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worry,” she added wryly, remembering the time when she and Honey had stopped speaking because of Trixie’s suspicions of Honey’s cousin Ben Ryker.
    Groaning, Trixie rolled over on her side and pulled the pillow over her head, as if to silence her own thoughts. I’ll never get to sleep if I just let myself keep jumping from one memory to another, she thought.
    She rolled onto her back and, putting the pillow under her head, began a relaxing exercise she’d read about. Starting with her toes and working upward, she tensed and then relaxed her muscles, concentrating on the muscles and keeping her mind a blank. Finally, she drifted off to sleep.

    Trixie woke with a start, sat bolt upright in her bed, and gasped for breath. She looked around the room, only gradually coming out of the nightmare she’d just been dreaming and returning to the real world, where everything was familiar, even the bright patch of morning sunlight on the foot of her bed.
    She closed her eyes and sank back on her pillow, remembering the dream. She’d been walking through a crowd of people when she’d spotted Regan’s red head in the distance. She’d called his name, but he hadn’t seemed to hear her. Struggling through the crowd, she’d come to a road and spotted Regan walking away from her. She’d begun to run, harder and faster than she ever had in her life, but she couldn’t seem to catch up to him.
    Finally, in a burst of speed, she had caught up to him. She had thrown her arms around him and said, “Oh, Regan, I’m so glad I found you!” But just then, a man had appeared from nowhere. He’d been wearing a dark suit, with a badge on the lapel that said “Track Official.”
    “You’re disqualified!” he’d shouted, and while Trixie had tried to understand what he meant, Regan had disappeared.
    “And I woke up,” Trixie murmured. “What a wonderful way to start the morning.” Sighing, she got out of bed.
    By the time Trixie started her morning chores, she was already waiting impatiently for Honey’s phone call, and her spirits were almost as low as Dan’s had been the night before.
    “You’re just tired,” she told herself as she changed the sheets on her bed. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be so worried about a silly old dream.” Gathering up the sheets she’d just taken off the bed, she rolled them into a ball in her arms, marched to the laundry chute, and threw them down, as if she were trying to throw the memory of the dream away with them.
    But it wasn’t that easy to put the nightmare out of her mind. She vacuumed and dusted with her mind only partly on her work.
    She was standing with the dustrag in her hand, gazing across the living room at the telephone and wishing it would ring, when she felt a tug on her sleeve and looked down into the worried gaze of her little brother.
    “I need a glass of water, Trixie,” Bobby said. “I need it bad, and I asked you twice, but you didn’t hear me. What’s wrong, Trixie?”
    “I’m sorry, Bobby. I—I was thinking about something else. Let’s go get some water.”
    “What were you thinking about, Trixie?” Bobby demanded as they walked into the kitchen.
    Mrs. Belden looked up from the bread dough she was kneading and smiled. “I’ve been wondering the same thing all morning, Bobby,” she said. “I suspect that while your sister’s hands are doing dusting and vacuuming here in Sleepyside, her mind is far away, at a certain boys’ camp in upstate New York.”
    “What does that mean?” Bobby asked, looking from his mother to his older sister in confusion.
    Laughing, Trixie gave Bobby a hug as she told him, “Moms means that I miss Brian and Mart and Jim.”
    “Oh,” Bobby said solemnly. “I understand that. I miss them, too, Trixie. I miss them something awful .”
    “I’m going to remind you both of what you just said when your brothers get back and the four of you begin teasing each other, as you always do. And, although I haven’t been able to hear