Mystery in the Sand by Gertrude Warner

Author:Gertrude Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
Published: 2010-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Violet’s Adventure

Benny woke very early next morning. He looked out and saw that the weather had changed. It was very windy. The waves were high and the sand was blowing.

Benny pulled on an old pair of pants and a sweatshirt. He wanted to race along the beach, barefoot, and have the whole place to himself.

Without waking Henry or the girls, Benny opened the door and slipped outside.

The very first thing, he stubbed his toe on a stone.

“Ow!” he exclaimed. “That stone wasn’t there last night. Now who in the world would put a stone right in my way?”

Then suddenly he saw a piece of white paper blowing away. He raced after the paper.

The wind blew it high, then low. At last it dropped on the sand.

“Got you!” said Benny. He put his foot on it, until he could pick it up. “That stone I stepped on was holding you down.”

Benny soon saw that the paper was a sheet of writing paper, folded in half. On the outside something was written in old-fashioned writing. Benny could hardly read it in the dim light, but at last he made out the words, “Thank you.” Then he opened the paper and looked inside. He read the message twice. It did not seem to make any sense. It said, “All thanks you. We all thank you.”

That was it. Benny turned the paper over. He folded it again. “Who wrote this?” he thought. “And it must be for us, right in front of our trailer. That sentence, ‘All thanks you,’ isn’t even good English.”

He started back to the trailer house. Now he looked around to see if anyone was in sight. The beach was empty from one end to the other.

“Perhaps there are footprints,” Benny thought.

But all he found were his own barefoot tracks he had just made chasing the paper.

Near the door Benny found what he was looking for. There were three small footprints on the hard sand. “They look like a child’s shoes,” he thought.

Two footprints pointed toward the trailer, and one was made as the person turned to go toward the water. But that was all. Everything else was washed away by the tide. There was nothing to show where the nighttime visitor had come from or gone.

But Benny still had the note. He read it again. Then he opened the door of the trailer and found Henry and the girls just waking up.

“Look!” Benny called. “A new mystery!”

Everyone took turns looking at the note, reading it, and then looking out at the beach.

At last Jessie said, “Well, I don’t know what to make of this.”

“We can show it to Mr. Lee,” Benny said.

“If he’s out on a windy morning like this,” Henry said. “The weather has changed.”

“Let’s have breakfast inside,” Jessie suggested. “Ben, you sit where you can watch for Mr. Lee.”

But although everyone watched, Mr. Lee and Richard did not come down the beach. There was not a sign of them. Jessie let the hot water for the tea grow cold.

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