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The Mystery of the Golden Reindeer

Three Cousins Detective Club

#30 The Mystery of the Golden Reindeer by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 2000.

Titus doesn’t really like to go Christmas shopping. The department store is always crowded around Christmastime, and he’d really rather just stay home, where it’s comfortable and quiet, and eat popcorn and watch videos. However, his mother really wants to go to the department store and so do his cousins, so they persuade him to come along. The three cousins are allowed to browse in the toys without adult supervision, as long as they stay together. They make arrangements to meet Titus’s mother for lunch in the store’s restaurant.

When they get to the toy department, they hear an announcement about a lost child, and to their surprise, their younger cousin, Patience, suddenly appears. She had been shopping with her grandmother when she spotted her cousins and started following them. As far as Patience is concerned, she wasn’t lost because she knew where she was. It was her grandmother who was lost, and she points out that she found her cousins instead of them finding her. The cousins manage to find Patience’s grandmother and reunite the two of them, and they invite them to come to the restaurant with them for lunch.

When they meet up with Titus’s mother, they all are surprised when she tells off Titus for wandering around the department store by himself when he was supposed to stay with his cousins. They all insist that Titus was with them the entire time. Titus’s mother was sure that she saw him riding the escalator alone, but none of them were on the escalator because Patience is afraid of escalators. Patience suddenly speaks up and says that she must have seen the “other Titus”, not the “real Titus.”

They enjoy the restaurant, which has a large Christmas tree, decorated with golden reindeer. During lunch, Patience tries to point out the “other Titus” to them, but nobody else spots who she’s pointing to. Patience is known for having an imaginary friend named Amy and for making up tall tales. She sometimes mixed up things she’s imagined with things that are real, so they’re not sure if she really saw the “other Titus” or not. (Personally, I thought this was silly on their part because they already know that Titus’s mother saw someone who looked a lot like him. Titus is wearing a distinctive black-and-white scarf, so I figured at this point that there’s someone wearing a scarf that’s also black-and-white.) Titus feels a little uneasy that there might be another him wandering around.

Titus’s mother wants to look at some furniture after lunch, and she asks Patience’s grandmother if she could come with her and give her opinion. The three cousins would rather go look at store windows instead of furniture, and Patience insists that they take her with them. The older cousins know that Patience can be a handful to look after, but Sarah-Jane knows that she would feel badly if they didn’t take Patience somewhere where she would have more fun than she would have looking at furniture. Patience promises that she’ll stay with her cousins and not run off anywhere, so the adults agree to let her go with them.

While Titus and Patience are looking at the Christmas tree together, Titus is surprised by a teenage boy who comes up to him and starts talking to him as if he knows him. The teenager says that he has a message for him and tells him, “Happy Birthday. The golden reindeer. Dish towels. Christmas tree.” Titus asks him what he’s talking about, and the teenager says that he was paid to deliver that message to him and that he must have been expecting him. When the other cousins come back from the restrooms, Titus and Patience tells them what happened, and they’re equally confused. All they can think is that this bizarre message was meant for the “other Titus.” But, who is the “other Titus”, and what does the message mean?

Theme of the Story:

“What you get from wisdom is better than the finest gold.”

Proverbs 8:19

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

This mystery does involve a lookalike for Titus. However, the mystery doesn’t quite end when they meet the other boy. He tells them that he got a phone call telling him to come to the department store for a special message about something that belongs to his family that was stolen. When the other kids tell him the message that was given to Titus, he finds it just as confusing as they do.

It’s Patience who really solves the mystery of what the clues in the message mean, and that’s both because she is nosy and because, as a young child, she doesn’t take certain things for granted, the way an adult or older child would. Sometimes, people see not what’s actually there but what they expect to see. Titus’s mother didn’t really see him on the escalator alone; she saw the other boy, who happened to be wearing a different black-and-white scarf. She just figured it was Titus because she expected the boy with the black-and-white scarf would be her son, and she didn’t look closer to notice that it wasn’t the same boy and that the scarf actually had a different pattern. It was the same with the teenager who was looking for the other boy. In the case of the clues, all of the older kids assume that the packages underneath the decorative Christmas trees in the department store are just empty boxes, wrapped up for decoration. Because Patience wants to check to see if they’re all empty, she’s the one who realizes that one of the packages isn’t like the others.

We never learn who stole the object that the other boy was looking for, but he does get it back. Also, Patience learns to get over her fear of the escalator.

Posted on by TracyC

In the Sunken Garden

Kay Tracey

In the Sunken Garden by Frances K. Judd (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1952 (revised from 1941 edition), 1980.

Kay Tracey discovers that she has a doppelganger when she’s running some errands for her mother and some people in town act like they know her even though she’s never seen them before. As she heads home, a dog even follows her car, as if it thinks that she’s his owner. Kay is bewildered by this, but she decides to take the dog home with her until she can figure out who really owns him.

This is just the beginning of Kay’s entanglement with her mysterious double. Ronald Earle, the boy who likes Kay, gets angry because he thinks that he’s seen her out riding with someone else in his car after turning down a ride with him to attend her mother’s luncheon party. Kay straightens Ronald out only to be confronted with her cousin, Bill, who returns home, very upset because he has heard that Kay was in a car accident and is now in the hospital. Bill is relieved to see Kay perfectly fine at home, but that still doesn’t clear up the question of who this mysterious double is.

According to the hospital, the girl who was in the car accident told them she was Jane Barton, but she checked herself out of the hospital because she only had minor injuries. That isn’t the end of the matter, though. A man named Joe Craken shows up and accuses Kay of wrecking his car in the car accident. He says that the police identified her as the driver of the other car in the accident based on her physical description. With Joe Craken attempting to sue her for damages and the injuries done to a passenger in his car, Kay needs to find her mysterious double!

This mysterious double seems to have some connection to the old Huntley place, a mansion outside of town. The Huntleys were distant relatives of Ronald’s, and Kay learns about the family scandal from someone who used to work for the family. Years ago, Mrs. Huntley’s sister, Trixie Rue, was a dancer with a promising career, but she gave it all up to get married. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t really work out, and she and her husband fell on hard times. Mrs. Huntley gave her sister some money to help her get by, but apparently, it wasn’t enough because the sister resorted to stealing to help support herself and her baby daughter and ended up having to leave town in disgrace. Does this local scandal have any bearing on the sudden appearance of Kay’s double? One night, while having a look at the old Huntley mansion, Kay sees a ghostly white figure dancing in the garden. Was it her mysterious look-alike or someone else? Before the mystery is over, Kay’s look-alike will need her help as much as Kay needs hers.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

The various parts of this mystery fit together much better than the first Kay Tracey book I read. The first book I read in this series seemed rather awkward, but there is a more cohesive thread in this story. The mysterious double, the Huntley family scandal, and the ghostly dancing figure in the garden all fit together in a way that makes sense. However, there are two sets of villains in this story, and although Kay was not involved in the car accident, it turns out that, rather than her double trying to fob off responsibility on Kay, it’s actually the driver of the other car who was responsible for the accident and had always planned on trying to blame Kay for the accident to extort money from her. It was just his bad luck that he crashed his car into the car Jane was driving instead of Kay’s. This story also has a side plot involving a benefit show that Kay and her friends are putting on with others who are also taking dance lessons, and there’s more rivalry with Chris Eaton, the nasty snob they know from school.

I still find that the Kay Tracey books aren’t particularly good on readability, though. The language is a little old-fashioned, and at times, the plot seems to drag. I think this is one of the better books, plot-wise. The story felt more cohesive than the previous one and mystery stories with mysterious doubles, long-lost relatives, spooky mansions, and inheritance are pretty classic and compelling. However, I did get a little bored while reading it because I just didn’t find the writing style to be very engaging.