Marjorie and Judyentered the Lodge by the back door and found Mr. Taggart in the kitchen with a big bundle of clean laundry.
“Hello, girls,” he said pleasantly. “Find any buried treasure yet?”
“No,” Judy replied, “but down on the beach we—”
Marjorie nudged her and said quickly, “We found a lot of absolutely worthless shells.” She grinned at Ann Mary who came into the kitchen then with a bag of soiled linen. “You and your rare specimens! I’ll bet you sent us off on that wild goose chase just to get us out of your hair.”
Ann Mary laughed. “Maybe I did.” She turned to Mr. Taggart. “I really sent them down to the lake to keep them from digging up the whole place. Pat and Mal worked hard on the vegetable garden behindthe cabin, and I’m not going to have the kids ruin it in their search for something which they know perfectly well isn’t there.”
“That’s right,” the laundry man said with a grin. “A carrot in the hand is worth a diamond in the bush.” He picked up the bag and started for the door.
“Wait a minute, please,” Ann Mary said. “There’s more upstairs. Sit down and make yourself comfortable while I gather up the bed linen.”
“Do you want me to do it for you, Ann Mary?” Marjorie asked, hoping the answer would be no.
“Thank you, no,” Ann Mary said emphatically. “The last time you counted the sheets you counted one of them twice.”
Marjorie giggled, and the girls followed Ann Mary out into the hall. As she hurried up the stairs to the balcony, Judy said:
“I wish you’d show me the secret room sometime, Marjorie. I think you’re mean to keep it a secret from me, your very best friend.”
“Why, of course, I’ll show it to you,” Marjorie cried impulsively. “And there’s no time like the present.” She led the way into the alcove and said, “Seethose bookshelves? Now watch, while I press this button.”
Open-mouthed with amazement, Judy watched as the shelves moved aside, revealing a short flight of stairs that led down into a little room.
“Why, that’s the most marvelous contraption I ever saw,” she said enviously. “I wish we had something like it at home.”
“We can’t go in,” Marjorie said. “It’s a law we passed at a meeting of the Allen Lodge Board of Directors. Only Phil and Pat can go in. As a matter of fact,” she added thoughtfully, “I guess I shouldn’t have showed you how the door works without first asking their permission.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” Judy promised. “But why all the secrecy?”
“Well,” Marjorie explained, “we keep all the guests’ valuables and all the money in that little old wall safe in there.” She stopped suddenly. “Oh, gosh, I guess that was Ann Mary who just went by the alcove. She must have heard us talking in here and now she’ll guess that I showed you the secret room.”
“Will she tell Phil and Penny?” Judy asked worriedly.“And will they bawl you out? Oh, I hope not. It was all my fault! Curiosity killed the cat,” she finished lamely.
“You mean,” Marjorie said as she closed the door, “let the cat out of the bag!” She grinned. “No, Ann Mary won’t tell. If she thinks I did let the cat out of the bag, she’ll bawl me out herself. But she’s no tattle-tale, and neither is Pat. They’re both grand people. And so are the Donahues.”
“Everyone at the Lodge is swell,” Judy agreed, and added cautiously: “Since we’re probably already in Dutch, don’t you think maybe we’d better ask Penny’s permission before we go through those old trunks in the storeroom? I know Ann Mary said we could, but after all, Penny is the housekeeper, isn’t she?”
Marjorie nodded. “We’ll get her permission right now.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “She’s probably out on the porch having tea with your parents and Mr. and Mrs. Curtis. And I guess Mr. and Mrs. Sanders, too.”
“I tell you what let’s do,” Judy said. “Let’s put on a fashion show. Didn’t you say that the trunkyou’ve already opened is full of old-fashioned dresses and costume jewelry?”
“What a wonderful idea!” Marjorie raced ahead of Judy down the spacious hall to the porch.
Penny, looking very lovely in a pale yellow afternoon frock, looked up from the tea table with a smile. “Having fun, girls?” she asked. “I don’t have to ask you if you’re hungry. Help yourselves to sandwiches and cookies.”
“We’re not hungry for once, Penny,” Marjorie told her with a laugh. “We came out to ask you if it’s all right if we put on a fashion show for you while you’re having tea. The boys have deserted us, and Judy and I want to dress up and parade around in some of the old costumes in the storage room.”
“Go right ahead,” Penny said. “That’s the best idea you’ve had all summer, Marjorie.” She turned to Mary Curtis who was sitting on the other side of the table. “Don’t you think so, too, Mary?”
Mary nodded. “Anything to keep those two out of mischief.”
Marjorie and Judy hurried away to the storage room. “My, why haven’t we poked around in herebefore?” Judy asked Marjorie. “What’s in all those boxes and trunks anyway?”
“I only know what’s in the trunk we already opened,” Marjorie told her. “These are the old, old trunks.” She pointed to two little trunks standing side by side. “After the fashion show we’ll go through them carefully for clues. The other boxes all contain things of ours that we’ve put away so we wouldn’t clutter up the house with things we didn’t need.”
Half an hour later the girls appeared on the porch and marched sedately up and down, hoping they were behaving like professional models.
It was all Penny could do to keep from laughing. To her they looked as stiff as wooden puppets in a Punch and Judy show.
“What period are you representing?” Brook’s mother asked, suppressing a smile. “Jane Austen?”
Marjorie relaxed enough to shrug. “We haven’t the faintest idea, Mrs. Sanders. Let’s pretend that the audience has to guess.”
“All right,” Mrs. Sanders agreed. “I’ll stick toPride and Prejudice.”
“I’d say that the black velvet was of the nineties,after the big sleeves and hideous bustles had gone out,” Mrs. Powell said.
Mrs. Curtis thought it was of a later period. She laughed and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if those bustles came back in again. I’m afraid they wouldn’t look quite as cute on us as they do on those two young ladies!”
Mary told them she thought the blue satin dress was meant to be worn with hoops and was probably from a period dating near the Civil War.
“Let’s go see if we can find the hoop,” Marjorie said, taking Judy by the hand and heading back to the storeroom.
They had had enough of dressing up by this time, and they got back into their blue jeans and proceeded to turn the contents of the trunks inside out. They felt every part of the inside of the trunks for hidden places, they shook all the clothes carefully and examined them minutely, but all to no avail.
“Maybe all of the costume jewelry in that box isn’t set with imitation stones,” Judy said without much hope.
“But it is,” Marjorie said. “Do you want to lookat it?” She impatiently yanked off the lid and the old velvet lining fell away. Then they both saw it—an old map, pasted inside the cover!
Marjorie was so surprised she sat right down on the storage room floor. “Oh, my goodness,” she finally got out, “to think, if it hadn’t been for you, we might not have even opened the jewelry box. I never would have thought of looking here because I examined it so carefully when Phil and Penny first opened this trunk.”
But Judy wasn’t listening. She had hurried to a window with the lid and was examining the map carefully. “Marjorie,” she groaned, “this is positively the worst thing that ever happened to us!”
Marjorie scrambled to her feet and hurried to peer over Judy’s shoulder. In another minute she, too, was groaning. “There’s no doubt about it,” she mumbled sadly. “This map tells exactly where the treasure is buried. And where it is buried is right under the potato hills in Pat’s garden!”
“That’s the way it looks to me,” Judy said mournfully. “He won’t dig up those potatoes until the fall. The vines have hardly begun to blossom.” Very nearto tears she added, “And—and you’ll find the treasure after I’ve gone back to school!”
Just then Penny appeared at the door. “What on earth is the matter with you two?” she asked. “I could hear your moans and groans from the balcony.”
“We’ve found the map that shows exactly where the treasure is buried,” Marjorie wailed. “B-but Pat won’t let us dig it up.”
Penny’s blue eyes were dark with surprise. “Don’t be silly, Marjorie,” she said. “Of course, Pat will let you dig it up.”
Marjorie hurried across the room to show Penny the map. “See,” she said pointing. “The big X is behind the Donahues’ cabin on the west side. Judy and I know what’s planted there. We got blisters on our hands the day we helped Pat and Mal hoe up those potato hills!”
Penny glanced at the map and then she laughed. “You silly girls! Don’t you know that this is a joke the boys played on you?” She went back into the hall and called up the stairs:
“Jimmy, come down here right away, please.”
Jimmy took the stairs two at a time. “What’s up?” he demanded. “The house on fire?”
For answer Penny handed him the jewelry box lid. “Didn’t you paste that map there to play a joke on the girls?”
Jimmy stared at the map in amazement. “Honestly, Penny,” he said soberly. “I never saw the darn thing before.”
“How about Alf and Brook?” Penny asked sternly. “A joke’s a joke, but this one might have caused serious trouble. If someone not as thoughtful as Marjorie had found it and followed directions he would have ruined Pat’s potatoes.”
“I know,” Jimmy said, still staring at the map. “But neither Alf nor Brook did it, Penny. They’ve never been inside the storage room, so they couldn’t possibly have planted this map in the cover of the costume jewelry box.”
“Well then,” Penny said firmly. “The person who did, did it purposely to annoy us.”
“I don’t know how you can be so sure of that,” Marjorie objected. “Ithink someone put it in the lid long before Pat and Mal planted the garden.”
Penny gave her a fond pat. “I hate to disillusion you, honey, but the map was pasted in the lid quite recently. Last week when I opened the box to show Mary the costume jewelry the old velvet lining fell out. And there wasn’t any map there then.”
Marjorie sighed with disappointment. “Oh, dear,” she began, “then I suppose the same mean person put that scrap of paper in the bot—”
But she never finished what she had planned to say. For just then Phil called out excitedly from the porch:
“Penny,Penny! Peter’s here!”