The Mysterious Code Read online

  This is a reissue edition of a book that was originally published in 1961. While some words have been changed to regularize spelling within the book and between books in the series, the text has not been updated to reflect current attitudes and beliefs.

  Copyright © 1961, renewed 1989 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Golden Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1961.

  www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kenny, Kathryn.

  [Trixie Belden and the mysterious code]

  The mysterious code / by Kathryn Kenny ; illustrated by Paul Frame. — 1st Random House ed.

  p. cm. — (Trixie Belden ; #7)

  Previously published under the title: Trixie Belden and the mysterious code. SUMMARY: While preparing for a fund-raiser antique show, Trixie and the other members of the Bob-Whites discover a secret code in the pages of an old magazine in the attic.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80873-8

  [1. Clubs—Fiction. 2. Ciphers—Fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Frame, Paul, 1913– ill. II. Title. III. Series.

  PZ7.K396Mr 2004 [Fic]—dc22 2003024894

  First Random House Edition

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. No More Bob-Whites?

  2. Trixie’s Big Idea

  3. “The Winnah!”

  4. Treasures in the Attic

  5. The Acrobatic Alphabet

  6. A Musical Mystery

  7. Thieves!

  8. Foreign Intrigue

  9. Lost in a Blizzard

  10. A Caller in the Night

  11. The Mask Comes Off

  12. “This Can’t Be I!”

  13. Moll Dick Goes Partying

  14. At the Police Station

  15. The Most Fun Ever

  16. The Show Takes Shape

  17. Brom’s Surprise

  18. Night Watch

  Chapter 1

  No More Bob-Whites?

  Trixie Belden rushed into the Sleepyside Junior-Senior High cafeteria. She pushed back her short sandy curls, threw her notebook on the table, and sank into a seat between her two best friends, Honey Wheeler and Diana Lynch.

  “What kept you so long?” Honey asked. “We’re starved.”

  “Something terrible!” Trixie gasped when she could get her breath.

  “Come on, Trixie, tell us,” her brother Mart said. “Don’t be so dramatic!”

  “I’m not—being—dramatic. Something awful is going to happen to the Bob-Whites of the Glen. Mart, please get Jim and Brian from the kitchen. I want the club members together right now so I can tell all of you.”

  “Heck, Trixie, they can’t leave their jobs at lunch time.”

  “It’s an emergency,” Trixie insisted.

  “All right,” Mart said resignedly, “I’m on my way.”

  Mart, only eleven months older than his thirteen-year-old sister, did not always respond so quickly. Today, though, the tears in Trixie’s blue eyes convinced him that she was in earnest.

  “Can’t you give us a hint?” Diana asked. “You sound as though we were all going to be stricken with some awful plague.”

  “It’s almost worse than that,” Trixie sobbed. “Oh, there they are.”

  “What is it?” Honey’s brother, Jim, asked. “Trixie, you’re crying. You never, never cry.”

  “I’m not really,” Trixie said and dried her eyes. “It’s just this: This morning Mr. Stratton, the principal, stopped me in the corridor and—”

  “You’re failing in math again,” Mart said. “Gleeps, if that’s all it is—”

  “He asked me about the jacket I’m wearing,” Trixie went on, scorning Mart’s interruption. “I happen to be the only one wearing our B.W.G. jacket today. He wanted to know what is cross-stitched on the back of it.”

  “Did you tell him it’s a secret?” Diana asked indignantly.

  “The name isn’t, Diana. I told him it stands for our club, the Bob-Whites of the Glen.”

  “Then what did he ask?” Mart had little sympathy for faculty interference of any kind.

  “What the purpose behind the club is,” Trixie said.

  “Well, that is a secret,” Honey said.

  “I don’t believe it is, Sis,” Jim said. “In fact we don’t have a secret club at all. It belongs just to us, certainly, but it isn’t secret.”

  “Calm down and go on, Trixie.” Mart was impatient. “You make such a big deal out of everything.”

  “I’m not doing it this time, and you’ll see. I told Mr. Stratton we were organized just like brothers and sisters, the six of us, to help one another.”

  “I’ll bet that set him back on his feet,” said Mart.

  “Oh, Mart, listen,” Honey insisted. “Go on, Trixie, there must be more.”

  “Yes, there is, and it’s the worst part. I’ll die dead if anything happens to the B.W.G.’s.”

  “It won’t,” Jim said confidently.

  “Mr. Stratton threatened it might,” Trixie insisted. “After I told him the purpose of the club he said, ‘I don’t think that purpose is enough to justify such an organization in the eyes of the members of the school board.’ Is that awful enough for you, Mart?”

  “Gleeps, yes,” Mart said. “Out of a clear sky, too.”

  “Hardly.” They all looked at Trixie’s brother, Brian. He was the oldest club member, sixteen, and serious-minded. They paid attention to what he had to say.

  “You know the whole school’s been talking about the vandalism that’s been going on,” he said. “Maybe that is what has stirred up the board. You know, worry about gangs forming in Sleepyside.”

  Trixie jumped to her feet and snapped her fingers. “You’re right, Brian,” she said. “That’s what Tad Webster meant.”

  “Now you’re being mysterious again,” Brian said. “What does Spider Webster’s brother, Tad, have to do with the situation? There isn’t a better policeman in all Sleepyside than Spider,” and he added, “or a better friend of the Bob-Whites of the Glen.”

  “That’s true,” Trixie agreed, “but he surely picked a goon for a younger brother. He saw me talking to Mr. Stratton and asked me what he had been saying to me.”

  “You didn’t tell him, did you?” Diana asked. She didn’t like Tad either.

  “Of course I didn’t. He told me, instead. Mr. Stratton had been questioning him, also, because Tad’s president of the Hawks. Tad had the nerve to say that he thought the Hawks had a lot more reason for existence than the B.W.G.’s.”

  “Mr. Stratton said that?” Honey asked, her big hazel eyes widening.

  “No, Tad did.”

  “They do have some good athletes in the Hawks,” Mart said. He had been a Little Leaguer and could not quite make the Pony League when Tad did. “Tad can throw a curve as well as any pro.”

  “We’re getting away from the subject again,” Brian reminded Trixie.

  “Oh, yes, thanks, Brian.” Trixie was still breathless. “Tad told me that the vandalism and thievery—someone stole fifteen dollars out of Mr. Stratton’s desk last night—had driven the board members and Mr. Stratton nearly crazy. Tad told me he thought they were out to get all clubs.”

  “You don’t honestly believe that Mr. Stratton thinks the B.W.G.’s are
breaking windows and looting desks and lockers, do you?” Jim asked. He and Brian found it difficult to rationalize some of Trixie’s thinking.

  “No, I don’t. Oh, you all have me so confused I don’t know what to think.”

  “You didn’t just sit there and take what Mr. Stratton said, did you?” Mart asked. “Didn’t you tell him about any of the good things the club has done?”

  “I didn’t, Mart, because those things are what make the club secret, things like—well, like showing up Diana’s phony uncle, and—”

  “Helping me get away from my cruel stepfather,” Jim said.

  “And the time you and Honey saved little Sally Darnell’s life—and catching Dapper Dick, the thief—” Mart started counting on his fingers. “Well, what did you tell him, Trixie?”

  “I told him about how Jim is going to start a school for boys some day.”

  Big, red-haired, freckled Jim looked embarrassed. When his Great-uncle James Frayne died and left half a million dollars to his orphaned nephew, Jim had put it all in a trust fund dedicated to a school for orphan boys that he planned to open when he finished college.

  “Did you tell him Brian is going to be the resident physician at my school?” Jim asked Trixie.

  “Yes, I did. I told him, too, that Mart is going to take care of all the land around it when he finishes agricultural school.”

  “And that wasn’t enough for him?” Diana asked.

  “No, it wasn’t. He said that was all far in the future. He thought it was ‘splendid for you to want to help one another.’ ” Trixie touched the fingers of her hands together and rocked back on her heels in imitation of Mr. Stratton. “Then he spoiled it all by saying that he and the board would have a hard time believing that our little club could do anything for millionaires like the Wheelers and the Lynches.”

  “I wish—how I wish we didn’t have any more money than anyone else,” Honey moaned.

  “I wish the same thing,” said Diana.

  “He doesn’t know how wonderful and kind and generous you and your families are,” Trixie said. “Anyway, money doesn’t solve all the troubles people have.”

  “That’s right,” Honey agreed. “Mr. Stratton should talk to Miss Trask and she’d tell him what a different person the B.W.G.’s have made of me.”

  Miss Trask had been Honey’s teacher when she was in private school. Now she lived in the Wheeler home and supervised it. It was she who insisted that Honey’s mother and father send her to public school, outfit her in blue jeans for play, and let her do the things other girls her age were doing. Honey, who had been sickly most of her life, was now pink-cheeked and starry-eyed with health.

  “He should know, too,” Diana said, “how the B.W.G.’s gave my parents a whole new set of values. We’re lots more of a family since my mother and father discharged the butler, the nurses for my twin brothers and twin sisters, and half the maids. They thought when we first moved into this neighborhood that we’d have to live like millionaires. I guess we couldn’t do it because we’ve really been poor most of our lives.”

  “We’re getting away from the subject again,” Brian warned. “What makes the situation so urgent now, Trixie?”

  “The school board is having a meeting tonight—”

  “And?”

  “And they may very well tell us that we can’t ever be a club again!”

  “Our beautiful clubhouse that we’ve worked so hard to rebuild!” Diana sighed. She was the newest club member. She had felt pretty lonely before the B.W.G.’s had asked her to join them. “I used to look at you, Trixie, and your two older brothers, Brian and Mart, and Honey and her adopted brother, Jim, and think that nothing would ever make me quite as happy as to be asked to be a B.W.G. and now—”

  “And now,” said Trixie, once more the efficient co-president of the club, “now we aren’t going to go down without a fight.”

  “Most of what you have been saying has been trying to read Mr. Stratton’s mind.” Jim was being practical. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea if we were to talk to Mr. Stratton before that meeting this evening?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you ever since I came in,” Trixie said. “Mr. Stratton said he wanted all of us to come to his office at three thirty this afternoon.”

  “What do you think that means?” Diana asked. “A chance for us to save the club?”

  “Trixie doesn’t know that, Diana,” Brian said. “I know this, however. If Jim and I don’t get back into the kitchen pretty soon we’ll be fired. That would make such a dent in the club’s funds it would die a natural death.”

  “Let’s meet here, then, at three twenty-five. We’ll go to the principal’s office together,” Trixie said solemnly. “Jeepers, I forgot to eat my lunch. Not one of us ate anything. It’s real trouble, sure enough, when we’re too worried to eat.”

  The six members of the B.W.G.’s were a sad-faced lot. The club had been organized, in the first place, because the members’ families lived out in the country near the little town of Sleepyside. All of them had to take the bus to school. The town boys and girls had many after-school activities which the bus travelers could not share.

  Trixie, her brothers Brian, Mart, and little six-year-old Bobby lived at Crabapple Farm on Glen Road, two miles from Sleepyside.

  On the western boundary of the farm, and just up the hill, Honey Wheeler, thirteen, lived with her parents and her adopted brother Jim, fifteen. Their home, Manor House, was a huge estate with acres of beautiful rolling lawn, a bird sanctuary and game preserve, a private lake, riding horses, and many servants.

  Diana Lynch, thirteen, too, whose father had recently become a millionaire, lived in another large country estate. Her twin brothers and twin sisters were much younger.

  In spite of the vast wealth of the others, the Beldens loved their white frame farm home best. Though their parents worked hard—their father had a position in the Sleepyside bank—they never lacked time to make their children’s friends welcome.

  The club members, whose secret whistle imitated a Bob-White’s call, all wore red jackets which Honey had made, with “B.W.G.” cross-stitched on the back.

  They had remodeled the old gatehouse on the Wheeler estate, and now used it as a clubhouse. When they had first discovered it, it had been almost a ruin, set in a tangle of shrubs and vines. The B.W.G.’s had worked hard to rehabilitate it. The boys had done most of the repair work on the roof and interior. The girls had painted, made curtains, and helped clear the vines and shrubs away.

  It was a rule of the club that all funds used in the work of the club had to be earned by the individual members. Honey’s father and Diana’s father would have financed the club for any amount, but the members did not want this. Trixie contributed five dollars a week which she earned helping her mother. Honey, who had learned to mend and sew at summer camps and private schools, earned the same amount as Trixie by doing mending. Diana was paid to help look after her little brothers and sisters. Mart did all the odd jobs he could find around the neighborhood. Jim and Brian, of course, worked in the school cafeteria.

  As a group they had patrolled the game preserve before Mr. Maypenny, the present gamekeeper, had been employed. For this Mr. Wheeler had paid them the regular gamekeeper’s wages.

  Recently, too, when they had been at a dude ranch in Arizona for two weeks at Christmastime, they had substituted for the regular work crew who had left mysteriously. Diana’s uncle, who owned the ranch, had paid them the same wages that he paid the regular employees.

  Working together, planning together, playing together, the six had grown into a close-knit clan. They believed sincerely in the worthwhile objectives of the Bob-Whites of the Glen.

  Surely nothing could destroy the club now.

  Chapter 2

  Trixie’s Big Idea

  “Don’t you think I’d better leave my Bob-White jacket in my locker?” Trixie asked when they all met to go to Mr. Stratton’s office.

  “Why
do you want to do that?” Mart asked.

  “Because it was our jackets that seemed to bother him so much,” Trixie said. “On second thought, I don’t think I will take mine off. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “It would too closely approximate appeasement,” Mart said. “In the minds of the most erudite men in diplomatic circles, an attempt to placate is tacit acknowledgment of guilt.” Mart tried out all his big words on the club members. Diana’s puzzled violet-blue eyes widened. She even mixed up one-syllable words.

  “Never mind, Diana,” Brian said. “He probably doesn’t know what the words mean himself. He reads the editorials in the New York Times and learns them by heart.” Secretly Brian was proud of his younger brother.

  “I don’t see how any of you can laugh,” Trixie said. “Here we are now at the judgment seat.”

  Six serious-faced young people went into the principal’s office. Six chairs were drawn up facing Mr. Stratton’s desk.

  “Good afternoon,” he said and smiled. “Now let me see, you are Brian Belden … and you, Martin Belden.”

  They nodded their heads.

  “And Jim Frayne?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jim said.

  “And Madeleine Wheeler.” Honey winced at the unfamiliar name.

  “Trixie Belden. Is Trixie a nickname?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.

  “Not exactly,” Trixie answered. She had been christened Beatrix, but people didn’t have to know that. Her understanding mother had just called her Trixie when she enrolled for kindergarten.

  “Last of all, Diana Lynch.” Mr. Stratton straightened. His smile faded. “Now who is to be spokesman?”

  “I am,” said Trixie. Jim was co-president of the Bob-Whites, but Trixie usually did the talking because … well, because she was naturally chatty.

  “Trixie, you have told me about the B.W.G. club and the reason for its being. I’m afraid it isn’t enough. The board feels it must scrutinize closely the reason for any organization not sponsored directly by the school. It doesn’t want secret societies to exist in Sleepyside schools, when clubs—really gangs—can be the source of so much trouble. With vandalism occurring in Sleepyside, we feel we must clamp down. And whatever ruling we make about secret clubs will affect the good ones as well as the bad.”