The Hudson River Mystery

by Campbell, Julie

  ”Transported I am

  From the haunts of man

  On the banks of the Hudson Stream,

  Where the wolves and owls

  With their terrible howls

  Disturb our nightly dream.”

  Loyola’s strong voice dropped to a ghostly quaver on the last phrase.

  ”Spooky,” Bobby admitted.

  Trixie agreed with a shiver. The wolves and the owls... and the sharks, she added to herself.

  Brian in Trouble ● 3

  THAT’S JUST REPULSIVE!” Di Lynch’s violet eyes widened in dismay. ”Why, I’ve been swimming in that river. And just last month, I took the twins swimming at the Croton Point beach, and I can’t bear the thought that there might have been sharks in that water!” Di had two sets of twins in her family, and she adored baby-sitting for them. ”I just can’t believe it.”

  ”It sounds too weird to be true, Trixie,” agreed Jim Frayne. He leaned against a locker and frowned down at her.

  Trixie avoided his eyes and reached for a notebook inside her locker. She should have known better than to bring up this subject again! She had deliberately kept quiet on the bus ride to school that morning, not wanting to provoke any more sarcastic remarks from her brothers. Patiently she had listened while Di had rattled on about the inch of water that had crept into the Lynch basement, and Jim had told about the hard time Regan had had keeping the horses calm during the storm. Biding her time until the group was inside the school building, she had cornered Di and Jim, the last two Bob-Whites who hadn’t yet heard of her discovery. Once again, her friends’ reactions gave her very little satisfaction.

  The notebook Trixie had grabbed dislodged a torrent of papers into the hallway, so it was a moment before she could respond. ”That’s just the point, Di,” she said, stuffing a sheet of equations back into her locker. ”We’ve all been swimming in that river. A lot of us have gone sailing and fishing and iceboating there, too. But most of all, we’ve always thought of the Hudson as, well, as a thing of beauty, if you don’t mind my getting poetic about it. We’ve never considered it as a threat!”

  ”Your English teacher will be impressed,” Jim said dryly. ”But I think I’ll need more proof before I’ll be impressed with your shark story.”

  ”I don’t think you really want proof,” said Trixie ominously.

  Di’s pretty face grew apprehensive. ”What do you mean?”

  ”I mean, do we have to wait until someone gets killed before we believe in the killer?”

  ”Oh, don’t say that,” Di wailed.

  ”Don’t be so gullible, Di,” said Jim. ”You know Trixie’s hyperactive imagination as well as I do.” He bent down to pick up an old test paper Trixie had missed. ”Anyway, Ms. Schoolgirl Sha-mus, what do you propose to do about this so-called killer?”

  Trixie slammed her locker shut just as the first warning bell rang. Briefly she told Jim and Di about getting more information from Thea Van Loon. Then the trio scurried off to their respective homerooms.

  As it turned out, Jim was wrong about one thing. None of Trixie’s teachers were overly impressed with her performance that gray Monday morning. She had grabbed the wrong notebook, after all, and goofed miserably when her turn came up in math class. In English class, her mind drifted back to the shark; when she was called upon, she replied absently, ”The shark did it.” Only then did she realize that the rest of the class had been discussing the whale in Moby Dick!

  To top things off, her history teacher chose that day to give a surprise quiz. At least, it came as a surprise to Trixie. I hope Dan and Brian are doing better on their chemistry test than I’m doing on this, she thought as she guessed blindly on one question after another. Oddly enough, one of the questions had to do with the old Vikings’ fishing voyages. I can’t get away from the subject, Trixie thought with a rueful grin.

  One hour in which sharks did not come up was lunch period. Trixie entered the cafeteria with the resolution to avoid that topic, and she stuck to it. As if by unspoken agreement, none of the other Bob-Whites brought it up, either. Instead, the discussion centered around the previous night’s storm, the upcoming party the Bob-Whites were planning for Halloween, and Mart’s habit of disrupting the Belden canning rituals with his word tricks.

  ”Oh, Mart,” giggled Di, ”you’re so smart at everything else. How can you be such a klutz in the kitchen?”

  ’”My specialty, Diana, is gormandizing preserved and pickled delectables,” he replied. ”The actual concocting of such delicacies is better left to someone with a more mundane turn of mind. Your friend Beatrix, for example, whose mind is eminently suited to vegetables.”

  ”What was that first thing you said?” Di asked. ”You’re going to be some kind of specialist? I thought Brian—”

  ”What he’s trying to say,” Trixie said sweetly, ”is that he eats like a pig and has a brain like one, too! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to put a call through to his feeding trough.” Before Mart could get in the last word, she gulped down the last of her tuna fish sandwich and went tearing down the hall toward the pay phone.

  When Trixie came back to the Bob-Whites’ table a few minutes later, it was with a slower pace and a longer face. She sat down by Honey and began gloomily peeling a banana.

  ”Something wrong?” Honey asked in her sympathetic way.

  ”Oh, I guess it’s not the end of the world,” said Trixie. ”It’s just that Moms has eighty tons of tomatoes that she claims will rot overnight if Mart and I don’t help her right after school. So we can’t go see Thea today, Honey.”

  ”We’ll go tomorrow,” Honey promised. ”Maybe Thea heard you were coming and left a few bushels of tomatoes on our doorstep,” Brian said.

  Trixie made a face at him and retorted, ”You’re just jealous you’ll miss out on all the fun. Where are you disappearing to after school, anyway?”

  ”I told you. That’s why I drove my jalopy to school this morning instead of taking the bus. Loyola and I have to drive into White Plains to buy some supplies for our project.” Brian looked at his watch and stood up so fast that he almost lost his balance. ”In fact, I’ve got to split. Loyola and I have something to go over before our next class.”

  Trixie scrambled to her feet. ”I simply have to get to my locker pronto,” she said. ”If I don’t show up with the right book in at least one of my classes today, I might as well take the bus home right now. Hmmm, the way my day is going, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea!”

  Trixie’s afternoon at school was no more productive than her morning had been. Fortunately, the assembly-line canning process that Helen Belden set up left little room for additional misfortune at home.

  Bobby was proud to be assigned the task of washing the tomatoes Mrs. Belden had selected. Mart had his hands full with scalding them and dipping them in cold water. Trixie quartered them, while Mrs. Belden packed the jars and boiled them for the required forty-five minutes.

  Mart dumped several tomatoes into the boiling water at once, causing a slight spray to shoot upward, splashing Trixie.

  ”Mart, watch out,” complained Trixie. ”Jeepers, you’re more lethal than a shark.”

  ”Bobby, I think Reddy wants to come inside,” said Mrs. Belden. ”Could you let him in?”

  Bobby skipped out into the hall, and Mrs. Belden continued talking in low tones. ”Trixie, I wish you’d drop this business about the shark. You’ve got Bobby rather upset.”

  ”Oh, gosh, I didn’t even think—”

  ”I know you didn’t, dear. I wasn’t worried about it myself, until last night when I went in to say good night to him. Between that song Loyola sang and the story you told at dinner, Bobby was full of all kinds of fantasies. I don’t think he slept very well last night.”

  ”Now I feel terrible,” Trixie said. ”Prom now on, my lips are sealed!”

  ”That’ll be the day,” snorted Mart. Then, as Bobby and Reddy entered the room, he said, ”Come on, I’m running out of ammunition here. How
about tashing more womatoes?”

  ”Womatoes, womatoes,” Bobby chanted. Trixie and Mrs. Belden threw weary looks toward Mart, who assumed a cherubic smile as he carefully lowered a tomato into the pot.

  Minutes later, there came a sound of footsteps in the hallway.

  ”That couldn’t be your father,” murmured Mrs. Belden. ”He has a retirement banquet to attend tonight.”

  It was Brian who shuffled into the kitchen and without a word sat down at the table, his head in his hands.

  Trixie took one look at her ashen-faced brother and said sharply, ”Brian, what’s wrong?”

  Brian stared back at her and said slowly, as if he still couldn’t believe it: ”I—I’ve had an accident with my car....”

  Instantly his family surrounded him, full of concern and questions: ”Are you all right?”

  ”Is anyone hurt?”

  ”Brian, what happened?”

  ”How did you get home?”

  Brian waved his hands. ”I didn’t mean to scare everyone,” he said apologetically. ”I’m fine. It’s just that nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

  ”Please, what happened?” begged Trixie. Everyone joined Brian around the table except Mrs. Belden, who asked, ”Can I make you some tea?”

  ”Yes, thanks,” said Brian. ”I still feel weak.” He looked as though he were mentally shaking off some sort of vision, and then he began his story. ”Loyola and I were getting some special equipment in a large bait and tackle shop in White Plains. It was right downtown, and I had a hard time finding a parking place.”

  ”Who was driving?” Mart asked, getting up to rescue the last of the tomatoes from the pot.

  ”I was. Loyola doesn’t even have her driver’s license yet. But she was the one who noticed the only space left on the block—”

  ”I’ll bet you had car trouble,” guessed Trixie. ”You were just saying last night that it hasn’t been running right lately. What happened—did it conk out on you?”

  ”You’re certainly getting into the habit of jumping to the wrong conclusions lately,” Brian said, annoyed.

  ”Merely a quotidian occurrence with our sister,” said Mart lightly, coming back to sit beside Brian.

  ”Anyway,” Brian went on, ”what happened had nothing to do with my jalopy. I mean, it was entirely my fault. I saw the space Loyola pointed out and moved into the right lane. Instead of backing into the space, like I should have done, for some reason I decided to pull forward. And I—I guess I just wasn’t paying attention. I sort of blacked out. The next thing I knew, I had steered the jalopy right into the next car!”

  ”Oh, Brian!” gasped Trixie.

  ”Actually it was more like I brushed against the car,” Brian hastened to say. ”I didn’t really do much damage, and there was no damage at all to my car that I can see. Naturally I stopped right away and got out to see what I’d done. The car’s owner was in the tackle shop and came running out to see what had happened.”

  Bobby, who had but a six-year-old’s appreciation of the seriousness of the occasion, was turning words over in his mind. ”Bait and tackle... hmmm, tait and backle. Is that right, Mart?” he asked.

  ”You can play with your words after I finish my story,” snapped Brian. ”Well, the owner was very upset at first, but after she took a good look at her car, she calmed down. She insisted that we shouldn’t call the police and wouldn’t hear of my paying for the damage.”

  Mrs. Belden set a mug of steaming tea near Brian and sat down. ”Of course you will pay for the damage,” she said.

  Brian nodded. ”That’s what made me feel so terrible. It turned out that her car was almost brand-new—a very expensive silver sports car. No wonder she was so hysterical at first! What I did was to put a scratch in the small rubber guard over the rear fender. I felt so guilty about putting the first scratch on a brand-new car that I promised to buy the replacement part and put it on her car myself tomorrow after school.” He paused to take a sip of tea. ”She wouldn’t hear of it for several minutes, but finally—probably just to keep me quiet—she agreed. She left then, and Loyola and I got our errand taken care of. Then I drove home. So I guess everything turned out okay. I don’t know why I still feel sort of disoriented over the whole thing.”

  His mother leaned over and placed her hand over Brian’s. ”You do seem flustered,” she agreed. ”And since you’ve come home, you’ve seemed a little cranky and irritable. Brian, is there anything wrong—I mean, really wrong? Are you feeling all right?”

  ”I’m fine,” Brian insisted. ”And I apologize for being so impatient. I seem to be doing nothing but causing trouble these days.”

  ”I’ll talk this over with your father when he comes home,” Mrs. Belden said. ”I do think that, besides your paying for and putting on the replacement part, it might be best if you didn’t do any driving for a week or so. Of course, your driving record up till now has been perfect—”

  ”No, you’re absolutely right,” Brian said. ”I acted irresponsibly. Would it be all right if I drove to school tomorrow, though, so I can take care of fixing that sports car?”

  ”Of course,” said Mrs. Belden, getting up from the table. ”Now, if my womato helpers will give me a few more minutes of their time, we’ll be able to work on getting some dinner together. I promise that whatever it is won’t have tomatoes in it!”

  A noisy cheer came from Mart.

  Brian rubbed his eyes, finished the last of his tea, and stood up. Abruptly he turned to Trixie. ”Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. ”The owner of that car—it was, of all people, that person you and Honey said you were going to see this afternoon—Loyola’s friend, Thea Van Loon.”

  A Shocking Confession ● 4

  AFTER SCHOOL THE FOLLOWING DAY, Trixie and Honey found themselves crammed into the front seat with Brian in his jalopy. To Trixie, Brian still seemed moody and unpredictable. She had been almost surprised when he had agreed at ’once to let the two girls accompany him to Thea’s.

  Brian drove to a nearby car dealer’s and went inside to purchase the part he needed. Trixie and Honey waited in the car, chatting about the prospect of meeting a writer of children’s books.

  ”She’s probably a retired schoolteacher or some other sweet-little-old-lady type,” Trixie speculated.

  ”Who drives a racy sports car?” Honey teased. ”Well, everyone has little quirks,” said Trixie stubbornly. ”Take you, for instance. You come from one of the wealthiest families around here. Yet you wear blue jeans and sweatshirts half the time, just like me.”

  ”We’re not that wealthy, and I’m not quirky-just comfortable,” said Honey. ”Anyway, I love that name—Thea Van Loon. She sounds like a tall, willowy, ballet-dancer type. High cheekbones, long scarf, kind of arty-looking.”

  ”Who walks around quoting A Child’s Garden of Verses and Alice in Wonderland, ” Trixie went on dreamily. ” ’Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you’re at!’ Gleeps, Honey, I have a feeling that once we get to talking, Thea will be overwhelmed by how much we know about the Hudson—”

  ”Trixie, don’t get carried away. Although, now that you mention it, maybe she’ll refer to us in a footnote or two.”

  ”Footnote? One of those things at the bottom of a page that’s in that teeny print you can hardly read? Oh, no, I can see us more in the front of the book, right after the title: ’Respectfully dedicated to two fine Hudson River detectives, Trixie and Honey....’ Both girls burst out laughing.

  The two girls were still in the middle of their giggle attack when Brian came back with the part. Wordlessly he started the car and drove it to Wentworth Avenue, a nearby street lined with apartment houses.

  For some reason, Trixie didn’t feel like sharing their jokes with Brian. He doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor these days, she thought.

  The woman who opened the door of the old apartment building was nothing at all like Trixie’s or Honey’s fantasies. Thea Van Loon was in her early thirties, Trixie
guessed. Her faded jeans and nondescript top were not exactly high fashion. She was barely taller than Trixie and on the plain side. Still, the smile of recognition that crossed her face made her seem pleasant and open.

  ”Hello, Brian,” she said. ”I must have told you a hundred times not to bother coming over here, but somehow I knew you’d be the type to come anyway.”

  Brian started apologizing for the accident all over again.

  ”The car’s right out in front,” Thea interrupted him. ”I hope the repair doesn’t take you more than a minute.” She looked inquiringly at the two girls.

  ”Er, this is my sister, Trixie, and our friend Honey Wheeler,” Brian said. ”They were wondering—” He stopped, obviously at a loss for words.

  Trixie, too, was tongue-tied, but Honey stepped forward and said with composure, ”We pestered Brian so much, Ms. Van Loon, that he agreed to let us come with him. We’ve never met a children’s book author before, and we just couldn’t let the opportunity pass by.”

  ”We’ve been dying to meet you,” Trixie added breathlessly.

  Thea looked flattered. ”Why don’t you girls wait inside?” she asked. ”Brian, let us know when you re through.” Leading the way down the hall, she added, ”And call me Thea.”

  The girls followed her and sat in the chairs Thea pointed out.

  ”My goodness, Brian is certainly a conscientious young man,” Thea commented.

  ”That’ s one of many reasons why he’s going to make such a good doctor,” Trixie said proudly.

  ”A doctor, hmm?” Thea stretched out on a couch. ”I’m sorry I can’t offer you girls a snack, but this isn’t my apartment, and I don’t know where anything is.”

  ”Oh, we didn’t come for food,” Trixie blurted. ”What Trixie means,” said Honey, ”is that we were hoping you might tell us something about your job. What’s it like to write books for kids?” Thea snorted inelegantly. ”Not as glamorous as you might think,” she said. ”For one thing, the pay is terrible.”