Power of Suggestion Read online

  Nancy pushed the thought from her mind and continued to listen to Parker.

  “I want you guys to know that, since I didn’t do anything wrong, we have nothing to be ashamed of. I think it’s important that we have our party tomorrow, and I vote in favor!”

  This last statement was greeted by applause, hoots, and whistles of approval. When the rest of the group voted, the decision was unanimous: The party would proceed as planned.

  As the meeting broke up, Nancy noticed that Parker and Bess stayed behind on the couch. She and Ned went over and joined them.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but I have to ask you some questions, Parker,” Nancy said.

  Parker nodded. “Sure. Bess has just been filling me in on what you guys found out today.”

  “Can you tell me about your father’s gun?” Nancy asked.

  Parker suddenly looked down at his lap. “Uh, it wasn’t exactly Dad’s gun anymore. He’s a collector—he’s got dozens of guns in display cases. But he gave me that little thirty-eight snub-nose for my eighteenth birthday. We just hadn’t gotten around to changing the registration.” Parker paused before adding, “It’s my gun.”

  “Your gun! Oh, Parker, how could you overlook something like that? Have you told the police?” Nancy was becoming exasperated. Every time she began to believe in Parker’s innocence, some new bombshell made him look even more guilty.

  Parker’s green eyes darted around. “I—I just remembered,” he said, looking confused. “It’s weird. It’s as if I didn’t even remember owning it until just now! I keep the gun locked up in my desk drawer at home. At least, I did.”

  He was becoming more flustered, so Nancy decided not to press him anymore. “You’re going to have to let the police know about this in the morning,” she said. “Meanwhile, why don’t you relax? You and Bess could go see a movie or something.”

  Parker looked questioningly at Bess, and she nodded her agreement. “Okay,” he agreed. “Anything but a murder mystery! What are you going to do?”

  “I have an idea,” Nancy said, turning to Ned. “I’ll need your help.”

  • • •

  “You think he’s guilty, don’t you?” Ned asked.

  Nancy was hurt by his accusing tone. “I don’t know what to think,” she said truthfully. “One moment I think he’s the nicest, most open guy in the world, and the next I think it might all be an act. You’ve got to admit his behavior is very odd.”

  It was after eleven in the evening, and the two of them were sitting in her blue Mustang, parked on a darkened residential street several blocks from campus.

  “He is acting weird,” Ned agreed. “It’s a side of him I never saw before yesterday. At least keep an open mind, okay?”

  Nancy kissed Ned’s cheek. “That’s why we’re here,” she told him.

  She glanced across the street at the single-story green building where Wayne had lived. It was in a neighborhood of rundown houses near the campus—the student rental district, Ned had explained. The house was roped off with police tape, but Nancy wasn’t going to let that stop her.

  “If you see anything suspicious, beep the horn twice,” she told Ned. When he nodded, she slipped quietly out of the car, leaving him sitting behind the wheel of her Mustang.

  Nancy had gone back to the dormitory and changed into black jeans and a dark, hooded sweatshirt. Now she crossed the street and slipped around to the side of the house. She tested all the windows, until at last she found a basement one that opened. She took a deep breath, then climbed through, dropping several feet to the floor.

  Nancy had brought a penlight with her, and she shone it around her briefly. The basement was a mess, full of boxes and piles of books. Before going through those things, however, she wanted to examine the rooms where Wayne had spent most of his time. Moving as silently as she could, Nancy picked her way carefully to the stairs on the other side of the basement.

  For a moment she stopped, holding her breath. Had she heard the floor above her creak? She listened, her heart pounding, but heard nothing more. It must have been the house settling, she decided.

  Nancy climbed the stairs and stepped into a tiny kitchen with dirty dishes still piled up in the sink. The kitchen led to a small living room full of musty furniture. There were bookshelves and file cabinets everywhere, and a computer sat on a desk.

  Nancy played her penlight over the papers piled on the desk. She would definitely check those out as soon as she’d made a quick survey of the house.

  She tiptoed across the living room to another doorway, which she guessed must lead to the bedroom. After carefully pushing the door open, she took a step in. It was pitch-black.

  A sudden sound behind Nancy made her whirl around. She flicked on her penlight—and gasped.

  A shadowy figure lurking behind the door was swinging a heavy bowling trophy right at Nancy’s head!

  Chapter

  Nine

  NANCY REACTED INSTANTLY. She ducked, and the swinging trophy swooshed harmlessly past her ear.

  Lashing out with her hand, Nancy caught her attacker’s wrist. She pivoted, twisting the person’s arm over her shoulder and following through with a judo throw that carried the shadowy figure right over her.

  The attacker sprawled awkwardly on the floor. A quick glance told Nancy that it was a girl about her own size. In a flash, Nancy pinned the other girl’s arms in a judo hold. With her free hand, Nancy reached out and found her penlight, which she had dropped during the attack. She flicked it on and shone the beam in the other girl’s face.

  “Diana DeMarco!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been looking for you all day, and now I find you here, trying to kill me!”

  “I was not!” the pretty, dark-haired girl protested.

  Nancy looked at her dubiously. “Then why did you attack me?”

  “I heard you coming up the stairs and got scared. I thought you were Wayne’s killer! I was just protecting myself. Now let me go—you’re hurting me!”

  Nancy released her grip, and Diana got to her feet. “Who are you, anyway? Why are you here, and how do you know who I am?”

  “I think I’m the one who should be asking the questions,” Nancy said, “but I’m Nancy Drew. I saw you talking to Wayne in the student union yesterday shortly before he was killed. I’m trying to find out who killed Wayne and why. Now, what are you doing here?”

  As Diana brushed her hair from her eyes, Nancy appraised her. She was nearly as tall as Nancy. Her blue ski jacket was open over a gray bodysuit and tight black denim pants that she wore with boots.

  “I—I was looking for something,” Diana told her, glancing nervously around.

  Nancy crossed her arms over her chest. “Why don’t you try telling me what it is?”

  A look of embarrassment crossed Diana’s face. “I did something terribly wrong,” she said after a long pause. “I was Wayne’s student, and I was dating him.” She took a deep breath, and then her words came out in a rush. “I knew it was against school regulations, but I couldn’t help it—I really liked Wayne. He resisted at first, but I kept after him. Finally he gave in, and we started seeing each other secretly.”

  “Yes?” Nancy prompted. Diana still hadn’t said what she was doing here.

  “But then, when he was killed,” Diana went on, “I knew I could get into big trouble if anyone found the love notes I’d sent him. I knew where he kept his spare key, so I came here looking for them.”

  “Did you find them?” Nancy asked.

  Diana nodded and reached into her coat pocket. “Careful,” Nancy warned, fearing that Diana might have a concealed weapon. “Move slowly.”

  The other girl eased a little packet out of her pocket and held it up so Nancy could see it wasn’t a weapon. Nancy took the packet from her, opened it, and gave a couple of the notes a quick reading. They were romantic and passionate, and Nancy felt awkward reading them. Still, there might be something useful in them. For the moment, she decided to hang onto the letters.

 
“You must be taking Wayne’s death pretty hard,” she said sympathetically.

  Diana didn’t reply right away, and Nancy saw that she was blinking back tears. Then Diana asked, “What did you mean when you said you’re trying to find out who killed Wayne? I thought the police had proof that Parker Wright did it.”

  “You know Parker from your study sessions. Do you think he’s capable of murder?”

  “It is hard to believe,” Diana admitted. “But then, who?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Nancy said, tapping the letters against her palm. “If you have any information, you should go to the police.”

  Diana immediately became flustered. “No! I mean, I couldn’t.” She looked nervously around Wayne’s darkened bedroom. “Listen, we’d better get out of here, or we’ll both be in trouble! Please, let me have those letters back.”

  “I think I’ll hold on to them,” Nancy said coolly. She felt sure that Diana was hiding something, and she was determined to find out what it was.

  “I don’t think you should,” Diana said, her voice hardening. “Look, we can’t just stand around here chatting. I saw a police car cruise by, just before I entered. The police could be back at any moment.”

  “I still have a lot of questions I want to ask you,” Nancy said.

  “Fine. I’ll answer them—but not here.” Diana reached out and snatched the letters from Nancy’s grasp. Before Nancy could react, Diana walked out of the bedroom. “We can have breakfast together at nine o’clock,” Diana called over her shoulder. “Meet me in my dorm room.” Then she was gone.

  Nancy felt a surge of frustration. She didn’t trust Diana, but there was really no way she could force her to stay and talk.

  Nancy was about to continue her search of the house, when she noticed an envelope lying on the floor of Wayne’s bedroom. It must have fallen out of Diana’s pocket when Nancy threw her down. Was it another love letter? She picked it up and opened it.

  The envelope contained two small computer diskettes. She’d have to wait until later to examine them, though. For now, she wanted to finish looking around and get out of here. If Diana had been telling the truth about the police circulating, she didn’t want to get caught!

  As Nancy slipped the envelope into the pocket of her jeans, she felt the glossy coating of the Positive Tapes pamphlet Larry Boyd had given her earlier. She made a quick search of the rest of the house but didn’t turn up anything that could be a clue to who Wayne’s murderer was. Ten minutes later, Nancy left, slipping out the kitchen door and carefully replacing the police tape across the doorway.

  Since she didn’t want to be spotted by any patrol cars, she sneaked through the yard next door, then crossed the street a few houses down. She approached the Mustang quietly, on the passenger side. Ned was staring intently at Wayne’s house and didn’t realize that Nancy was there until she flung open the door and popped into the car. “Boo!” she said. “Miss me?”

  Ned jerked around, startled. Then he started to laugh. “Who taught you to sneak around like that?”

  “Years of practice, Nickerson,” she responded, giving him a quick kiss.

  “Find anything?”

  Nancy nodded. “Diana DeMarco,” she replied. Before Ned could ask anything more, she said, “I’ll tell you all about it. But right now let’s get out of here. The cops might be patrolling this street.”

  Ned started Nancy’s car and pulled away from the curb. Before they reached the end of the block, a police car rounded the corner, then drove past them, headed in the direction of Wayne’s house. Nancy gave a sigh of relief. It had been that close.

  As they drove back to the Emerson campus, she told Ned about her encounter with Diana.

  “They were actually dating?” Ned asked, looking surprised. When Nancy nodded, he added, “So do you think she could have killed him?”

  Nancy grew thoughtful. “It’s possible, though I don’t know what motive she could have. She seemed genuinely upset by Wayne’s death, but I had a definite feeling she was hiding something.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the envelope Diana had dropped. “Maybe these will help.” She told Ned about the diskettes and how she’d found them.

  “What’s on them?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to look.” She opened the envelope and took out the diskettes, then read the hand-lettered labels. “Hey, this might be important!”

  Ned glanced over from the driver’s seat. “What’ve you got?”

  “This one is labeled Subliminal Persuasion: Analysis and Assessment,” Nancy told him. “I think these are the records of Professor Edberg’s study!”

  • • •

  “I’m glad Parker and Bess had a good time at the movies,” Nancy said two hours later as she and Ned walked down the upstairs hall of the Omega Chi Epsilon house. They’d just knocked on Parker’s door and found him half-asleep. He woke up long enough to tell them that after the movie, he had dropped Bess off at Packard Hall, then returned to the fraternity.

  “Let’s just hope Maury is having some luck with those diskettes so that we can all get some sleep,” Ned said. He pushed into a tiny bedroom that was filled with computer equipment. A narrow bed was squashed against one wall, as if it were an afterthought.

  “This is interesting,” Maury Becker said, looking up from his computer screen. Immediately after leaving Wayne’s house, Nancy and Ned had gone back to the fraternity to show Maury the diskettes Nancy had found. He’d immediately agreed to examine them. Then Nancy and Ned had gone out to get something to eat so that Maury would be able to concentrate, without the two of them hovering over him.

  “It took a few tries to find which word-processing program Edberg was using,” Maury now said. “After that it was a breeze to access his file menu. It’s going to take time to examine them, but it looks like this first disk, the one labeled Subliminal Persuasion, contains records of Professor Edberg’s study.”

  Nancy leaned over Maury’s shoulder and peered at the screen. “What about the other disk?” she asked. “The one labeled Reevaluation?”

  Maury frowned. “That one’s proving more difficult to access,” he explained. “It’s been blocked—a coded input sequence is required in order to access the files.”

  “In English, please, Maury,” Ned interrupted. “We’re not all computer experts.”

  “Okay, look. You boot up the computer, it asks you what you want to do. You tell it the program you want to use, and then the computer reads the diskette,” Maury explained. “This block is preventing me from getting into the disk to read what’s on it. Unless you tell the computer the secret code, it won’t open the files. It’s a security device.”

  “So someone wanted to keep the information on this second disk secret,” Nancy said.

  “That’s right,” Maury answered.

  Nancy felt herself growing excited. “This information could be the key to Wayne Perkins’s murder!” she said. “Are you sure we can’t access the information?”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” Maury said, smiling up at her. “That would be impossible only if Wayne was a better programmer than I am. But nobody is a better programmer than I am!”

  Ned put his arm around Maury’s shoulders. “And that’s why we love you, Maury. Who could resist such modesty? How long do you think it will take until you break into this disk?”

  “Not long. A day. Maybe a day and a half,” he said distractedly, his attention already refocused on his work. “Come back Sunday morning after breakfast. I should have it by then.”

  “Yikes!” Nancy said, glancing at her watch. “It’s already two in the morning.”

  Ned yawned. “I’m beat. Come on. Let’s get you to the dorm.”

  • • •

  “I can’t wait to meet this elusive Diana DeMarco,” Bess said the next morning as they left their dorm room.

  It was just before nine o’clock. Nancy had already been up for an hour, despite having gone to slee
p so late. She couldn’t stop thinking about the case. After dressing in white corduroy slacks and a blue sweater, she’d sat at one of the desks in her room, thinking over what she’d learned so far.

  All the evidence pointed to Parker. He’d been with Wayne just before the murder, the gun was his, and he and the teaching assistant had been having problems. But then, Diana was hiding something, and she had been in the study group, too. And if Wayne had gone to the trouble of protecting information about the research, maybe the subliminal study was the key.

  “I just hope Diana’s there,” Nancy said now, closing the door to their room behind them. “She’s been pretty elusive so far.”

  The two girls went down a flight of stairs to the first floor, then made their way to Room 106. After several knocks, the door was opened, and Janis Seymour, wearing a nightgown and bathrobe, blinked at them.

  “You again!” Janis said angrily. “What are you doing here so early?”

  “I’m sorry if we woke you, Janis, but Diana asked me to meet her here at nine,” Nancy said.

  Janis stared at Nancy. “She didn’t say anything to me. Anyway, she’s gone.”

  “She’s gone?” Nancy felt a terrible sinking feeling. She never should have trusted Diana! “Where did she go?”

  Janis shrugged. “I heard her rattling around the room while it was still dark. I guess she was packing her bags. But I was half-asleep, and it didn’t really register.” Janis stepped back, showing Nancy and Bess Diana’s side of the room.

  Nancy couldn’t believe her eyes. Diana’s things had been completely cleared out!

  Chapter

  Ten

  NANCY, this is awful!” Bess cried, looking around the room in alarm.

  Nancy groaned, mentally kicking herself for letting Diana convince her to wait until morning to interview her. “Listen, Janis, your roommate could be in real trouble. You’ve got to let us help her.” She had a feeling that Diana was an important link to the case, and she had to find out where the dark-haired girl had gone.