The Nancy Drew Sleuth Book Page 9

“Perhaps it’s here right now,” Honey muttered apprehensively, staring at a closet door, but not quite daring to open it.

  “We’ll have to look everywhere,” Nancy said, and turned the knob. But they found no ghost in any of the closets or rooms, and no clue of any kind turned up. When they came to a door next to the kitchen and opened it, the door squeaked tremendously. Breathless, the young detectives waited to see what lay beyond. It was nothing but an empty pantry!

  Martie heaved a sigh of relief. “I almost expected a skeleton to be hanging in there!” she said.

  The girls were intrigued by the kitchen, which was large and had a fireplace.

  “I suppose,” said Sue, “that in olden days they used to cook food in this fireplace.”

  “Perhaps the ghost is here right now, ” Honey said.

  “Like barbecued hot dogs,” Karen quipped, and everyone laughed.

  “Well, that’s it for the first floor,” Nancy declared. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  The steps were heavily carpeted, but a couple of the treads squeaked. The Detective Club members scrutinized them inch by inch but found nothing suspicious.

  As the girls reached the top and started down the hall Cathy exclaimed, “Look! A man’s footprints!”

  There was a circle of impressions faintly visible in the dust that had settled on the dark oak floorboards. All of the girls stared at them in amazement.

  “This is positively weird,” Sue said finally. “Where did the man come from, and where did he go?”

  Nancy looked at the ceiling. “That’s the only place. But I see no evidence of a break-in or any tampering with the panels. Do you?”

  Her friends shook their heads.

  “Where do we go next?” Honey asked a bit apprehensively.

  “To the bedrooms,” Nancy said resolutely.

  The search went on in silence until Cathy spoke up. “We’re certainly advertising our visit,” she said, and pointed to the trail of footprints the girls had been leaving.

  “Maybe we’ll scare the ghost,” Sue said.

  “One thing I’m sure of,” Nancy said. “The ghost is no thief. There are beautiful art objects in the rooms and lovely paintings on the walls. A thief would have taken all of them.”

  “Which makes it even harder for us to solve the mystery,” Martie added.

  The third floor yielded no clues, so the girls went to the basement. Since the electricity was switched off, the stairs were almost in total darkness. One part of the cellar, however, had a large window. Rays of sunlight were filtering through and illuminated the opposite wall.

  Honey pointed to a series of letters that were crudely painted on it. “Look!” she called out. “What does this mean?”

  The girls studied the strange writing, which read:

  PAZF XUHQ TQDQ UR KAG HMXGQ KAGD XURQ

  “It must be a code,” Cathy remarked. “I’ll bet the ghost left it.”

  “Let’s try to figure it out,” Sue said eagerly.

  Quickly the girls pulled notepads from their handbags and tried all the codes they knew, but nothing fit. They listed the alphabet forward and backward, interposing letters, but finally turned to Nancy in despair.

  “We give up!” Sue said. “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Try this,” Nancy said. “Write the alphabet from A to Z in a horizontal line. Then underneath start with the second part of the alphabet, writing M under A, N under B and so forth until you come to Z under N. Then write the first part, putting A under O, B under P until you finish with L under Z.”

  The girls worked busily, applying the code to the message on the wall. Finally, Honey deciphered it.

  “It says DONT LIVE HERE IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE!” she cried out. “Oh, how dreadful!”

  “What do you think it means?” Sue asked.

  “It could be a sinister warning that no one is safe on the premises,” Cathy surmised, “or it could indicate that there’s something unhealthy about this place. By living here, a person might become ill or even die!”

  “Maybe that’s what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Costello,” Martie added. “You remember Maria said that they were in a nursing home. Perhaps they are there to recuperate from a disease they picked up here.”

  “That’s not a very cheerful thought,” Honey remarked.

  “But a possibility,” Nancy said, defending the statement. “However, I’m more inclined to think the ghost is trying to keep people from buying this property and is using the warning message to scare away anyone who’s interested in it.”

  As the girls went back to the first floor Nancy said, “What kind of an individual do you think the ghost is?”

  “From the footprints we saw earlier, I’d say the ghost is a man,” said Honey.

  “And a pretty smart one,” Peg continued. “Maybe he has a sense of humor.”

  “He enjoys playing tricks on people,” Martie added.

  “Well, I don’t want him playing any tricks on me!” Karen declared emphatically.

  Nancy said that she had noticed a photo album in the library. “It just occurred to me that it may contain a clue. I’d like to look at it again.”

  The club members followed Nancy into the large, wood-paneled room. The album lay on a table, and Nancy opened the first page.

  “Everybody in the pictures is mentioned by name!” Peg said in surprise. “Here are Julia and James Costello, and all their brothers and sisters.”

  “They must be the owners of the place,” Martie said.

  “How do you know?” Peg asked.

  “Because on the outside of the album it says ‘Property of Julia and James Costello.”’

  The book contained names of cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. “Apparently Mr. and Mrs. Costello had no children,” Nancy said.

  “Here’s a picture of Maria,” Peg pointed out. “It must have been taken a long time ago. She looks much younger in it.”

  Nancy flipped to another page. They came to a series of horses, each with a name and the word thoroughbred underneath.

  “They’re beautiful!” Martie exclaimed.

  As Nancy turned the next page she said, “Here’s a photograph of one of the horses with its groom. The horse is called Big Beauty, and the groom is Ben Wells.”

  Honey said she thought one of the persons in the album might be the ghost. “Perhaps we should memorize them all!”

  Her remark was met with great sighs.

  “Maybe only a few,” Nancy told her. “Did you notice the tiny d alongside some of the names? My guess is that it stands for deceased. If we eliminate those people, our list won’t be so long.”

  “The same applies to the horses,” Cathy added. She went back to the pages where the animals were shown. There was a small d alongside the name of each horse.

  “But the groom, Ben Wells, is apparently still living,” she pointed out. “We should ask Maria where he is, and we should talk to him.”

  When they finished looking at the album, Nancy suggested that they all go outdoors. “We also have the barn and the stable to investigate,” she said.

  The girls started with the huge barn, which still had hay in the loft. But there was nothing else in the building, so they went to the stables.

  “What a beautiful place!” exclaimed Karen, who was fond of horses and rode frequently. There were stalls on two sides of a wide aisle. “During bad winter weather the horses were probably exercised by being walked up and down the aisle,” she added.

  To the girls’ amazement the stalls had beautifully polished mahogany sides, and the floors were spotlessly clean except for a layer of dust. Each enclosure had a three-quarter high door, with a picture of a horse hanging on it. Karen admired the animals in the photographs.

  “Oh, here’s one that shows Big Beauty and Ben Wells,” she exclaimed.

  All the girls looked at the pictures, then inspected the whole place thoroughly. There was no clue to a ghost, but Peg found a trapdoor in the floor. There was no ring with whi
ch to pull it up, only a small opening.

  “It looks like a keyhole,” she remarked.

  Nancy took out her ring of keys and tried one after another. None fit.

  Since there was no way to raise the trapdoor, the club members decided to continue their search outside. They strolled around the grounds but saw nothing suspicious. Finally, Nancy suggested that they go back home and get ready to return that evening.

  She locked the big entrance gate, then the girls climbed into the car. On the way home they planned their evening’s strategy.

  It was decided that Cathy and Peg would watch the second and third floors of the house. Sue and Karen would take the first floor and nearby grounds, while Nancy, Honey, and Martie would observe the barn and stable.

  The sun was setting when Nancy went from house to house picking up the club members. Each girl carried a strong flashlight, a stout cane in case of an attack, and a whistle.

  One whistle blow would mean “I have seen something.” Followed by another blow, the message would come from Cathy and Peg. Followed by two blows, it would be from Sue and Karen, and if there was one long blast after the first short one, it would be from Nancy, Honey, and Martie.

  The girls reached the old estate in time to make their way to the designated posts before it was too dark to see where they were going. For nearly an hour there was no disturbance of any kind, and the club members wondered if they had come on a wild-goose chase.

  Suddenly, Cathy and Peg, who were huddled near the second-floor stairway, were startled by an agonizing cry from the third floor. They tiptoed upstairs in the darkness. Just as they reached the landing, the two girls heard the cry again.

  Quickly they turned on their strong flashlights and saw a man disappear through a door at the end of the hall! He closed it softly behind him, and there was a faint click. The girls rushed toward the door, but when Peg tried to open it, she realized that the man had locked it from the inside!

  “We’d better tell the others,” Cathy urged.

  Keeping their lights on, the girls ran downstairs to the first floor. Just then Karen and Sue blew their whistles.

  “Did you see the man?” Peg asked.

  “No,” Karen replied. “But we heard weird violin music. We flashed our lights around but couldn’t see anything. It was positively spooky!”

  “Where was it coming from?” Cathy asked.

  “The parlor.”

  The four rushed into the room but found nothing. Peg concluded that the sounds could have come from the fireplace, and shone her light up the chimney. But the chimney made a turn, and they could see nothing above.

  Cathy and Peg now told about the man who had disappeared through a door at the end of the third-floor hallway.

  “He must know a route of escape,” Karen said. “Let’s go down to the basement and see if there are stairs coming from the third floor. We might have missed them the first time.”

  They descended the kitchen stairway and flashed their lights around the basement but saw nothing until Karen beamed her light up the fireplace chimney.

  “Girls, look!” she cried out. “There’s a ladder fastened to one wall, and it goes all the way up! Obviously, this is where the man came down!”

  Karen and the others continued their hunt through the cellar. When they reached the room where the code had been printed on the wall, they were startled to see that it had been underlined twice with red crayon!

  “The ghost has been here!” Peg exclaimed. She and her friends looked at the markings with new interest. The upper crayoned line was straight, but at the right end of it, the line curved downward into two loops. The lower line looked like a picture of jagged lightning.

  Sue asked, “Do you suppose there’s a message in these lines?”

  The girls studied them for a while, then Karen had an inspiration. “The loops at the end of the top line form a B. The lower line looks like a series of Ws.”

  “Meaning,” Sue cried out, “that this code could have been written by Ben Wells!”

  While the four girls stared at the marks, Nancy, Honey, and Martie were having an adventure of their own. A mysterious light had suddenly appeared in the garden, showing a white figure swaying along the treetops and heading for the entrance gate. The three followed it excitedly, but after a few moments it disappeared.

  “This is where the man came down!” Karen cried out.

  Just then they heard a horse neigh in the stable. The girls rushed inside. There was no horse in sight!

  “The ghost again!” Honey said.

  Nancy dashed toward the trapdoor. It was wide open, and a man was descending into the darkness!

  On a hunch Nancy cried out, “Stop, Ben Wells! We’ve found you! You can’t play ghost any longer!”

  The man was so amazed at being called by name that he stood still. The three girls ran up to him, but Honey paused long enough to blow her whistle sharply, followed by a long blast.

  Karen, Peg, Sue, and Cathy heard the signal as they were coming out of the mansion. They practically flew toward the stable and gasped in surprise when they saw the trapped man.

  “How did you know my name?” he asked.

  Nancy replied, “We saw your picture in an album beside a horse named Big Beauty.”

  “And you’re the ghost!” Peg exclaimed. “We figured out those two red crayoned lines you put under the code you wrote. The top one forms a B, and underneath is a series of Ws. You’re Ben Wells!”

  “I didn’t think anybody would ever find out,” the groom said, hanging his head. He stepped up to the floor and closed the trapdoor. “I haven’t done any harm here,” he added. “Nobody can accuse me of that!”

  “You certainly scared a lot of people!” Nancy said. “Why?”

  “I’ve always loved this place. I worked here as a boy and later as a groom. Mr. and Mrs. Costello were very good to me, and I admit I was wrong in trying to prevent the place from being sold. But I wanted it for myself. So I played ghostly tricks to keep people away.”

  “How did you get in?” Sue questioned.

  “I have duplicate keys to everything in the mansion,” Wells replied. “Also to the barn and stable. When Mr. and Mrs. Costello became ill and had to go to the nursing home, I was dismissed. It broke my heart, and after a few days I decided to come back and live here by myself. But I was sure not to leave any food or clothes where people could find them.”

  Karen spoke up. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that the new owners might have horses and would need a groom?”

  Wells shrugged. “They might have their own. Why should they hire me?”

  He explained that he knew about the secret ladder in the chimney and the various underground hideouts. “There’s a series of tunnels beneath the mansion that lead to the different outbuildings. They’re really old. The Costellos did not build them, but I found the tunnels and pointed them out to my employers. They said I should keep the secret because visitors might get hurt in them.”

  Honey asked, “How about the shoe prints on the second floor? They don’t go anywhere!”

  Ben grinned. “There’s a hidden ladder in the second-floor ceiling. I climbed down, made a few prints, and went up again. You can’t tell where the ladder is because of the design on the paneled ceiling.”

  Sue asked Ben Wells how he knew about codes and how he did his various tricks.

  “My father was a magician,” the man replied. “I learned a lot of things from him. Some of the gadgets I used while playing ghost I built myself; others I bought, like the violin tape.”

  He paused momentarily, then asked, “Did you figure out the code?”

  “Yes, we did,” the girls replied.

  Ben Wells was not sure that they were telling the truth and asked them what it meant.

  “Don’t live here if you value your life, ”Honey said.

  Wells shook his head in amazement. “You ladies certainly are smart.” He sighed. “What are you going to do to me?”

  The c
lub members waited for Nancy to speak. She said, “Come with us to my car.”

  If Ben had any idea of resisting, he knew it was hopeless with seven strong, healthy girls watching him. He meekly went along with them. Nancy unlocked the entrance gate, and they let themselves out. At the car she used her new cell phone and contacted Chief McGinnis at police headquarters.

  Quickly she told him the Costello mystery had been solved. Would the chief please call her father and come to the estate with him at once? The officer promised to do so.

  While they were waiting, Ben said cheerfully, “How would you like to see a few sleight-of-hand tricks?”

  The girls told him they would, so Ben pulled several handkerchiefs from his pocket, knotted them, and rolled them in his hand. Presently, he plucked at the corner of one, and out came all the others, no longer tied together.

  “That’s great!” said Sue, and Ben did several other well-known tricks, like taking money out of Karen’s ear and turning a light on Honey’s shoes to make them appear to be green.

  Finally the groom looked up at the girls. “I take it you’re all amateur detectives. Would you like me to teach you some of the sleight-of-hand tricks? They may come in handy in your work.”

  Before the girls had a chance to answer, Chief McGinnis and Mr. Drew drove up. Everything was explained to them, and they decided to take Ben Wells back to headquarters for further questioning.

  As the car pulled away, Ben leaned out a window. “Any time you want to learn some tricks, get in touch with me!” he called.

  ACTIVITY

  Readers: Here’s another code for you to try to crack. The answer is on page 152. Good luck!

  E KSSH HIXIGXMZI QYWX PSSO JSV XLI YRYWYEP E GEWYEP KPERGI MW RSXPMOIPC XS XYVR YT ERC IZMHIRGI

  ANSWERS TO CODES

  Answer to code on page 50: A good detective absolutely never gives up.

  Answer to code on page 150: A good detective must look for the unusual. A casual glance is not likely to turn up any evidence.