We certainly didn’t expect to find our first clue while we were still hundreds of miles from where we were going to spend our vacation—and in the most unexpected place!
We camped the first night in a wooded area near a little river in a private campground the ranch owner called Lazywild. First, we set up the tent, made a fire in the outdoor fireplace, and helped Little Jim’s mother get their gasoline camp stove going. Then, because the river was close by, the sun was still up, and the weather extrahot, it seemed we ought to plunge in and work up still stronger appetites by swimming and splashing around a little.
The rancher, whose name was Sam Alberson, warned us, “Take it easy out there, boys. We’ve had a lot of rain this summer, and there might be an old stump or two. Water was pretty high last week when that there cloudburst hit this part of the country. No use getting your shins skinned up. And I wouldn’t try diving. The water’s not deep enough.”
As we’d done back home when we found Little Jim’s calico cat in a gunnysack, we tested the bottom of the stream first. We waded all the way across and back at the place we were going to swim in, and once up and down, but didn’t find anything except a couple of old tin cans. So we plunged in and had a wonderful time, getting ourselves good and hungry and a little more tired than we had been.
Almost too soon, Little Jim’s mother called us to come to supper.
At the same time, Circus, who was near the shore, exclaimed, “Look at this! Somebody’s been drinking here!”
I looked where he was looking and saw a quart bottle shining in the late afternoon sun. Circus quickly stooped and picked it up. In a second, I thought, he’ll swing back his strong, long right arm and throw the bottle as far as he can.
That was what he’d started to do, when Dragonfly stopped him, yelling, “Don’t throw that away! It’s got something in it. A letter or something!”
And Dragonfly was right. Even with Little Jim’s mother’s voice still in my mind calling me to supper, and my own appetite pulling me toward camp, I still wanted to see what, if anything, was in the bottle Circus had found.
You could have knocked me over with a sunbeam, I was so astonished at what we found in the bottle.
When he had opened it, Circus took out a note and read it aloud.
Whoever finds this, take warning! Alcohol is ruining my life. Try as I will, I cannot get free from the bottle. Someday it will kill me. It will do the same for you if you take it into your life.
Around the campfire, while we were having hot cocoa, sandwiches, and the warmed-up spaghetti and meatballs Mom had sent along in a sealed container, we talked about the warning in the bottle and wondered who had put it there.
We had just finished eating when the rancher in whose campground we had our tent pitched came out to see if there was anything we needed. Spying the empty bottle, he shook his head and frowned. “The Devil’s best friend. My father died an alcoholic, and my mother with a broken heart.” He looked with a scowl toward Little Jim’s father.
It took Little Jim’s mother only a minute to make clear to long-mustached Sam Alberson that neither she nor her husband—and, of course, not a one of the Sugar Creek Gang-would be foolish enough to drink alcohol, which whiskey is one-half of.
“It may be useful as a preservative in medicines and as an antiseptic, but as a beverage—no!” Little Jim’s usually mild-voiced mother had more fire in what she was saying than I’d ever heard her have. Hearing the Sugar Creek church’s pianist say that in that way made me realize my parents were even more right than I had thought they were when they had taught me never to use alcohol as a drink. I had promised them I never would.
Circus broke in then, to say, “I found the empty bottle out there on the shore.”
Sam Alberson’s attitude changed quickly at Little Jim’s mother’s answer and Circus’s explanation. “There was a sad case here some time ago because of this stuff. A young woman rented one of the cabins for a week—for her health, she said. She spent a lot of time writing and reading, hiking up and down the creek, and she rented one of our saddle horses every day. I didn’t know then that she was an alcoholic, because the first week she didn’t drink at all. But her second week was one long binge. She stopped swimming and boating and riding and just lay around camp.”
Big Sam Alberson shook his head sadly, looking around the fire at all of us. Then he cleared his throat. The sound in the dark was a little like a bullfrog’s “Grum-m-m-mph.” Then he finished, “Such a beautiful woman! Her whole life ruined. I wonder what became of her.”
Because we all wanted to be up early in the morning, break camp, and get going toward the Rockies, we quick had a short devotional time around the fire, and with the last words of Little Jim’s father’s prayer in my mind, I was in the tent with Circus and Poetry getting ready to undress and slip into my sleeping bag.
Circus was going to keep the whiskey bottle for a souvenir of our trip, and he had the note that had been in it in his shirt pocket.
“Let me see it a minute, will you?” Poetry asked Circus, who handed it over. “Care if I keep it for you in my wallet?”
The note tucked in his wallet, Poetry whispered to me to come outside a minute. He had something to tell me, he said. What he told me was, “I’ve an idea. Let’s slip down to the camp office and get a bottle of pop.”
But that wasn’t what he really wanted, I discovered when a little later we were in the room where Big Sam was reading and listening to the radio news. “Mr. Alberson, do you care if we look at your camp register to see if there’ve been any visitors from where we come from?”
Big Sam didn’t care, so pretty soon Poetry and I were standing at the registration desk, poring over the names of people who had stopped at the camp. I still didn’t have any idea what was on his mind, but I noticed he had Circus’s note in one hand and was comparing the handwriting of different registrants with the writing that had been in the whiskey bottle.
“What you trying to find?” I asked in a subdued whisper.
His answer was in an indifferent tone. “Needle in a haystack—looks like anyway. You ever see such a guest book?”
I never had. It was the kind of book anybody might expect, though, by the helter-skelter look of things around the place: Big Sam’s necktie hanging sloppily and his hair needing combing. Papers and magazines scattered here and there.
The guest book was the loose-leaf kind with a ring binder, and some of the pages were upside down.
A few seconds later Poetry let out a gasp and exclaimed, “See! Here it is! The same handwriting!”
I looked at the place his finger was indicating, and there wasn’t any question at all about the two being the same. The handwriting on the note from the bottle was like that of the name on the register.
“Connie Mae Spruce,” I said and thought what a pretty name it was.
“Find anything?” Sam Alberson’s deep voice asked in our direction from the chair where he was reading the paper.
“Nobody from Sugar Creek,” Poetry’s duck-like voice answered, “unless maybe she didn’t write her address—and it doesn’t give the date.”
Sam’s voice droned a kind of sleepy reply as he said, “I keep last year’s guests on the upside-down pages. That way I don’t get mixed up.”
Big Sam stood and followed his mustache over to where we were. He looked at the register and at the name Poetry pointed out and said, “That’s the woman I was telling you about. She came in a taxi from Lincoln and didn’t seem to want to give her address—that’s why there isn’t any. I should have insisted on it, though, because she left a briefcase in her cabin, and I could never send it to her.”
Big Sam turned the guest book upside down, then right side up again, as if he himself was a little puzzled as to which was right, up or down. The phone rang then, and he went to answer it.
Poetry and I bought a bottle of pop apiece, not wanting the rest of the gang to know what we’d been up to. We worked our way around behind the tent, slipped in, and pretty soon were in our sleeping bags—and also wide awake.
“Why,” I whispered to him, “don’t you explain what’s on your mind—why you wanted the name and address?”
His answer was: “Because I think the woman who left the note in the bottle could be the same one who got drunk in the Wild Horse Tavern at Aspen. When we get there, we’ll compare the handwriting we found in the bottle with the register at the Snow-slide Motel, and I bet they’ll be the same and the name’ll be the same, too. Then we’ll know she was here a year ago.”
“But that won’t solve any mystery,” I protested. “We won’t know where she is now—not if she disappeared in a blizzard last New Year’s Eve.”
Poetry’s whisper back through the dark was half yawn as he said, “We’ll solve that mystery when we get to it.”