The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

  “But you won’t meet him,” Terry said quickly. “He’s not there!” She waited to see what effect this statement would have on the mysterious woman.

  “No? He often goes away, sketching. He is very strong. A sea such as this wild one would delight him. However, I will go over and wait for him.” Olga decided and drew her slim legs back into the car as she prepared to drive away.

  “But he won’t come back; at least, we don’t think he will. He’s been gone for days without taking the car or his skiff, and the houseboat was not even locked,” Arden stated and watched the woman closely for her reaction to that statement.

  “What do you mean?” Olga asked shrilly and jumped quickly out of the car to stand squarely in front of Arden. She looked straight into Arden’s eyes and repeated her question. “What do you mean? What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Dimitri’s gone,” said Arden simply.

  “Gone?” Olga asked. “Come, we must go over at once! There is something I must find out!”

  And then the excitement began all over again.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Olga Makes Light of It

  “To find out something,” was what Olga had said, her dark eyes flashing. The girls, too, wanted to find things out. Did Olga know about the missing snuffbox, and did she also know, or suspect, where Dimitri might be?

  They eagerly accepted the invitation to get into the car. Olga drove rapidly, scorning ruts and bumps. Once she spoke questioningly to Arden, who was in the front seat with her.

  “My little friend, Melissa? Did she enjoy her ride?”

  “Very much,” replied Arden. “But she got into trouble over it. Her father—”

  “Ah, yes, she told me of him. Have you seen her recently, then?”

  “Not for quite a few days,” Arden answered, and then she remembered, with a start, that no one had seen Melissa or George Clayton for—she could not recall how long. Three or four days, at least.

  “The dog!” Olga exclaimed suddenly. “Is she still on the boat? She cannot bear me. I attempted to discipline her once, and ever since that I cannot go near her. She never forgets.”

  “She’s still there, but I guess we can tie her up before you go in,” Arden said, wondering how they were going to do it.

  Then Olga drove without talking further. When they got to the end of the narrow road leading to the houseboat the three girls sprang out and, going on board, coaxed Tania to the stern of the craft, where they tied her securely. They then called down that it was safe for Olga to come aboard.

  “Watch her carefully,” Arden cautioned Terry and Sim, indicating Olga. “Notice just what she does.”

  Terry and Sim agreed silently as Olga appeared at the steps. Tania barked furiously at the sight of her and strained to get loose. Olga, casting the merest glance in the direction of the animal, at once went inside the houseboat. The three girls followed close behind her. She did not hesitate in the living room. But, walking briskly, pushed aside the curtains and stopped short as the broken cupboard caught her eye. The mysterious covered canvas might not have been there for all the notice she gave it.

  “Who did that?” she asked, angrily turning to the girls. “Who? Tell me at once!”

  “We found it that way,” Arden answered. “What’s the matter?”

  “Matter?” Olga repeated. “Did you not know, then, that Dimitri had here a gold box worth a fortune? Come! I see by your faces you did know. This is where he kept it. I told him it was foolish. After all, one can get around Tania with a piece of raw beef. Yes!”

  She was quite beside herself with rage. Her dark eyes flashed, and she bit her lips impatiently. Then, apparently realizing how odd all this must seem to the girls and shrugging her shoulders, she attempted to make light of the incident. With another shrug of her expressive shoulders, she said:

  “But of course he has removed his precious box with him. He can take care of himself, that one. Ha! Yes! There is no use wasting time here. I must get back to New York—quickly!”

  Olga fumbled in her bag and pulled out a gaudy compact. At the same time a paper fell but, though she did not notice it, none of the girls attempted to pick it up. The whole affair seemed to rob them of their natural intelligence. Olga’s personality was so overpowering.

  “But,” Arden began, “why should he break open the cupboard? Surely he had a key.”

  “I have known him to lose things more important than keys. Don’t worry your pretty heads over it, Dimitri is not harmed, I am sure of it.” Olga used her compact vigorously. All that she did was vigorous.

  “And Tania,” Sim reminded her. “He left nothing for her to eat.”

  “About that I know nothing. Oh, you dear, foolish children! What do you think has happened? Murder? Abduction? Come, I am going back!” Olga swept out of the small space. She had succeeded in making the girls feel very young and rather silly. They followed her almost against their wills, and she drove them back to the cottage, where she stopped and, smiling brightly, said:

  “Please don’t distress yourselves. I tell you, Dimitri is very capable. You believe me—yes?”

  “Yes, of course,” Arden faltered.

  “Oh, and if you see my little friend Melissa, tell her I have been here, will you?”

  The girls nodded dumbly, and Olga drove off up the muddy road, splashing the brown water widely out from beneath the wheels.

  There was a temporary lull in the storm, a sort of breathing spell. The rain had ceased, and the wind was less. The surf, though, was heavier than ever, booming on and tearing at the beach.

  Arden stood in a little pool of rain water watching the car fade from sight. She suddenly moved aside as the water soaked through her shoes and wet her feet.

  “What next?” she asked of no one in particular. “She is the queerest person I ever saw.”

  “Do you think she really was disturbed about Dimitri and just pretended she wasn’t?” Sim inquired.

  “If you ask me,” Terry began, “she doesn’t care a snap about Dimitri. But she did seem mad about the box and the broken cupboard.”

  “That’s just what I thought,” agreed Arden. “I think she was surprised to find it gone, and maybe I’m crazy, too, but she seemed to expect that, somehow.”

  “Why should we tell Melissa we saw her?” Terry reflected. “Anyway, we haven’t seen Melissa for days, and that’s odd, too.”

  “That’s just Olga’s manner: playing Lady Bountiful to the poor native child,” Sim sneered. “What does she know about Melissa, anyway?”

  “What does she know about this whole business?” Arden said firmly. “I’m for telling Chief Reilly. Then, if anything should be wrong, our consciences would be clear. What do you say?”

  “I think you’re right, Arden!” Terry exclaimed. “There’s more to this than we realize. Wait till I tell Mother where we’re going.”

  Terry ran into the house and was out again almost at once.

  Arden backed the car from the garage, Sim shut the doors after her, and the three were ready for the drive to the village.

  “Let’s go!” called Terry hopping into the moving car. “Hurry, Arden! It’s beginning to rain again.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Reilly on the Case

  The rain was coming down in torrents by the time the village was reached, and, going at once to Reilly’s garage, the girls found him seated in his narrow little office reading a newspaper.

  He smiled jovially as she saw them, his little blue eyes almost hidden behind many wrinkles.

  “Afternoon, ladies!” he exclaimed. “How’s this for weather? A cat can look at a king.”

  But Arden had no time for polite preliminaries.

  “Mr. Reilly,” she began, “we have something very important to tell you.”

  “Have you, now? What’s happened? Rain leakin’ through into your dinin’ room table? It never pours but the salt gets damp.”

  “Please, I’m serious,” Arden said firmly, and taking a deep b
reath she announced:

  “Dimitri Uzlov has disappeared!”

  “Disappeared! What do you mean?”

  “He’s been gone from the houseboat for days, and nobody has heard from him. You said, yourself, you hadn’t seen him lately. Remember?”

  “Yes, I remember,” agreed the chief. “But what makes you think he’s disappeared?”

  “His dog came over to our house, starving, with a piece of frayed rope on her collar,” Terry burst out.

  “The door of the houseboat was open, and the rain was pouring in,” volunteered Sim.

  “Both his car and rowboat are there, and there’s a cupboard broken open on the houseboat,” Arden added excitedly.

  “But perhaps he’s just gone for a day or two,” suggested the chief, obviously not wanting to start on a “case” in the riotous weather.

  “Oh, you must believe us!” Arden exclaimed. “It takes more than a day or two to starve a big dog. And we inquired all around the village. No one has seen Mr. Uzlov.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?” Reilly asked professionally. “How many people know he’s gone?”

  “Just us and my mother and that woman who came to see him,” Terry answered.

  “Oh, Terry!” Arden exclaimed. “And we don’t even know her last name or her license number. We let her go away without asking.”

  “How stupid! That’s just what we did, and I’m sure she knew more than she let on,” Sim said in dismay.

  “Mr. Reilly,” Arden pleaded, “won’t you come with us to the Merry Jane? We’ll feel better if you take a look around, because we’d never forgive ourselves if anything was wrong.”

  “Why—” Reilly rubbed his chin thoughtfully—“yes, I’ll come. Might as well go right now. Just in case—”

  “Good! You follow us in your car, as we won’t be coming back this way again,” Arden decided as Chief Reilly slipped into his warm uniform coat whereon a large shiny badge was prominently displayed.

  He followed them back along the road in his ancient flivver, his fat cheeks shaking as he bounced over the ruts and puddles.

  He slung one plump leg over the door without opening it and slid, rather than climbed, out. The girls waited impatiently as he stood surveying the lonely stretch of Marshlands from all angles.

  Terry fidgeted. “What does he think he’s going to see, looking around like this? White pebbles as in the fairy tale?” she hissed.

  “Shh-h! he’ll hear you,” Arden cautioned.

  Chief Reilly, having had his look around, mounted the wooden steps at the rear side of the houseboat and asked, in his most businesslike manner:

  “Everything just as you found it last?”

  “Everything; except for the closed window,” Arden replied.

  Tania, delighted at seeing her friends again, “woofed” happily, and apparently Chief Reilly was her friend, too, for she allowed him to rub her silky ears.

  “We came over here the day Tania ran to us, begging for food. And we found the place deserted and this cupboard broken open,” said Arden.

  “Huhm-um,” Reilly grunted, peering into the small compartment with its shattered door.

  “These paint brushes,” Sim said, showing him one, “were never left by Mr. Dimitri to harden up like this. They were scattered about when we first came over.”

  “That so?” the chief asked. “I wouldn’t know about that. I’m no painter.”

  “There’s something else that’s very odd,” Arden stated. “Dimitri Uzlov had in his possession a very valuable gold box. Besides ourselves, we don’t know just how many people knew about it, but we think the woman Olga did. Anyway, it’s gone, too.”

  Reilly raised his eyebrows. The case was beginning to be interesting. What he had imagined to be the silly idea of excitable “summer folks” seemed now to have something to it after all.

  “Did this artist have many visitors?” he asked.

  “Two that we know about,” replied Terry.

  “The woman Olga, and a man who rowed over here in our boat a few nights ago. He came back toward morning,” said Sim.

  “The woman came first and asked the way over here. Terry rowed her over. Dimitri and she seemed to be very angry about something. We rowed her back again, and she took Melissa Clayton for a ride in her car, a green sport roadster,” supplied Arden.

  “Funny I never saw it go through town,” Reilly remarked at this point. “But what you don’t know can’t set the river on fire.” He grinned.

  “It’s more than that,” Terry agreed. “That woman didn’t seem to want to be seen in town at all.”

  “And something very queer about the whole thing,” Sim interrupted, “is where has Melissa been all this while? She usually hangs around our house.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t consider that,” Reilly suggested. “This bad weather probably accounts for it. She’s home.”

  “Well, then, after that,” Arden went on with her story of events, “a man, dark, tall, and somewhat like Dimitri, drove up one night and he, too, asked the way to the Merry Jane. He wouldn’t let us row him over. He was very polite about it, and he took our boat. Toward morning I saw him drive away in his car that he had left parked at Terry’s house, and—and—” Arden faltered as she realized another surprising fact—“that’s the last time we heard from Dimitri!”

  CHAPTER XIX

  Tania Howls

  This startling announcement held them all speechless. They had completely overlooked its significance. And yet it was so obvious. The dark stranger had evidently come over to the houseboat that night and— Surely he was responsible for Dimitri’s disappearance.

  Terry wandered over to the combination bed and couch and sank down upon it. She looked in a bewildered fashion at the floor and almost immediately was galvanized into action. At her feet lay a white paper; something they had not noticed before. She snatched it up and spread it out on her knee. It was part of an envelope torn partly across and lengthwise. Written on it in ordinary blue ink was this:

  Ser

  Ninth S

  New Y

  “Look!” excitedly exclaimed Terry. “Here’s part of an address!”

  They all crowded close to see, and Chief Reilly, as befitted one in his station, held out his hand for the paper. Terry meekly gave it to him.

  “You’re right!” he exclaimed and turned the paper over. Then, as the surprised girls watched, he drew out from the inside of the envelope a second small piece of paper. “This seems to be some kind of a map,” he announced, turning it around in an effort to decide which was the top.

  “Let’s see!” Arden asked. The chief gave it to her. “It is a map!” she agreed, “and it shows the road from the city and the branch one to the village. See, it has part of the word Oceanedge.”

  “Perhaps we can find the rest of it,” Sim suggested. But a most careful search failed to reveal more of the paper.

  “Olga dropped that!” Arden announced suddenly. “I remember seeing it fall from her bag, but I was too stupid to do anything about it.”

  “Oh, no, Arden,” Terry said. “If you had noticed it and called it to her attention, she would have picked it up again. As it is now, we’re reasonably sure she knew the way to the Merry Jane all the while, though she tried to make us believe she didn’t.”

  “And to think we let her go without even finding out her name or who she was,” Sim moaned.

  “Now I’m sure there’s something queer about Dimitri being away,” Arden said convincingly. “Why should Olga pretend to be ignorant about the road? Why didn’t she worry about Dimitri? How did she know about the snuffbox? She went straight to the cupboard as if to get it.”

  “You girls may have stumbled on something at that!” the chief exclaimed with a faint note of admiration in his voice. “Yes, indeed!”

  They stood in the untidy living room wondering what might be the solution to all this mystery. Tania rubbed against Sim’s slim legs. The girl gently pulled the silky ears, something
forming in her mind.

  “I’ve got an idea!” Sim cried out. “Perhaps Tania could trace Dimitri if she had something of his to sniff at. After all, she’s a wolfhound, and the hound part of her name must mean that she can trace missing persons.”

  “We can try,” Arden admitted. Somehow, despite the chief’s presence, the girls regarded the “case” as their own and did not dream of consulting him on matters such as this one.

  Momentarily the discovery of the piece of letter and the map was forgotten in the excitement of the new suggestion. Sim found a battered old felt hat and held it before Tania’s nose.

  The dog sniffed at it disdainfully and then sat back on her haunches looking at Sim.

  “Go find him!” Sim urged. “Find Dimitri!”

  The tone of her voice may have done it, or else it was a game of dog and played before, for she sprang up again and dashed toward the door. Standing on her hind legs and pushing with her forepaws, she opened it, for it was not fully latched.

  Tania galloped down to the water edge and ran back and forth excitedly, her nose to the ground. The cat-tails in the marsh bent before the strong wind, which whistled eerily through the tall sedge grass. As is usual with nor’easters, the rain had temporarily ceased again, and the afternoon sky seemed a little brighter. Tania turned to look questioningly at the girls as she raced back and forth along the little strip of ground. At last she stopped and, sitting down, facing the storm-swept bay, she howled mournfully.

  “Tania!” Arden called. The dog came slowly to her, tail between her legs, a picture of despair.

  “What does that mean?” Terry asked of Reilly. She did not dare to interpret the performance for herself. “Do you think he may have—drowned?”

  “Naw,” Rufus Reilly replied scornfully. “It probably don’t mean a thing. That dog couldn’t follow no scent in the wet weather. Just the same,” he continued wisely, “this here is a mysterious case, all right, all right! I’m glad you called me in. It’s the first time I’ve had any real work to do in years. Now, what in thunder did I do with that paper? I’ve got to study it a bit.” He began to search in his numerous pockets.