Read The Yellow House Mystery Online

Authors: Gertrude Warner

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The Yellow House Mystery (9 page)

Bill was still asleep when they got into the station wagon again. He was still asleep at lunch time. They did not wake him for lunch.

“He needs sleep more than food now,” said Joe.

“I do hope he isn’t sick,” said Alice in a worried voice.

“I don’t think he is,” said Joe. “I think he’s had just too much excitement. It is such a change from not talking at all.”

“It shows us we’ll have to be very careful of Bill,” said Jessie. “But I can hardly wait to ask him the end of that story.”

Bill slept almost all the afternoon. As they came near home, they had to wake him up. When they drove up to the door of their grandfather’s house, Bill was sitting up very straight.

Mr. Alden was sitting on the porch in a big chair. Beside him was Mrs. McGregor. They were waiting.

Bill leaned forward to look. “It’s my Margaret!” he said, almost crying. “She has the same beautiful blue eyes!”

Joe and Henry helped the old man out of the car and up the steps.

“Bill!” cried Margaret. She put both arms around him and led him to her chair. “It’s all right, Bill! It’s all right!” she said, over and over.

Just then there was a very loud noise from upstairs. It seemed to come from Jessie’s room. It was Watch. He came rushing down the stairs and out of the door, barking and barking. He could not believe that his four children had come back to him again. At last he lay down by Jessie’s feet, tired out.

“Now I guess he will eat his meals,” said Mr. Alden. “As for Mrs. McGregor, she hasn’t eaten a good meal since you all went away.”

Benny said, “I think it’s funny. We have so many people that can’t eat. I don’t have any trouble eating
my
meals.”

“Now that we’re all together again, Benny,” said Grandfather laughing, “everyone will be all right. I think I shall eat better myself. We have things for supper that you like best. There is hamburger for you. Bill always liked fish best and that’s what he’ll have. There’s ham for Joe and apple pie for Jessie.”

“No pie for me?” asked Benny, taking his grandfather’s hand.

“What do you think?” teased his grandfather. “I don’t believe anyone will go hungry tonight.”

It was wonderful to see Bill eat. With his Margaret beside him again, he seemed like a different man.

“I feel better and better,” he said.

After supper the family sat again on the porch.

“Joe,” whispered Benny, “couldn’t we talk to Bill now? He seems all right to me.”

“You can try,” said Joe. “We’ll soon see how he takes it. We can stop if he gets too upset.”

Benny went over then to Bill and Margaret. He put his hand over Bill’s.

“We want to ask you just a few more things, Bill,” he said. “Are you too tired?”

“No, little boy,” said Bill. “I don’t think I shall ever be tired again. Ask me anything you want.”

Benny looked at Joe. Joe smiled back at him.

Then Benny said, “We want to know something more about your brother. How was he going to make the money three times as much?”

“I didn’t know myself at first,” answered Bill. “But later I found out he was going to give it to some friends of his to bet on the horse races.”

“Oh, but he might have lost it all!” cried Henry.

“Yes, I know that now,” said Bill. “His friends were bad people, I’m afraid. Sam would have been all right if his friends had let him alone. But he always did what they said, and I always did what my brother Sam said.”

He looked around sadly. “One night after Sam was killed, these men came up to Maine. They hunted all over my house, but they couldn’t find the money. I didn’t know where the tin box was myself. But they didn’t believe me. They tried to make me tell, and we had a great fight. But at last they went away, and I never saw them again.”

“Were they the ones who told you the barn was burned?” asked Mr. Alden.

“Yes. They didn’t want me to go home and tell all I knew, so they told me Margaret was dead.”

“I suppose that finished you,” said Benny.

Bill smiled at him. “Yes, that finished me. I didn’t want to live any more without Margaret, and I didn’t want to see people. Besides, I couldn’t come home without the money, so I went into the deep woods to live alone forever.”

“Oh, I’m so glad we found you!” said Jessie suddenly. “Supposing we had never asked to go into the little yellow house on Surprise Island! Now you and Mrs. McGregor can live right here in her rooms, can’t they, Grandfather?”

“If her rooms are big enough,” said Mr. Alden.

“Three rooms ought to be big enough for two people,” said Mrs. McGregor, happily.

“I can help with the horses,” said Bill. “Do you still have horses?”

“Yes, we have two,” answered Mr. Alden. “But you will rest a long time before doing any work.”

Darkness began to fall. The birds began to sing their evening songs. The family sat quietly for a minute and listened.

Then Violet said, “Isn’t this a happy house, Alice? You and Joe so happy on the top floor—”

“And Bill and Mrs. McGregor will be in their own little rooms,” cried Benny.

“Don’t forget us,” said Henry, “with our mystery all solved, and getting back to Grandfather.”

“And we’ll all go and live in the little yellow house on Surprise Island every summer,” said Benny.

“Hold on, my boy. Not so fast!” said Mr. Alden. “That’s Bill’s house.”

“Oh, so it is,” said Benny. “Well then, he and Mrs. McGregor can live in it every summer, and we can go over to see them.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said Mr. Alden with a smile.

Violet suddenly put her hand on her grandfather’s knee, and looked up into his kind face. She could not see very well, for it had grown quite dark. But she knew he was smiling at her.

“Grandfather,” she asked, “couldn’t you use some of that money to fix up the little yellow house on Surprise Island? It is so dusty and the chairs are so old.”

“A fine idea!” said Mr. Alden, taking her small hand in his big one. “We could buy a lot of chairs with that money. And by the way, where
is
the money?”

“Right here!” said Jessie at once. She took it out of her handbag and gave it to Mr. Alden.

“Maybe Bill and I could paper and paint the rooms before school begins,” said Henry.

“Oh, we could all paint!” shouted Benny, jumping around. “Let’s paint the outside, too.”

“That would be fun,” said Alice. “Joe and I could help you every day after work on the cave.”

“Right now you children have something new to think about,” said Joe. “We will take a lunch over every day, and work until we get the house all fixed up.”

Violet sat down beside her grandfather in his great chair. He moved over quickly to make room for her and put his arm around her.

“I’m glad the little yellow house isn’t a sad place to you any more, Grandfather,” she said, leaning her head back against his arm. “It’s going to be a happy place again.”

“We’ll still paint it yellow,” said Benny. “Ho-hum!”

“What does ‘ho-hum’ mean this time, Ben?” asked Henry, laughing at his little brother.

Mrs. McGregor answered, smiling at Bill, “To me it means, ‘Thank you, children.’”

Mr. Alden said, “To me it means I’m very glad you are all at home again.”

“Well,” said Benny, “what I really mean is that I can hardly wait until tomorrow to paint that little yellow house!”

About the Author

G
ERTRUDE
C
HANDLER
W
ARNER
discovered when she was teaching that many readers who like an exciting story could find no books that were both easy and fun to read. She decided to try to meet this need, and her first book,
The Boxcar Children,
quickly proved she had succeeded.

Miss Warner drew on her own experiences to write the mystery. As a child she spent hours watching trains go by on the tracks opposite her family home. She often dreamed about what it would be like to set up housekeeping in a caboose or freight car-the situation the Alden children find themselves in.

When Miss Warner received requests for more adventures involving Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden, she began additional stories. In each, she chose a special setting and introduced unusual or eccentric characters who liked the unpredictable.

While the mystery element is central to each of Miss Warner’s books, she never thought of them as strictly juvenile mysteries. She liked to stress the Aldens’ independence and resourcefulness and their solid New England devotion to using up and making do. The Aldens go about most of their adventures with as little adult supervision as possible-something else that delights young readers.

Miss Warner lived in Putnam, Connecticut, until her death in 1979. During her lifetime, she received hundreds of letters from girls and boys telling her how much they liked her books. And so she continued the Aldens’ adventures, writing a total of nineteen books in the Boxcar Children series.

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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1953, 1981 by Albert Whitman & Company

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0759-8

This 2010 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com

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