Mystery at Shadow Pond. Mary C. Jane
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1958, renewed 1986 by Mary C. Jane.
All rights reserved.
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Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
DEDICATION
To my sisters and brothers
NELL,
MARGARET,
CHARLIE,
AND KEN
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.