The Crooked Banister Read online

  A moment later the mechanical man began waving his right arm in a circle. Nancy and Ned looked at each other, puzzled. What did this gesture mean?

  Nancy made a guess. “Maybe Robby is indicating that we are to rotate something.”

  “Perhaps it’s the knob,” Ned said.

  He turned the knob until it came off. “Now what?” he asked. “Even if this has unlocked the drawer, there’s still no way to pull it out. Any ideas, Nancy?”

  “No.”

  The couple stood looking at the desk for several seconds. Then both of them leaned down and began working on the edges of the drawer with their fingernails.

  “It’s moving!” Nancy exclaimed.

  Seconds later they were able to pull out the drawer. It contained a neat pile of papers. On the top was a folded document marked: The Last Will and Testament of Rawley Banister.

  “I’m sure we’re not supposed to read this,” Nancy stated.

  Ned closed the drawer and screwed the knob back on.

  Nancy said, “I’ll tell Mrs. Carrier and Thomas about the will as soon as we see them.”

  When the desk was locked, the robot turned and rolled away. They followed him back into the hall. The mechanical man stopped directly under the Oriental wall hanging and pointed upward.

  “There certainly must be a secret in this picture,” Ned remarked.

  Nancy nodded. “It may have something to do with the will.”

  Suddenly the robot turned and began to move forward. They walked after him, but apparently the tape was almost finished. He went to the kitchen and the whirring sound stopped.

  Nancy removed the tape and locked Robby in the closet. She and Ned returned to the front hall.

  Bess called excitedly from upstairs, “Here comes Mr. Mead! Don’t let him in!”

  George, Burt, and Dave appeared at the head of the stairs.

  “Yes, it’s Clyde Mead,” George confirmed. “But I think we should let him in. If we don’t, how are we going to capture that swindler?”

  “You’re right,” Ned called up. “The instant he comes to this door, we’ll tackle him!”

  George said, “I’ll be right down to help you. But not by the stairs. Every time I’ve been in this house, I’ve wanted to ride on the crooked banister. Now I’m going to do it!”

  “I’ll go too!” Burt said. “Let me get on first. You follow.”

  “All right,” George agreed.

  They climbed up. Burt had chosen the banister which had been sawed off at the wall. Nancy was about to suggest they switch to the other railing, but it was too late. George and Burt had started down. Their twisting descent was so swift they were almost swung off.

  “It’s like riding a roller coaster!” George cried.

  As they neared the bottom, both she and Burt grabbed the rail hard and tried to stop. But they were not able to. The next moment there was a loud crash. A gaping hole appeared in the plasterboard wall and George and Burt disappeared through it.

  “Oh!” screamed Bess, who was halfway down the stairway.

  Nancy and Ned rushed to the opening and looked inside. George and Burt were just picking themselves up from the floor.

  “Are you hurt?” Nancy asked quickly.

  Before George and Burt could answer, a solemn voice announced hollowly, “Now you cannot escape! You’re trapped among the poisons!”

  The dire message was repeated.

  CHAPTER XX

  The Capture

  DURING the excitement which followed George and Burt’s crash through the wall into the poison room, loud thumping could be heard on the front door. The other young people intent on trying to help the couple step out paid no attention.

  “Are you all right?” Nancy asked, leaning through the opening.

  “We’re fine as far as we can see,” George replied, “but I’d like to find out what’s here. Hand me a flashlight, will you?”

  Ned produced one from his pocket and gave it to her. A strange sight met their eyes! There were rows of shelves, each filled with metal boxes alongside bottles marked POISON. Fortunately, none of the bottles had been overturned or broken, so their contents had not spilled onto George and Burt.

  “I guess Rawley Banister had a mania for poisons,” George remarked. “On some of these bottles are the names of the poisons from the plants and reptiles that the serpents in the Oriental wall hanging are eating.”

  Burt added, “Here’s the tape recorder that greeted us with that fiendish message.”

  The thumping on the front door became more insistent. Bess turned to Nancy. “What shall we do? I’m sure that’s Mr. Mead.”

  As Nancy hesitated to let him in, Ned suggested that Burt hand out one of the metal boxes so he could see what was inside. Ned set it on a step of the stairway and opened the lid. The box was filled with money!

  Nancy was hardly paying attention. She was thinking, “If we let Mr. Mead go we may never have a chance to capture him. But if we open the door, he’ll see what’s here and I don’t think that’s a good idea. He might have a gun and help himself to this treasure.”

  She turned to Ned and relayed her thoughts to him. “Suppose I ask Mead to come around to the back door? You and Dave can let him in.”

  “And make him a prisoner!” Ned answered. “Come on, Dave!”

  Nancy hurried to the front door and asked, “Who’s there?”

  “Clyde Mead. You’re Nancy Drew, I guess. You told me about this interesting place and I thought I’d come to see it.”

  “All right,” Nancy answered in as calm a voice as she could manage. “Please go around to the rear door.”

  “Right away,” the man said affably.

  For a second Nancy felt sorry for him, knowing what was going to happen, but she brushed the thought aside. The man was a swindler and should be handed over to the police.

  Meanwhile Ned and Dave had hurried to the rear door in the kitchen. When the man opened it, the two husky football players tackled him.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Mead cried out angrily as the boys helped him up but held his arms tightly.

  “You’ll find out in a few minutes,” Ned told him.

  The prisoner struggled to free himself. “Let me go! I haven’t done anything!” he shouted. “If it’s my money you want, take it but get your hands off me!”

  Mead was not a muscular man and Dave had no trouble holding him alone.

  “Ned, get the others,” Dave directed. Mead looked at him questioningly but received no explanation.

  When Ned reached the hall he was astounded to see the lower steps of the crooked stairway piled with small metal boxes. Each was open and every one contained money.

  “There are thousands of dollars here,” Nancy told him. “Probably enough to pay all the people Rawley swindled, and lots left over.”

  “Here’s a list of his victims,” George interposed.

  “And we found the skeleton’s bracelet!” exclaimed Bess, holding it up. “It’s even more gorgeous than in the photograph we saw in Rawley’s book.”

  The rubies in the serpents’ eyes gleamed brightly and Ned saw that the gold jewel piece was studded with turquoise.

  “I wonder where Rawley got the bracelet?” he asked. “I’ll bet he bought it from the thief who stole it in Mexico.”

  “Probably,” Nancy agreed. “Here’s a tag that says it came from the arm of an ancient Aztec woman’s skeleton.”

  She led the way to the kitchen. When Mead saw the whole group, he paled.

  Bess was the first to speak. “You are a faker, Mr. Clyde Mead. You took my money for a little Navaho boy but never gave it to him!”

  “What do you mean?” the man asked. “Of course I did.”

  Nancy told about the trip she and her father had made to Arizona and what they had learned. Mead suddenly lost all his bravado.

  “Okay,” he said. “I was pressed for money and thought up that scheme of getting some. I’ll repay everybody whose cash I took.”
r />   George spoke up. “We found a printing press in the basement. Did you use it to make your fake pamphlets about the Indians?”

  “Yes.”

  Nancy looked straight at the man and said, “You weren’t alone in that scheme and in a whole lot of others, too. You’re a pal of Rawley Banister’s and the two of you swindled a number of people.”

  Mead’s jaw dropped. He stared at Nancy as if he could not believe his ears. Convinced that the young detective had concrete evidence to prove her charges, Mead made a complete confession.

  “Where’s Rawley now?” Nancy asked him.

  “You figure it out. He left here saying he was going on a long trip. Rawley owed me a great deal of money for helping him with his schemes.

  “When I reminded him of this, he said half-jokingly, ‘I’ll give you two hints. If you can find the answers in my house to two riddles, you can have whatever you locate.’ ”

  Mead said that one clue was, “Find the skeleton’s bracelet.” The other was, “Find the silver armor mask.”

  “I had no idea what Rawley meant, but I asked him for a key. He gave me one to the rear door of this crazy house. The first time I was here someone came to the front door and banged the knocker loudly. “Whoever it was seemed very angry,” Mead said. ”Almost simultaneously a recorded message told the person to come back some other time.

  “When he was gone, I traced the ‘voice’ to a miniature tape recorder cleverly hidden over the door and tore it out. I knew I’d be coming here again and didn’t want any visitors to plan on returning.”

  Mead mopped his forehead with a handkerchief as he continued, “I kept out of the way of the man who worked for Rawley. But I met him once. He was the general handyman and incidentally he knew how to make the bridge go up and down. Also he sometimes set the moat on fire. His name is Mickey Garver.”

  “He must have been the one who knocked out the guard,” Nancy remarked.

  Mead said he did not know about that, but Garver had told him he had set the motel fires and stolen the Melodys’ papers to protect Rawley from being prosecuted for that swindle.

  “Who telephoned me and tried to get my father off the case?” Nancy questioned.

  “That was Rawley. I found out Mr. Drew had come to Mountainville to work on the case. When you and your father learned that Rawley had jumped bail, you started to track him down. When he called me from New York City, I told him what you two were up to. Rawley said he was going to get the Drews off the case at once.”

  Bess spoke up. “But he didn’t!”

  Nancy said to Mead, “I suppose you sent the notes to me about the bracelet and the mask. When you couldn’t find them yourself, you wanted me to do it, then you would try to steal them.”

  The prisoner admitted this was true, saying he had kept a close scrutiny on the girls’ activities in Mountainville.

  George grinned. “We figured out the riddle of the mask, then found the bracelet.”

  Mead looked at the young people unbelievingly. “I thought you were smart enough to decipher the messages, but had doubts that you were smart enough to find the bracelet.” He sighed in disgust. “If I hadn’t taken money from Bess Marvin and Rawley’s sister for the Indian children, I never would have been caught,” he added ruefully.

  Ned told the man he was not so sure of this. “The police are delving into Rawley’s affairs and will discover that you two were working together.”

  Suddenly the prisoner cried out, “You’ll never get Rawley! He’s dead!”

  Everyone in the kitchen gasped. “What do you mean?” Burt asked.

  “A few days ago I saw a newspaper report that his cruiser blew up and he drowned. Rawley was using an assumed name that only I knew. I saw the item about the accidental death of De Koork Retsinab. Substituting the letter ‘c’ for the last ‘k’ in De Koork, you will find that this man’s name spelled backward is Crooked Banister.”

  “And you didn’t report this to the police authorities?” Dave asked Mead.

  “No. I was afraid of being found out.”

  Ned asked Mead if he knew about the robot.

  “Yes. Rawley told me the sound of a voice activated it.”

  Nancy mentioned that she and her friends had found portraits with the faces painted out and poison put on them. “Have you any idea why?” she asked.

  Mead thought a moment. “Rawley once said to me, ‘I hate all my relatives except my parents and brother and sister. I’d like to poison them all!’ I liked Rawley but he was kind of wacky.”

  The questioning was interrupted by the rapping of the front-door knocker. Nancy and Ned went to see who was there. The callers proved to be Mrs. Carrier, Thomas Banister, and three policemen.

  “Is Clyde Mead here?” one of the officers asked.

  “Yes,” Ned replied. “He’s our prisoner in the kitchen.”

  “Good,” said the officer. “The authorities finally trailed Mead to Mountainville.”

  Nancy told him that Mead had confessed and implicated Mickey Garver. The officer said the handyman would be taken into custody.

  Nancy led the way to the kitchen. Within seconds Mead was being escorted out the back door by the three officers.

  “Didn’t I see a hole in the hallway wall?” Mrs. Carrier asked, a puzzled look on her face. “And boxes on the stairway?”

  Nancy quickly related all that had happened. Then the other young people showed her and Thomas the money, the skeleton’s bracelet, and the bottles of poison.

  When the excitement over the tremendous find had died down, Nancy told Mrs. Carrier and her brother of Rawley’s death.

  His sister said soberly, “I believe Rawley had a premonition of his death. That’s why he left the message and key with me.”

  Thomas nodded solemnly. “I’m glad Rawley will be spared having earthly authorities punish him.”

  Then he added, “One thing is not clear to me. How did Rawley get into the space back of the bookcase without breaking the wall?”

  Nancy said they had not figured this out yet. “Perhaps the robot can tell us. By the way, he showed us where Rawley’s will is.”

  “We’ll look at that later,” Thomas said.

  The group returned to the kitchen and examined the unused tapes. One was marked BC.

  “Maybe this means bookcase,” Nancy said.

  “Try it,” Mrs. Carrier directed.

  The robot was brought from the closet and the tape inserted. Everyone watched him intently. The whirring sound started and the mechanical man rolled out to the hall, then into the living room. He stopped in front of the bookcase.

  Then the robot raised his arms high over his head and pointed to the top of the bookcase. Next he moved his arms as if indicating that the piece of furniture was to be pulled out. At this gesture the tape ended.

  “I’ll take a look,” Ned said and swung to Dave’s shoulders.

  Leaning forward he gave the bookcase a tug and it moved toward him easily. When Dave and Ned rolled it out into the room, the searchers found a door leading into the narrow poison room.

  “This must have been the original door into the hall,” Burt remarked.

  The bookcase was shoved back into place and the watchers heard a click.

  Mrs. Carrier turned toward Nancy and her friends. “How can we ever repay you for all you’ve done?” she said.

  “We want no reward,” Nancy said quickly. “It has been a great pleasure to meet you people and work on the mystery.”

  The young detective looked dreamily into space, wondering what her next case would be. It soon followed and became known as The Secret of Mirror Bay.

  Thomas Banister spoke up. “You girls have brought to a close one of the most bafHing mysteries I have ever heard of. We can never thank you enough. Nancy Drew, you’re a wonder!”

  Nancy smiled and laid a hand on the mechanical man. “Do you know who really solved this mystery?” she asked. “Robby!”

  bsp; Carolyn Keene, The Crooked Banister