“Honey, will you take Mrs. Riker inside?” she asked. “I’d like to see what Blackberry’s up to. He’s helped us solve mysteries before. There must be something in the barn he wants to show us.”
“Mice, probably. But go ahead,” Honey told her. “I know where everything is. I’ll have refreshments ready for the rest of us by the time you get back.”
Judy intended to take only a few minutes. But when they reached the barn Penny and Paul wanted to climb to the hayloft. There they found three of the club members, two girls and a boy, apparently searching for something in the hay.
“Hi, there!” Judy greeted them. “Be careful, Black Spots, or someone will rub you out. And if you’ve lost anything, don’t look for it. We’ve been warned.”
Ricky, the club president, looked at her with a baffled expression on his face.
“You are joking?” he said in what Judy considered a charming accent. “The Americans make the jokes I do not understand.”
“There was a big fight,” spoke up Muriel Blade. “The rest of the kids went to Wally’s house, but Anne and me, we stuck by Ricky.”
Anne, the youngest of the club members, was solemnly regarding the two Riker children. She was standing in a shaft of light that came in through a small window overlooking the grove.
“We know them,” she told Judy. “We tried to trail the bad men for them.”
“Did you see the men’s faces?” asked Judy. “What did they look like?”