RATING: GOOD
SPOILERS!!!
This is a short book, so I read it almost in one sitting. The mystery this time involves the new girl, Letitia Blackstock. First, Justice finds herself troubled because Letitia decides that they should be best friends, so Stella becomes jealous, and Letitia is not very tactful around Dorothy, so the girl also becomes upset. Justice feels powerless because she doesn’t want to lose her friends but she also likes Letitia.
Justice spends half term with Letitia because Justice’s father is busy. When they return to the school, Letitia brings food and she suggests they eat it in the old barn. So the girls go there and Nora starts telling the tale of Grace Highbury, the ghost of the school. Then they see someone going past the window dressed in white, and all of them get scared and decide to return to the dormitory. When they get there, Letitia is nowhere to be seen. So they have to tell the matron and the headmistress. Letitia is nowhere in the school, and Dolores says that there is a ransom note and Letitia has been kidnapped.
Even though Justice is told several times to keep out of the matter, she doesn’t obey. First, she is sent a message, asking her to go to the tower at midnight, and there she finds an envelope. When she is on her way back to the main building, she falls into the swimming pool, and the new gardener Ted finds her and takes her to the sick bay. The headmistress is very angry and at first, she tells her that she is expelled, but her father manages to convince the headmistress to give Justice a new opportunity. Dorothy and Justice become suspicious of the matron when they find a white dress that has been mended in her wardrobe, and they think that she was the one who scared the girls. The matron tells the police that it is her wedding dress, and Dorothy, who cleans the woman’s lodgings, discovers that the matron’s husband is Ted, the new gardener.
Justice goes to the cottage where Ted lives, and when they get there, they see the new art teacher, Mr Davenport, come out of the house. He says that there is nobody there, and when the police are told, they discover that Ted is gone and there is a plan for the trains to Edinburgh, so they think that Ted has run away.
Justice next finds the nuts that Letitia gives her horse, and she and Dorothy follow the traces of nuts, and Justice remembers that there is a priest’s hole in the school. The nuts lead them to the art studio, and Justice remembers that Mr Davenport was looking at a wooden board the first day she saw him. Her instinct is correct and they find Letitia there. They are then confronted by Mr Davenport, and they discover that Mr Davenport and Ted the gardener are one and the same, and the man simply used a fake beard to hide his identity. The police arrive and Mr Davenport and his wife are arrested.
The police explain that Mr Davenport was an artist who years ago was hired by Letitia’s parents to paint her portrait, but when the portrait showed her as an ugly girl, Mr Davenport was fired, and now he used this chance to have his revenge.
At the end of the book Justice’s father talks to her, and she fears that he is going to tell her that he and Miss De Vere are more than friend and want to marry. However, Herbert wants to talk to her about Dorothy. He thinks that Dorothy is a very intelligent girl and shouldn’t have to work at such an early age. So he is willing to pay for Dorothy’s fees so that the girl can be a student in the boarding school. Justice is happy, and this means that in the next book Dorothy will be another pupil in the school. I wonder how this will pan out.
My Reading Journal 