This is my second attemp at my first post. I saw that somebody else posted a simliar inquiry here so I thougt I would give it a shot. I had this all typed up and the verdammit computer touch pad dumped it into limbo. I have tried several google type searches with no luck. So here goes again. Please forgive my typos as I forgive your typos! This was a book that I think I got from scholastic at one of the bookfairs that we had at school when I was a boy in the early to mid 70s. I was very lucky to have parents who didn’t have a lot of money but who loved books and bought us all the books we wanted. The story takes place in New England some place. It is a mystery. I don’t remember the name of the boy who is the lead character. It starts out with the boys parents dying in a plane? crash. His uncle Julien, his fathers brother? Who is a lawer takes him into his ancestral house that is near a salt marsh and is reached over a bridge called the fiddlers bridge. The house’s main door has pineapples carved on each side (the ancient sign of hospitality according to the book) The uncle is very distant and forbidding to the boy. The boy makes friends with a pair of twins from the town. In the boys families distant past, colonial times, one of the ancesters was tried for witchcraft. He was called the fiddler. It is said that you can hear the fidder play by the bridge sometimes and it is bad luck. There is a family feud of sorts dating back to the colonial witchcraft days. The boys uncle Julien tried to end it by courting a girl from the other family. The uncles father also was trying to end the feud by making a business deal with the other family to become a partner or invester in the other family business. The uncles father sets out to meet to do the business deal with a briefcase of money. He never makes it and is found by the bridge, there is the imprint of the briefcase but the briefcase is not found. This happened many years before the boy in this story comes into the picture. There is also a hired hand (Ben?) and his mother that work on the property. A lot of the story takes place in the salt marsh and its streams or estuarys. To make a long story short the hired hands father tried to take the money the night that the uncles father died, but the father hid the briefcase. The son is still looking for it . He frames the boy by setting fire to a wharehouse in town. The boy is chased into the salt marsh at night and he has to hide. The twins help the boy by spying on the hired hand and reporting that the hired hand set the fire. The boy finds the hiding place for the money in a secret room under the family chapel that is reached from the fiddlers bridge. Does anybody know the title and author for this book? Thanks for the help!!
Mystery of the Witches Bridge by Barbee Oliver Carleton, Scholastic, 1967.
Nice going, **Sigmagirl **(and Cathode Ray for remembering all that)! I remember that one too. When I was a kid in the seventies, I think I read every book in the library that seemed like it might have ghosts or witches in it.
I learned long ago that when I am about to submit a particularly long post, I make sure that I have a copy of it before I submit it. There’s several ways to do this. You could compose the post in a file which you do a save on each time you finish a paragraph (or several sentences).