Читать книгу Mystery at Shadow Pond - Mary C. Jane - Страница 4

CHAPTER 1

The Stranger in the Red Car

On the back porch of the farmhouse where they lived Neale and Margie Lawson were racing with the sun that was slowly beginning to sink behind Tumbledown Mountain. Before it got too dark to see, Neale wanted to get the last wires fitted into the robot he was building, and Margie wanted to finish her book. Neale squinted his blue eyes and gave his whole attention to fitting the wires into the right holes, but while Margie read she kept one eye on the setting sun and the long shadows that were creeping over the fields.

Daddy had been so late with the milking tonight it was going to be almost dark by the time the milk was ready to be taken to Mr. Willey. A shiver of excitement crept up Margie’s spine at the thought of approaching Mr. Willey’s spooky old house and knocking on his door after dark. Even in bright daylight it was a little bit scary. She always got breathless and her knees quaked as they did when she was getting ready to dive into deep water. At night it would be almost too exciting, unless Neale would go with her.

The last red thumbnail edge of sun had just disappeared behind Tumbledown when Mamma came to the door with the jar of milk in her hand and asked, “Whose turn is it tonight? Yours, Margie?”

Margie closed her book reluctantly and got up. Her mother hesitated a moment, looking around her at the shadowy fields and the faint afterglow that was already fading from the sky.

“I didn’t realize it was so late,” she said. “I need a loaf of bread, too, and I hate to send you away up to Joe’s after dark. Maybe Neale had better go with you.”

Margie drew a relieved breath while her brother rubbed his eyes, pushed his robot back against the porch wall, and agreed, “I might as well go. I can’t see to work on this any more.”

Mamma handed them the jar of milk and the money for the bread. “I hope poor old Mr. Willey will drink some of this milk himself,” she said. “But I don’t suppose he will. That cat will get it all.”

“Mr. Willey’s so thin and pale he’s just like a ghost,” Margie told her. “He doesn’t look as if he ever ate anything.”

“But Sarah gets fatter every day,” Neale added.

Mrs. Lawson sighed. “I don’t know what anyone can do about it. Mr. Willey has money enough so he could live on beefsteak and ice cream if he wanted to. But even your grandfather could never persuade him to spend an extra penny.”

As the children started up the long driveway toward the road Blueledge Mountain loomed before them, all in dusky, deep-blue shadow. It was so near it seemed almost to overhang their white farmhouse and red poultry barn and Daddy’s gardens that stretched back to the shore of Shadow Pond.

“Mr. Willey scares me, the way he comes creeping to the door and counts out the money for the milk,” Margie said. “Usually he doesn’t say a word, and that makes me think he’s cross about something. Then once in a while he says ‘Thank you,’ in that funny, cracked-sounding voice of his, and it surprises me so I jump.”

“If you jump when he speaks to you, no wonder he doesn’t talk much,” Neale said. “I’m not scared of him, or of his gloomy old house, either.”

“He makes me think of Heidi’s grandfather in the book I’m reading,” Margie went on. “Everybody was scared of him until Heidi came to live with him and made him different.”

Neale, who never read a book unless he had to, hadn’t heard of Heidi. “Was her grandfather a miser like Mr. Willey?” he asked. “Did he go without the food and clothes he needed so he could hoard his money?”

“Well—no—he wasn’t quite like that. But he did live all alone in a hut on the mountain and wouldn’t have anything to do with people.”

Neale dismissed Heidi’s grandfather from his thoughts. “He wasn’t like Mr. Willey, then. Mr. Willey doesn’t live in a hut. People say his house used to be one of the finest ones in town. A regular mansion. But now look at it—all closed up, with never a sign of life except for that cat sitting on the doorstep licking her paws. I wonder where she came from, anyway?”

“Grampa used to say some good angel must have sent her. He said every human being needed someone to love and Mr. Willey never had anybody in his whole life until Sarah came to his door.”

“Grampa was a friend to him,” Neale reminded her. “I bet Mr. Willey misses him.”

He fell silent, and Margie knew he was thinking how much he himself was going to miss Grampa, especially in vacation time. Though their grandfather had been nearly eighty when he died, this spring, he had been their favorite companion. On quiet evenings and rainy days when Margie was reading and Mamma and Daddy were busy, Neale got bored with nothing to do. Then Grampa would think of something really interesting to keep him busy. Building the robot had been one of Grampa’s ideas.

They rounded a curve in the road and saw Mr. Willey’s big house just ahead of them, bleak and empty looking in the dusk, with the shutters closed across all the windows except one. From the kitchen, the yellow light of an oil lamp shone dimly. Margie thought the one little square of light only made the rest of the house look more lonely. Imagine using oil lamps and living in one room when you had plenty of money for electric lights and everything else you needed!

“What do you suppose makes a man become a miser?” Neale asked in a puzzled voice.

“I asked Grampa about it once and he said Mr. Willey’s father and mother died when he was a baby and he was brought up by an uncle who was very cruel to him,” Margie answered. “Grampa thought that had something to do with it.”

“But if he had a hard time when he was young I should think he would have wanted to spend money and have all the fun he could when he got a chance,” Neale said.

“Grampa told me there was a famous book called Silas Marner about a man who was a miser. It explained all about how he came to be that way. Grampa said it would help me understand about Mr. Willey if I read it when I grew up.”

“Huh,” Neale scoffed. “You’re just like Grampa about books. You think they have the answer to everything. Mr. Willey will be dead and gone by the time you’re old enough to read Silas Marner.”

Margie didn’t bother to argue. She knew Neale was feeling a little unhappy tonight. His best friend, Jimmy Foster, had gone away to camp for the summer and he was lonesome. He thought his whole vacation was going to be spoiled, without Grampa and without Jimmy.

“But I am going to read that book,” she told herself. “I won’t wait until I’m older. I’ll start it right away. I’ll show Neale a thing or two.”

They found Sarah on Mr. Willey’s back steps, as usual, waiting for her milk. She didn’t purr or rub her fur against their ankles the way most cats would have done. She just sat still and gave them a long, wise stare from her green eyes.

“Like a witch’s cat,” Margie whispered to Neale with a shiver.

Mr. Willey opened the door and took the milk. He was tall and stooped with mournful dark eyes and long gray hair that hung down into his neck. As he hunted in his pocketbook for money to pay them, Margie noticed that he was pursing his lips and clearing his throat as if he were getting ready to speak.

“Did you folks have—vis’tors—yesterday?” he asked in his unsteady, rusty-sounding voice.

Margie answered, “Nobody was home yesterday, Mr. Willey. There was a program at school and Mamma and Daddy went. It was the last day, you know.”

Mr. Willey nodded his head solemnly. “Thought so,” he muttered, as if Margie’s answer had satisfied him.

“I saw a big red car in your yard,” he went on. “A man got out and went up on your porch. I saw him from my back field. He peeked in the windows for a long time. Tried the door, too.”

He paused, giving both children a penetrating stare as if trying to find out what effect his story was having on them. They waited uneasily. Margie wanted to turn and run, but it was clear that the old man wasn’t quite done with what he had to say.

“Your folks know anybody with a big, long, red car like that?” he demanded, his eyes not moving from their faces.

Margie’s mind raced hurriedly over the friends and aunts and uncles who sometimes came to visit at their house. None of them had big, expensive cars. Most of them had jeeps or trucks or well-worn old Fords and Chevvies.

“We don’t know anybody with a fancy car like that,” Neale answered.

The old man nodded again. “Didn’t think it was folks of yours.”

He closed his screen door and moved back into his kitchen, mumbling something the children couldn’t make out. “Same red car—no way to act—”

Margie’s brown eyes were like saucers and her words tumbled over each other, as she and Neale walked off. “What was he talking about? Why should it matter to him if somebody stopped at our house?”

Neale’s voice was thoughtful. “I wonder who the man in the red car could have been. It seems queer for a stranger to peer in our windows and try our door when nobody was home.”

“Daddy and Mamma will probably know who it could have been,” Margie said. “But I can’t see why Mr. Willey was so excited about it.”

“Mr. Willey is acting mighty strange, lately,” Neale said. “Last night I went down to the shore to take a ride on Firefly, and when I started back to the house it was almost dark. Just as I got to the bridge I saw Mr. Willey standing in the brook, staring at the bridge. He didn’t say a word. He just kept nodding his head, the way he did tonight, as if he was satisfied about something. I was so surprised I—well, I ran all the way to the house.”

“Standing in the brook?” Margie gasped. “It’s a good thing it was you who saw him there. I would have screamed. What could he have been doing?”

Neale shrugged his shoulders. “Search me!”

They puzzled about the old man’s strange behavior while they climbed the long hill toward Joe’s Diner. Far below them, the waters of Shadow Pond glimmered like liquid silver in the dusk, and hundreds of fireflies twinkled over the nearby fields. At the top of the hill the red and blue neon signs of the diner lighted the roadway.

“Just the same,” Margie said finally, “there can’t be anything really bad about Mr. Willey. Grampa wouldn’t have been so friendly with him if there had been. Remember how they used to play checkers together? Grampa always said he was a good, honest man who never hurt anyone but himself with his queer ways.”

Neale’s voice sounded doubtful. “Maybe he’s changing. Maybe he’s getting more queer as he grows older.”

Joe had no customers in the diner when the children entered. He was busily polishing his gleaming counters, and he greeted them with a loud, “Hi, Neale, hi, Margie, how’s everything? I suppose you feel real bad that school’s closed down for the summer!”

While Neale picked out a loaf of bread Joe grinned at Margie. “What are you going to do with yourself this vacation? Want to come up here and cook for me?”

Margie’s lightly freckled cheeks flushed and her brown eyes snapped. She tossed her head so her golden pigtails bounced against her shoulders. Joe always loved to tease her. She knew he liked to hear her words tumble over each other when she got excited, so she closed her lips tightly and let Neale do the talking.

When they started to leave Joe said, “Oh, by the way, there was an important-looking man in here yesterday asking about you folks. He drove up in a great big red Cadillac. He wanted to know if the Lawsons still lived on that farm at the foot of the hill. I told him your whole family was away at the school program, but he drove down toward your house just the same. He seemed mighty anxious to find you.”

Margie’s dark eyes looked so startled that Joe added, “Don’t get scared, Margie. No matter what you’ve done, it wasn’t the state police nor the sheriff, after you, I’m sure of that.”

“I’m not scared!” Margie flashed indignantly, forgetting her determination not to let Joe make her talk.

They heard his delighted laugh as they closed the door behind them.

“Who could that stranger have been?” Margie wondered aloud. “I don’t see why he should peek in our windows and try our door, the way Mr. Willey said he did, when Joe had already told him we weren’t home.”

“He asked for us by name, so he can’t be a stranger,” Neale reminded her. “Maybe he’s a long-lost uncle or something. Let’s hurry home and ask Mamma and Daddy about him!”