The Mystery off Old Telegraph Road by Julie Campbell Read Free Book Online

for the Bob-Whites?
    Feeling the lump begin to rise in her throat once again at the thought of losing Honey’s friendship forever, Trixie leaned over the handlebars and began to pedal as fast and as hard as she could.
    When she was totally out of breath, she began to coast and raised her head to look around her. To her surprise, she found that she was approaching the deserted house on Old Telegraph Road.

A Piece of Charred Paper • 6

    TRIXIE TURNED onto the gravel drive, got off the bike, and pushed the kickstand down with her foot.
    For a few moments, she stood still, leaning on the bike seat with one hand while she caught her breath after her wild ride. When she was finally breathing easily again, she began to walk around the clearing.
    She paced off the distances and discovered that the clearing was almost one hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep, plenty of room for as many cyclists as would probably be there at one time.
    Then Trixie scouted around the clearing, looking at the ground for any pieces of broken glass or rusty nails that could puncture a bike tire—or a bare knee.
    There was so little debris on the ground that Trixie decided Mr. Wheeler must have hired someone to come over to the deserted house occasionally and check on it and clean up the grounds.
    “There are just too many vandals in the world these days who have nothing better to do than wreck abandoned houses, or at the very least clean out their cars on the front lawns,” Trixie muttered.
    After Trixie had finished cleaning up the yard and had put what little trash she found in piles to be picked up later, she decided to do a little exploring.
    The two-story frame house had once been white, but most of the paint had peeled away years before, leaving the boards underneath to weather. There was a small brick stoop on the front of the house, and on the stoop sat an old concrete urn that was filled with caked and lumpy dirt and a few dried stems of long-dead plants.
    As Trixie walked around to the back of the house, she saw that all of these windows had been covered with sheets of plywood and crisscrossed with two-by-fours, like those in the front.
    “When Mr. Wheeler wants to protect an abandoned house, he goes all the way,” Trixie said aloud. “It’d take more than a casual vandal to break into this place. A person would have to have a lot of determination even to try.”
    In the back, Trixie discovered that the house had an old-fashioned cellar, with the heavy wood doors to the outside built parallel to the ground. The wood was weathered and splintered from being covered with snow and rain, but the sturdy brass hinges still looked shiny. “I bet they’d turn without so much as a squeak if someone pulled open that door,” Trixie said to herself. “It’s too bad there’s no way to find out.” The doors were locked with a massive padlock.
    When she’d seen what little there was to see around the house, Trixie turned her attention to the backyard. The outlines of the dilapidated picket fence indicated that it had been a huge yard —although now it was difficult to distinguish the yard from the game preserve beyond it, since both were covered with rough grass and weeds.
    In one comer of the yard, an area surrounded by wire fence indicated what had once been the garden. Trixie wandered over to it to see if anything had come up “volunteer” this spring, but so far only a few small weeds and the first sprigs of spreading grass had invaded the garden.
    As Trixie turned to walk back to her bike, she was forced to admit that this was the most un-mysterious abandoned house she’d ever seen. Even if she hadn’t known the background, about the former owners’ moving to town and Mr. Wheeler’s buying it from them, she didn’t think she would have found a single thing to make her suspect a mystery.
    That’s just as well, Trixie thought as she pedaled back down the drive. My mysteries have gotten me into enough trouble lately. I almost wish