False Pretences Read online

  The light had nearly reached the end of the aisle now. Nancy carefully slid the book off the shelf and lifted it over her head in both hands.

  “I know where you are, Nancy,” David said, in a voice that was almost conversational. “I see you.”

  He was lying. The light was still aimed forward, up his aisle.

  “Why make this any harder than it has to be?” he continued, taking another step forward. “I don’t want to make you suffer. I like you. That’s why I let you keep on investigating for so long. But now I can’t let you get in the way of my plans any longer. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Another step brought him into Nancy’s field of view. His back was to her, but he was just a little too far away for her to risk an attack.

  “You have no idea how long I’ve been setting my plan in motion. Fortunately, doing so was right in my line of work,” he added, almost as if they were chatting over dinner.

  “It was a pretty brilliant piece of investigating, you know. I had to find out who Granny Carlisle’s lawyer was, then manage to infiltrate Jack into your father’s firm. After that, it should have been easy. All Jack had to do was find any copies of her will and destroy them. Then he could move on, and I’d just wait for the old lady to die. But Jack got greedy. He kept the will and tried to bleed me. It didn’t work, did it?.

  “It’s such a shame that you had to walk in on me the night Jack died, Nancy,” he said in the same soft voice.

  “Maybe I should have taken you out of the picture then, but I was kind. Instead, I sneaked out the door to the fire stairs and waited there.” He laughed eerily. “I’m afraid you missed that, Nancy. It’s around the elevator bank. Once I heard the cops come I went down to the lobby, flashed my press pass, and went back up.” He paused. “You know, you wouldn’t have felt a thing. It might have been kinder, but I wasn’t thinking straight.

  “You look like the pictures of my mother, when she was your age. Did you know that? She died when I was very little. She wanted to go away and leave me. I didn’t want her to. I tried to stop her. I grabbed her by the legs, but she tripped and hit her head. And then—”

  Suddenly Nancy understood the meaning of what he was saying. That was how David’s mother had fallen, unconscious, into the river. Or at least that was what David believed. He had spent almost his whole life thinking that he had killed his own mother!

  Nancy must have let out a faint sound—a gasp or a moan—because David now started to turn in her direction, swinging the flashlight toward her.

  At that moment the clamor of a bell filled the library basement. Startled, David turned toward the source of the racket, and Nancy jumped out from her hiding place and brought the heavy volume down on his head. As he slumped to the floor, the flashlight flew from his hand. There was a small crash and a faint tinkle, then Nancy was once more plunged into darkness.

  She edged past where she thought David must be and started in what she hoped was the direction of the stairway.

  Suddenly a hand closed around her ankle.

  David wasn’t unconscious.

  Nancy couldn’t hold back. Without thinking, she raised her other foot and stamped down hard on the hand that held her ankle.

  “My arm!” David screamed. “You hurt my arm!” He began to sob like a little child.

  Nancy started to run, as much to get away from the sound of his crying as to escape any further attack. She had taken only a few steps when a pool of light appeared up ahead. A voice called, “Hey, who’s been fiddling with the switches? What’s going on down here?”

  Nancy clasped her hands over her eyes as an unbearable brightness filled the basement. Then, peeping through slitted fingers, she saw a gray-haired man in a guard’s uniform hurrying toward her.

  “Thank goodness,” she said.

  • • •

  Carson Drew joined Nancy at police headquarters. David Megali was at River Heights Hospital, under police guard, being treated for a broken arm and a possible concussion.

  Detective Washington took the Drews to an interview room with a stenographer in a corner.

  “Well, Mr. Drew,” Washington began, “I owe you an apology. And I know I owe your daughter my gratitude. Without her fine detective work I don’t know when this murder would have been solved.”

  Carson put his hand on Nancy’s. “She cleared my name, too,” he said, smiling at her fondly. He turned to Washington then. “You think you have a solid case against Megali?” Carson asked.

  “I think we will have, once we run down a few of the leads Nancy’s given us,” Washington replied. “We’re holding him on attempted assault now.”

  “I blame myself a little,” Nancy’s father said. “I should have been more careful about hiring Broughton. It’s obvious now that Megali knew we were his grandmother’s attorneys. He must have convinced his old college friend to take a job with us, specifically so he could get his hands on Mrs. Carlisle’s will. From now on I intend to keep our clients’ wills at the bank. That vault at the office is secure but obviously not secure enough. I thought I had checked his references, but I guess I didn’t speak to the right people.”

  Detective Washington asked, “If I understand what you told us, Nancy, David killed Broughton because Broughton double-crossed him.”

  Nancy nodded. “That’s right. I imagine that David went to the office that night to collect the copies of the will. When Broughton told him that he’d hidden the original, David suddenly saw himself paying blackmail to Broughton for the rest of his life. He felt his only way out was to make Broughton’s life very, very short.”

  “That was brilliant of him to tip off the police and the press that I was stealing from my elderly clients,” Carson observed. “It kept the press and the police occupied, and it gave me a good reason to want to put the blame on a burglar, which must have been his original idea.”

  “And meanwhile,” Nancy said, “he pretended to help me with my investigation as a way of keeping tabs on me. And I fell for it. Even when he pretended to show up at Broughton’s apartment and rescue me from the closet he himself had locked me in, I didn’t question the coincidence. And it didn’t occur to me that he had booby-trapped my car while I was waiting inside the restaurant for him. He had me completely snowed.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Nancy. You broke the case,” her father pointed out. “That’s what counts.”

  Nancy rubbed her temples. “Yes, I guess so. The fact is, I liked him. I respected his drive to find out the truth. I have that drive myself. What I didn’t realize about David was that he was perfectly willing to suppress the truth once he’d found it out.”

  “He and his friend Broughton both liked to discover other people’s secrets to use against them,” Washington observed.

  “And all his life,” Nancy said, “David had been guarding the biggest secret of all—that when he was only four, he killed his own mother.”

  “Is that true?” Carson asked.

  Washington shrugged. “We’ll never know. According to the computer, Megali’s father died years ago. And there weren’t any other witnesses to the accident. Megali obviously thinks he did it, and his grandmother probably does, too. Why else would she cut her only heir out of her will?”

  Nancy shook her head sadly. “I guess growing up thinking he was a killer made it easier for him to kill Broughton,” she said. “And when it looked as if I was getting too close to the truth, he decided he had to kill me, too. He obviously planted that car bomb as a warning. But I think crashing into the phone booth I was in was for real.”

  “How did he manage to track you to the library?” Detective Washington asked.

  Nancy rolled her eyes and gave a sigh of exasperation. “I guess he was following me all along,” she replied. “But I made the library easy for him. I told him I was going there, and why, and when. I did everything but hand him a weapon!”

  As Nancy and her father were leaving the police station, Bess and Kyle came rushing up to them. />
  “Nancy, are you all right?” Bess demanded. “I called your house and Hannah told me what happened.”

  “I’ve been better,” Nancy said with a little laugh. “No, I’m fine. Really.”

  “I want to hear all about it,” Bess continued. “And don’t forget you promised to tell Brenda about it, too.”

  Nancy let out a heartfelt groan.

  Kyle took Nancy’s hand and shook it. “You cleared my name,” he declared. “You also gave me a new aim in life.”

  Bess gasped. “Kyle! You mean you’re not going to law school after all?”

  He laughed. “Sure I am,” he said. “I’m more determined than ever. But now I know that I want to go into criminal prosecution and put guys like Broughton and Megali behind bars where they belong.

  “With,” he added, a twinkle in his eye, “an awful lot of help from brilliant detectives like Nancy Drew!”

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Simon Pulse

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  Copyright © 1993 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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