“I may receive another telephone message,” she thought, “but I doubt it. That woman probably will be too badly frightened to try to contact me again.”
At the exit of Baldiff Road, Penny headed down the winding hillside highway which she and Louise had followed on the night of the blizzard. The route, although slightly longer, would take her close to the Riverview Yacht Club.
“I’ll go that way and see if my car is still there,” she decided. “Then tomorrow I can have it hauled home and jacked up. I should have looked after the matter long ago.”
The coupe rounded a curve and the road dipped between an avenue of swaying, whispering pines. To the left, shrouded in snow, loomed the old Harrison house. The estate was picturesque in itself, and Mose Johnson’s tale about a ghost had intensified the girl’s interest.
“Wonder who owns the place now?” she speculated. “Probably not any member of the Harrison family, as I believe they were old-timers in Riverview.”
Penny slowed the car to idling speed. Deliberately keeping to the left hand side of the road, she studied with deep interest the long, snow-frosted fence which bounded the grounds. The barrier was an unfriendly one, high and spiked at the top.
Suddenly her attention focused upon a well-beaten path in the snow just inside the fence. The footprints, plainly visible in the bright moonlight, extended the full width of the grounds.
Into Penny’s mind flashed the wild yarn told by Mose Johnson.
“Ghost tracks!” she thought. “At least those prints must have been made by whatever he saw beyond the gate.”
So interested was Penny in the path that for an instant she completely forgot her driving. The front left wheel of the car struck a tiny mound of ice and snow at the road’s edge.