendly although Darney was too proud to let him know about our troubles. So after the Lynches had gone, Darney went over to see if the house was locked up and everything as it should be, and there in the big garage was the trailer, all hitched up and ready to go with the keys in the tow car.”

  “The Lynches must have planned to take their vacation in the Robin and changed their minds at the last minute,” Trixie put in.

  Mrs. Darnell nodded in agreement. “The temptation was too much for Darney. He couldn’t go off and look for work, leaving me, too weak to stand, with the care of the children. He knew he’d find work on one of the farms upstate—he knows this part of the country—his family once owned Wilson Ranch.”

  “And so,” Honey finished sympathetically, “he just borrowed the Robin, planning to return it before the Lynches came home.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Darnell said. “But it was very wrong of us and we deserve to be punished. We’ve never drawn a happy breath since we started out. What with having to keep the children cooped up inside whenever we stopped for fear one of them would prattle and give away our secret. And then my big girl, my Joeanne—” She broke down again.

  Trixie couldn’t stand it another minute. “You haven’t got a thing to worry about, Mrs. Darnell,” she said firmly. “I know Mr. Lynch and he’s just about the kindest man alive. He’ll understand why you had to borrow his trailer. Why, he’s got four or five children of his own, all younger than Diana. I’m going right back to Autoville and call him up and tell him the whole story. Just you wait and see. He’ll tell the police to stop looking for the Robin. Then Mr. Darnell can leave you with the Smiths while he returns the trailer.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Mrs. Darnell wailed. “The Smiths will never take us back, and I think Darney has already been arrested, he’s been gone so long. Oh, if only he’d been willing to let well enough alone, but no, he had to go and risk being caught himself to put the troopers on the trail of those thieves!”

  Trixie and Honey gasped in unison. “Was it Mr. Darnell who called headquarters yesterday?” Trixie demanded in amazement. “Did he know that the Smiths’ old barn was the trailer thieves’ hide-out?”

  Mrs. Darnell nodded tearfully. “Darney was out searching for some sign of Joeanne. He thought at first she might have gone to Wilson Ranch because she’s heard him speak of his old home so often, and how as a boy he used to swim in a quarry. Then yesterday around noon he caught sight of the roof of an old barn down in the hollow on the other side of the road. He looked inside it, hoping she might be hiding there and saw this big van and valuable trailer equipment lying around. Then, not an hour lat
er, he stumbled across the same van hitched to a trailer in the woods on this side of the road. Nothing would do but he must walk five miles to the nearest gas station and risk being arrested himself while he tips off the police.”

  She smiled through her tears, and Trixie saw that, in spite of her worries, Mrs. Darnell was proud of her husband. “That’s Darney for you,” she said, “and Joeanne is exactly like him. They have the same thick black hair that grows like weeds, and they’re both as stubborn as mules and as honest as the day is long. If it hadn’t been for my being so sickly, my Darney would never have touched that trailer.”

  A twig crackled in the woods and all three of them jumped as a tall, broad-shouldered trooper stepped out from behind the thick trunk of an old oak tree.

  Chapter 17

  Mrs. Smith Takes Over

  Out of the corner of her eye, Trixie saw with inner amusement that gentle, kindhearted Honey had doubled up her fists and looked prepared to scratch the trooper’s eyes out. Trixie herself let out a long, pent-up sigh of relief, for the trooper with the sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves was standing there uncertainly, as though torn between his sense of duty and sympathy for Mrs. Darnell.

  “I’m sorry to have been eavesdropping, ma’am,” he told her in a most apologetic voice. “I saw that blond kid sleigh-riding down the hill on the seat of her pants and came over to investigate.” His kind blue eyes twinkled. “So it was your husband who called headquarters yesterday?”

  Mrs. Darnell’s lower lip trembled and she caught it between her teeth. “Yes, it was,” she said defiantly, “and it was he who took the red trailer you’ve been looking high and low for these past few days.” She pointed through the trees. “There it is, waiting for you, and it’ll be the answer to my prayers if you take it away.”

  “Now then, take it easy, ma’am,” the sergeant said soothingly. “Our orders about that red trailer have been changed since yesterday. When we notified Mr. Lynch that it hadn’t been stolen by one of the gang that’s been operating in this neck of the woods, he said for us to skip it. Said he’d just learned that one of his very good neighbors had borrowed it and that he would be very much obliged if we would have this fact announced on the radio as soon as possible.”

  The sergeant twirled his cap. “Couldn’t help overhearing what you were telling these girls just now, Mrs. Darnell. Sounds as though you were the neighbors Mr. Lynch told us about on the phone. Guess Mr. Lynch only just heard about the trouble you people have been having. I figured you might like to have a motorcycle escort down the river when your husband drives the Robin back to Sleepyside. You can’t always tell how the cops in some of those small towns might act if they saw a red trailer passing through. Might get all excited and ask you a lot of foolish questions.”

  Mrs. Darnell’s thin face turned pale, then red and then pale again. “Oh, officer,” she gasped, “we don’t deserve such kindness.”

  The trooper went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “And then there’s the question of the rewards. All together they mount up to quite a tidy sum, and we boys would like to add a little something to it. I don’t even have to ask the men in my troop.” He reached into his hip pocket and produced a thick leather wallet. “In the first place,” he said, “the disappearance of the Robin fixed those trailer thieves. As long as it didn’t show up right away the way the other ones did, the reporters in the press and on the air kept howling for action. All the hue and cry ruined the crooks’ racket. Smart of your husband to figure that out, Mrs. Darnell. And very modest of him not to give us his name when he tipped us off. We could use a man like that.” He slipped a twenty-dollar bill into the pocket of her apron. “Just a small token of our appreciation for all the time and trouble you saved us. If Mr. Darnell ever wants a job, let me know.”

  It was all Trixie could do to keep from throwing her arms around the trooper’s neck and hugging him. He slapped his cap back on his head and saluted smartly. “I’ll be getting back to headquarters now. When Mr. Darnell is ready for the motorcycle escort, have him drop by and just say the word.”

  His broad shoulders disappeared through the trees before anyone could utter a sound.

  And then the silence was broken by Mrs. Darnell’s weeping, but this time she was crying for joy. “That dear, kind man,” she sobbed. “We don’t deserve any of it, but I’ll pray for his health and happiness every night of my life. If we could only find Joeanne now, our troubles would be over.”

  Trixie reached out and patted her hand. “I know where Joeanne is,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “You go back and wait in the trailer for your husband. Honey and I will bring Joeanne to you.”

  Mrs. Darnell smiled shyly. “I believe you do know where my daughter is. I’m glad I was right about you girls. Deep down inside me I was sure from the beginning that I could trust you.” She turned and darted away like a timid little gray squirrel.

  “Trixie Belden,” Honey said sternly, “I’m ashamed of you. You had no business arousing false hope in that poor woman. You don’t know where Joeanne is any more than I do.”

  Trixie tugged at Honey’s bare arm. “I don’t know but I’m practically certain. Both Jim and Joeanne are not far away. Come on!”

  Bud sat down on his haunches mournfully, as though undecided as to whether he should follow Mrs. Darnell or his mistress. Honey bit her lip. “I love that little black nuisance,” she said more to herself than to Trixie, “but I think he’d be happier with a family of children than with me all alone in that big old house. Wait,” she told Trixie. “I won’t be a minute, but I want to give him to Sally right now and get it over and done with.”

  Trixie watched Honey disappear through the trees with Bud frolicking at her heels. “Honey’s mother has just got to adopt Jim,” she said grimly through her teeth. “He’ll be a perfect brother for Honey. Mrs. Wheeler has got to see it that way. She’s just got to!”

  Honey came running back then, her cheeks flushed and her hazel eyes sparkling. “That Sally!” She panted as she followed Trixie around the base of the hill. “Her mother made her thank me, of course, but she was as fresh as paint about it. ‘Thank you for bringing back my puppy,’ she said like a little queen. ‘He was losted but I won’t let him get losted any more.’ ”

  Trixie chuckled. “Sally makes me homesick for Bobby. He’s an awful pest, but I guess I miss him even more than I do Brian and Mart. Oh, Honey,” she went on enthusiastically, “won’t it be wonderful to be back home again? We can ride every day and go swimming in your lake, and—”

  “Nothing will ever be the same again without Jim,” Honey interrupted sadly. “Please don’t keep me in the dark any more. What makes you think we’re going to find him and Joeanne close by?”

  “I don’t know why we were both so dumb we didn’t guess before,” Trixie admitted. “Remember what Mrs. Smith said about two boys who bicycled up to the farmhouse and offered to help pick the beans?”

  Honey nodded. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it. I thought for a while that her hired hand who fell out of the old apple tree might have been Jim, but Jim is much too smart to have done anything so stupid.”

  The neglected path they had been following came out abruptly on the main highway about twenty yards south of the entrance to the Smith farm.

  “That hired hand wasn’t Jim,” Trixie said, “but the big brother Mrs. Smith said was so husky and knew his way around a farm, is. Why, Honey, she even called the little brother, Joe. I didn’t put two and two together until Mrs. Darnell was talking about how much Joeanne is like her father. She said both of them have hair that grows like weeds, and I thought to myself, ‘Now both of them have haircuts too.’ And right at that moment I got a mental picture of Joeanne in those patched blue jeans without her pigtails. And I saw at once that anybody would take her for a thin little boy.”

  Honey covered her face with her hands. “Oh, Trixie,” she moaned, “we were dumb. Do you think it’s too late? Do you think Jim may already ha
ve left the Smiths?”

  “Not Jim,” Trixie said firmly. “He’d never leave until the bean crop is in. They couldn’t even go down in the garden yesterday after the rain for fear of spreading rust through the beans, but now that the sun has dried off everything, you can be sure that Jim is down there right now, picking away like mad.”

  Honey began to laugh, rather hysterically, Trixie thought. “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,” she cried, grabbing Trixie’s hand and starting to run. “To think we were sitting in Mrs. Smith’s kitchen yesterday eating chocolate layer cake and drinking spiced grape juice while Jim was only half an acre away!”

  “Jim and Joeanne,” Trixie agreed breathlessly as Honey dragged her into the Smith driveway. “I was only half listening to Mrs. Smith when she went on and on about the two boys. I was thinking about the abandoned barn and how it must be down in the hollow below the old orchard. The sky was clouding over and I wanted to get away so we could explore before it poured.”

  “If we’d only waited a few more minutes,” Honey gasped. “Jim and Joeanne would have come up from the garden at the first drop of rain.”

  “That’s right,” Trixie said, forcing Honey to slow down to a walk. “Let’s get our breath before we barge into the house. Mrs. Smith will think we’re crazy.” She mopped her face with her handkerchief and Honey followed suit.

  It was terribly hot and sultry and the sun was shining through a haze that hung over the fields below the farmhouse.

  “It can’t be later than ten o’clock,” Honey said thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s still too wet to pick beans. Maybe they’re—”