_The Famous_ JUDY BOLTON _Mystery Stories_
By MARGARET SUTTON
_In Order of Publication_
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THE VANISHING SHADOW
THE HAUNTED ATTIC
THE INVISIBLE CHIMES
SEVEN STRANGE CLUES
THE GHOST PARADE
THE YELLOW PHANTOM
THE MYSTIC BALL
THE VOICE IN THE SUITCASE
THE MYSTERIOUS HALF CAT
THE RIDDLE OF THE DOUBLE RING
THE UNFINISHED HOUSE
THE MIDNIGHT VISITOR
THE NAME ON THE BRACELET
THE CLUE IN THE PATCHWORK QUILT
THE MARK ON THE MIRROR
THE SECRET OF THE BARRED WINDOW
THE RAINBOW RIDDLE
THE LIVING PORTRAIT
THE SECRET OF THE MUSICAL TREE
THE WARNING ON THE WINDOW
THE CLUE OF THE STONE LANTERN
THE SPIRIT OF FOG ISLAND
THE BLACK CAT’S CLUE
THE FORBIDDEN CHEST
THE HAUNTED ROAD
THE CLUE IN THE RUINED CASTLE
THE TRAIL OF THE GREEN DOLL
THE HAUNTED FOUNTAIN
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_A Judy Bolton Mystery_
THE HAUNTED
FOUNTAIN
By
_Margaret Sutton_
Grosset & Dunlap
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
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© GROSSET & DUNLAP, INC. 1957
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_The Haunted Fountain_
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TO SALLY
_Who Helped Us Explore
A Real Haunted Fountain
Like the One in This Story_
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Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I An Unsolved Mystery 1
II If Wishes Came True 9
III A Strange Encounter 17
IV Unwelcome Visitors 25
V Forbidden Ground 32
VI A Diamond Clue 39
VII A Moaning Cry 46
VIII Judy Is Warned 53
IX Horace Cooperates 62
X Blackberry Leads the Way 69
XI Under the Fountain 78
XII A Mysterious Prisoner 86
XIII A Desperate Situation 93
XIV A Forced Entrance 99
XV A Broken Water Pipe 107
XVI A Frantic Appeal 115
XVII A Daring Attempt 122
XVIII The Haunted Tower 129
XIX Falco 136
XX A Passing Shadow 144
XXI Tragic News 151
XXII Afterwards 159
XXIII Lorraine’s Confession 166
XXIV The Secret of the Fountain 173
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ILLUSTRATIONS
She was again at the mercy of the
foaming spray
“Oh dear! I wasn’t quick enough.” 26
“It looks—like a diamond!” gasped Judy 44
“Hey! What are you doing here?” 81
He lay there motionless 110
“This will teach you not to go poking 142
around where you’re not wanted!”
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The Haunted Fountain
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CHAPTER I
An Unsolved Mystery
“Tell Judy about it,” begged Lois. “Please, Lorraine, it can’t be as
bad as it appears. There isn’t anything that Judy can’t solve.”
Lorraine tilted her head disdainfully. “We’re sisters now. We’re both
Farringdon-Petts and should be loyal to each other. But you always did
take Judy’s part. She was the one who nearly spoiled our double wedding
trying to solve a mystery. I don’t believe she’d understand—understand
any better than I do. Everyone has problems, and I’m sure Judy is no
exception.”
“You’re right, Lorraine,” announced Judy, coming in to serve dessert to
the two friends she had invited for lunch at Peter’s suggestion. “I do
have problems, and there are plenty of mysteries I can’t solve.”
“Name one,” charged Lois. “Just mention one single spooky thing you
couldn’t explain, and I’ll believe you. I’ve seen you in action, Judy
Bolton—”
“Judy Dobbs, remember?”
“Well, you were Judy Bolton when you solved all those mysteries. I met
you when the whole valley below the big Roulsville dam was threatened
by flood and you solved that—”
“That,” declared Judy, “was my brother Horace, not me. He was the hero
without even meaning to be. He was the one who rode through town and
warned people that the flood was coming. I was off chasing a shadow.”
“A vanishing shadow,” Lois said with a sigh. “What you did wasn’t easy,
Judy.”
“It didn’t need to be as hard as it was,” Judy confessed. “I know now
that keeping that promise not to talk about the dam was a great big
mistake and could have cost lives. I should have told Arthur.”
“Please,” Lorraine said, a pained expression clouding her pretty face,
“let’s not talk about him now.”
“Very well,” Judy agreed. “What shall we talk about?”
“You,” Lois said, “and all the mysteries you’ve solved. Maybe you were
mistaken about a thing or two before the flood, but what about the
haunted house you moved into? You were the one who tracked down the
ghosts in the attic and the cellar and goodness knows where all. You’ve
been chasing ghosts ever since I met you, and not one of them did you
fail to explain in some sensible, logical fashion.”
“Before I met you,” Judy said, thinking back, “there were plenty of
them I couldn’t explain. There was one I used to call the spirit of the
fountain, but what she was or how she spoke to me is more than I know.
If my grandparents knew, they weren’t telling. And now they’re both
dead and I can’t ask them. They left me a lot of unsolved mysteries
along with this house. Maybe I’ll find the answers to some of them when
I finish sorting Grandma’s things. They’re stored in one end of the
attic.”
“Another haunted attic? How thrilling!” exclaimed Lois. “Why don’t you
have another ghost party and show up the spooks?”
“I didn’t say the attic was haunted.”
Judy was almost sorry she had mentioned it. She wasn’t in the mood for
digging up old mysteries, but Lois and Lorraine insisted. It all began,
she finally told them, the summer before they met. Horace had just
started working on the paper. Judy remembered that it was Lorraine’s
father, Richard Thornton Lee, who gave him his job with the _Farringdon
Daily Herald_. He had turned in some interesting church news,
convincing Mr. Lee that he had in him the makings of a good reporter.
And so it was that he spent the summer Judy was remembering in
Farringdon where the Farringdon-Petts had their turreted mansion, while
she had to suffer the heat and loneliness of Dry Brook Hollow.
Her thoughts were what had made it so hard, she confessed now as she
reviewed everything that had happened. She just couldn’t help resenting
the fact that her parents left her every summer while they went off on
a vacation by themselves. What did they think she would do?
“You’ll have plenty to read,” her father had told her. “I bought you
six new books in that mystery series you like. When they’re finished
there are plenty of short stories around. Your grandmother never throws
anything away. She has magazines she’s saved since your mother was a
girl. If you ask for them she’ll let you have the whole stack. I know
how you love to read.”
“I do, Dad, but if the magazines are that old—”
Judy had stopped. She had seen her father’s tired eyes and had realized
that a busy doctor needed a vacation much more than a schoolgirl who
had too little to do. He and Judy’s mother usually went to the beach
hotel where they had honeymooned. It was a precious memory. Every
summer Dr. Bolton and his wife relived it. And every summer Judy went
to stay with her grandmother Smeed, who scolded and fussed and tried to
pretend she wasn’t glad to have her.
“You here again?” she had greeted her that summer, and Judy hadn’t
noticed her old eyes twinkling behind her glasses. “What do you propose
to do with yourself this time?”
“Read,” Judy had told her. “Mom and Dad say you have a whole stack of
old magazines—”
“In the attic. Go up and look them over if you can stand the heat.”
Judy went, not to look over the old magazines so much as to escape to a
place where she could have a good cry. It was the summer before her
fifteenth birthday. In another year she would have outgrown her
childish resentment of her parents’ vacation or be grown up enough to
ask them to let her have a vacation of her own. In another year she
would be summering among the beautiful Thousand Islands and solving a
mystery to be known as the _Ghost Parade_.
“A whole parade of ghosts,” Lois would be telling her, “and you solved
everything.”
But then she didn’t even know Lois. She had no idea so many thrilling
adventures awaited her. There seemed to be nothing—nothing—and so the
tears came and spilled over on one of the magazines. As Judy wiped it
away she noticed that it had fallen on a picture of a fountain.
“A fountain with tears for water. How strange!” she remembered saying
aloud.
Judy had never seen a real fountain. The thrill of walking up to the
door of the palatial Farringdon-Pett mansion was still ahead of her. On
the lawn a fountain still caught and held rainbows like those she was
to see on her honeymoon at Niagara Falls. But all that was in the
future. If anyone had told the freckled-faced, pigtailed girl that she
would one day marry Peter Dobbs, she would have laughed in their faces.
“That tease!”
For then she knew Peter only as an older boy who used to tease her and
call her carrot-top until one day she yelled back at him, “Carrot-tops
are green and so are you!”
Peter was to win Judy’s heart when he gave her a kitten and suggested
the name Blackberry for him. The kitten was now a dignified family cat.
But the summer Judy found the picture of a fountain and spilled tears
on it she had no kitten. She had nothing, she confessed, not even a
friend. It had helped to pretend the fountain in the picture was filled
with all the tears lonely girls like herself had ever cried.
“But that would make it enchanted!” she had suddenly exclaimed. “If I
could find it I’d wish—”
A step had sounded on the stairs. Judy remembered it distinctly. She
had turned to see her grandmother and to hear her say in her usual
abrupt fashion, “Enchanted fountain, indeed! If you let people know
your wishes instead of muttering them to yourself, most of them aren’t
so impossible.”
“Were they?” asked Lois.
She and Lorraine had listened to this much of what Judy was telling
them without interruption.
“That’s the unsolved mystery,” Judy replied. “There weren’t any of them
impossible.”
And she went on to tell them how, the very next day, her grandparents
had taken her to a fountain exactly like the one in the picture. It was
in the center of a deep, circular pool with steps leading up to it.
Beside the steps were smaller fountains with the water spurting from
the mouths of stone lions. Judy had stared at them a moment and then
climbed the steps to the pool.
“Am I dreaming?” she remembered saying aloud. “Is this beautiful
fountain real?”
A voice had answered, although she could see no one.
“Make your wishes, Judy. Wish wisely. If you shed a tear in the
fountain your wishes will surely come true.”
“A tear?” Judy had asked. “How can I shed a tear when I’m happy? This
is a wonderful place.”
“Shed a tear in the fountain and your wishes will surely come true,”
the voice had repeated.
“But what is there to cry about?”
“You found plenty to cry about back at your grandmother’s house,” the
mysterious voice had reminded her. “Weren’t you crying on my picture up
there in the attic?”
“Then you—you _are_ the fountain!” Judy remembered exclaiming. “But a
fountain doesn’t speak. It doesn’t have a voice.”
“Wish wisely,” the voice from the fountain had said in a mysterious
whisper.
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