The Elusive Heiress Read online

  “Oh, that would be a wonderful place to begin,” Nancy agreed, her spirits lifting after the discouraging reports she’d read. Before she could go on, however, Ned and Jennifer came back to join them and she could see that Jennifer was looking very worried.

  “No sign of your mother?” Nancy asked.

  The blond head shook emphatically.

  “Why don’t I go talk to some of the counter people?” Mrs. Reed volunteered. “Maybe Mrs. Buckman has been delayed and called in a

  message. It’s been so noisy and crowded, we wouldn’t have heard a page.”

  “Maybe we could call your mother, Jennifer,” Nancy suggested, looking around at the emptying airport. “Do you know your phone number?”

  “I don’t remember,” Jennifer admitted nervously.

  “We’ll look in the telephone book or call information,” Nancy told her, taking her hand as they went to the bank of telephones.

  Ten minutes later, she and Jennifer rejoined Ned and Mrs. Reed. “Any luck?” Ned asked.

  Nancy sighed. “Her phone has been disconnected and there is no new listing.” Nancy looked hopefully toward Mrs. Reed.

  The older woman shook her head. Jennifer burst into tears.

  “It will be all right,” Nancy assured her, dropping to her knees beside the child. “We’ll find your mother, I promise.”

  “Nancy is a very good detective,” Mrs. Reed agreed, adding her soothing voice to Nancy’s assurances. “And in the meantime, we’ll all go to my house. You can stay with me, Jennifer, till we find your mother. Would you like that?”

  The sobs slowed a little as Jennifer looked at Nancy. “Will you really find her for me?” she asked.

  “I’ll do my very best,” Nancy answered, sure that it would be much easier to find a woman who’d only been missing one day than to locate one who had disappeared forty years ago.

  As they left the airport, Nancy cast one last glance around, her attention caught by a prickly feeling of being watched. Two young men she’d noticed before were now standing near the telephones and she felt their eyes following them as they crossed the room with Jennifer.

  3. Vanished!

  Mrs. Reed’s home was a handsome, two-story brick located just on the edge of the city and Nancy could see that the warm, friendly greeting of Mrs. Reed’s big collie helped Jennifer to feel better.

  “Why don’t you and Brewster go and explore the backyard?” Mrs. Reed suggested to the little girl. “His ball is out there somewhere and he dearly loves to chase it. I’m afraid I’ve been so busy getting ready for Frontier Days, I’ve been neglecting him.”

  Once Jennifer was out of earshot, Nancy turned to her hostess. “What do you think I should do, Mrs. Reed?” she asked. “Should I call Mrs. Peterson?”

  "I think so. But why don’t you call me Grace? Mrs. Reed is much too formal, since we’re all going to be living here together.”

  Nancy smiled. “Thank you, Grace,” she said, excusing herself to the telephone, which sat on a small table in one comer of the room. Her conversation with Mrs. Peterson lasted several minutes, but when it finally ended, Nancy hung up with a long sigh.

  “What’d she say?” Ned asked when Nancy joined him and Mrs. Reed again.

  “Just that there have been no messages from Jennifer’s mother since we left River Heights. Mrs. Peterson is terribly upset about everything, and she apologized profusely for any inconvenience she may have caused us—”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Reed said, “and I hope you assured her not to worry.”

  “Oh, I did,” Nancy replied.

  “Now, why don’t I call the police?” the woman suggested.

  “It’s really very kind of you to get involved like this.” Nancy sighed. “I just never dreamed that her mother wouldn’t be waiting for her. Mrs. Peterson seemed so sure.”

  “Jennifer didn’t.” Ned broke into the conversation for the first time.

  “What do you mean?” Nancy asked, surprised.

  “Well, we were talking while you were reading and apparently Jennifer never spoke to her mother when she called for her to come home. She was a little hurt to think that her mother didn’t even want to talk to her.”

  “That is strange,” Nancy observed. “Do you suppose it could have been some terrible practical joke?”

  “Surely Mrs. Peterson wouldn’t have been fooled,” Ned said. “She seemed like a very conscientious housemother to Jennifer.”

  “That’s true,” Nancy agreed, but her thoughts strayed for a moment to the two young men she’d noticed at the airport. They had certainly seemed interested in Jennifer. But if they’d been sent by her mother, why hadn’t they approached the girl? It was really very confusing.

  “I’ll call the police,” Mrs. Reed repeated forcefully, heading for the telephone. “Meantime, Nancy, why don’t you pour some lemonade for us? And there are fresh-baked cookies in the ceramic pumpkin in the kitchen. The lemonade is in the refrigerator. I left everything ready for us. I knew you’d need some refreshments after your long flight.” She smiled. “We can have them on the table out back—with Jennifer.”

  Nancy hurried over to give the woman a hug. “Thank you, Mrs. . . . Grace,” she whispered.

  Ned returned from checking on Jennifer and Brewster and asked, “Shall I take the suitcases to our rooms? If you’ll tell me where you want us . . .

  Grace looked around. “I almost forgot that,” she admitted. “You’ll be in the room at the end of that hall, Ned.” She pointed. “Nancy and Jennifer can share the front bedroom upstairs. The first door to the right at the top of the stairs.”

  “Don’t be too long,” Nancy teased, “or Jennifer and I will eat all the cookies.”

  Grace joined Nancy just as she finished filling the glasses and was taking cookies from the huge pumpkin cookie jar. She was frowning.

  “Dave Hill is going to check into it,” she said, “but he didn’t sound too hopeful. Everyone is so busy during the rodeo.”

  “What about Jennifer?” Nancy asked. “They won’t take her away, will they?”

  Grace smiled. “I told Dave he could count on me to take care of her till her mother is found.” Nancy sighed. “I just hope that is soon,” she said.

  “Where do you think we should start looking?” Ned asked, joining them in time to take the tray that Nancy had filled.

  “I think we should drive by the Buckman house,” Nancy suggested. “I noticed the address when I was trying to call her from the airport.”

  “I thought you said the phone was disconnected,” Ned reminded her.

  “Maybe she’s just returned from somewhere and hasn’t had the phone turned on,” Nancy countered. “Or her neighbors might be able to tell us something.”

  “That’s a good thought,” Grace agreed. “I don’t really watch my neighbors, but I usually know when they’re called out of town or something.”

  The romp with Brewster seemed to have made Jennifer feel much better. As soon as she finished a glass of lemonade and several cookies, she was quite content to settle on the floor in front of the television set, one arm around the collie’s furry neck. Nancy and Ned left her there under Grace’s watchful eye, while they borrowed her small coupe and drove into Cheyenne, seeking the address from the phone book.

  When they finally found the street, Nancy felt her hopes ebbing. The house was a small, attractive one, but the lawn was shaggy and brown from lack of care and the windows had the blind look of drawn shades.

  “It doesn’t seem very promising, does it?” Ned observed.

  Nancy shook her head. “I guess we’d better try the house, though,” she said. “And maybe peek in the garage windows, see if there’s a car parked there.”

  “You try the door, I’ll check the garage,” Ned agreed, as they got out of the car, “but if she is living here, she definitely needs some yard work done.”

  “Maybe she isn’t able to do it,” Nancy reminded him. “She was in an accident, you know.”

 
Ned nodded, then left her, walking around the side of the house to the garage. Nancy hurried to the front door, noticing as she did that there were several bits of junk mail in the mailbox. The doorbell echoed emptily behind the white-painted door and, after several tries, she gave up and went to see if Ned was having any luck.

  “There’s a car in there,” Ned told her when they met at the corner of the house. “I can’t see it very well, but it looks like a fairly new one.” “Then she has been here,” Nancy said, brightening.

  “Or someone has,” Ned corrected. “She could have rented the garage, you know. People sometimes do if they don’t have a car of their own.”

  Nancy sighed and acknowledged that he might be right. “You take the neighboring houses to the east and I’ll take the ones to the west,” she said. “That way it won’t take so long to find out if anyone has seen Mrs. Buckman.” It took longer than Nancy had expected and the results were dismal. Most of the neighbors seemed suspicious of Nancy’s questions and reluctant to discuss the owner of the house. It was

  only when she tried the cottage directly across the street that she got some answers.

  “Lorna was here for a few days early in the week,” the tired-looking woman told Nancy. “I was real surprised to see her, if you want to know the truth. I thought she might sell the place after the accident, but I suppose with a child to raise and everything . . .”

  “You haven’t seen her today?” Nancy asked. The woman shook her head. “Not for two or three days. I expect she left town to get away from the rodeo crowds. A lot of people do, you know. Folks come here from all over just to see the rodeo and the local people leave just to avoid it.” She laughed without humor. “Guess that’s human nature.”

  “Do you have any idea where she might go?” Nancy pressed. “It’s really very urgent that I get in touch with her.”

  “What do you want with her?” The eyes were suddenly hostile.

  “It has to do with her little girl,” Nancy explained. “Do you know anyone Mrs. Buckman might have gone to visit or who might know where she is?”

  The woman considered for several minutes, then shook her head. “I only know Lorna to say hello and good-bye to, that’s all, and I didn’t even do that much this time. Just waved out the window at her. She could be just about anywhere and nobody in this neighborhood would know it.”

  “Well, if she should happen to come back, could you give her a message for me?” Nancy asked, sure even as she spoke that her mission was hopeless. “Could you give her my name and phone number and ask her to call me right away?”

  The woman didn’t look particularly eager, but after a few moments’ thought, she nodded reluctantly. “If I happen to see her,” she said, “I guess I could do that much.”

  Nancy wrote her name and Grace’s phone number on a piece of paper from her purse, then thanked the woman and returned to the car. An equally discouraged-looking Ned was waiting for her. “Any luck?” he asked.

  Nancy shook her head. “She was there the first of the week, but no one seems to know where she went or why.”

  Ned nodded. “No one I talked to even knew she was here. It’s not a friendly neighborhood.”

  Nancy started to get into the car, then stopped as a blue automobile came along the street. “It might not be friendly,” she observed, “but it certainly is curious.”

  “What do you mean?” Ned asked.

  “Unless I’m very mistaken, that’s not the first time I’ve seen that car,” Nancy told him, squinting against the sun, though it did no good. She couldn’t see the person or people inside, not with the shiny sun shades pulled down over the windows and the sun glinting on the front windshield. She also missed getting the license plate number as the car quickly rounded the corner.

  “Maybe they know where Lorna Buckman is,” Ned said in a serious tone, as Nancy hurriedly started the car. But before they reached the end of the road, the blue automobile had vanished into the heavy flow of traffic on a nearby street.

  Nancy sighed. “What am I going to tell Jennifer?” she asked, well aware that Ned couldn’t answer that question any more than she could. There were times when being a detective was very discouraging.

  4. Close Call

  Though the bright lights of the town and the colorful music and neon glow of the carnival near the rodeo grounds offered excitement, Nancy was too discouraged and worried to be interested. She was glad when Ned drove her back to the Reed house, even though she wasn’t looking forward to telling Jennifer that she hadn’t been able to find her mother.

  Fortunately, Jennifer was too tired by the day’s events to notice the lack of conviction behind Nancy’s assurances that she would do better tomorrow. Once dinner was over, Jennifer soon went up to bed, leaving the three worried adults alone to discuss what to do next.

  “I made some calls while you were gone,” Grace began. “Checked the hospitals, things like that. There’s no record of Lorna Buckman being treated anywhere in Cheyenne.”

  “I just don’t know where to look next,” Nancy admitted. “I’m beginning to feel haunted. First, Clarinda Winthrop disappeared forty years ago and now Lorna Buckman seems to have done the same thing.”

  Grace shook her head. “I just don’t see how a mother could leave a child like Jennifer on her own this way. She wouldn’t have any way of knowing that you were flying with the girl. Suppose she’d come into Cheyenne all alone?” Nancy shuddered, then got up to move restlessly about the room.

  “Would you like to go for a walk?” Ned suggested.

  Nancy nodded. “I really think I need one,” she admitted. “I’m much too restless to sleep right now.”

  “Grace?” Ned asked.

  Grace Reed shook her head. “Why don’t you take Brewster?” she suggested. “He’d love a walk, I’m sure.”

  The night was cool and a breeze ruffled Nancy’s titian hair. The stars seemed extra close and bright once they looked away from the glow of Cheyenne’s many lights. “I think we should take Jennifer to the parade tomorrow,” Ned said as they followed the white plume of the collie’s tail along a rough path.

  “Oh, Ned, what about searching for her mother?” Nancy asked.

  “You said you didn’t know where to start,” he reminded her. “Maybe a little relaxation will do you both some good. Besides, I think she’d enjoy it and I know I would.”

  Nancy responded to his teasing grin. “So would I,” she admitted. “And that’s a good idea. We can always start our search after the parade.”

  The July sun was hot the next morning as they waited on the crowded curb. Nancy looked longingly at the shade near the storefronts behind them, but knew she couldn’t relinquish her position if she wanted to see the parade. Jennifer, somewhat recovered, was already dancing off the curb into the street to look for the first riders.

  “Should be coming pretty soon,” Ned announced, checking his watch. “It’s past ten.”

  “Parades are always late,” Jennifer informed him.

  “Not too late,” Nancy said as her sharp ears caught the distant sounds of a band. “It must be coming now.”

  A shout from the crowd confirmed her statement and everyone pressed forward as the first riders came into view, their horses dancing wildly as the wind caught the flags their riders carried and made them snap around the horses’ ears.

  One of the horses, a big bay, reared and slipped on the unfamiliar pavement. Nancy pulled Jennifer back quickly as the rider spurred the horse forward, then steadied him so he didn’t fall.

  Wagons, buckboards, carriages, and even stagecoaches followed each other along the parade route. Teams, nervous and wet with sweat from the excitement and unfamiliar crowds, danced and jumped from the sounds of firecrackers and the blanks fired by a number of riders costumed as possemen or desperados.

  There were floats depicting Old West scenes. One featured square dancers who swirled and danced on the wide bed of a truck as the music and voice of the dance caller filled the air.
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br />   “That looks like fun,” Ned commented as an old-fashioned chuck wagon barbecue scene passed, filling the air with an all-too-authentic scent of cooking meat. “I wonder how you get to be on a float.”

  “I’d like to ride in a wagon,” Nancy said, her attention caught by a buggy that was passing. “Look at those dresses. They must be genuine antiques, too.”

  “I’d rather ride a horse,” Jennifer stated, then began waving furiously to several youngsters who were passing. They waved back, calling her name.

  Nancy smiled, happy to see that Jennifer had momentarily forgotten her mother’s disappearance, then realized that she might be overlooking a clue. “Who were those children, Jennifer?” she asked.

  “Becky and Andy from the Pony Club,” was the quick answer, though Jennifer didn’t even look her way.

  “Would their parents know your mother?” Nancy asked.

  This time Jennifer turned from the parade, her eyes bright with excitement. “Sure they would,” she replied. “We used to go on picnics and rides together and our mothers always had meetings about the food and everything.”

  “After the parade, I want you to give me as many names of the Club members as you can remember,” Nancy told the little girl. “One of them may know where your mother is.”

  A mounted sheriff’s posse came abreast of them, shouting and firing blanks into the bright, hot air. Shouts from the crowd made it plain that the men were well-known and liked. One rider stopped to take a young boy in front of him on his horse.

  The next wagon had a sharpshooter on board and he spent his time tossing light-colored balls into the air, shooting them over the crowd so that when they shattered, the brightly wrapped candies inside fell to the eagerly waiting children.