| She was again at the mercy of the foaming spray | |
| “Oh dear! I wasn’t quick enough.” | |
| “It looks—like a diamond!” gasped Judy | |
| “Hey! What are you doing here?” | |
| He lay there motionless | |
| “This will teach you not to go poking around where you’re not wanted!” |
“Tell Judy about it,” begged Lois. “Please, Lorraine, it can’t be as bad as it appears. There isn’t anything that Judy can’t solve.”
Lorraine tilted her head disdainfully. “We’re sisters now. We’re both Farringdon-Petts and should be loyal to each other. But you always did take Judy’s part. She was the one who nearly spoiled our double wedding trying to solve a mystery. I don’t believe she’d understand—understand any better than I do. Everyone has problems, and I’m sure Judy is no exception.”
“You’re right, Lorraine,” announced Judy, coming in to serve dessert to the two friends she had invited for lunch at Peter’s suggestion. “I do have problems, and there are plenty of mysteries I can’t solve.”
“Name one,” charged Lois. “Just mention one single spooky thing you couldn’t explain, and I’ll believe you. I’ve seen you in action, Judy Bolton—”
“Judy Dobbs, remember?”
“Well, you were Judy Bolton when you solved all those mysteries. I met you when the whole valley below the big Roulsville dam was threatened by flood and you solved that—”
“That,” declared Judy, “was my brother Horace, not me. He was the hero without even meaning to be. He was the one who rode through town and warned people that the flood was coming. I was off chasing a shadow.”
“A vanishing shadow,” Lois said with a sigh. “What you did wasn’t easy, Judy.”
“It didn’t need to be as hard as it was,” Judy confessed. “I know now that keeping that promise not to talk about the dam was a great big mistake and could have cost lives. I should have told Arthur.”
“Please,” Lorraine said, a pained expression clouding her pretty face, “let’s not talk about him now.”
“Very well,” Judy agreed. “What shall we talk about?”
“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve solved. Maybe you were mistaken about a thing or two before the flood, but what about the haunted house you moved into? You were the one who tracked down the ghosts in the attic and the cellar and goodness knows where all. You’ve been chasing ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did you fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”
“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back, “there were plenty of them I couldn’t explain. There was one I used to call the spirit of the fountain, but what she was or how she spoke to me is more than I know. If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling. And now they’re both dead and I can’t ask them. They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries along with this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of them when I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re stored in one end of the attic.”
“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed Lois. “Why don’t you have another ghost party and show up the spooks?”
“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”
Judy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She wasn’t in the mood for digging up old mysteries, but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began, she finally told them, the summer before they met. Horace had just started working on the paper. Judy remembered that it was Lorraine’s father, Richard Thornton Lee, who gave him his job with the Farringdon Daily Herald. He had turned in some interesting church news, convincing Mr. Lee that he had in him the makings of a good reporter. And so it was that he spent the summer Judy was remembering in Farringdon where the Farringdon-Petts had their turreted mansion, while she had to suffer the heat and loneliness of Dry Brook Hollow.
Her thoughts were what had made it so hard, she confessed now as she reviewed everything that had happened. She just couldn’t help resenting the fact that her parents left her every summer while they went off on a vacation by themselves. What did they think she would do?
“You’ll have plenty to read,” her father had told her. “I bought you six new books in that mystery series you like. When they’re finished there are plenty of short stories around. Your grandmother never throws anything away. She has magazines she’s saved since your mother was a girl. If you ask for them she’ll let you have the whole stack. I know how you love to read.”
“I do, Dad, but if the magazines are that old—”
Judy had stopped. She had seen her father’s tired eyes and had realized that a busy doctor needed a vacation much more than a schoolgirl who had too little to do. He and Judy’s mother usually went to the beach hotel where they had honeymooned. It was a precious memory. Every summer Dr. Bolton and his wife relived it. And every summer Judy went to stay with her grandmother Smeed, who scolded and fussed and tried to pretend she wasn’t glad to have her.
“You here again?” she had greeted her that summer, and Judy hadn’t noticed her old eyes twinkling behind her glasses. “What do you propose to do with yourself this time?”
“Read,” Judy had told her. “Mom and Dad say you have a whole stack of old magazines—”
“In the attic. Go up and look them over if you can stand the heat.”
Judy went, not to look over the old magazines so much as to escape to a place where she could have a good cry. It was the summer before her fifteenth birthday. In another year she would have outgrown her childish resentment of her parents’ vacation or be grown up enough to ask them to let her have a vacation of her own. In another year she would be summering among the beautiful Thousand Islands and solving a mystery to be known as the Ghost Parade.
“A whole parade of ghosts,” Lois would be telling her, “and you solved everything.”
But then she didn’t even know Lois. She had no idea so many thrilling adventures awaited her. There seemed to be nothing—nothing—and so the tears came and spilled over on one of the magazines. As Judy wiped it away she noticed that it had fallen on a picture of a fountain.
“A fountain with tears for water. How strange!” she remembered saying aloud.
Judy had never seen a real fountain. The thrill of walking up to the door of the palatial Farringdon-Pett mansion was still ahead of her. On the lawn a fountain still caught and held rainbows like those she was to see on her honeymoon at Niagara Falls. But all that was in the future. If anyone had told the freckled-faced, pigtailed girl that she would one day marry Peter Dobbs, she would have laughed in their faces.
“That tease!”
For then she knew Peter only as an older boy who used to tease her and call her carrot-top until one day she yelled back at him, “Carrot-tops are green and so are you!”
Peter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a kitten and suggested the name Blackberry for him. The kitten was now a dignified family cat. But the summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and spilled tears on it she had no kitten. She had nothing, she confessed, not even a friend. It had helped to pretend the fountain in the picture was filled with all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.
“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly exclaimed. “If I could find it I’d wish—”
A step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered it distinctly. She had turned to see her grandmother and to hear her say in her usual abrupt fashion, “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people know your wishes instead of muttering them to yourself, most of them aren’t so impossible.”
“Were they?” asked Lois.
She and Lorraine had listened to this much of what Judy was telling them without interruption.
“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied. “There weren’t any of them impossible.”
And she went on to tell them how, the very next day, her grandparents had taken her to a fountain exactly like the one in the picture. It was in the center of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it. Beside the steps were smaller fountains with the water spurting from the mouths of stone lions. Judy had stared at them a moment and then climbed the steps to the pool.
“Am I dreaming?” she remembered saying aloud. “Is this beautiful fountain real?”
A voice had answered, although she could see no one.
“Make your wishes, Judy. Wish wisely. If you shed a tear in the fountain your wishes will surely come true.”
“A tear?” Judy had asked. “How can I shed a tear when I’m happy? This is a wonderful place.”
“Shed a tear in the fountain and your wishes will surely come true,” the voice had repeated.
“But what is there to cry about?”
“You found plenty to cry about back at your grandmother’s house,” the mysterious voice had reminded her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture up there in the attic?”
“Then you—you are the fountain!” Judy remembered exclaiming. “But a fountain doesn’t speak. It doesn’t have a voice.”
“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had said in a mysterious whisper.
“Did you?” Lois interrupted the story to ask excitedly. “Oh, Judy! Don’t keep us in suspense any longer. What did you wish?”
“Patience,” Judy said with a smile. “I’m coming to that.”
First, she told her friends, she had to think of a wise wish. There had been so much she wanted in those early days before the flood. Dora Scott had been her best friend in Roulsville, but she had moved away.
“You see,” she explained, “I made the mistake of having just one best friend. There wasn’t anybody in Dry Brook Hollow. I remember thinking of how lonely I was and how I wished for a friend or a sister, and suddenly a tear splashed in the water. It made little ripples. I thought I had to wish quickly before they vanished, and so I began naming the things I wanted as fast as I could. I’m not sure they were wise wishes. They seem rather selfish to me, now. I wasn’t thinking of anybody but me, Judy Bolton, and what I wanted. It wasn’t until after I began to think of others that my wishes started to come true.”
“But what were they?” Lois insisted.
Lorraine seemed unusually quiet and thoughtful. Judy did not notice the fear in her eyes as she replied airily, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I wished for lots of friends and a sister, and I wished I could marry a G-man and solve a lot of mysteries and that’s as far as I got when the ripples vanished. I thought the spell was broken and so I didn’t wish for anything more.”
“Wasn’t there anything more you wanted?” Lois asked.
“Of course,” replied Judy. “There were lots more things. I wanted to go places, of course, and keep pets, and have a nice home, and—”
“And your wishes all came true!”
“Every one of them,” Judy agreed, “even the one about the sister. You see, it wasn’t a baby sister I wanted. It was a sister near my own age. That seemed impossible at the time, but the future did hold a sister for me.”
“It held one for me, too,” Lois said, squeezing Lorraine’s hand under the table. “Don’t you think sisters should tell each other their problems, Judy?”
“Honey and I always do,” she replied “but then it was different. I didn’t know I would marry Peter or that he would become a G-man, and he didn’t know he had a sister. It is strange, isn’t it? But the strangest thing of all was the fountain itself.”
“Why?” asked Lorraine. “Do you still think it was enchanted?”
Lois laughed at this, but Judy was serious as she answered, “I was still little girl enough to think so at the time. I wandered around, growing very drowsy. Then I found a hammock and climbed into it. I must have gone to sleep, because I remember waking up and wondering if the voice in the fountain had been a dream.”
“A hammock?” Lois questioned. “Are you sure it wasn’t a flying carpet?”
“No, it was a hammock all right,” Judy assured her, laughing. “It was hung between two trees in a beautiful garden all enclosed in rose trellises thick with roses. Did I tell you it was June?”
“All the year around?”
Again Lois laughed. But Lorraine said abruptly, “Let’s not talk about rose gardens in June. It’s a long way from June to December.”
“Do you mean a garden changes? I know,” Judy said, “but I think this one would be beautiful at any time of the year. There were rhododendrons, too, and I don’t know how many different kinds of evergreens. I explored the garden all around the fountain.”
“And then what happened?” Lorraine urged her.
“Yes, yes. Go on,” entreated Lois. “I didn’t dream you’d kept anything that exciting a secret. Why didn’t you try to solve the mystery?”
“I think I would have tried,” Judy admitted, “if I had been older or more experienced. I really should have investigated it more thoroughly and learned the secret of the fountain. But after the ripples went away it didn’t speak to me any more, and I didn’t really think it had heard my wishes. I was still wishing for a friend when I met you, Lois. It did seem impossible for us to be friends at first, didn’t it? Lorraine was your friend.”
“I did make trouble for you,” Lorraine remembered. “It was all because of my foolish jealousy.”
“It was nothing compared to the trouble caused by the Roulsville flood,” declared Judy. “After that things started happening so fast that I completely forgot about the fountain. Honestly, Lois, I don’t believe I thought about it again until after we moved to Farringdon and I walked up to your door and saw the fountain on your lawn.”
“The Farringdon-Pett puddle, I always called it,” Lois said with a giggle. “I’ve seen lots nicer fountains.”
“You have?” asked Judy. “Then maybe you’ve seen the one I’ve been telling you about. I think the picture of it is still in the attic. Come on up and I’ll show you.”
Lois and Lorraine had finished their dessert while Judy was telling them the story of the fountain. Somehow, she wasn’t hungry for hers. She had tasted it too often while she was making it.
“I’ll leave it for Blackberry,” she decided.
Lois watched in amusement as the cat lapped up the chocolate pudding after Judy had mixed it generously with cream.
“Sometimes,” Judy said fondly, “Blackberry thinks he’s a person. He eats everything we eat, including lettuce. Do you mind if he comes with us, Lorraine? He wants to explore the attic, too.”
“He’ll remember he’s a cat fast enough if there are any mice up there,” Lois said with a giggle.
Leaving the table, they all started upstairs with the cat bounding ahead of them. In modernizing her grandparents’ house to suit her own and Peter’s tastes, Judy had seen to it that the old stair door was removed. But there was still a door closing off the narrower stairs that led to the attic. Blackberry reached it first and yowled for Judy to open it.
“He can read my mind. He always knows where I’m going,” Judy said as the door creaked open and the cat shot through it. A moment later a weird rolling noise came from the floor above.
“Come on. There’s nothing up here to be afraid of,” Judy urged her friends.
“Maybe not, but I’m beginning to get the shivers,” confessed Lois as she followed Judy to the sewing room at the top of the last flight of stairs.
“So am I,” Lorraine admitted. “I’m not superstitious about black cats, but they are creepy. Does Blackberry have to roll spools across the floor?”
“Now he thinks he’s a kitten,” laughed Judy. Pausing at still another door that led to the darker part of the attic, she turned and said mysteriously, “Up here we can all turn back the clock. Does anybody care to explore the past?”
The exploration began enthusiastically with Judy relating still more of what she remembered about the fountain.
“When I told Grandma about it she laughed and said I must have dreamed it. She said if wishes came true that easily she’d be living in a castle. But would she?” Judy wondered. “When I first remember this house she was still burning kerosene lamps like those you see on that high shelf by the window. I think she and Grandpa like the way they lived without any modern conveniences or anything.”
“I think so, too,” Lois agreed, looking around the old attic with a shiver. “It is strange they both died the same winter, isn’t it?”
“Maybe they wanted it that way. Maybe they wished neither of them would outlive the other. If they did wish in the fountain,” Judy went on more thoughtfully, “I’m sure that was one of their wishes. Another could have been to keep the good old days, as Grandma used to call them. That one came true in a way. They did manage to keep a little of the past when they kept all these old things. That’s what I meant about turning back the clock.”
“If wishes came true I’d like to turn it back a little myself,” Lorraine began. “It would be nice if things were the way they used to be when I trusted Arthur—”
“Don’t you trust him now?” Judy asked.
Afterwards she was sorry for the interruption. Lois and Judy both questioned Lorraine, but that was all she would say. Judy wondered, as they searched through the old magazines, what was wrong. Lorraine was of a jealous disposition. Was the green-eyed monster coming between her and her handsome husband, Arthur Farringdon-Pett? Until now they had seemed blissfully happy. But there was no happiness in Lorraine’s face as she gazed at a picture of one of the fountains and then said in a tight little voice, “It is. It’s the very same one.”
“But that’s the picture I’ve been searching for!” Judy said eagerly. “Do you know where it is?”
“I can’t be sure. But if it ever was enchanted, I’m sure it isn’t now. Let’s go,” Lorraine said suddenly to Lois. Judy knew she was suggesting a fast trip home. But, apparently, Lois did not understand it that way. If she did, she pretended not to.
“Where?” she asked. “To the fountain? I’d love to, wouldn’t you, Judy?”
“I certainly would,” Judy replied enthusiastically. “Do you recognize it, too?”
“I think so,” Lois answered after studying a little more closely the picture they had found. “It looks like the fountain on the Brandt estate.”
“The department store Brandts?” Judy questioned. “Then my grandparents must have driven old Fanny all the way to Farringdon.”
“Not quite all the way,” Lorraine objected. “The Brandts own that stretch of woods just before you come into the city. You’ve passed it lots of times.”
“Of course,” agreed Judy. She put the magazine back in its place under the eaves and turned eagerly to her friends. “I do remember a road turning off into the woods and going on uphill,” she told them. “I never thought it led to a house, though. There isn’t even a gate. Could that be the road my grandparents took?”
“Why don’t we take it ourselves and find out?” Lois suggested.
Lorraine was not too enthusiastic about the proposed trip to the Brandt estate. Finally she agreed to it under one condition. They were not to drive all the way to the house which, she said, was just over the hilltop. They were to park the car where no one would see it and follow the path to the fountain.
“But suppose we can’t find the path?” asked Judy.
“You’ll remember it, won’t you?”
Judy thought she would, but she wasn’t too sure. She and Lois both argued that it would be better to inquire at the house. Lois knew Helen Brandt slightly.
“She’d be glad to show us around. This way it looks as if we’re planning a crime,” Lois said as they started off in the blue car she was driving.