The Castle Mystery Read online

  There was no one in the girls’ room.

  “Maybe we can see them from up here,” Henry suggested. He took the binoculars and looked out from the tower. “Nope, all I see is Sandy Munson driving the Jeep up the hill. Let’s go out and see if Jessie and Violet went back to the greenhouse.”

  “Okay,” Benny agreed. “Why are you taking Jessie’s hat, Henry?”

  “Maybe Watch can catch Jessie’s scent and follow the girls.”

  Benny liked this idea very much. On the way to the greenhouse, the boys took one last look back at the castle. Maybe the girls were playing a game of hide-and-seek with them.

  “Henry! Look up at that window.” Benny pointed to the rose window over the front door. “It’s moving!”

  Indeed there seemed to be someone looking out from the center of the round stained glass window where the painted knight was supposed to be.

  Henry grabbed Benny’s hand and raced back to the door.

  “Shucks!” Benny said when they got closer. “I guess it was just somebody going by in that room.”

  “I guess so,” Henry agreed. “Let’s ask Carrie about getting into it sometime. There’s something strange about that window.”

  When the boys got to the stables, Watch raced toward them. When he sniffed Jessie’s bright red cap, he wagged his tail eagerly.

  “Go find Jessie, boy,” Henry said.

  Watch put his nose to the ground. Then he went right inside the stable and stood under a window. There on a windowsill was a wrapped piece of candy.

  “Good boy, Watch!” Benny cried when he saw the candy his sisters had left for him. “This is more fun than following any old map.”

  It sure was. With another sniff of Jessie’s hat, Watch led Henry and Benny to a toolshed. Lo and behold, there was a wrapped candy waiting right up on a shelf next to an old toolbox.

  “The girls can’t be too far ahead,” Henry said. “Watch is a better guide than a map any day.”

  The boys were sure they would catch up to their sisters very soon. Watch led them to the next stop, a pretty ironwork summerhouse with a bench inside.

  “Grape!” Henry announced as he unwrapped a purple candy.

  “Look, Henry, they even left a dog biscuit for Watch!” Benny said in amazement.

  Benny waited while Watch finished his munching and crunching. Then Benny gave him Jessie’s hat to sniff again. “I like this treasure hunt!” he told Henry.

  Watch ran ahead of the boys. He stopped in front of an old blue door built into the hillside. They had never noticed it before because it was partly hidden by bushes.

  Henry turned the doorknob. The door didn’t budge.

  “They can’t have gone in here,” Henry told Benny. “The door is locked tight.”

  “Tell that to Watch,” Benny laughed. “He keeps walking back and forth in front of this door.”

  The boys pulled and pushed, then turned and twisted the rusted iron doorknob. Nothing happened.

  “Watch must be wrong,” Benny said.

  Henry put Jessie’s hat under Watch’s nose again. “Find Jessie, boy.”

  Again Watch paced back and forth in front of the door.

  “Let’s go back to where we started at the greenhouse,” Henry suggested. “Maybe the girls are back by now. Or maybe they went another way when they couldn’t get this door open.”

  This time the boys took the path along the cliff. They looked down to see if their sisters had gone to the lake. When they passed the entrance to the footpath, Watch dashed down the steps.

  “Watch! Watch!” Henry called out.

  Watch kept right on going.

  “We’d better follow him,” Henry told Benny.

  The boys could hear Watch sniffing ahead of them. Finally he stopped right in front of the gate to the cave.

  “Henry! Benny! Here we are,” Jessie cried, peering out when her brothers got close. “We’re in here.”

  Henry pulled at the gate. “What? How did you get in here? It’s locked.”

  “I know it’s locked,” Jessie began. “Open it with that big key, and we’ll tell you about our adventure.”

  Henry and Benny looked at each other with surprise.

  “What key?” Henry asked. “We don’t have any key.”

  Now the girls were surprised.

  “Didn’t you find the key we left hanging by the blue door? We left it there with a few candies so you would notice it and follow us into that end of the cave. Now we’re locked in.”

  “We didn’t notice any candies or any key,” Benny said in a shaky voice. He didn’t like seeing his sisters behind the locked gate.

  Jessie tried not to get nervous. “We put the key back and locked the door behind us. Then we followed the cave until we got here. Go back and see if the key fell on the ground.”

  Henry raced off while Benny waited with his sisters. “Is it spooky in there?” he asked in a very small voice.

  Violet smiled at Benny. “It is a little spooky. The cave twists and turns a long, long way under the cliff until it stops here. Jessie and I were glad that Carrie gave us flashlights when we went back for the candy. She’s the one who told us about the key. It probably opens this gate, too.”

  Henry came back all out of breath. “The key and the candy are gone!”

  “They are?” Jessie asked. “Why, we put the key right back! I know we did. Who could have taken it?”

  “Someone must have been watching us, Jessie,” Violet said. “Someone who wanted us to get locked in. But who?”

  “We’ll have to find that out,” Henry said. “But first I have to get you free. In the tool shed I found this metal cutter to break the lock. We’ve all had enough adventure for today.”

  “That’s for sure,” Benny agreed.

  Henry worked away at the old lock until he was able to pull it apart. As soon as the gate opened, Watch went up to the two girls and licked them over and over.

  “There, there, boy, it wasn’t so bad,” Violet said.

  All the same she waited outside while Henry and Benny took a few steps inside the cave to see what it was like.

  “We’ll have to come back with a bigger flashlight,” Henry said. “First I want to find out what happened to that key and who sent us on this wild goose chase with this useless map.”

  “You mean a dog chase, don’t you, Henry?” Benny asked. “Not a goose chase.”

  Everyone laughed at Benny’s good joke.

  “Too bad we didn’t find any treasures,” Jessie said to Benny.

  “But we did!” Benny said. “You and Violet were the treasures!”

  CHAPTER 7

  Benny Solves a Puzzle

  “What an adventure!” Benny announced when he came back to the castle.

  The children chattered on about their morning while they helped Carrie get lunch. As usual, Benny was starving, which was too bad. Lunch that day was just dibs and dabs of leftovers from the day before.

  “Sorry about serving reruns again, Benny,” Carrie said. “I thought Sandy would be back with the groceries by now.”

  “I found one can of tuna fish left,” Jessie said when she looked in the almost empty cabinets. “Maybe I can stretch it out.”

  Carrie looked disgusted. “That Sandy! Where can she be? She promised to be back by lunchtime.”

  Henry was surprised to hear this. “Wait a minute. At least an hour ago Benny and I saw a red Jeep driving back toward the castle. Wasn’t that Sandy?”

  “That must have been someone else on the lake road,” Carrie said. “It’s too bad it wasn’t Sandy. I guess we’ll have to make do with what food we have.”

  By the time everyone had sat down to eat, the lunch tasted just fine to the Aldens. Their morning’s adventure had made them hungry for anything, even leftovers.

  “We’re going to start work on the stained glass windows in the towers this afternoon,” Carrie announced when lunch was over. “I’ve got this book of old photos and watercolors that show how the windows
looked originally.”

  Violet studied the pictures of Drummond Castle as it once was. “Do you think someday the castle will really look like this again?”

  Carrie gave Violet a smile. “With patience and care, we can do anything. Now let’s find Mr. Tooner. Your grandfather mentioned you like drawing and painting, Violet. I think you might be of special help.”

  Mr. Tooner was halfway up the staircase in the other tower when the Aldens caught up with him. He didn’t even turn around when Carrie came up with the Aldens. He just went right on taking down the plywood coverings from the damaged windows.

  “Already at work, I see,” Carrie said to Mr. Tooner. “Violet is going to sketch the windows from the picture and number the window pieces that are missing. Then we can give her sketches and your measurements to the glassmaker.”

  “If you like, you can hand things to us, Mr. Tooner,” Henry said. “We can help you put back the plywood coverings.”

  Jessie gathered up old nails scattered around the floor. “These can be used again if we hammer them straight. Can Benny borrow this extra hammer?”

  “Humph,” was Mr. Tooner’s answer.

  The children decided this meant yes. Soon Benny was banging away on the nails to make them straight. Henry helped take down the plywood so Mr. Tooner wouldn’t have to go up and down his step stool every time. As Mr. Tooner uncovered each window, Violet made sketches to show the missing pieces. Then Jessie labeled them with the measurements.

  After each window was done, Benny handed Mr. Tooner nice straight nails to hammer on the coverings again.

  “Did I do these right, Mr. Tooner?” Violet asked when she put down her colored pencils.

  Mr. Tooner looked at Violet’s drawings. His face seemed to brighten. “Why, yes, Miss, yes. That is just the way they should be.”

  After that, Mr. Tooner didn’t seem to mind that the Aldens were there.

  “I can see you don’t need me,” Carrie said. “I’ll be downstairs. Maybe Sandy is back by now.”

  Mr. Tooner and the Aldens labeled every window along the tower staircase until they got to the top floor.

  “Are we going in here?” Henry asked when they came to a locked door. “Carrie says no one goes in that room.”

  “This room is closed up, but look what I have,” Mr. Tooner said. He jiggled some keys in his pocket. The children all wondered the same thing. Did Mr. Tooner have the big key to the blue door?

  He didn’t. When he held up his key ring, they saw it had only small, ordinary-sized keys on it.

  Mr. Tooner opened the door to the mysterious tower room, and they all went inside. The room was cluttered with boxes and old furniture and toys. Most of the windows were plain leaded ones. There was another one hidden under a square of plywood. When Mr. Tooner and Henry pulled down the wood covering, a rainbow of colors filled the room.

  “It’s hardly damaged at all!” Jessie cried. “Just one or two pieces are missing.”

  Mr. Tooner showed the children just how to measure the pieces that needed to be replaced. Violet sketched them and wrote down the measurements. The children, and even Mr. Tooner, hummed and hammered, measured and whistled. When they had finished, the children looked around the room.

  “This looks like an old attic,” Benny said. “I guess that’s why no one comes up here.”

  “It’s too bad,” Jessie said. “We like our two little tower rooms on the other side.”

  This made Henry realize something. “Isn’t it strange that this room is only as big as one of our rooms? Since the towers are the same size from the outside, they should be the same size on the inside!”

  “Or there should be another room,” Jessie said, puzzled.

  “I’d like to find a secret room,” Benny said. He crawled behind the old toys and suits of armor piled up all around. He tried to look behind the bookcase, but realized it was built into the wall.

  “This has been used as a storage room ever since Mr. Drummond died,” Mr. Tooner said. “Once it was used as a playroom for some of the servants’ children. There’s probably a crawlspace around it, nothing more. Well, we’re finished with these windows. Let’s go downstairs and work on the others.” As Benny left the room, he took one last look at the suit of armor standing in the corner of the room. He knew it was impossible, but he was almost certain he’d seen it move. He hurried to catch up with the others.

  “Listen,” Violet whispered to Jessie as they followed Mr. Tooner down the tower stairs. “Mr. Tooner is humming that same fiddle tune we heard.”

  Mr. Tooner’s humming carried clearly up the stone staircase.

  “You’re right,” Jessie said. “But I don’t think it has anything to do with the missing violin. He’s too nice to be mixed up with that.”

  Henry overheard the girls. “I bet Mr. Tooner sometimes hears that same music, and it just got into his head. He probably doesn’t even realize where that tune came from!”

  “Well, anyway I’m glad he’s humming instead of being grouchy like before,” Violet agreed.

  The children stopped whispering when they caught up with Mr. Tooner. He waved them down a hall on the second floor toward the front of the castle.

  “Where to now, Mr. Tooner?” Henry shifted the step stool from one shoulder to another.

  “Another secret room?” Benny joked.

  For the first time, the children saw Mr. Tooner smile a real smile. His blue eyes twinkled.

  “You guessed right, my boy,” Mr. Tooner said to Benny. “Now follow me. Henry, you can put down that ladder. You girls can leave the toolbox and papers in the hall. Nothing needs fixing in here.”

  With that, Mr. Tooner pulled out his key ring again. He opened a door to another small room filled with soft colored light.

  “It’s the room with the round stained glass window over the front door!” Violet cried.

  “Yes, indeed,” Mr. Tooner said. “Mr. Drummond used to spend a lot of time here. He had this room and that window specially designed.”

  Mr. Tooner went over to the window and clicked two latches. Out fell the central piece of stained glass. The children gasped.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not broken,” Mr. Tooner said with a very nice smile. “Here Benny, hold this piece over your face.”

  Benny carefully took the painted piece of the knight’s face. It fit right over his own! Benny knew just what to do next. He went over to the empty space and put his own face in the window. It fit almost perfectly.

  “I can see everything from up here!” he cried.

  “And so could Mr. Drummond,” Mr. Tooner explained. “He designed the removable glass so he could see who came to the door ahead of time. Then he would decide if he wanted to meet with a visitor or not.”

  Mr. Tooner slapped his knee. “I sometimes do the same. Half the time people who come to the door are just a plain bother. If I don’t like ’em, I don’t answer the door.”

  “You must have liked us, Mr. Tooner,” Violet said. “I saw a face the day we arrived at Drummond Castle. Remember? You were the one who answered the door.”

  Mr. Tooner shook his head. “I answered the door, but I haven’t been in this room for weeks. Too much work to do.”

  “But … but, someone was here,” Violet said. “Now that I know this is a lookout, I’m sure someone was watching us the day we drove up.”

  “What about this morning?” Henry asked Mr. Tooner. “Benny and I are sure someone was up here. But when we got close, the person moved away.”

  “Can’t be, my boy, can’t be,” Mr. Tooner told Henry. “Even Mrs. Bell doesn’t have a key. She thinks it’s my private storage room and doesn’t bother me about it.”

  The children were completely confused. They couldn’t say for sure that they had seen a face in the funny window. But they certainly thought they had.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mysterious Music

  When the children came downstairs to help with dinner, Carrie was on the phone.

  “Just wa
it there,” Carrie said, disgusted. “I can’t imagine why you ran out of gas. There was enough in the tank for at least one trip to town. Never mind. I’ll send someone for you right away.”

  “What is it, Caroline?” Mr. Alden asked when he saw how upset his old friend was.

  Carrie shook her head. “It’s Sandy, of course. Who else would have forgotten to fill the gas tank? What I can’t figure out is why she ran out of gas at all. The tank was low, but she should have been able to make it to town. And why is she calling so late when she left this morning?”

  “There, there,” Mr. Alden said. “Henry and I will go for her. Now where was Miss Munson calling from?”

  “From a pay phone where the lake road and the highway meet,” Carrie answered.

  After Mr. Alden and Henry left, Benny and Violet began to set the table. Jessie checked the pantry, then the refrigerator.

  “I guess we’ll have to wait for Sandy to get back with the groceries,” Jessie said. “We can figure out what to make for dinner when we see what she bought.”

  Carrie twisted a dish cloth she had in her hands. “Sandy is so unreliable. I wish the Drummond Foundation had let me interview her myself. What good is it to know all about the castle and not be dependable?”

  A half hour later, when it was dinnertime, Henry and Mr. Alden walked in the door, with Sandy Munson right behind.

  “Hello, Sandy,” Carrie said without a smile. “If we all help unload the groceries from the Jeep, we can get dinner on the table.”

  “But there’s nothing to unload,” Mr. Alden told Carrie. “Didn’t Miss Munson tell you she ran out of gas before she ever got to town?”

  Sandy looked down at the floor. “I … I’ll go back to town in the morning, Carrie. I’m sorry. I guess I was lower on gas than you thought. Somebody can have my portion of whatever you have for dinner.”

  “That won’t be much, Sandy,” Carrie said. “We have very little food. I had hoped to restock today.” Carrie looked around the kitchen at all her hungry helpers. “We can discuss this in the morning.”

  Jessie found some eggs to make omelets. Violet sprinkled drops of water on the breakfast rolls to freshen them up before reheating them.