The Mysterious Stranger

The mystery of the stranger who claims Whit's End was once his childhood home deepens. Kent Wakefield has told everyone that he used to live in a house exactly like Whit's End, and Whit and Lucy have discovered that such a house really exists - the old Tate House, which burned down more than twenty years ago and now stands as a charred ruin guarded by a snappish caretaker named Mrs. Ullman. When Whit and Lucy return to Whit's End, they find police cars out front. Kent has frightened Connie and run off, and his uncle, James Wakefield, insists the man is mentally ill and demands that everyone stop investigating his story. But Whit notices something odd. Mr. Wakefield knows that Whit was nearly killed by falling debris at the Tate House - something nobody told him.

Convinced the investigation must go on, Whit and Lucy dig into old records with newspaper editor Dale Jacobs and Doc Morton. They learn that in the Tate House fire, Katherine Anderson died, her little boy Kenneth was sent to foster homes, and her husband Steven was terribly burned - yet part of Steven's hospital file is missing, and there is no record that he ever died. A visit to the retired Dr. Newcastle uncovers the missing piece. A wealthy, mysterious brother-in-law in a wheelchair moved Steven into private care at Tate Lodge, the cottage behind the ruined house. His name was James Wakefield. That means Wakefield is not Kent's adoptive uncle at all - he is his real uncle, and the family fortune that should have gone to Katherine's husband and son went to him instead, because everyone believed they were gone.

Meanwhile Kent has remembered Mrs. Ullman as his family's old housekeeper and gone back to Tate Lodge alone. There he finds his uncle waiting, along with a shuffling, silent figure - Steven, his own father, hidden away all these years. Wakefield has Kent drugged with a syringe and, fearing that Whit knows everything, decides a "tragic accident" is the only way out. Mrs. Ullman refuses to be part of murder, and at that moment Whit arrives, telling Wakefield the pieces have all fallen into place and it is over. The police take Wakefield and Mrs. Ullman away.

Afterward, Whit and his friends piece together how one man's greed stole years from a father and son. Kent - really Kenneth Anderson - stops by Whit's End to say thank you and to apologize to Connie. He is on his way to visit his father in the hospital, hoping that somehow, one day, his father will know him. How can anything be normal after all this, Lucy wonders. Only by the grace of God, Whit says.