The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Mildred A. Wirt

  “Great! I for one shall be most proud to have a poet for a brother-in-law.” Then to Lena May: “Maybe you thought you were keeping it a secret from us, little one, but you weren’t, and we’re glad, just as glad as we can be.”

  Their youngest, shining-eyed, looked up at the oldest sister, who sat at the head of the table, then she said: “Of course I had told Glow, because she is Mother to us, but after that letter from Dean this morning, I want to tell you all.”

  Then merrily Bobs exclaimed: “Now, Gloria, we’ve all ’fessed up but you. Aren’t you and Mr. Hardinian going to be married some day and live happily ever after?”

  “I never knew two people who seemed better suited for each other,” Gwendolyn commented.

  Gloria smiled. “And what would you have us live on, dear? You know that it takes Mr. Hardinian’s entire income to pay the expenses of his Boys’ Club. Of course the little chaps pay five cents a night for a bunk when they have work, but he has to loan money to others who are out of work, who might take to stealing if they had no other way to procure food. However, they have never failed to pay him back when they did get work.” Their oldest sister’s enthusiastic praise of the welfare worker told how great was her admiration for that truly noble young man, if nothing more.

  “Crickets, what was that?” Bobs suddenly exclaimed.

  “Only the telephone, my dear,” Lena May remarked. “Bobsy, will you answer it?”

  Three minutes later that girl fairly plunged back into the kitchen, her shining eyes assuring them that she had heard something of an astonishing nature.

  “It was Ralph,” she exclaimed, as she sank down into the nearest chair. “The mystery is solved!”

  “Solved?” her sisters repeated inquiringly and all at once. “How? When? Who is the heir?”

  Roberta laughed. “Well, here’s where I resign as a detective,” she declared. “I’ve had three cases and although each one has been successfully solved in spite of me, it has not been because of any cleverness on my part.”

  “But, Bobs, do tell us what Ralph said. We’re bursting with curiosity.”

  “My partner-detective feels as chagrined about it as I do, for the solution of the mystery just turned up; we neither of us ferreted it out as we had hoped that we would.”

  “Bobita, you’re just trying to tantalize us,” Gwen declared. “Do tell us from the beginning.”

  “Very well then, I will. Ralph said that his dad happened to recall recently something which his father had once told him. You know it was Ralph’s grandfather who was the intimate friend and legal advisor of Mr. Pensinger.

  “It seems that a week before his death, Mr. Pensinger had sent some important papers and a letter to the office of Mr. Caldwaller-Cory, the grandfather, you understand. Just as he was about to examine them, he was called away on urgent business and he left the papers on his desk, expecting to return soon. The Cory building was even then in the process of construction, but Ralph’s grandfather had moved in before it was quite completed.

  “That day the floor was being put down in the room adjoining the small office. Later, when Mr. Caldwaller-Cory returned, his mind was so filled with the intricacies of the new case which had just been given to him, that he did not even notice that the brown packet containing the Pensinger papers was gone; in fact, he had forgotten that it ever existed; but a week later, when he received word that his friend, Mr. Pensinger, had died suddenly, he recalled the papers and began to search for them, but they were never found.”

  “Oh, I know where they were,” Lena May said brightly, “under the floor.”

  Bobs nodded, her eyes glowing. “That’s just it!” she affirmed. “Recently Judge Caldwaller-Cory said to Ralph, ‘Either we will have to tear down this old building of ours or we will have to renovate it and bring it up to date.’

  “Ralph is romantic enough to want to retain the atmosphere of the days of his grandfather, and so he favored the latter plan. Soon carpenters were tearing up the office floors to replace them with hard wood and the packet was found.”

  “And in those papers, had Mr. Pensinger made some different disposition of his property?” Gloria inquired.

  Bobs nodded. “Yes,” she said. “It seems that Mr. Pensinger, after his wife’s death, visited Hungary, found his daughter Marilyn, who lived but a short time, and so, as he was without an heir, he had written Mr. Caldwaller-Cory, requesting him to use the Pensinger fortune wherever he thought it would be most needed.”

  “What will become of this house?” Lena May inquired.

  “Ralph didn’t say. He wants to tell that himself. In fact, he said that he was coming right up in The Whizz and that he wasn’t coming alone, either.”

  “I suppose that Dick De Laney will be with him,” Gloria remarked as she cleared the table.

  “We aren’t going to be kept long in suspense,” Gwendolyn said, “for The Whizz just passed the window and there’s the knocker. Shall I go to the door?”

  Before her sisters could reply, that maiden was half-way down the long hall, and a second later she reappeared with Ralph at her side. Two other young men followed closely. One indeed was Dick De Laney and the other was Mr. Hardinian. His dark, expressive eyes showed that he was much mystified by all that was happening.

  “Shall we go into the salon?” Gloria inquired when greetings were over.

  “No indeed. This dining-room corner with its cheerful grate fire is the pleasantest part of the old house,” Ralph declared. “Dick, help me bring in another chair or two.”

  “Now sit down, everybody, and I’ll tell you the results of my conference with my father.” Ralph was plainly elated about something, which, as yet, he had revealed to no one.

  When they were seated, he turned at once to the tall, dark Hungarian. “Mr. Hardinian, you were telling me last week that your temporary wooden building for the Boys’ Club is to be torn down next month that a tobacco factory may be erected, were you not?”

  “Yes,” was the reply of the still puzzled young man. “I can’t imagine where I am to take my boys. I don’t like to have them bunkless even for one night.”

  “Of course not, nor shall they be,” Ralph continued. Then he looked at the girls beamingly. “Not if these young ladies will consent to having a model clubhouse erected in the old garden back of their mansion.”

  “Ralph, how wonderful that would be!” Gloria exclaimed. “But what do you mean?”

  “Just what I say,” the lad replied. “The former owner of this place wanted his fortune used for some good cause, and Dad and I thought that it would be great to help Mr. Hardinian carry on his fine work right here on this very spot as a sort of memorial, and couldn’t it be called The Pensinger Boys’ Club, or something like that?”

  “Indeed it could,” Mr. Hardinian’s dark eyes expressed his appreciation more than words could have done. Then to the tall girl at his side he said: “Now, many of our dream-plans for the boys can be made a reality.”

  Turning to the others, he continued: “I am sure that Gloria is now willing that I should tell you that she had consented to some day mother all of our boys, and because of this splendid new plan, I hope that the some-day may be very soon.”

  And it was. Indeed, before another year had passed, each of the girls was in a home of her own.

  THE PHANTOM TOWN MYSTERY, by Carol Norton

  CHAPTER I

  LUCKY LOON

  A whirl of gleaming sand and dust on a cross-desert road in Arizona. The four galloping objects turned off the road, horses rearing, riders laughing; the two Eastern girls flushed, excited; the pale college student exultant; the cowboy guide enjoying their pleasure. A warm, sage-scented wind carried the cloud of dust away from them down into the valley.

  “That was glorious sport, wasn’t it, Mary?” Dora Bellman’s olive-tinted face was glowing joyfully. “Wouldn’t our equestrian teacher back in Sunnybank Seminary be properly proud of us?”

  Lovely Mary Moore, delicately fashioned, fair as her fr
iend was dark, nodded beamingly, too out of breath for the moment to speak.

  Jerry Newcomb in his picturesque cowboy garb, blue handkerchief knotted about his neck, looked admiringly at the smaller girl.

  “I reckon you two’ll want to ride in the rodeo. I never saw Easterners get saddle-broke on cow ponies as quick as you have.” Then his gray eyes smiled at the other boy, tall, thin, pale, who was wiping dust from his shell-rimmed glasses. “Dick Farley, I reckon you’ve ridden before.”

  Dick flashed a radiant smile which made his rather plain face momentarily good-looking. “Some,” he said, “when I was a kid on Granddad’s farm just out of Boston.”

  Jerry, a little ahead, was leading them slowly across soft shimmering sand toward a narrow entrance in cliff-like rocks.

  Dora protested, “Mary ought to know how to ride a cow pony since she was born right here on the desert while I have always lived on the Hudson River until two weeks ago.”

  “Even so,” Mary retaliated brightly, “but, as you know, I left here when I was eight to go East to school and since I have never been back, I haven’t much advantage over you.”

  The cowboy turned in his saddle and there was a tender light in his eyes as he looked at the younger girl. “I’m sure glad something fetched you back, Mary, though I’m mighty sorry it was your dad’s illness that did it.”

  Dora, glancing at the pretty face of her best friend, saw the frank, friendly smile she gave the cowboy. To herself she thought,—“Jerry certainly thinks Mary is the sweetest thing he ever saw, but she only thinks of him as a nice boy who once, long ago, was her childhood playmate.”

  They had reached the narrow entrance in the wall of rocks. It was a mysterious looking spot; a giant gateway leading, the girls knew not where. On the gleaming sand near the entrance lay a half-buried skeleton. It looked as though it might have been that of a man rather than a beast. The girls exchanged startled glances, but, as Jerry was riding unconcernedly through the gateway, they silently followed.

  “What a dramatic sort of place!” Dora exclaimed in an awed voice as she gazed about her.

  They were on a floor of sand that was circled about by low mountains, grim, gray, uninviting. Here and there in crevices a twisted dwarf tree clung, its roots exposed. There was a death-like silence in the place. Even the soft rush of wind over the desert outside could not be heard.

  Mary shuddered and rode closer to the cowboy. “Jerry,” she said, “why have you brought us here? Is there something that you want to show us?”

  The cowboy nodded. “You recollect that Dora was saying how she wished there was a mystery she could solve—” he began, when he was interrupted.

  “Oh, Jerry,” Dora’s dark eyes glowed with anticipation, “is there really a mystery here—in this awfully bleak place? What? Where? I don’t see anything at all but those almost straight up and down cliffs and—”

  There was an exultant exclamation from Dick Farley. Perhaps his strong spectacles gave him clearer sight.

  “I see a house, honest Injun, I do, or something that looks powerfully like one.” He turned questioning eyes toward the cowboy.

  “Righto! You’re clever, old man!” Jerry Newcomb told him. “Don’t tell where it is. See if the girls can find it.”

  For a long silent moment Mary and Dora sat in their saddles turning their gaze slowly about the low circling mountains.

  Dora’s excited cry told the others that she saw it, and Mary, noting the direction of her friend’s gaze, saw, high on a narrow ledge, what looked like a wall made of small rocks with openings that might have been meant for two windows and a door. The flat roof could not be seen from the floor of the desert.

  “How perfectly thrilling!” Dora cried. “What was it, Jerry, an Indian cliff dwelling?”

  The cowboy shook his head. “Let’s ride up closer,” he said. He led the way to the very base of the low mountain. The ledge, which had one time been the front yard of the house, had been cracked by the elements and leaned outward, leaving a crevice of about twenty feet. There were no steps leading up to the house. It was, as far as the three Easterners could see, without a way of approach.

  Dick Farley rode about examining the spot from all angles. “Jerry,” he said at last, “if it isn’t an Indian dwelling, who did live there? Surely not a white family!”

  The cowboy shook his head. “Not a family. Only a man, Danish, but he was white all right. Sven Pedersen was his name but everyone called him ‘Lucky Loon.’ The name fitted him on two counts. Lucky because he struck it rich so often, and he certainly was ‘loony’ if that means crazy.”

  “What did he do?” Mary asked, her blue eyes wide and a little terrified.

  “Sven Pedersen had a secret—Dad said—and that was why he took to hoarding all the wealth he got out of his gold and turquoise mines. My father was a boy then. He says he hasn’t any doubt but that old rock house up yonder is plastered with gold and turquoise.”

  Dora asked in amazement, “Doesn’t anybody know? Hasn’t anyone ever climbed up there to see?”

  “No one that I’ve heard tell about,” Jerry said. “No one cared to risk his life doing it, I reckon.” Then, seeming to feel that he had sufficiently aroused his listeners’ curiosity, the cowboy went on to explain. “As Sven Pedersen grew old, he got queerer and queerer. He took a notion that he was going to be killed for his money, so after he’d built that rock house, he shut himself up in it, and if any intruder so much as rode through that gateway in the rocks over there, bang would go his gun and the horse would drop dead. He was sure-shot all right, Sven Pedersen was.”

  Dick Farley’s large eyes glanced from the high house out to the gate in the wall of rock. “I bet the rider of the dead horse scuttled away mighty quick,” he said.

  “I reckon he did,” Jerry agreed when Dora exclaimed in a tone of horror: “He must have shot a man once anyway. Mary and I saw the half-buried skeleton of one out by the gate. We were sure we did.”

  “Maybe so,” Jerry went on explaining. “You see no one could tell whether the Lucky Loon was in his house or out of it; no one ever saw him in the door or on the ledge, but they found out soon enough when they heard his gun bang.”

  “How did he get his food and water?” Dick asked.

  “Maybe there’s a spring on the mountain,” Dora suggested.

  “Nary a spring,” the cowboy told them. “These mountains and the desert around here are bone dry. That’s why there’s so many skeletons of cows hereabout. Some reckoned that he rode away nights to a town where he wasn’t known. He might have stayed away for days and got back in the night without anyone knowing.”

  “But, Jerry, what happened to him in the end? Does anybody know? Did he go away?” Dora and Dick were questioning when Mary cried in sudden alarm, “Oh, Jerry, he isn’t here now, is he?”

  It was Dora who replied, “Of course not, Mary. You know Jerry wouldn’t bring us in here if there was any danger of our being shot.”

  “I reckon Sven Pedersen’s been dead this long time back,” the cowboy told them. “Father was a kid when Lucky Loon was old. Dad says he and some other kids watched around the gate rocks, taking turns for almost a week. They reckoned if the old hermit had gone away, they’d like to climb up there and find the Evil Eye Turquoise Sven had boasted so much about before he shut himself up.”

  “Did they climb up there?”

  “What was the eye?”

  “One question at a time, please,” Jerry told the eager girls. “No, they didn’t go. Dad said it was his turn to watch one night. There was a cutting wind and since it was very dark, he thought he’d just slip inside of the rock gate where the blowing sand wouldn’t hit him. Dad got sort of sleepy, after a time, crouched down on the sand, when suddenly he heard a gun bang. He leaped out of the gate, up on his horse and galloped for home. He laughs when he tells that story. He reckons now that he’d dreamed the shot since Sven Pedersen never was seen again and that was thirty years ago.” The cowboy had looked at his
watch. “Jumping Steers!” he exclaimed. “Most milking time and here I’m fifteen miles from the ranch. Dick, will you ride home with the girls?”

  Jerry had whirled his horse’s head and had started for the gateway, the others quickly following. Dick, at the end, was just passing through the gate when they distinctly heard the report of a gun.

  CHAPTER II

  THE GHOST TOWN

  Safely outside of the wall of rocks, the four young people drew their restless horses to a standstill. Mary’s nettlesome brown pony was hard to quiet until Jerry reached out a strong brown hand and patted its head.

  Mary lifted startled blue eyes. “Jerry, what do you make of that?” she asked. “We couldn’t have imagined that gun shot and surely the horses heard it also.”

  Jerry’s smile was reassuring. “’Twas the story that frightened you girls, I reckon,” he said, glancing about and up and down the road as he spoke. “It’s hunters out after quail or rabbits, more ’n like.”

  Then, seeing that Mary still glanced anxiously back at the gate in the rock wall, Dick said sensibly, “Of course you girls know that Sven Pedersen couldn’t be in that high house. He must have been dead for years if he was old when Jerry’s father was a boy.”

  “Of course,” Dora, less inclined to be imaginative, replied. Then to the cowboy she said in her practical matter-of-fact way, “Hurry along home to your milking, Jerry, and Dick, don’t you bother to come with us. Now that you’re working on the Newcomb ranch you ought to be there. It’s only a few miles up over this sunshiny road to Gleeson. We aren’t the least bit afraid to ride home alone, are we?” She smiled at her friend.

  Mary, not wishing to appear foolishly timid, said, in as courageous a voice as she could muster, “Of course we’re not afraid. Goodbye, boys, we’ll see you tomorrow.”