The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek by Paul Hutchens (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) 📕

the first thing I noticed when we came to within a few yards of the green-canvas, ranch-house-style tent was that one of the tent’s wings with the green roof and the mosquito netting sidewalls had in it a baby’s play pen, and in the pen was a lot of things for a baby girl to enjoy—a doll, a pink teddy bear, a very small broom like the one Charlotte Ann helps Mom sweep with and a little tea set for playing house. Beside the tent, hanging by a rope and a spring, was a jumper swing like the one that used to hang from the limb under the plum tree in our yard in which Charlotte Ann used to sit and bounce herself up and down and laugh and gurgle and have the time of her life—but now it’s too little for her.

“The poor, dear girl,” Mom said with a sigh kinda under her breath and in my direction—Mr. Everhard having gone on into the tent to tell his wife she had company. Mom was looking at the baby things with a sort of faraway expression in her eyes. I could hear voices inside the tent and it sounded for a minute as if there was a half argument. Then the canvas flap of the tent opened and Mrs. Everhard came out.

Mom gasped when she saw her, maybe on account of the way she was dressed and what she had in her hand.

“Such a pretty dress,” Mom said, half to me and half to nobody.

I hardly ever paid any attention to what anybody was wearing, especially a woman or a girl, on account of it didn’t seem important, but I guess any woman or maybe even a boy would gasp at the green and brown and yellow and also red summery-looking dress Mrs. Everhard had on. It had a lot of milkweed flowers on it with pretty swallow-tail butterflies with spread wings on each flower. Her yellowish hair was the same color as the sulphur butterflies that fly around our cabbage plants with the white ones and I noticed it was still combed like it had been in church, with some kind of sparkling pin in it. She was wearing a pair of dark glasses and green and yellow shoes.

To my tangled-up surprise she had in her hands a shovel like the one she had been using to dig in the ground. She looked all around in a sort of dazed circle, not seeing us at first, then she started off in a hurry toward the direction of Strawberry Hill.

Say, quick as anything and without knowing I was going to do it, I whistled a sharp bobwhite whistle that flew as straight as an arrow right toward her. It made her stop stock-still and stand and stare. Then her eyes fell on Charlotte Ann, whom Mom had dressed special for the visit in a little blue organdy playsuit that made her look as cute as a bug’s ear and even cuter.

Say, Frances Everhard dropped her shovel like it had had a hot handle and gasped an excited gasp like women who like babies do when they see a pretty one and said, “You darling baby!” and started to make a beeline for her, like she was going to pick her up, then she stopped, whirled around fast and disappeared into the tent.

For just a second I had a queer fluttering feeling in my heart and it was kinda like about fifty pretty black and yellow, swallow-tail butterflies had been fluttering in front of my eyes in the bright sunlight and then all of a sudden had flown toward the green tent and disappeared all at once. It was the same kind of happy feeling I get when I hear a wood thrush singing but can’t see it and wish I could.

A jiffy later she was back outside again with a folding camera. For a while she didn’t act like anybody was around except Charlotte Ann. Her extra-pretty face was all lit up and she seemed very happy. “She looks almost enough like my own Elsa to be a twin,” she told Mom. “In fact, almost enough to be her.” Then she sighed a heavy sigh and so did Mom.

Well, it was a very interesting visit we had that afternoon at the ranch-house tent. As soon as Charlotte Ann got over being a little bit bashful, she let Mrs. Everhard hold her and take all kinds of pictures of her: in the playpen, in the jumper swing, lying on a blanket and doing different things. She had her bobwhite husband take a picture of the two of them while she held Charlotte Ann on her lap.

Everybody had a good time except me on account of I like to keep my mind in a boy’s world, and nobody could do that when there were three grown-ups and a baby around. So I asked if they would like me to get some fresh, cold water from the spring and when they said “Yes,” I took a thermos jug and shot like a red-headed arrow out past the pawpaw bushes toward the old overhanging linden tree above the spring.

I was thinking as I ran that the mystery of the little holes being dug all over Sugar Creek territory was all explained and it looked like the gang would have to scout around for some other problem to set our seven different kinds of brains to working on. I didn’t know as I ran that on account of Charlotte Ann and the woman’s dead baby looking so much alike I was going to have to put my own brain to work in a very special way before the summer was over.

I guess I never realized before just how wonderful a person I had for a baby sister until I thought I was going to lose her. As quick as I can, I will start telling you all about it. First though I have to tell you something else about her because some of the people who will read this story don’t know much about her and it will help them understand how come she got lost.

We always had more fun than you can shake a stick at, taking care of Charlotte Ann at our house, in spite of the times when she was a nuisance. Pop especially had a lot of bothersome fun because he nearly always had to put her to bed at night—that is, after she was a little bigger than being a little baby. Going to bed was one of the things Charlotte Ann didn’t like to do even worse than she didn’t like to do anything else—after she got to be about two years old. Before that we didn’t have to worry about her getting all the sleep she needed because she would go to sleep anywhere, any place and nearly any time, but all of a sudden she was a grown-up two-year-old and seemed to have ideas of her own about such things as going to bed at night and taking afternoon naps.

“That is because at two,” Mom said—she having been reading a book on how to take care of babies at that age—“they are great imitators. Whatever they see you do they want to do too. They like to do grown-up things before they are old enough or strong enough or have sense enough to.”

“Or sense enough not to,” Pop said and Mom agreed with him, both of them seeming to think it was funny, but I couldn’t understand what they meant.

“Also,” Mom said, “a two-year old has to have twelve hours of sleep at night and at least one hour in the afternoon of every day.” She was talking to me at the time. “You had to have it when you were a baby and we saw to it that you got it whether you wanted it or not—which you generally didn’t—and see what a wonderfully-fine, strong boy it made out of you!”

I got a mischievous streak when she said that and answered, “I can see how maybe I am a wonderful boy and very fine but I feel very weak right now.” She had just a jiffy before ordered me to carry in a couple of armfuls of wood for the wood-box, which never seemed to have sense enough to stay full and always managed to get itself empty at the very time I didn’t want to fill it and generally when I wanted to do something else.

“See,” I said to Mom, “before you asked me to get that wood I could swing both arms up over my head and still feel fine—just like this,”—holding my arms over my head like I was as strong as the imaginary man named Atlas who used to hold the world on his shoulders. “But now,” I went on to Mom, “I’m so weak I can’t lift my right arm more than this high, just about as high as my waist, I am so weak.”

I had heard Little Jim’s pop say and do that to Little Jim’s mom once and it had sounded cute so I had decided to try it on my parents the first chance I got.

Mom, who was getting dinner at the time, stopped stirring the gravy, turned and looked through the lower part of her bifocals at me and said, “Poor boy. That’s too bad. If you can’t lift your hand any higher than your waist how then can you carry in the wood! I’ll take care of the wood myself. Maybe you’d better go and lie down for an hour while your father and I have dinner because, your mouth being a little higher than your waist, you won’t be able to feed yourself,”—and for some reason I right away went out and carried in several armloads of wood without saying another word, getting it done about the same time Mom had dinner ready.

But let me get back to telling you about Charlotte Ann and how she got mixed up in our mystery. The worst trouble we had with her was that when we finally got her into bed at night or in the afternoon when it was her nap time she didn’t want to go to sleep. Sometimes she would call for a drink of water or something to eat and sometimes she would come toddling out in her bare feet to wherever Mom and Pop and I were, interrupt our reading or our talking or Pop’s evening nap on the davenport. She nearly always came out wide awake acting very friendly and like she felt more at home when she was up than when she was down.

“What on earth makes her want to do that?” I said one day. “Doesn’t she have sense enough to stay in bed?”

“She’s lonesome,” Mom answered. “She’s awful lonesome and she has to have lots of attention. You were that way when you were little.”

“Oh, quit telling me about when I was little years and years ago,” I said, not wanting to even be reminded that I ever had been, years and years ago.

As I started to say, getting Charlotte Ann to bed was a hard problem. It got to be my job to help Mom make her go, when Pop had to be away.

But when Mom and Pop were both away, then I had to do it all by myself—being what Pop called a baby sitter, which is a person who takes care of a baby while the parents are absent.

One very hot afternoon Mom and Pop both had to be gone to town for two or three hours and so they let me stay home to take care of Charlotte Ann, giving me orders to see to it that she took her afternoon nap between 1:30 and 2:30, or as near to that as I could get her