“Perhaps he is. But I find Melissa more interesting. Seemed to me that man she called ‘Pa’ had hypnotized her. And how mean of him not to let her keep the bracelet,” Terry remarked. “Just plain mean!”
As if that brought up different theories in each mind, their conversation dragged. The swim and the row in the morning left them feeling pleasantly weary and completely satisfied. Healthy fatigue was the real answer.
Sim moved back and forth in the rustic swing, while Terry and Arden gazed dreamily out to sea, where the dying sun turned white clouds to pink and painted the water a deep blue in the miracle of sunset.
They never even realized that a car was coming rapidly down the road behind the house, raising billows of sandy dust, until it stopped with screeching brakes at the back gate of Terry’s house.
“Who’s that?” Sim asked, as Sim would.
“I haven’t the least idea, little one,” Terry answered. “Unless it’s some more spies or kidnapers.”
“Let’s go see,” Arden suggested. “May we?”
But they were saved the trouble, for a woman was striding up the sand-edged path to the porch. She was dressed in black satin with a huge silver fox scarf, and glittering earrings showed beneath a small satin turban. She had dark eyes, and her lips were a scarlet gash. The girls waited apprehensively.
“I beg your par-r-don,” the woman began. “Have you a houseboat around here? He calls it—” she fumbled in a handbag and taking out a paper looked at it closely—“he calls it Merry Jane. Can you tell me how to reach it?”
“There is a houseboat down the bay, if that’s the one you mean,” Terry answered. “It is, I imagine, the only one around here.”