The Secret of the Wooden Lady by Carolyn Keene

the astonished girls, a sheepish expression on his face.
    “I suppose you’ll think I’m a superstitious old man when you learn why I did that. We men of the sea pick up some strange stories. There’s one in the Far East that if a certain kind of lizard crawls toward a man he’s doomed to die.”
    “Oh, how dreadful!” Bess quavered. “Nancy, we’d better leave right away!”
    “Don’t be silly,” George scolded her cousin. “Why, that poor little lizard was as harmless as a mouse. Anyway, this isn’t the Far East.”
    “Maybe the telegram will explain who sent it,” said Nancy, ripping open the envelope.
    Nancy read aloud the message which proved to be from her father and had no connection with the package. Mr. Drew had had a long telephone conversation with Mr. Ogden of the Eastern Shore Shipping Company. Mr. Ogden had been amazed to learn their long-lost clipper, the Dream of Melissa, had turned up. He was coming from Maryland in a few days to find out about it. He would be very appreciative if Captain Easterly remained in charge and Nancy and her friends stayed with him.
    “That settles it, Bess,” George spoke up when Nancy read the instructions. “We’re staying. You know what I’m going to do? Hunt up that boy who brought the lizard and make him tell me who gave him the job of delivering it.”
    “I’ll bet it was either Flip Fay or old Grizzle Face,” Bess asserted.
    Captain Easterly had walked off a distance. He stood looking southward. Nancy knew he felt sad about the turn of events. She guessed that he was afraid of legal difficulties in connection with buying the clipper, and that the company would put a price on it which he could not afford to pay.
    “I’m sure Dad will come back on this case as soon as he can, and work things out,” Nancy told him.
    To get the captain’s mind off his worry, George added, “Why don’t we get to work on your cabin, Captain, and repair some of that damage?”
    “You girls are a tonic for an old fellow,” he said, smiling. “I’ll do the work myself, and you girls solve the mysteries.”
    Nancy’s eyes danced with excitement. “I’m going to Provincetown. The Dream of Melissa sailed from there on her last known voyage, you recall.”
    The captain looked at her quizzically. “Think you can find somebody who’s heard of her?”
    “I’m going to try.”
    Bess remained aboard. As Nancy and George set off in the rowboat, Bess called, “Be careful, won’t you?”
    They promised. In town the girls separated. Nancy caught a bus for Provincetown.
    As she rode along the beautiful coast in the bright summer afternoon, Nancy’s brain was in a whirl of deductions about the Dream of Melissa. Someone in Provincetown must have been waiting for Captain Rogers to return. A sweetheart, a wife? Perhaps he had children. Would any of their descendants remember the story?
    When she stepped from the bus, Nancy gasped in delight at the quaint old town. No wonder so many artists came here to paint the weathered houses, the flower gardens, the little shops, the old fishing boats tied up at the wharves.
    Nancy did not know where to begin asking questions. Perhaps if she wandered along the water’s edge she would meet someone who looked as though he might know a few answers.
    The first person she came to was a white-haired man in a blue smock, seated on a canvas stool. He was sketching the outlines of a dilapidated shed. She watched him a moment.
    “Do you paint, young lady?” he asked as he looked up, smiling.
    “Not very well,” Nancy confessed.
    From that small beginning they entered into a conversation. The painter, John Singleton, told Nancy that he had been coming to Provincetown every summer for many, many years.
    “Then you must know something of the town’s history,” Nancy said. “Did you ever hear of a clipper ship called the Dream of Melissa ? Or of Captain Perry Rogers?”
    The artist frowned, as if he were trying to remember something. “Seems