The Phantom Friend A Judy Bolton Mystery — Reading Companion

“What’s the matter with you two?” Pauline Faulkner demanded as she stopped short, almost colliding with Judy and Irene. “You can’t just stop skating and gaze at the sights. Other people will bump into you. There, I knew it!”

“Watch it!” someone called out just too late.

Florence Garner, the fourth member of the skating party, turned sharply on her skates and went sprawling. But she was soon picking herself up.

“Are you hurt, Flo?” Irene asked solicitously.

“We’re sorry,” Judy added. “We didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m upset in more ways than one,” Florence replied as the four girls skated off the ice. “Nothing is turning out the way I planned it. Pauline said—”

“Never mind what I said,” Judy’s dark-haired friend interrupted. “We’ll discuss it at lunch.”

Ten minutes later the rented skates had been returned, and the four girls were sitting around a table in a nearby restaurant. The waiter served steaming hot soup.

“This will warm us up,” Irene commented over her soup plate. “Remember, Judy, I promised you we’d skate by the golden statue the next time you came to New York, and now we’ve done it.”

“It was fun, but watching your television show will be the real treat,” Judy told her. “When do you have to be at the studio for rehearsal?”

“Not until two. There’s lots of time.” Irene looked at the girl she had first known as Judy Bolton. She herself had been Irene Lang then, a timid little mill worker with a secret ambition to become a singer. Now, although her ambition had been realized and she was also a happy young wife and mother, she still looked to Judy for advice.

“I have a big decision to make,” Irene confessed. “If you were in my place, Judy, you’d know what to do. I don’t want your little namesake to think of her mommy as one of the ‘naughty’ people on television. That’s what she calls the people who do the commercials. We even have a little song we sing about it. Dale and I made it up to amuse little Judy. Of course, I’d never dare use it on my show,” Irene added with a laugh. “The sponsor would never get over it.”

“Sing it, Irene,” Judy urged her.

“Right here?” The Golden Girl of TV and radio looked about the restaurant as if she had been asked to commit a crime. “I couldn’t!”

“You could if you sang it very softly. Come on, I’d like to hear it, too,” Pauline urged.

“Oh, very well,” Irene gave in. “We call it ‘_When I Grow Up_,’ and it goes like this:

“_When I grow up I’ll be a teacher or a hostess on a plane, Or perhaps I’ll be the weather girl and know about the rain. I might sing and play like Mommy on TV or radio, But I wouldn’t do commercials, No, I wouldn’t do commercials, No, I_ wouldn’t _do commercials and interrupt the show_.”

“I don’t like them much either,” agreed Judy after the song was over and she had stopped laughing. “Especially when you see the same thing over and over. It makes a person wonder—”

“Wonder what?” asked Pauline.

Irene laughed. “Judy is always wondering about something,” she explained to Florence Garner. “Her husband, Peter Dobbs, calls her his wonder girl. Peter is—” She paused. “Shall I tell her, Judy?”

“She’ll find out anyway. He’s an FBI agent. It isn’t something you can keep from your friends. Of course,” Judy added, “there are times when it’s better if people don’t know.”

“Criminals, you mean?”

“I mean anybody. Right now Peter is away on an assignment. I don’t even know where he is. But let’s talk about you, Flo,” Judy suggested to change the subject. “Is it all right if I call you by your first name?”

“Of course. I know we just met today, but I feel as if I’d known you always,” the brown-haired girl returned warmly. “Pauline has told me so much about you. I work for an advertising agency on Madison Avenue not far from the office where Emily Grimshaw holds forth.”

Judy laughed. Pauline’s employer was a literary agent who peddled the works of busy authors like Irene’s husband, the detective story writer, Dale Meredith.

“She knows how to get contracts from publishers. Getting advertising accounts isn’t easy, either,” Florence continued. “I’m afraid a good many people share Irene’s feelings about commercials and with reason. You should hear those ad men when they’re in conference.”