Wilma Tenderfoot and the Case of the Frozen Hearts by Emma Kennedy Read Free Book Online

famous detective too. My name’s Wilma. This is Pickle. He’s a dog. Aren’t you hot, wearing all those knitted things?”
    Wilma, as we know, was only ten years old, which goes a long way to explaining not just her dizzy demeanor but her sudden lapse in manners. Mrs. Speckle, on the other hand, was fifty-two years old and was in no mood for explaining her love of knitted things to a cheeky young girl. Or her dog. “Listen to me, young lady,” said Mrs. Speckle with a marked tug of her bobble hat. “Famous detectives get to be famous detectives by hard work and indulging in long periods of contemplative silence, which, on the present evidence, I suspect you will find impossible.”
    â€œWhat does contemplative mean?” asked Wilma, hooking both her hands over the frame of the opened window and swinging on it.
    â€œThinking about something very hard,” said Mrs. Speckle. “Which I think you should do before you swing on that window again.”
    â€œWho’s swinging on my window, Mrs. Speckle?” asked a voice like a warm cake with hot liquid chocolate at its center. Desserts, like people, can be serious, and for this reason in Cooper you will sometimes hear adults saying, “This is a serious dessert.” Well, this voice was a serious voice, and at the sound of it Wilma fell off the window and into some snowdrops. Pickle barked and leaped about a bit. Mrs. Speckle, who had noticed that the peppermint tea was turning a shade of green that was not the right kind, winced and spun around. There, standing before her, was Theodore P. Goodman.
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    Let’s make no bones about it—Theodore P. Goodman was a very impressive man. As a descendent of the great Hayten Araucan, one of the founding fathers of Cooper Island, the detective was allowed to wear a mustache. The dense fawn whiskers that gathered under his nose fanned out to stunning blond peaks with the tips a deep brown as if they’d been dipped in chocolate. His hair was the color of wheat, and his head, as it caught the sunlight coming in through the window, looked as if it was made of gold. He wore a waistcoat made from the finest silk and a battered leather overcoat that had pockets deeper than oceans. There was a chain attached to one buttonhole, at the end of which hung a magnifying glass, the tool of choice for any detective worth his salt.
    â€œMr. Goodman!” said Mrs. Speckle, who was still staring at the peppermint tea and wishing that her employer would drink it before everyone’s day was ruined. “Nothing for you to concern yourself with. Look now, here’s your tea. Shall I fetch you a few corn crumbles to go with it?”
    Theodore’s mustache twitched at the mention of corn crumbles, for which he had a terrible weakness, but he was a detective first and biscuit* lover second, and if someone was swinging on his window he wanted to know who. “You were conversing with someone, Mrs. Speckle,” said Theodore P. Goodman, fingering his magnifying glass.
    â€œWhat does conversing mean?” said a small muffled voice from outside the window.
    â€œTalking, chatting, and generally entering into conversation with,” said the detective, poking his head out of the back kitchen window.
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    When people whose lives are going to be forever entwined meet for the first time, they have no way of knowing how important they are going to be to each other, and as Theodore P. Goodman, who was a very famous and serious detective, met Wilma Tenderfoot, who was a very young and cheeky Lowsider, there was no way of knowing that within just one week Wilma would be in such perilous danger that Detective Theodore P. Goodman would be her only hope. But for now Wilma wasn’t in perilous danger; she was just lying in a famous detective’s snowdrops, which, although not life threatening, still spelled trouble. “Hmmm,” said Theodore, eyeing the small child. “It would