The Mystery of the Death Trap Mine - M. V. Carey [19]
In the morning, the boys were awakened by hearty laughter from below. They went down to find Allie perched on a stool in the kitchen, watching with obvious pleasure as Mrs. Macomber sat at the table, drinking coffee and talking with great animation to Magdalena. The widow’s tanned face was alive with excitement.
“Sorry if we disturbed you last night,” said Jupe, when he and the others had been introduced.
“I’m not.” Mrs. Macomber laughed. “It reminded me of the old days. Forty-five years ago Twin Lakes was quite a town! The sheriff had to break up fights every Saturday night.”
“Say,” said Allie, “speaking of the old days, do you remember Wesley Thurgood?”
Mrs. Macomber laughed. “How could I forget him? I see him every day.”
“No,” said Allie. “I mean, do you remember when he was a little kid? He says he was born here.”
“And so he was,” said Mrs. Macomber. “His folks lived in the little green house down by the courthouse and his father was foreman on the night shift. He was a real mining man.
Wesley was the last boy born in town before I left here. That was at the end of the boom days and people had started to move away. Wesley was only a toddler when the mine shut down and he and his folks left. I keep meaning to ask him about his parents — what they did after they left Twin Lakes — but I never get a chance. He’s so darned busy driving around in that fancy red truck of his, lugging stuff in, puttering around the mine. He was out at dawn this morning. I saw him go by wearing that ridiculous hard hat, which he needs the way I need another head.”
The group in the kitchen heard a car pass by on the road. Allie ran upstairs to the window on the landing. She was back shortly with the news that Thurgood had returned and that he had two men with him. “They looked like Mexicans,” she reported. “Now what’s he up to?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” prompted Mrs. Macomber.
“Because he isn’t speaking to me,” said Allie, “and if I bother him again, Uncle Harry swore he’d lock me up.”
“I doubt that,” Mrs. Macomber told her. She took her leave and returned to her own house across the road.
In the days that followed the Three Investigators finished pruning the largest field of Christmas trees and started work on another. Allie pruned, too, but she also spent a great deal of time riding Queenie in the field near Wesley Thurgood’s place. She saw that the two dark-haired, dark-eyed labourers seemed to be living in the big building that had once housed the mine works. A shiny new padlock had been put on a little wooden shed that stood near the mine entrance. Thurgood continued to drive out on his mysterious errands.
The second day after the labourers arrived, a truck delivered sacks of cement, dozens of steel fence posts, and great rolls of chain-link fencing. Under Thurgood’s direction, the two men set to work putting up an eight-foot fence around Thurgood’s property.
“He’s going to a lot of trouble to protect a worthless mine,” said Allie at lunch on the day the men began work on the fence. “Who cares about the mine, anyway?”
“You do,” said her uncle. “You’d give your eyeteeth to get in there and he knows it. To say nothing of those creeps who came swarming in when that body was found. I don’t blame him for fencing his place. If people were as interested in Christmas trees as they are in mines, I’d fence this property.”
Uncle Harry left after lunch to spray weeds in the field near the road. Jupe leaned back in his chair and frowned. “No one is interested in Christmas trees,” he said. “So why was there a prowler in the barn the other night? What is there in the barn that would interest even the most avid curiosity seeker?”
The others couldn’t answer him. When the dishes had been cleared away they all trooped out to the barn to look around again.
“Nothing,” said Pete. “A lot of hay for the horses, some tools and hoses, and an old car that doesn’t run.”
“Maybe the prowler just wanted a machete,” said Allie.
“That’s a gruesome idea,” said Bob. “A machete is an ugly weapon. And