Race Against Time Page 7

  As Bess was examining the various pieces, a tall, severe-looking woman emerged from the back room. She wore her black hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly back into a bun at the nape of her neck.

  Almost at once her glance lit on Nancy. With an angry gasp, she walked belligerently over to the girls with her hands on her hips and exclaimed to the young detective, "What are you doing here, you little snoop?"

  Nancy was stunned. "What are you talking about?" she responded.

  "Don't act coy with me. You know perfectly well what f m talking about! You're Nancy Drew, aren't you?"

  "Of course."

  "I thought I recognized you! I saw your picture in the paper with a story about those television commercials you're appearing in out at Rainbow Ranch. And I suppose that underhanded sneak Roger Harlow sent you here to spy on me!"

  Velma Deene's eyes flamed with rage at the very mention of her fancied long-time enemy. "He's probably even accused me of stealing Shooting Star. Well, you and your friends will have to leave my gallery this instant!"

  Nancy realized that the woman was beyond reason. Turning to her friends, she murmured, "Let's go," and started toward the door in a dignified manner. George followed as coolly as Nancy. But Bess was in an agony of embarrassment. As she started after her two friends, she brushed against a piece of ceramic sculpture and knocked it over. It fell to the floor and smashed into tiny pieces!

  11. A Painting Puzzle

  The loud crash was followed by a dead silence. Bess went pale, then blushed crimson with shame.

  Everyone in the room seemed to be staring at her!

  Her predicament became even worse as Velma Deene gave way to a fit of rage. "Just look what you've done!" she shrieked. "Ruined one of the prize pieces in the exhibit! How dare you teenagers come into my gallery and behave like rowdies!"

  Sputtering with anger, the woman strode toward Bess, looking as if she were about to slap her.

  Nancy remained calm despite the owner's display of bad temper. "There's no need to make a scene," she said in a quiet but clear voice. "We'll pay for the damage."

  "Ill believe that when I see your parents walk in and hand me the money," Velma Deene retorted sarcastically. "In the meantime, you can clean up the pieces. Sheer vandalism, that's what it is. I knew you three spelled trouble the moment I laid eyes on you!"

  This was too much for Nancy. "What was the price marked on that piece, Bess?" she cut in.

  Bess groped nervously on the floor for the fragment of sculpture bearing a price sticker. "N-N-Ninety-nine dollars," she reported.

  The gallery owner shot a withering glance at Nancy Drew as if to emphasize that this was far more money than any teenaged girl was likely to carry in her purse.

  To the woman's surprise, Nancy took out her checkbook and a pen and coolly proceeded to write a check for ninety-nine dollars to the Deene Art Gallery.

  "Good for you, Nancy!" George spoke up. "Bess and I will pay you our share as soon as we get home."

  The other shoppers in the gallery had been watching in silence. But it soon became apparent from their expressions and their murmured comments that they sympathized with the three girls and thoroughly disapproved of the woman's harsh,

  insulting manner. One even turned and walked out with a look of disgust.

  Seeing this, Velma Deene seemed to undergo a change of attitude. "Perhaps I overreacted a bit," she purred to the girls with a sudden, artificial smile, "but I've been through a very trying week, getting this exhibit organized."

  As Nancy tried to hand her the check, she gushed, "No, no! You needn't pay for the figurine. I was forgetting all about the gallery's insurance policy. That covers any breakage."

  The young detective would have insisted on paying, but Velma Deene brushed the check aside. So Nancy shrugged and put it in her purse, murmuring, "Whatever you say."

  The spectators smiled and seemed almost ready to applaud as the three girls walked out. The owner, with a frozen smile on her face, was left to regain her poise and repair her shattered image in the eyes of her customers as best she could.

  Outside, as the girls got into Nancys car, Bess was tearfully apologetic over her clumsiness. "Oh, what an awful scene!" she quavered. "Breaking anything in a china shop or art gallery is bad enough, but a masterpiece like that! And then to have everyone stare at you with that woman carrying on the way she did!"

  "Oh, forget it!" George said. "Nancy soon put her in her place."

  "Even so," Bess said remorsefully, "I did break a ninety-nine-dollar ceramic sculpture!"

  "Never mind, Bess." Nancy paused before starting her car to give her friend a comforting pat on the hand. "Well make sure it's paid for one way or another."

  She explained that Velma Deene was a possible suspect in the Shooting Star case, and that Roger Harlow had insisted on paying any expenses incurred in the investigation. "So 111 ask him to mail a check to the gallery, in case there's any problem with the insurance."

  "Would you, Nancy?" Bess exclaimed, brightening gratefully. "I'll feel better knowing that, even though it doesn't make up for my clumsiness."

  By the following morning, the girls had forgotten the unpleasant incident. Bess was not needed in any of the scenes of the vampire movie to be shot that day and had promised to go shopping with George, so Nancy drove to the Grimsby Mansion alone.

  Bright sunshine was flooding down through the forest trees, and the old house looked almost cheerful with young people bustling in and out.

  Nancy changed quickly into her costume and applied her makeup with a bit of help from Sara.

  The first scene to be shot involved her and Mike Jordan, who was dressed in old-fashioned clothes to play her suitor. Nancy was supposed to be nervous over various spooky events that had happened the night before while Mike tried to soothe her fears.

  Although he flubbed his lines on the first take, the scene was soon completed smoothly. Then everyone helped shift the lights and other equipment to the third floor. Here the script called for Nancy to discover strange footprints on the floor of an old room that supposedly had been kept locked.

  "Move that light a bit closer, Jack, so we'll get some spookier-looking shadows," Ned suggested.

  A sudden thud sounded on the stairway just below as if a foot had slipped on one of the steps.

  Ned's eyebrows rose in surprise. "What was that?"

  "Search me," said Jack. "We're all here, aren't we?"

  There was a moment of silent counting. Everyone in the film club was either inside the room or hovering in the doorway.

  Jane Logan seemed to finish counting first. "We must have a visitor!" she announced uneasily.

  Her words were a signal for most of the group to run out into the hallway and down the stairs. Just as they reached the second floor, Ernie Gibson, who had played the role of the doctor on the first day of shooting, heard a sound from the corner room.

  "In there!" he cried, pointing the way. Footsteps pounded in a rush to investigate.

  Mike Jordan entered the room first. There was no one in sight, but he reached the open window just in time to glimpse a young man sliding down a back-porch roof to the ground. "There he goes!" Mike exclaimed.

  As the others gathered around the window to peer out over his shoulder, two figures could be seen running off through the woods.

  Another wild rush ensued, downstairs to the back door, in a frantic effort to nab or identify the figures. But as the club members emerged onto the back porch, they heard a car start up in the distance and speed away.

  "What do you make of it, Nancy?" asked Sara.

  "I've no idea. I never even got a look at them."

  "I'll bet it was Lenny and Gwen," Jack said. "It would be just like those two to come back and try to cause some trouble."

  But Ned shook his head doubtfully. "The intruders both looked male to me."

  Nancy said nothing, but could not help thinking of the weird warning marked on the table top and the odd indications that Ned
and Mr. Ullman had noticed of earlier visitors who had somehow gained entry to the mansion.

  Rather than waste time dwelling on the incident, the group resumed filming. By early afternoon, an impressive amount of footage had been shot. "Were doing great," Ned congratulated the other members of the film club. "Keep this up and we may beat our own schedule!"

  Turning to their movie heroine, he added, "And you're doing a terrific job of acting, Nancy!"

  The others joined in with praise that made her blush.

  Nancy's scenes were finished for the day. So after changing back to street clothes, the titian actress started happily out to her car.

  As she walked through a room that led to the front hallway, Nancy paused. Almost without being aware of it, her trained eyes told her that something about the room seemed different. But what? In a subtle way, the sparse furnishings of the room had changed.

  Puzzled, Nancy glanced over the few items of furniture but could not discover anything amiss. Then her gaze shifted to the walls, and suddenly she realized what had alerted her to attention.

  A painting was gone!

  12. Roadside Clue

  For a moment, Nancy could not imagine what had happened to the framed picture. Nor could she recall exactly when she had last seen it.

  But where had it gone? A break-in by burglars seemed unlikely. Yet none of the club members would have had any reason to take down the painting.

  Nancy caught her breath as another thought suddenly struck her. Those two intruders who had been chased away just before the second scene was shot! Was it the painting they had been after? Yet, the slight noise that gave them away certainly had not come from this small downstairs room.

  Nancy called Ned and the others. But none of them could account for the missing picture.

  "The question is, did those two snoops we saw take the painting?" Ned remarked.

  "The one who slid off the roof certainly wasn't carrying anything," Mike Jordan declared.

  Jack Billings looked at the puzzled group. "When we saw the two of them run off through the woods, they weren't carrying anything that big, either. At least, I don't think so."

  The others agreed.

  Nancy had been staring at the wall and thinking. "Look, people, we've been assuming all along that the picture was part of the old Grimsby furnishings."

  "Sure, what else?" Mike said.

  "But if that's so, how do you explain this?" Nancy pointed to the wall where the painting had hung.

  "Explain what?" Sara asked in a puzzled voice.

  Nancy said, "We know that the picture hanging there was square-cornered, don't we? But look at the wall stain."

  The discoloration of the old tan wallpaper clearly showed the outline of an oval painting!

  "You're absolutely right, Nancy!" Ned exclaimed. "If the picture that we saw had been up ever since the Grimsbys lived here, it would certainly have left its own mark."

  "That's weird." Jane Logan shivered.

  As the group broke up, they were still discussing the mystery. Nancy arranged to meet Ned at West-moor University later, and then went out to her car. But she did not drive off immediately. She sat at the wheel for a while and mused.

  The disappearance of the picture seemed baffling —as mysterious as the theft of Shooting Star. Who could have taken the painting? And why?

  This certainly wasn't the first odd thing that had happened at Grimsby Mansion. Nancy was reminded of the silver bud vase that Ned had found. Like the missing picture, that also had not been part of the original furnishings of the old house, or so it seemed, judging by appearances. Were the two items connected somehow?

  That last thought helped Nancy to decide her next plan. She would pay a visit to police headquarters to see if any information on the vase had turned up.

  Nancy started her car and drove to River Heights. In the lobby of the police building, she encountered Detective Phil Hart.

  "Sorry, Chief McGinnis isn't here," he told her with a smile. "He had to go see the dentist for a toothache. I have news for you, though, about that silver bud vase you brought in."

  "Oh, yes." Nancy's eyes were bright with interest.

  "That vase was reported stolen in one of those recent country-house burglaries. Remember the 'W' engraved on it? That was the detail that enabled us to identify it. The vase was reported stolen by the owners, named Waggoner, on May 9th."

  Nancy pondered this information for a moment, then said, "I have some news for you, too, Detective Hart." She told him about the missing painting and added, "It showed a hunting scene with hounds and red-coated riders. I noticed it particularly because one of the horses in the picture reminded me of my own horse, Black Prince. Do you suppose that painting might also have been stolen just like the silver bud vase?"

  "Let's check it out," the detective said. "Have you got a few minutes, Nancy?"

  "Yes, of course."

  He took her up by elevator to the second floor. When they were both seated in his small office, he took a sheaf of papers from his desk drawer and skimmed through them.

  "Ah, here's the list," he said presently. A moment later, as he ran his finger down the page, his eyebrows suddenly rose. "Well, well, well! Here's a painting that was reported stolen on June 21st in another of those country-house burglaries. Its described as a nineteenth-century hunting scene in a gilded frame measuring approximately thirty-six inches by forty-eight inches, with scarlet-coated huntsmen riding with hounds."

  "That's it!" the girl cried excitedly. "I'm sure of it!"

  The detective beamed at her. "Nice going, Nancy. It looks like you've given us another lead on these robberies."

  Nancy smiled regretfully. "A lead maybe, but not the painting itself, unfortunately. Do you have any clue as to who's committing those country-house burglaries?"

  "Not really. The roads around that Brookvale Forest area where the crimes have occurred are all well patrolled at night. Yet the burglar's only been seen once and even then he was disguised!"

  Detective Hart related that one of the robbery victims had been awakened one night by a noise in his living room and had come downstairs in time to surprise the robber snatching an expensive clock off the mantel. The thief had on a black Halloween costume with a white skeleton painted on both the front and the back, and a skull mask to match.

  "That doesn't give you much to go on," Nancy murmured sympathetically.

  The police detective grinned back at her. "Don't worry. It just takes patience. Give us time and a few breaks, plus some more help from Nancy Drew, and we'll nab him yet!"

  An hour later at Westmoor University, Nancy met Ned as he emerged from the film lab. She quickly told him the news about the silver vase he had found and the painting taken from the Grimsby Mansion. The boy was startled.

  "Why on earth would the robber dump part of his loot there?" he puzzled. "Such an out-of-the-way place as an old house in the woods. It's like the middle of nowhere!"

  "I agree it doesn't seem to make much sense," Nancy said. "The obvious thing would be to take it to the nearest big city, where he could find a professional fence to help dispose of the stolen goods. But he must have had a reason."

  She mused in silence for a moment, then looked up at Ned with a smile. "How would you like to drive out to North Road with me right now?"

  "What for?"

  "A black van was seen there on the night that Shooting Star was stolen. The police think that may be how the horse was carried off, so I'd like to search for clues." With a twinkle, Nancy finished, "It won't be out of your way because I'm inviting you to dinner tonight. Hannah's making a shrimp casserole and I know you love that."

  "Uh—oh!" Ned laughed. "You just said the magic word. I'll come peaceably."

  Driving along North Road, which bordered Brookvale Forest, Nancy located Tortoise Pond with no difficulty. Witnesses had said the van was parked just across the road from the pond.

  Nancy and Ned searched for clues in the tall grass bordering the road. Wit
h a sudden cry, she swooped down on a broken piece of fan belt.

  "Look at this, Ned," she said. "Could this have come off the van?"

  "Maybe." He inspected the object closely. "But even if it did, this wouldn't be enough to help you identify the make or model, if that's what you're thinking."

  "Not exactly." There was a thoughtful frown on Nancy's face. "Suppose this did come off the van. Would that disable it in any way?"

  Ned shrugged. "It might. That depends on how many belts the van's engine had, and which one this was. If the crooks didn't know it was gone, the van might have overheated and stalled before they'd driven very far."

  Nancy was excited by his answer. "If that did happen, Ned, the thieves would have been in a mess! Just imagine being stranded out on the road late at night with a stolen racehorse in their van. They might have had to abandon the van and escape on horseback!"

  Ned chuckled. "That sounds like a Wild West movie! But assuming you're right, what do we do now?"

  "Simple. Let's drive along the road and look for an abandoned van."

  "We don't even know which way they went."

  "So well try both directions," Nancy said with a smile. "Let's try away from River Heights first."

  "Sounds reasonable," Ned agreed.

  A few moments later, they were driving slowly along the highway. Less than two miles from Tortoise Pond, Nancy suddenly stopped and pointed. "Look, Ned! I think I see it!"

  13. Smoke Scare

  Ned stared in the direction Nancy was pointing.

  The reddish rays of the setting sun shone right in their eyes, silhouetting the treetops and leaving the trunks and underbrush in gloom. But he could make out the shape of a large black object half-hidden among the trees.

  "You're right!" he exclaimed suddenly. They both got out of the car and hurried to investigate more closely. It was, indeed, a black van.

  "Good thinking, Nancy," Ned said, giving her a quick hug. "This has got to be the one the police are looking for."

  "Lets check and see if the fan belt is missing," Nancy said.