The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

  First, she walked with light footsteps toward the window of the telegraph and ticket office nearest the tracks. She tried to peer through this window into the waiting room beyond but could see nothing through the murky glass and the heavy mesh of wire that covered it, save the indistinct figure of the ticket agent whose duties were combined with those of baggage-man, train dispatcher, telegraph operator, and occasional expressman.

  “I’ll try the side window,” Arden determined, and through this she was able to glance into the deserted station. There was no one in the waiting room, as far as she could see: not even one of the few town taxi-drivers escaping from the heavy fog and the chilly dampness of the approaching night.

  “Here’s luck!” Arden thought. “If I’m quick I can send the telegram and be out of here before anyone sees me. Of course, the smart thing to have done would have been to write out my message before I came here. But I think it won’t take long.”

  The dark brown door leading into the waiting room was heavy and stuck at the sill. That many feet had kicked it loose was evidenced by several dents and scratches showing at the bottom in the dim glow of an outside lamp under the station platform covering. After one or two futile efforts Arden managed to push back the door and enter.

  The ticket and telegraph office was faintly lighted, but as Arden looked in through the little window, protected by a wicket of brass, she could not make out the form of the agent she was sure she had seen when she peered in from the outside platform.

  “Oh, dear!” worried the girl. “He must have gone out, and before he comes back to take my message, someone from the college may stop in here and catch me. That’s the worst of these country places. I suppose there isn’t another train for some time and the agent went out for a rest. If I could only reach in and get a telegraph blank I could write the message, with a notation to send it collect, and leave it here for him. Let’s see—what shall I say? ‘Must have a thousand dollars at once. Can you send it? Letter follows.’ Dad will probably think I’ve embezzled some of the college funds or stolen some jewels. Oh, where is that agent?”

  She drummed impatiently with a pencil on the shelf of the window and stood on tiptoes to look in. As she did so the agent suddenly emerged from where he was crouched low in a stooping position halfway into a small supply closet in one corner of his cubbyhole of an office, out of Arden’s sight. The agent stood up so quickly, directly in front of the wicket window confronting Arden, that it was as if some gigantic Jack-in-the-box had popped out at her.

  “Oh!” she gasped, preventing herself, by a strong effort, from springing back. Then again, but less hysterically: “Oh, here you are!”

  “Well?” asked the agent and he smiled.

  Arden opened her mouth to say she wanted to send a telegram, but the sudden appearance of the man, popping up into her view in that manner, was so disconcerting that she could only stand there and stare at him. And as she stared she realized, with a shock, that she had seen the face of this man somewhere before. She stood there, silent and perplexed, trying to solve the puzzle, trying to remember. Could she have seen the man before?

  He stood patiently waiting for her to state her wants.

  But Arden went into a strange panic of fear and uncertainty.

  “I—I think I’ve forgotten something!” she gasped, backing nervously away from the window. “I—I’ll come back—later.” She forced to her face a rather sickly smile.

  “Very well,” said the man behind the wicket. “I’ll be open for quite a while yet.”

  Then, turning away, Arden fled, pulled open the door, scurried across the tracks and rushed back to college. Her one thought was to bring Terry and Sim with her to the station on a strange errand. She wanted them to help her identify the man in the ticket office as the missing Pangborn heir, pictured on the placard in the post office.

  For that was exactly what Arden believed. So obsessed had she become with the poster picture and the reward offered for information about the original, that she was sure she was right.

  The man who had popped up at the wicket window was Harry Pangborn.

  “I’m positive of it!” murmured Arden as she ran faster. “But I must get Sim and Terry to look at him. I’ll need their evidence.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  In Danger

  With startling suddenness, the night, aided by the dense fog, settled down over Cedar Ridge. Arden was alarmed. She had not thought it was so late, though she was quite sure the supper bell had not yet rung. She ran faster, her beating heart keeping time with her pattering feet.

  “Oh, I hope Terry and Sim will come back with me and see this for themselves,” she thought. “How wonderful that I have made this discovery! I need not wire Dad for that money after all. I’m sure,” she tried to convince herself, “that I am right. Quite sure!”

  There was no time to be lost. Supper would soon be served and the three from 513 dared not be absent from their places at the table very long. Nor would they want to be. Appetites were remarkably keen at the college, in spite of all the mystery and excitement and notwithstanding the eating that was done between meals.

  As Arden approached the main building which loomed up out of the fog like some dream castle, she called on her childhood friend, the “good fairy.” She murmured: “Good fairy, please don’t let us get caught, and for a wish, I wish that Terry and Sim will come back with me right away!”

  It seemed the good fairy did not entirely desert her child, for, as Arden started up the stairs, she met her two chums coming down.

  “Terry! Sim! I’ve the most exciting thing to tell you!” Arden gulped and continued: “Come outside a moment.”

  “Good heavens! You look as if you’d seen a ghost! Take a breath—or something—before you pass out!” advised Terry, a little incredulous.

  “Well, tell us, Arden!” Sim begged, wringing her hands in simulated melodramatic fashion. “This suspense is awful! It’s making an old woman of me!”

  “I don’t want anyone to hear,” Arden confided. “Can’t you step outside for a few seconds? You won’t be cold. I want you to do something for me.”

  Sim and Terry looked at each other.

  “Better humor her, Sim. She might turn violent. Come on,” Terry said in an exaggerated attempt at soothing a patient.

  “If I get violent it will be because you two show such little natural curiosity, Bernice Westover,” Arden retorted testily. “When you hear what I saw—”

  “How can we hear what you saw?” mocked Sim.

  “Oh—you—” began Arden, really provoked now.

  “All right, my dear.” Terry held open the main entrance door and motioned the other two out ahead of her. “If anyone wonders why we are going out when the supper bell has almost rung, we can say we want a breath of fresh air for an appetite.”

  “As if anyone who knows the feed here would believe that!” mocked Sim.

  But in spite of the banter, Arden finally herded her chums down to the cinder path in front of the dormitory building.

  “Come along a little farther,” she urged. “No one must hear!”

  Terry and Sim followed, now really convinced that Arden had something of moment to impart to them. She looked around half in caution, half in fear. When they were some distance from the main entrance and shrouded in the fog, Arden said in a low voice:

  “I was just over to the station—”

  “You were!” interrupted Sim. “Why, Arden Blake! If you were seen, it’ll be just too bad! What if Tiddy finds out?”

  “Yes, I know. But there are times when rules have to be broken,” admitted Arden. “If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or some historic personages like that hadn’t drafted a new constitution in Philadelphia when they had no right to do so, I wouldn’t be telling you all this.”

  “All what? That you were over to the station? It’s a grand night to break rules but a better one for murders,” declared Terry, sniffing the fog with her head thrown back and her eyes hal
f shut.

  “If you’d stop interrupting I could tell you.” Arden was beginning to lose patience. “I was over at the station, as I said, and I saw someone there: the night ticket agent, who is the very image of the missing man whose picture we saw on the reward notice in the post office! There!” Arden paused to see what effect this statement had on her friends. They seemed to take it very calmly, and Terry said, most practically:

  “Nonsense, Arden. If he was the man you think he is, someone else would have noticed him long ago and claimed the reward.”

  “Besides,” added Sim, “no young man, or old one either, who wanted to keep his whereabouts secret would be so foolish as to appear in so public a place as a railroad ticket office, and near the place where there was hanging a poster offering a thousand dollars for information about him.”

  “Not necessarily,” countered Arden calmly. “I have read somewhere that the cleverest criminals (not that Mr. Pangborn is one, though) always stay right in the place where they have committed a crime or are supposed to have vanished from. The trick is, that no one ever thinks of looking so near home for them. Poe has a story about a missing letter that was all the while right in the open, stuck in a rack with a lot of others.”

  “Oh, yes, we had to read that in English lit,” admitted Terry.

  “Well, what do you want to do, Sherlock—go over and identify the corpse?” asked Sim. “If you do, I’m afraid I can’t come. I have to go to Mary Todd for a notebook.”

  “Please, Sim, it won’t take a minute, or only two or three, anyhow. You can come right back and be in time for supper. Think how thrilling it would be if—”

  “It most likely won’t be,” finished Terry. “But I’m game. I like fog. It’s good for the complexion.”

  “If you and Terry go, I’ll come, too, of course. But I think you’re on a wild-goose chase,” declared Sim.

  “But I tell you he looked exactly like the poster!” affirmed Arden. “I stood here looking at him, with my mouth open like a fish, while he waited for me to speak. I was so surprised I just had to stammer something about forgetting what I came for, say I’d be back later, and run away. I don’t know what he thought of me.”

  “Maybe he can’t think. Anyhow, come on, Sim. But make it snappy. I’ve got something else to do more important than this,” said Terry.

  Arm in arm the three girls, a little nervous when they realized what would happen if they were caught breaking the campus rule in effect against them, started for the station. Arden hurried them impatiently, but Terry was in one of her teasing moods and refused to be hastened, pausing now and then to remark on the beauty of the night and attempting to point out, in the dense fog, places of interest on their brief journey.

  At the station a quick look through an end window showed the waiting room to be unoccupied except for a man standing near the big white pot-stove.

  “There he is—the agent!” whispered Arden. “He’s come out of his coop.”

  “You’d think he was a chicken!” chuckled Sim.

  “Oh, be quiet!” Arden begged. “Now you two go in and look at him.”

  “Aren’t you coming?” asked Terry.

  “No. I’ll wait outside here. I don’t want him to see me again. You two go in. Get a good look at him. Ask for—for time-tables. Oh, I’m so excited!”

  “Don’t be so nervous,” Terry admonished. “You’ll be so disappointed if you’re wrong. However—come on, Sim!”

  Terry and Sim, with none of the reluctance Arden was sure she would have experienced, marched around to the door. Arden drew back into the shadows of the fog and waited. She heard her chums enter, dimly heard the murmurs of their voices as, presumably, they asked for time-tables and caught the squeak of the door hinges again.

  “Where’d she go?” Terry murmured. Evidently she and Sim could not see the hidden Arden.

  “I hope this isn’t her idea of a joke, to get us here and then run back,” grumbled Sim.

  “No! No! Here I am!” exclaimed Arden, coming forth out of the gloom. “Did you—was he—is he—”

  “Arden, my pet,” began Terry, flipping a damp time-table, “we fear for your reason, we, your devoted friends. That agent looks no more like the picture of Harry Pangborn than you do!”

  “No?” gasped Arden. “I thought he was the very image of the poster picture.”

  “Sorry, Arden,” Sim continued. “But you’ll have to do better than this to claim the reward. That’s that, and as I’m dripping with dampness, I’m going back where it’s light and dry and warm and where I can eat.”

  “Yes, let’s go back!” agreed Terry, feeling a little sorry for Arden.

  Arden looked sadly at her chums. “And I was almost sure,” she murmured. “Don’t you think there’s a small, a tiny resemblance?”

  “Not the slightest!” chorused Terry and Sim.

  “Well, then, we must get back, I suppose. But I certainly feel like a balloon that has suddenly lost its gas.” Arden sighed.

  Slowly the three started down the station platform to the walk that led across the tracks and on to the college. As they were about to leave the shadowy shelter of the overhanging roof, Arden, who was in the lead, reached back two cautioning and restraining hands toward Terry and Sim.

  “Wait!” she whispered.

  “What is it?” they asked.

  “Ye gods! Here comes Henny—our reverend chaplain! He mustn’t see us here at this hour! Oh, what shall we do?”

  Arden was in a panic of fear.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  In Hiding

  The tall, slim figure, like a black ghost in the white fog, was approaching with measured stride, characteristic of Rev. Dr. Henry Bordmust.

  The three girls, toward whom he was unwittingly walking, looked wildly around for a place to hide. The platform was clear except for some benches, now holding only dripping fog drops.

  “Inside—quickly! Perhaps he won’t notice us!” whispered Arden.

  “Perhaps he will, though, and we mustn’t take a chance!” objected Terry. “Don’t forget, we’re over here without permission.”

  Forward stalked the tall black figure, splitting the fog into damp, swirling masses of mist as he trudged along.

  “Come on, girls!” hissed Sim. “He’s almost here! We can hide in the baggage room at the end of the station.”

  Quickly the girls scurried around the corner of the building toward the baggage room. Fortunately the door was open. Inside, showing beneath a small incandescent lamp, hung high, festooned with cobwebs and dust, were several trunks, valises, suitcases, and boxes. Some of the pieces of baggage and express seemed to have been forgotten, uncalled for or lost a long time. Dust was thick on them.

  “It isn’t very bright,” whispered Terry. Which was true. The high little light only made the gloomy shadows and corners more gloomy. “I wonder if there are rats here?” Terry breathed in alarm.

  “Oh!” gasped Arden. “Why do you have to think of things like that? Stop it!”

  “Hush!” cautioned Sim. “I hear footsteps coming this way.”

  “Shut the door!” begged Terry.

  Arden pushed it so that it was almost tight in the frame. There it stuck. It would close no farther.

  “Look!” she murmured. “The light will show around the cracks and the sill. We can’t shut it off. Oh, what’ll we do? If he comes in here he’ll be sure to see us. We were better off outside. Then we could run and vanish in the fog.”

  “He may not come in here,” spoke Sim hopefully.

  “Oh, but he’s coming—or someone is—right this way!” gasped Terry.

  They were in real panic now—fluttering about seeking concealment. Once Arden and Terry bumped together in their mad race around the little room, but they hadn’t a giggle among them.

  “Here—in here!” Sim suddenly hissed from a distant corner. “I’ve found some kind of a big packing box with a hinged cover like a trapdoor. We can hide in that.”

  “Can we
all get in?” asked Terry. “I don’t want to be left standing outside like this.”

  “I think we can make it,” Sim answered. “We must try, anyhow. Here, Arden—” She held out her hand, and Arden grasped it. “Now, Terry! I’ll guide you. It’s very dark in this corner, but I can make out the box. I’ll climb in first and you two follow.”

  Terry and Arden half heard, half saw Sim partly climb and partly fall over the side of a great box in one corner of the dim room.

  “Come on, Arden,” Sim urged. “It’s easy.”

  Arden put one leg over the side and raised herself up by her hands as if climbing a fence. As she did so there was a ripping, tearing sound.

  “My good stocking and part of my leg, too! Oh, dear!” lamented Arden.

  “Get in quickly. Never mind about that!” urged Sim. “All right. Cuddle down. Now, Terry!”

  “Oh, this is awful!”

  “Don’t talk! Climb in! Shrink a little, Arden!” commanded Sim. “She thinks she’s in bed and taking more than her half.”

  “I’m not!” Arden affirmed. “But I’ll shrink all I can!”

  “That’s better,” voiced Sim. “Now, Terry!”

  “Here I come! Oh! Oh!” Her voice indicated lamenting terror.

  “What is it?” Sim wanted to know.

  “I can see out through the crack in the door. The station agent is headed right for this place, and Henny is with him. Oh, they’ll find us, sure!”

  “Not if we stoop down and keep still!” declared Sim. “Why don’t you come in, Terry?”

  “I can’t! I’m caught—or something.”

  “Well, pull yourself loose! You’ve just got to!”

  “Here goes!”

  Again the ripping, tearing sound.

  “My best skirt on a big nail!” sighed Terry. Then she flopped over the side and down upon Sim and Arden.

  Despite the discomfort of their positions and the imminent danger of detection, Terry began to giggle. It was quickly infectious, and Arden and Sim held grimy hands over their mouths to stifle the dangerous sounds of hysterical mirth.