In the previous part, Trixie has just informed Molinson that there may be more remains to be found…

Part Three

The policeman blanched. “You think there really was a baby’s grave here?”

She nodded. “I’m almost certain. See, attached to the story of whatever happened between Vicky Spencer and Jerry Adams was a hint that the oldest people around thought there was something significant about it. So… I kind of went looking for clues to something that happened about sixty or seventy years earlier.”

“Whose baby do you think it was?” he asked.

“Ethel Brouwer’s,” she answered. “I think she died in childbirth and her family covered it up – mostly. Some people knew about it, which is how the story later got mixed up with the 1960s events.”

He frowned. “I suppose you can supply the name of the baby’s father, too?”

She met his gaze. “All I know is that Claude Brouwer’s share of the estate seems to have been a bullet to the head.”

He nodded. “Don’t leave town. I’m going to want to talk to you again.”

Trixie smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind. And I’ll send you a copy of my notes.”

As he went to talk to Nick, Honey pulled her aside. “So, you think it’s true what Mrs. Adams said? That the family all died or went mad?”

Trixie shook her head. “No… not really. I don’t think Mrs. Brouwer or Alma was mad. Alma was a cripple and had to be looked after and her mother did that faithfully for her whole life. Betty married a man named Stratton and eventually became Principal Stratton’s grandmother.”

“Oh? I thought the whole family died out.” Honey’s brow crinkled.

“No, the name disappeared and, I guess, the house fell into disrepair when Alma couldn’t live in it any more and Betty probably didn’t want it.” Trixie shivered a little. “I don’t know whether she knew that her brother’s grave was on the land, or not. Of course, she’d already died when the land was sold…”

“By relatives who had no idea of what had happened,” Honey put in. “That’s the kind of skeleton in the closet that people really don’t talk about!” She hesitated, frowning. “But is that really what happened? There’s no real proof, is there?”

Trixie glanced over to where Molinson was standing. “I think there’s a lot more proof than you’d think… but I’m not sure that we should give them any hints on where to find it.”

“What do you mean? Why shouldn’t they find it all out?”

“You heard what Sleepyside’s gossips did to a dead squirrel and a plastic skull. What would they do with this? And I’m sure I’m not the only one who knows that Principal Stratton’s grandmother’s maiden name was Brouwer.”

Honey stared at her for a long moment. “Yes, of course. Everyone in town knows everyone else’s grandmother’s maiden names.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. It only takes one person who knows and soon everyone knows.”

“True, I guess. But is it better to prove it, one way or the other, or to let people think what they like? Or, do we wait and see what the rumour mill makes of it first and then step in if it’s too terrible?” Honey wondered.

Trixie looked away. “When you put it like that…” She let out a sigh. “Okay, we’ve got to do this, don’t we? And we need to do it before the rumours get going.”

Honey’s expression altered. “I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t look now, but Mr. Lytell is behind you, with his curious face on. He’s talking to Terry Lynch and, by the looks of it, Terry’s telling him all about it.”

Trixie cursed. “At least he doesn’t know any of this. Maybe old Lytell won’t put two and two together – or, if he does, he might make it come out as twenty-seven.”

“Shh!” Honey warned. “He’s coming this way!”

“You do seem to stir up trouble wherever you go, don’t you?” the old man announced, by way of a greeting. “And what is it that you’ve gotten into this time, may I ask?”

Trixie gave an all-too-casual shrug. “I’m not really sure, yet. We’ll have to wait and see what the police say when they’ve had a chance to examine the scene.”

“You know, Trixie, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that you were looking for that there body.” He peered at her over his glasses. “It’s got me wondering if you’ve discovered the secret of the old house, at long last.”

“Secret?” Trixie asked. “What secret?”

He shook his head. “I’m sure you know all about it already.”

It was Trixie’s turn to shake her head. “No, I’m sure I hardly know anything about it at all.”

He eyed her suspiciously for a moment, then began to explain. “Folks have said the house here was haunted for as long as I can remember. No one ever could say why – they’d just give dark looks and hint at something dreadful having happened – but I’m thinking now that we know.” He gave her a telling glance. “Seems you’ve found what became of young Mr. Weiss.”

“Who?” Trixie asked, genuinely puzzled.

The old man laughed. “You’ve never heard that tale? Why, I thought every person within miles knew about the feud between the Brouwers and the Weisses and the disappearance of the eldest Weiss boy. Seems to me that the Brouwer lad probably killed him, buried him here. It’d be why he left town so sudden, never to be seen again.”

“Really? I was looking for something totally different,” she told him, “and I never heard about the haunting until today.”

“You should listen more to your elders,” he chastised and walked away without another word.

“What on earth was that all about?” Honey demanded, as soon as he was out of earshot.

Trixie’s face showed her puzzlement. “I haven’t the faintest idea. No one has mentioned anyone called Weiss in relation to this house. And I haven’t noticed any references to them, either, while I’ve been researching.” She frowned, thinking. “And it doesn’t really make sense, either. All along, I’ve been thinking that the decorative brickwork… the position of the body in relation to the wall… the proximity to the house… well, it all points to it being someone they wanted to memorialise, even if they couldn’t actually mark the grave. But an enemy?”

“I think I’d have to agree with you,” her friend answered, “but how can we find out? Do we really have to do what you told him and wait for the police to tell us? I might die of curiosity!”

Trixie giggled. “Of course not. We’re going right now to see Mrs. Vanderpoel and see what she has to say about it. Come on!”

“And where are you two off to in such a hurry?” Molinson asked, in testy tones.

Trixie arranged her features into a picture of innocence. “We’re going to visit Mrs. Vanderpoel and ask her what she knows about a man called Weiss.”

His suspicious look deepened. “And he is?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea. That’s why we have to ask.” As he threatened to explode with temper, she hurried to add, “Look, until two minutes ago, I’d never heard of him either, but Mr. Lytell thinks that’s him over there, so I thought I’d go and find out whether there’s any chance it might be and Mrs. Vanderpoel is my best source of local information. I guess you might want to look him up in your files, too, come to think of it. He apparently disappeared.”

“When? From where?”

“I don’t know that either, but if I find out, I’ll let you know,” she promised. “Can I go now?”

He stared at her for a long moment, then nodded.

Trixie smiled her thanks and began to walk away, urging Honey to come with her.

When they arrived on her doorstep, Mrs. Vanderpoel was delighted to see them.

“Come in, come in!” she cried. “Sit here and I’ll join you in a moment.”

Both young women gladly sat where they were told to sit and helped themselves to the plate of cookies and cups of coffee the old lady placed in front of them.

“Now, what can I do for you today? Have you come for more old stories, Trixie?”

“I have. But first, I should probably tell you that we’ve been digging near the shack this morning and we’ve found a skull.” She paused, while her friend made exclamations of horror. “I was thinking it was Claude Brouwer, but Mr. Lytell came past and said that I’d found out what happened to someone called Weiss, and he said something about a feud between the two families and I was wondering what that was all about.”

The elderly lady made a noise of contempt. “I never heard such a story!”

“So, you can’t tell us about the Weiss family?” Honey asked, looking disappointed.

“I can tell you all you like, but none of it will be about the Brouwers.”

“So there was no feud?” Honey persisted.

Mrs. Vanderpoel let out a sigh. “There were disagreements now and then – of course there were. Just not between those two families. They didn’t even know each other, as far as I know. The Brouwers’ only disagreement that I know of was with the Adamses, and that was not the Brouwers’ fault at all.”

Trixie frowned. “So where did the story come from? Was it real, but with the wrong names, or what?”

Their hostess hesitated. “It’s all such a long time ago, and I don’t really remember the details. I heard the story from someone else, long ago. I think there might have been a disagreement between two young men and that one of them left town, but I don’t think there was anything sinister about it – young men do disagree now and then. I think it might have been over a girl, but I couldn’t tell you her name.”

Honey smiled. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t suppose that you know when it happened?”

“No, I can’t rightly say that I do. Long, long ago. Perhaps even before I was born.” She sighed. “Stories like that change so much with the years. It might have been anything.”

Trixie grinned. “That’s why Mr. Lytell was not one of the people I approached the last time, when I was looking for information on the shack. He’s much too fond of gossip.”

From there, the conversation turned to other matters. At length, Trixie and Honey took their leave and headed into Sleepyside to consult the library.

“I have a couple of ideas on where to look,” Trixie explained as she led Honey into the basement, where the reference room was located. They moved over to the far side of the room. “Hardly anyone uses the files they have down here these days, but they’re useful if you want information that doesn’t need to be up-to-date.”

“If you say so,” Honey answered, wrinkling her nose at the dusty smell. “Where do we start?”

“You take this file and I’ll take this one,” Trixie directed. “If you find anything even a little bit like what we’re looking for, let me know.”

Honey nodded and set to work, reading the yellowed papers contained in the folder. Time passed. Trixie chose more files for each of them. At last, Honey made an exclamation of surprise.

“You’ve got something?” Trixie demanded.

“No. Yes. Not what we’re looking for, but maybe what we need instead.” She waved her hands, trying to find the best way to express what she meant. “It’s a newspaper clipping from the Sleepyside Sun with a story about the town’s unsolved mysteries. It was written in 1960.”

“The year before the business with Jerry Adams and the shack,” Trixie noted. “So, what does it say?”

“It’s headed, ‘Tales of Long Ago’. Do you want me to read it out, or should I just tell you what it says?”

“Summarise. Or read out the good bits.” Trixie grinned. “Old newspapers can be kind of wordy and dull. People seemed to have a lot more time in the olden days.”

Honey giggled. “I don’t think 1960 counts as the olden days.”

“Please, Hon. Tell me what it says, or do I have to come and read it for myself?”

Honey cleared her throat. “Well, it starts out by talking about the hundredth anniversary of something and all the changes in Sleepyside in the last hundred years and then goes on to talk about some of the more dramatic occurrences in that time, then there’s a subheading: ‘Our Mysterious Past’ and it talks about things that remained unexplained.”

“I really wish I’d seen this when we were at school,” Trixie put in, eyes shining. “I would have wanted to solve every one.”

“Maybe it’s just as well you didn’t,” Honey teased. “Anyway, the first story is about a ghost in the town hall. The second one is the one that I was interested in. It’s about someone called Weiss, who embezzled some money and disappeared, then years later, someone from town recognised him somewhere else, only by the time they’d called the police, he’d packed up and left town there, too. Then there’s a story about some missing money.”

“Does it give any dates?” Trixie wanted to know.

Honey shook her head. “It just says it happened near the end of the last century.”

Trixie frowned. “That narrows things down a little, but I don’t know if it’s enough to go on. I’d guess this is the right guy - the leaving town part is right. I don’t suppose it says who was the victim of the embezzlement?”

Once more, Honey shook her head. “Maybe, if he took your hint about looking in the police files, we can get that from Molinson.”

“Like he’ll hand over information to us,” Trixie scoffed. “He’s still angry with me for being the one to discover this, I bet.”

“He’s probably blaming himself. From what you told me, he pretty much dared you to do it.”

Trixie nodded. “Well, let’s see if there’s anything else to find. We’ve still got a few places that I’d like to look.”

Her optimism was misplaced. After two more dusty hours, they conceded defeat and left the library.

“I’m starved,” Trixie announced, as they walked out into the sunshine. “I hope somebody remembered to feed all the people at the dig site. I just remembered that I was supposed to do that and I left without even telling someone else to do it.”

“I’m sure that Jim will have everything under control,” Honey soothed, though with a note of teasing in her voice. “But maybe we should get something for ourselves from Wimpy’s. I haven’t eaten there in years.”

“You’ll probably be disappointed that it doesn’t meet up to your memories, but sure. I’m hungry enough to eat almost anything.”

“That’s not very reassuring, but I think I’m almost that hungry too,” Honey answered, looking dubious. “So, where do we go from here? In the investigation, I mean.”

Trixie thought for a few moments. “After lunch, I think we’ll go back and see what’s going on. The police are probably still there and we might be able to tell Molinson the things we’ve found out. And there’s something I already knew that I should have told him.”

“And after that?”

“Well, I guess it’s going to be the courthouse to look up records, but not today because they’re not open. After that, if I can fix a date for the embezzlement, or the later sighting, I guess I’ll be hitting the microfilm machines for old issues of the Sun.” She sighed. “I hate those; they make me seasick.”

“I guess they’re about the only local records we’re likely to find,” Honey answered. “What we really need is somewhere that someone might have written things down.”

Trixie smote her brow. “How could I be so stupid! I’ve got written records from really close by in my own possession and I never even thought of them!”

Honey gave her a quizzical look. “You have? Oh! Those old diaries from your attic.” She frowned. “Wait; they won’t be any help. They’d be too recent.”

Years ago, Jim had inherited his house from his great-aunt’s cousin Thelma Henley, who had no living relatives of her own. Trixie had consulted the woman’s diaries and other papers she had kept on more than one occasion, to help solve puzzles from the past.

“Yes and no,” Trixie answered. “She definitely lived there in the sixties, so we might get some clues about what happened then. But I was actually thinking about some of her mother’s things that we eventually found. Mrs. Henley would have been of an age to know about all of this!”

“Well, what are we waiting for?”

Trixie started walking faster. “Shall we skip Wimpy’s and find something at home? I’m sure they must have left something for us to eat.”

Honey nodded her agreement and they set off.

Back at Rose Cottage, Trixie scrounged up a hasty lunch for the pair, which they ate while they walked out to the barn. In the years that Jim and Trixie had lived there, they had never managed to completely tame the vast amount of belongings that the Henley family had left behind. The old barn was not much use to them, other than for Jim’s workshop, so the rest of it held the things they intended to go through one day for disposal.

“Right now, I’m feeling very glad that the barn didn’t catch fire last year,” Trixie mentioned. “Wouldn’t it be frustrating to know that I might have had something useful in it and my idiot brother had destroyed it?”

Honey did not answer, her mouth full of sandwich.

They reached the barn and Trixie hauled a door open. She wended her way to the place where she kept the old documents, chose a box, lifted it down and took off its lid. By now, both of them had finished eating.

“You take a look at Miss Henley’s diary for 1961 and 1962,” Trixie suggested, handing it to Honey. “I’ll look for the 1889 and 1890 events. I’ll check a lot more thoroughly later, but for now let’s just look around the dates that we know.”

It took little time to find the correct places in the diaries, but the other papers were more challenging. Trixie was still searching when Honey came up with her first find.

“Here’s the entry for the kidnapping,” Honey announced. “It doesn’t really tell us anything new. Miss Henley called Jerry Adams ‘that dreadful boy’ and she didn’t believe a word he said, but that’s about it.”

Trixie looked over and gave a nod. “Keep looking. Maybe she wrote more later.”

Only a moment later, Honey made an exclamation of surprise. “You’re right: she did. There’s a long entry here, reminiscing about people she knew in the past.”

“Anything that stands out?”

“Oh! Yes! She mentions here that her mother was a friend of Alma Brouwer and there’s some things here about how sad it all was.” Honey lapsed into silence as she tried to decipher the old handwriting. “What do you think this says? I can’t quite make it out.”

Trixie took the small book and squinted at it. “I think it says, ‘The burden of the past weighs heavy on me now, both the part that I know and the part I suspect. Aside from Mrs. Stratton, they are all gone now and there is no one to remember. The same can be said for me.’”

“What do you think it means?”

For a long moment, Trixie pondered. “I wonder if she’s talking about her sister. She seems to be comparing herself to Mrs. Stratton…”

“You think that supports the theory that one of the Brouwer girls secretly had a baby? I guess that makes sense. Didn’t Miss Henley’s sister give up a baby for adoption?”

Trixie nodded. “She did. I don’t suppose that Miss Henley knew too much about all this, since it must have happened more than ten years before she was born. Maybe there was something she found out from her mother. Maybe she let something slip when their own family crisis began.”

“Well, then, it’s much more likely to be with the mother’s things,” Honey reasoned. “Are you having any luck?”

Her friend shook her head. “Not so far. I have a feeling that there are some letters here somewhere that might have been from Alma, but I haven’t found them yet.”

They persisted for a little longer, then decided to leave this task for later. Trixie carried a couple of boxes back to the house so that she could work on them that night. After this, they resumed their interrupted plan to go back and speak to Molinson again.

When they returned to the shack, they found that almost everyone had gone, other than the police and their associates. The number of people working on the site had grown from the few officers who had first responded to a larger group of specialists. Wendell Molinson looked straight at Trixie as she approached.

“You’re back. I suppose that means you want information from me,” he grumbled.

Trixie shook her head. “No. I’m offering what I know. I’m a reformed character, you know. This is full disclosure and full cooperation.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

She ignored the jab. “So, I spoke to Mrs. Vanderpoel and she thought the story Mr. Lytell told was wrong. I’ve been to the library to look through their local history holdings and Honey found an article that was a retrospective on Sleepyside’s unsolved mysteries.”

“Heaven help us,” Molinson muttered, under his breath.

Once more, Trixie ignored what he said. “One of the mysteries mentioned an embezzler named Weiss who left town late last century and was later spotted elsewhere, but was never actually caught. So, I’ve gone back to my original assessment that the body over there is Claude Brouwer, but you should probably look up Weiss anyway, when you get a chance - maybe after you’ve been to see Principal Stratton.”

Molinson slowly closed his eyes, then opened them again. “And why, may I ask, would I want to see Trevor Stratton?”

Trixie glanced over at Honey, who was eyeing her in trepidation. “I thought everyone knew that his paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Brouwer,” she explained, with an impossibly innocent look. “She grew up in the house that used to stand over there.”

The policeman’s eyes narrowed. “Ah. So, that’s what you were keeping from me earlier. I knew there was something.”

Her innocent expression was replaced by a guilty one. “I was worried about the rumours that have been going around lately and how malicious they’ve been and I didn’t want anyone else to needlessly suffer. Honey convinced me that I was wrong. And I also had time to think things through a little better and came to the conclusion that soon everyone is going to know about Principal Stratton, whether I tell you or not, and that maybe it’s better if you just do your job.”

“Thank you,” he answered, rather begrudgingly. “Anything else to disclose?”

She shook her head. “No, I think that’s everything. And I meant it when I said I’d give you copies of my notes. I just haven’t had a chance yet to copy them.”

“Fine.” He scowled. “I have enough to get on with at the moment, without you adding to it.”

She smiled. “Good. I’ll be in touch.”

That night, Trixie got down to the task of going through the items left by the Henley family. Several times she got sidetracked, rereading items that interested her, but in no way related to the enquiry at hand. As a result, she stayed up late into the night, long after Jim had retired for the evening. Midnight had already passed by the time she found the letters from Alma.

“Bingo!” she whispered into the stillness around her. “I just knew it was her. Now, what can she tell me?”

Continue to part four.