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  “Nan, you’re kind of pale,” Bess said anxiously. “Are you really all right?”

  With a grateful smile Nancy assured her, “Now that you guys are here, I am.” She looked over at Mrs. Keating, who was standing by herself next to Nancy’s car.

  “Mrs. Keating, I guess I owe you some thanks, too,” Nancy said, going over to her. “If you hadn’t had second thoughts, I probably wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

  “Aunt Maggie!” Rick exclaimed, rushing to his aunt’s side. “Hey, are you okay? He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  Mrs. Keating glanced from her nephew to Nancy with a pale, blank expression. She looked as if she’d been carved from a block of ice.

  “Aunt Maggie?” Rick repeated when she didn’t answer. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  Nancy cleared her throat. Suddenly she felt sad—sad for Rick, who was about to learn the awful truth about his favorite aunt, and even a little sad for Mrs. Keating herself.

  “Rick,” Nancy said softly. “I think your aunt has something to tell you.”

  “What do you mean?” Rick looked puzzled.

  Instead of answering, Nancy looked expectantly at Mrs. Keating.

  “All right!” Mrs. Keating burst out suddenly. “I’ll tell him.” She turned to Rick, her eyes filling with tears. “Your uncle wasn’t trying to kill me, Rick,” she explained in a shaky voice. “The whole thing was a scam, from beginning to end. Bill and I planned to fake my death in an accident, so that we could collect the insurance money and start fresh somewhere else.”

  A shocked silence fell over the group. Rick’s jaw dropped, and he stared at his aunt.

  Poor guy, Nancy thought with a pang. She was pleased when Brenda moved forward and took his hand without a word. Rick hardly seemed to notice. He just continued gazing at his aunt, a look of horror on his face.

  “Don’t stare at me like that,” Mrs. Keating cried. She turned her back, and Nancy saw her shoulders heave with her sobbing.

  After a moment she went on. “It was Bill’s idea, but I didn’t have to be talked into it,” she said. “We both like spending money so much, there just never seemed to be enough of it—”

  “Enough for what?” Rick asked in a low, bitter voice. “Uncle Bill has a good job! Why don’t you just admit you were greedy?” -

  Mrs. Keating sighed. “All right, it’s true. We were greedy. But we also had some problems. Bill had been trying to pad out his salary with some risky gambles on the stock market. A couple of those went sour, and we lost a lot. So he took a—a loan from his bank.”

  A loan? Nancy remembered how upset Keating had gotten when his secretary told him the bank’s auditors were coming. “Mrs. Keating, do you mean your husband embezzled money from the bank?”

  “Maggie, don’t tell them anything!” came Mr. Keating’s furious voice.

  Turning, Nancy saw that he had come to, and was struggling against the ropes that bound his wrists and ankles. Ignoring him, Nancy repeated her question to Mrs. Keating.

  The older woman glanced hesitantly at her husband. “Well, I—oh, what’s the use! Yes, that’s what I mean. He embezzled.”

  “I see,” Nancy said with a nod. “Go on.”

  “At first we were going to stage a phony car accident. We were going to drive my car over the cliff and into the river. Then I’d disappear, and Bill would convince the authorities that I’d been in the car when it went over.” Mrs. Keating shrugged. “The current was strong there. No one would question the fact that there was no body in the car.”

  “Ugh,” Bess said softly. “That’s creepy!”

  Mrs. Keating looked at Brenda. “The day that I ran into you in the mall parking lot, I was trying to establish that my car had bad brakes,” she explained. “I never thought you’d make such a fuss and draw so much attention to me, and I certainly never dreamed you’d put me in your column the next day.”

  “I’m a journalist,” Brenda boasted. “It’s my job to make things public.”

  “But Brenda made up that letter,” Rick said to his aunt. “She didn’t know anything.”

  Mrs. Keating nodded. “I know that now, but at the time all we could think of was that somehow she’d found out about our plan. Bill was furious. I was just scared—I wanted to call the whole thing off then and there, but he refused. He told me not to worry about it, that he’d make sure Brenda didn’t talk.” Her brown eyes were filled with shame as she added, “When Rick told me about Brenda’s nearly being hit by the beam at the mall, I wondered if Bill had had anything to do with it, but I was afraid to ask.”

  “Did you, Mr. Keating?” Nancy called to him.

  “What do you think?” Keating suddenly flared. “Of course! It was a piece of cake. My bank was one of the principal backers of the mall when it was built. I have the blueprints in my office—I know every inch of that place. I followed the girl there, and then I sneaked up to the roof by way of one of the catwalks and waited for her to walk under the broken skylight.” His chest swelled with pride. “It was a calculated risk—but I’ve never been afraid of risks. I’m a winner.”

  “Most gamblers say the same thing,” Nancy pointed out. “But they all lose sooner or later.”

  Keating just glared at her. After a moment Nancy turned back to Mrs. Keating. “Please go on with your story.”

  Mrs. Keating brushed back her ash blond hair and swallowed hard. “Well, after Brenda’s column came out, things started happening fast,” she said. “Bill told me that the bank auditors were coming in to do an investigation. We thought they might discover the missing money, and we couldn’t let that happen. So we had to speed up our timetable. If I ‘died’ over the weekend, then Bill would have a plausible reason to be out of work next week. Without him the audit couldn’t be held, and the auditors would have to reschedule, probably to sometime in the fall—that’s the way these people work. And by that time we’d be long gone with the insurance money.”

  “Devious,” Ned said, shaking his head.

  “Yes, but the problem was that on Friday afternoon the mechanic from the garage where we’d had the car towed called to say that they’d discovered one of the brake shoes was missing.”

  “Ah!” Nancy said softly. “Enter Chris Trout.” She was pretty sure she knew what was coming next.

  Mrs. Keating nodded. “Right. Shortly after that, my brother-in-law showed up at our door,” she said. “He had the missing brake shoe, and he knew it had been filed down. He’d pretty much figured out what we were trying to do. He said he wouldn’t tell anyone about it—as long as we gave him half the insurance money, once we got it.

  “Our plans were falling apart,” Mrs. Keating went on. Nancy had the impression that it was actually a relief to her to confess everything. “It was too risky to try the phony car accident—the mechanic knew my car had been tampered with. But we had to try something. Chris was pressuring us for money. We didn’t know what to do—until this morning, when we heard there was a tornado watch.”

  “I heard that report, too,” Nancy told her.

  “Bill had been keeping a file of clippings on microbursts—he’s very interested in natural phenomena,” Mrs. Keating said. “I think he’d been turning over the possibility of staging a phony microburst for some time. At any rate, he knew how to do it. It seemed our problems were solved.”

  “Until I turned up,” Nancy guessed.

  “Not exactly. Chris came about ten minutes before you, to push us about the money,” Mrs. Keating corrected Nancy, nodding toward Trout’s still-unconscious form. “Bill knocked him out and took him up to the study. Then you came along.”

  “And you knocked me out, too, figuring that when the blast was over, the authorities would find our remains, and everyone would think that I was you,” Nancy concluded.

  Mrs. Keating nodded. “But I couldn’t go along with that,” she whispered. “I couldn’t.”

  “Maybe that will help you in court, Aunt Maggie,” Rick said.

  There was an
uneasy silence. Finally, after a long moment, Nancy spoke up. “Well, I suppose one of us should go call the police. With Mrs. Keating’s confession, and all these witnesses, I don’t think we’ll have much trouble proving this case.”

  “Just think,” Brenda gloated. “If it hadn’t been for me, we never would have stumbled on this case in the first place!”

  Nancy rolled her eyes. Rick’s whole family was falling apart, and Brenda could think only about herself!

  But Brenda seemed to have realized her own mistake. She was actually looking remorseful. “I’m sorry,” she said softly to Rick. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Rick’s face softened, and he smiled down at her. “I know you didn’t mean it,” he said. With a deep sigh he added, “I’m just glad to finally know the truth. And at least Aunt Maggie’s still alive.”

  “I guess that’s what really counts,” Brenda told him, giving Rick a sympathetic smile.

  Nancy grinned. Maybe Brenda would learn!

  • • •

  “Well, Brenda,” Nancy said after the police had taken all their statements and carted the Keatings and Chris Trout away, “I think we can drop the contest about whose summer is more exciting. We’re even now, at two attacks apiece—and I, for one, would rather not compete anymore!”

  “Hear, hear!” George cried.

  “Yeah, I hate competition,” Bess put in.

  Ned laughed. “I have an idea. I say we all just concentrate on having as much fun as possible this summer.”

  “That’s the best idea you’ve had in a long time,” Nancy declared. Then she kissed him.

  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.

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  ISBN: 978-0-6717-0037-9 (pbk)

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