Читать книгу The Mystery of the Pilgrim Trading Post - Anne Molloy - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

UNWILLING VISITORS

“Come on, you young ones, hop aboard. We’ll do our getting acquainted on the way home,” Cousin Mary Peter Tibbetts called from the driver’s seat of her old car.

Two boys and a girl had just filed down from the high, aluminum-sided bus at the filling-station stop. They were the only passengers for this town far down the Maine coast; the rest would go on to the next stop across the Canadian border. Now, stiff from hours of riding and somewhat bewildered in the bright sunshine, they walked toward their cousin’s car.

The new arrivals from Boston were thirteen-year-old twins, Will and Lettie Dennis, and their cousin, Jonas Wingate. Although the twins had looked forward to meeting Jonas this morning, they had disliked him from the first. And they felt from the tone of his few words on the trip that, although they were cousins and of the same age, he disliked them.

Cousin Mary Peter beckoned them on gently. Her car doors were waiting open like the spread wings of a bird.

“Come on, stow your gear in back there; plenty of room, especially for such small bags. They don’t look half big enough for folks that have come to stay all summer,” she said. Her voice was a bit gruff but her blue eyes were kind.

Will and Lettie exchanged glances that meant, doesn’t she know we came for a week’s trial, that we don’t have to stay if we can’t stand the place? As for Jonas’s feelings about this visit, they couldn’t read his face. So far it had worn but one expression, that of scorn for everything they had seen together from the crooked streets of Boston to the Maine countryside.

“Sit any way you want,” Cousin Mary Peter invited, “but be sure to slam the doors hard. They jiggle open in nothing flat on these rough roads.”

Will climbed into the front seat by Cousin Mary Peter. He knew without looking that Lettie was scowling at being in the back with Jonas. The car doors banged. Then, with a roar and a lurch, the car shot out into the main street. The town was so small that they were soon among open fields. They were green and rolling, returning to the wilderness for the most part, and sprinkled with daisies, buttercups, and the red-orange of Indian paintbrush. Beyond were the peaked tops of evergreens that continued on and on as far as the eye could see. It was hard not to believe that they didn’t stretch straight to the Arctic Circle.

“Why would anyone want to shoot for the moon when they can come here? It’s just as lonesome.” Although Jonas spoke low so his older cousin wouldn’t hear, his tone was scornful.

“Sorry to drag you off before you could even get a look at the town, but the bus was quite late and I’ve got folks waiting back home and along the way, too, for prescriptions,” Cousin Mary Peter explained. “I’m sure you’ve been told that I’m the village druggist and sometimes what amounts to the doctor. There’s none for miles.”

“I know, I know, Mother told me,” said Jonas impatiently.

“That so?” said Cousin Mary Peter. “And what else, I wonder? That I live alone in my haunted house and keep rather strange hours. That I eat when it suits me and work in my store?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” Lettie admitted tactfully, “Mother did say you didn’t exactly live by the clock.”

“That’s right,” Cousin Mary Peter continued. “Too many rules and regulations when I was growing up, I guess. I had too much living on the dot. These days I cook one big meal and sort of scrabble for the rest. Hope you won’t mind. Talking of food reminds me I’m hungry. Will, if you are Will, reach in the glove compartment and find a bar of chocolate. It’s in there somewhere. Divide it in four and pass out the pieces, will you? Also, hand me a little brown bottle that’s in there. I promised Lucy Hibbs I’d leave it for her. Yes, that’s the one.”

Suddenly she applied the brakes. Her passengers all jerked forward as the car halted before a dreary gray house.

“I won’t be more than a sec,” said Cousin Mary Peter. Bottle in hand, she strode toward the house.

“You wouldn’t think anyone could live in such a ramshackle place,” said Jonas. “The whole thing tips back, house, ell, barn, and all, as if any day they’d go toppling over like a line of domino soldiers.”

This was the most human remark her cousin had made so Lettie agreed with him. “I don’t think I’m going to like it here the least bit,” she said. “For summertime, it’s cold and gloomy. And what will we do all day? Cousin Mary Peter isn’t going to help us pass the time, is she?”

“Say,” Jonas burst out, “did you two want to come in the first place? I sure didn’t. My Dad and I had camping plans all made, the trip to the Rockies we’ve always talked about. Then when this invitation to Surprise Harbor came, plans got changed. My mother said one of us ought to be here for one last summer in the old Tibbetts homestead. I’m it, worse luck.”

Now his cousins could understand Jonas’s scornful attitude.

“We didn’t much want to come, but we didn’t have much to leave. Our dad was signed up to teach summer school and we’d have stayed right home,” said Lettie.

“Speak for yourself,” said her brother. “Maybe you didn’t have plans. I did. This was the summer I was going to get rich, mow lawns and all, and in between times work hard on tennis. I wasn’t the least bit crazy about coming away.”

“It was our mother that was crazy about our coming. She acted as if it were the end of the world when she got Cousin Mary Peter’s letter saying this was the old house’s very last summer.” Lettie smiled at her cousin.

“My mother was the same way. You’d think the Tibbetts homestead was the first, best, and most beautiful house in the whole country.” Jonas looked more agreeable every minute.

“What do you think, Jonas, should we tell our cousin we’re sorry her house is being torn down so that a new bridge can be built? Maybe she’d rather not talk about it,” said Lettie.

“Golly Moses, call me ‘Jo!’ Nobody uses my whole name. Maybe that’s one thing I’ve got against the Tibbetts house, my being named Jonas for the one who built it,” said Jonas.

“Jo it will be,” said Lettie.

Cousin Mary Peter’s return ended the conference.

“If ever there was a more contrary lot of coots than the people ’round here, I’d hate to see them,” she began as they drove off. “They claim they’ve got to have your medicine. You turn yourself inside out to get it to them. Then they tell you they’ve sent off for some packaged poison they’ve read about and then have the gall to blame you because your medicine doesn’t seem to be helping them. It’s frustrating and no mistake. Now, where’s my choc?”

“Oh,” said Will, embarrassed, “I forgot. We got talking.”

He divided the candy bar which he had been holding. Cousin Mary Peter popped a square of chocolate into her mouth and the others were quiet as they ate.

Then Will asked their cousin the question they had discussed. “How much longer are the bridge people going to let you keep your house?”

“Just as long as I can stave them off. The day they come to start tearing it down they’ll have to drag me out of it kicking and biting, I can tell you.” She accelerated the old car to prove that she meant this.

Even so a large black car overtook and passed them. The rush of its passing shook the smaller car. The blast of its horn made them all jump.

Cousin Mary Peter shook her fist at the disappearing rear end. “That’s the villain himself, that Bart Simes. He’s the one who had the bridge idea in the first place. Wangled poor old Ebbie Thaxter’s half of Eden Island away from him and now he wants the government to build him a bridge out to it so’s he can make lots of money from it. Talks of making Smuggler’s Cove out there into a lobster pound, having a marina to attract the yachting trade, and dear knows what all. He doesn’t care who gets trampled on. Tear down a fine house, ruin the loveliest island there is, it’s all the same to Bart.”

“But how can just one man get a bridge like that?” asked Will.

“Huh, by pretending there’s others that want it, that’s how. Bart got lots of the folks about, mostly the ones that owe him money, to sign a paper asking for the bridge.” In her bitterness, Cousin Mary Peter accelerated even more. The red speedometer needle vibrated angrily as it moved higher.

“I’ve always known Bart,” their cousin continued. “It seems we’ve been natural enemies from the first. In school he was top boy and I was top girl, and, if I do say so myself, sometimes I was top, period. We were always pitted against each other in everything from catching the biggest haddock to rowing the fastest to Eden Island. Now with this bridge ruckus I don’t speak to him if I can help it. Funny part of it is, he still phones over for medicine when he has the least little stomach-ache. Probably because I cost him less than a doctor.”

“Couldn’t you poison him?” asked Will with a croak so doleful that they all laughed.

“Now you’re talking,” said Cousin Mary Peter. In her glee she drove even faster. “That’s just what I’ll do—put a bit of arsenic in his next prescription.”

They rattled on over the rough roads. Suddenly the driver applied the brakes so abruptly that Will’s forehead bumped the windshield. “Drat it! Whoa, whoa,” she said as they stopped before a weathered shack. “I almost forgot, the Vances’ youngest is teething and kicking up. Will, dig me out that white bottle from the compartment.”

He found the bottle under a pile of candy wrappers. She hurried into the little house with the medicine.

“I hope she’s got something to mend a broken head,” he said, rubbing his bump.

“For a snapped neck, too,” said Lettie. She rotated her head to discover whether she still could. “Cousin Mary Peter is—well—sort of unusual, isn’t she?”

“Plain crazy is what my dad thinks,” said Jo, “to bury herself down here. He says she has all kinds of ability. But then he did have his heart set on that camping trip, so he wouldn’t approve of her now.”

Their cousin ran back to the car and on they swept.

The last few miles were traveled almost in silence. The passengers felt obliged to watch the road ahead as their cousin’s driving became more dashing. She swept around blind corners and tore up hills so sharp that chimneys appeared long before the houses beneath them. Except that politeness kept them from shrieking, it was like being on a roller coaster.

At long last Cousin Mary Peter said importantly, “At the top of the next rise you can look down and behold the ancestral mansion.”

She shot them up over the next crest and leaned forward in anticipation.

“Drat,” said Cousin Mary Peter. “Fog’s rolling in just the way it generally does when you want to impress strangers. Oh, drat.”

A swirling white mass like heavy smoke was swallowing houses and barns and dark, pointed spruce trees.

“If you look quick, you can see our chimneys,” she said, but even as she spoke the red bricks were drowned in a white tide of fog.

“Too bad,” said Lettie, because someone should.

The advancing fog engulfed them, too, and soon their view was limited to the edges of the road. Will turned to the back seat. For the first time the exchange of glances between the arriving cousins was three-way. They were in silent agreement to dislike this place. Cousin Mary Peter didn’t seem to know that they had come for a week’s trial; they must tell her tomorrow.

Today they wondered if they could endure a week in the old Tibbetts place.