The Hidden Staircase

by Carolyn Keene

  “I guess it’s hopeless, Helen,” she said. “I’m going back to Hancock and report everything to the police there. I’ll ask them to get in touch with Captain Rossland and Captain McGinnis.”

  “Oh, I hope they capture Gomber!” Helen said. “He’s such a horrible man! He ought to be put in jail just for his bad manners!”

  Smiling, Nancy turned the car and headed back for Hancock. A woman passer-by gave her directions to police headquarters and a few moments later Nancy parked in front of it. The girls went inside the building. Nancy told the officer in charge who they were, then gave him full details of the recent chase.

  The officer listened attentively, then said, “I’ll telephone your River Heights captain first.”

  “And please alert your own men and the State Police,” Nancy requested.

  He nodded. “Don’t worry, Miss Drew, I’ll follow through from here.” He picked up his phone.

  Helen urged Nancy to leave immediately. “While you were talking, I kept thinking about Gomber’s visit to Twin Elms. I have a feeling something may have happened there. You remember what a self-satisfied look Gomber had on his face when we saw him come out of the driveway.”

  “You’re right,” Nancy agreed. “We’d better hurry back there.”

  It was a long drive back to Twin Elms and the closer the girls go to it, the more worried they became. “Miss Flora was already ill,” Helen said tensely, “and Gomber’s visit may have made her worse.”

  On reaching the house, the front door was opened by Aunt Rosemary, who looked pale.

  “I’m so glad you’ve returned,” she said. “My mother is much worse. She has had a bad shock. I’m waiting for Dr. Morrison.”

  Mrs. Hayes’ voice was trembling and she found it hard to go on. Nancy said sympathetically, “We know Nathan Gomber was here. We’ve been chasing his car, but lost it. Did he upset Miss Flora?”

  “Yes. I was out of the house about twenty minutes talking with the gardener and didn’t happen to see Gomber drive up. The cleaning woman, Lillie, let him in. Of course she didn’t know who he was and thought he was all right. When she finally came outside to tell me, I had walked way over to the wisteria arbor at the far end of the grounds.

  “In the meantime, Gomber went upstairs. He began talking to Mother about selling the mansion. When she refused, he threatened her, saying that if she did not sign, all kinds of dreadful things would happen to me and to both you girls.

  “Poor mother couldn’t hold out any longer. At this moment Lillie, who couldn’t find me, returned and went upstairs. She actually witnessed Mother’s signature on the contract of sale and signed her own name to it. So Gomber has won!”

  Aunt Rosemary sank into the chair by the telephone and began to cry. Nancy and Helen put their arms around her, but before either could say a word of comfort, they heard a car drive up in front of the mansion. At once Mrs. Hayes dried her eyes and said, “It must be Dr. Morrison.”

  Nancy opened the door and admitted the physician. The whole group went upstairs where Miss Flora lay staring at the ceiling like someone in a trance. She was murmuring:

  “I shouldn’t have signed! I shouldn’t have sold Twin Elms!”

  Dr. Morrison took the patient’s pulse and listened to her heartbeat with a stethoscope. A few moments later he said, “Mrs. Turnbull, won’t you please let me take you to the hospital?”

  “Not yet,” said Miss Flora stubbornly. She smiled wanly. “I know I’m ill. But I’m not going to get better any quicker in the hospital than I am right here. I’ll be moving out of Twin Elms soon enough and I want to stay here as long as I can. Oh, why did I ever sign my name to that paper?”

  As an expression of defeat came over the physician’s face, Nancy moved to the bedside. “Miss Flora,” she said gently, “maybe the deal will never go through. In the first place, perhaps we can prove that you signed under coercion. If that doesn’t work, you know it takes a long time to have a title search made on property. By then, maybe Gomber will change his mind.”

  “Oh, I hope you’re right,” the elderly woman replied, squeezing Nancy’s hand affectionately.

  The girls left the room, so that Dr. Morrison could examine the patient further and prescribe for her. They decided to say nothing of their morning’s adventure to Miss Flora, but at luncheon they gave Aunt Rosemary a full account.

  “I’m almost glad you didn’t catch Gomber.” Mrs. Hayes exclaimed. “He might have harmed you both.”

  Nancy said she felt sure that the police of one town or the other would soon capture him, and then perhaps many things could be explained. “For one, we can find out why he was turning his lights off and on. I have a hunch he was signaling to someone and that the person was hidden in Riverview Manor!”

  “You may be right,” Aunt Rosemary replied.

  Helen suddenly leaned across the table. “Do you suppose our ghost thief hides out there?”

  “I think it’s very probable,” Nancy answered. “I’d like to do some sleuthing in that old mansion.”

  “You’re not going to break in?” Helen asked, horrified.

  Her friend smiled. “No, Helen, I’m not going to evade the law. I’ll go to the realtor who is handling the property and ask him to show me the place. Want to come along?”

  Helen shivered a little but said she was game, “Let’s do it this afternoon.”

  “Oh dear.” Aunt Rosemary gave an anxious sigh. “I don’t know whether or not I should let you. It sounds very dangerous to me.”

  “If the realtor is with us, we should be safe,” Helen spoke up. Her aunt then gave her consent, and added that the realtor, Mr. Dodd, had an office on Main Street.

  Conversation ceased for a few moments as the threesome finished luncheon. They had just left the table when they heard a loud thump upstairs.

  “Oh, goodness!” Aunt Rosemary cried out. “I hope Mother hasn’t fallen!”

  She and the girls dashed up the stairs. Miss Flora was in bed, but she was trembling like a leaf in the wind. She pointed a thin, white hand toward the ceiling.

  “It was up in the attic! Sombody’s there!”

  CHAPTER XVII

  Through the Trap Door

  “LET’S find out who’s in the attic!” Nancy urged as she ran from the room, Helen at her heels.

  “Mother, will you be all right if I leave you a few moments?” Aunt Rosemary asked. “I’d like to go with the girls.”

  “Of course. Run along.”

  Nancy and Helen were already on their way to the third floor. They did not bother to go noiselessly, but raced up the center of the creaking stairs. Reaching the attic, they lighted two of the candles and looked around. They saw no one, and began to look behind trunks and pieces of furniture. Nobody was hiding.

  “And there’s no evidence,” said Nancy, “that the alarming thump was caused by a falling box or carton.”

  “There’s only one answer,” Helen decided. “The ghost was here. But how did he get in?”

  The words were scarcely out of her mouth when the group heard a man’s spine-chilling laugh. It had not come from downstairs.

  “He—he’s back of the wall!” Helen gasped fearfully. Nancy agreed, but Aunt Rosemary said, “That laugh could have come from the roof.”

  Helen looked at her aunt questioningly. “You —you mean that the ghost swings onto the roof from a tree and climbs in here somehow?”

  “I think it very likely,” her aunt replied. “My father once told my mother that there’s a trap door to the roof. I never saw it and I forgot hawing heard of it until this minute.”

  Holding their candles high, the girls examined every inch of the peaked, beamed ceiling. The rafters were set close together with wood panels between them.

  “I see something that might be a trap door!” Nancy called out presently from near one end of the attic. She showed the others where some short panels formed an almost perfect square.

  “But how does it open?” Helen asked. “There’s no
knob or hook or any kind of gadget to grab hold of.”

  “It might have been removed, or rusted off,” Nancy said.

  She asked Helen to help her drag a high wooden box across the floor until it was directly under the suspected section and Nancy stepped up onto it. Focusing her light on the four edges of the panels, the young sleuth finally discovered a piece of metal wedged between two of the planks.

  “I think I see a way to open this,” Nancy said, “but I’ll need some tools.”

  “I’ll get the ones I found before,” Helen offered.

  She hurried downstairs and procured them. Nancy tried one tool after another, but none would work; they were either too wide to fit into the crack or they would not budge the piece of metal either up or down.

  Nancy looked down at Aunt Rosemary. “Do you happen to have an old-fashioned buttonhook?” she asked. “That might be just the thing for this job.”

  “Indeed I have—in fact, Mother has several of them. I’ll get one.”

  Aunt Rosemary was gone only a few minutes. Upon her return, she handed Nancy a long, silver. handled buttonhook inscribed with Mrs. Turn* bull’s initials. “Mother used this to fasten her high button shoes. She has a smaller matching one for glove buttons. In olden days,” she told the girls, “no lady’s gloves were the pull-on type. They all had buttons.”

  Nancy inserted the long buttonhook into the ceiling crack and almost at once was able to grasp the piece of metal and pull it down. Now she began tugging on it. When nothing happened, Helen climbed up on the box beside her friend and helped pull.

  Presently there was a groaning, rasping noise and the square section of the ceiling began to move downward. The girls continued to yank on the metal piece and slowly a folded ladder at tached to the wood became visible.

  “The trap door’s up there!” Helen cried gleefully, looking at the roof. “Nancy, you shall have the honor of being the first one to look out.”

  Nancy smiled. “And, you mean, capture the ghost?”

  As the ladder was straightened out, creaking with each pull, and set against the roof, Nancy felt sure, however, that the ghost did not use it. The ladder made entirely too much noisel I She also doubted that he was on the roof, but it would do no harm to look. She might pick up a clue of some sort!

  “Well, here 1 go,” Nancy said, and started to ascend the rungs.

  When she reached the top, Nancy unfastened the trap door and shoved it upward. She poked her head outdoors and looked around. No one was in sight on the roof, but in the center stood a circular wooden lookout. It occurred to Nancy that possibly the ghost might be hiding in it!

  She called down to Aunt Rosemary and Helen to look up at the attic ceiling for evidence of an opening into the tower. They returned to Nancy in half a minute to report that they could find no sign of another trap door.

  “There probably was one in olden days,” said Aunt Rosemary, “but it was closed up.”

  A sudden daring idea came to the girl detective. “I’m going to crawl over to that lookout and see if anybody’s in it!” she told the two below.

  Before either of them could object, she started to crawl along the ridgepole above the wooden shingled sides of the deeply slanting roof. Helen had raced up the ladder, and now watched her friend fearfully.

  “Be careful, Nancy!” she warned.

  Nancy was doing just that. She must keep a perfect balance or tumble down to almost certain death. Halfway to the tower, the daring girl began to feel that she had been foolhardy, but she was determined to reach her goal.

  “Only five more feet to go,” Nancy told herself presently.

  With a sigh of relief, she reached the tower and pulled herself up. It was circular and had openings on each side. She hoked in. No “ghost”!

  Nancy decided to step inside the opening and examine the floor. She set one foot down, but immediately the boards, rotted from the weather, gave way beneath her.

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t put my whole weight on it,” she thought thankfully.

  “Do you see anything?” Helen called.

  “Not a thing. This floor hasn’t been in use for a long time.”

  “Then the ghost didn’t come in by way of the roof,” Helen stated.

  Nancy nodded in agreement. “The only places left to look are the chimneys,” the young sleuth told her friend. “I’ll check them.”

  There were four of these and Nancy crawled to each one in turn. She looked inside but found nothing to suggest that the ghost used any of them for entry.

  Balancing herself against the last chimney,. Nancy surveyed the countryside around her. What a beautiful and picturesque panorama it was, she thought! Not far away was a lazy little river, whose waters sparkled in the sunlight. The surrounding fields were green and sprinkled with patches of white daisies.

  Nancy looked down on the grounds of Twin Elms and tried in her mind to reconstruct the original landscaping.

  “That brick walk to the next property must have had a lovely boxwood hedge at one time,” she said to herself.

  Her gaze now turned to Riverview Manor. The grounds there were overgrown with weeds and several shutters were missing from the house. Suddenly Nancy’s attention was drawn to one of the uncovered windowpanes. Did she see a light moving inside?

  It disappeared a moment later and Nancy could not be sure. Pci haps the sun shining on the glass had created an optical illusion.

  “Still, somebody just might be in that house,” the young sleuth thought. “The sooner I get over there and scc what I can find out, the better! If the ghost is hiding out there, maybe he uses some underground passage from one of the outbuildings on the property.”

  She crawled cautiously back to the trap door and together the girls closed it. Aunt Rosemary had already gone downstairs to take care of her mother.

  Nancy told Helen what she thought she had just seen in the neighboring mansion. “I’ll change my clothes right away. Then let’s go see Mr. Dodd, the realtor broker for Riverview Manor.”

  A half hour later the two girls walked into the real-estate office. Mr. Dodd himself was there and Nancy asked him about looking at Riverview Manor.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” he said, “but the house has just been sold.”

  Nancy was stunned. She could see all her plans crumbling into nothingness. Then a thought came to her. Perhaps the new owner would not object if she looked around, anyway.

  “Would you mind telling me, Mr. Dodd, who purchased Riverview Manor?”

  “Not at all,” the realtor replied. “A man named Nathan Gomber.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  A Confession

  NANCY DREW’s face wore such a disappointed look that Mr. Dodd, the realtor, said kindly, “Don’t take it so hard, miss. I don’t think you’d be particularly interested in Riverview Manor. It’s really not in very good condition. Besides, you’d need a pile of money to fix that place up.”

  Without commenting on his statement, Nancy asked, “Couldn’t you possibly arrange for me to see the inside of the mansion?”

  Mr. Dodd shook his head. “I’m afraid Mr. Gomber wouldn’t like that.”

  Nancy was reluctant to give up. Why, her father might even be a prisoner in that very house! “Of course I can report my suspicion to the police,” the young sleuth thought.

  She decided to wait until morning. Then, if there was still no news of Mr. Drew, she would pass along the word to Captain Rossland.

  Mr. Dodd’s telephone rang. As he answered it, Nancy and Helen started to leave his office. But he immediately waved them back.

  “The call is from Chief Rossland, Miss Drew,” he said. “He phoned Twin Elms and learned you were here. He wants to see you at once.”

  “Thank you,” said Nancy, and the girls left.

  They hurried to police headquarters, wondering why the officer wanted to speak to Nancy.

  “Oh, if only it’s news of Dad,” she exclaimed fervently. “But why didn’t he get in touch with me himself?
”

  “I don’t want to be a killjoy,” Helen spoke up. “But maybe it’s not about your father at all. Perhaps they’ve caught Nathan Gomber.”

  Nancy parked in front of headquarters and the two girls hurried inside the building. Captain Rossland was expecting them and they were immediately ushered into his office. Nancy introduced Helen Corning.

  “I won’t keep you in suspense,” the officer said, watching Nancy’s eager face. “We have arrested Samuel Greenman!”

  “The crinkly-eared man?” Helen asked.

  “That’s right,” Captain Rossland replied. “Thanks to your tip about the used car, Miss Drew, our men had no trouble at all locating him.”

  The officer went on to say, however, that the prisoner refused to confess that he had had anything to do with Mr. Drew’s disappearance. “Furthermore, Harry the taxi driver—we have him here -insists that he cannot positively iden. tify Greenman as one of the passengers in his cab. We believe Harry is scared that Greenman’s pals will beat him up or attack members of his family.”

  “Harry did tell me,” Nancy put in, “that his passenger had threatened harm to his family unless he forgot all about what he had seen.”

  “That proves our theory,” Captain Rossland stated with conviction. “Miss Drew, we think you can help the police.”

  “I’ll be glad to. How?”

  Captain Rossland smiled. “You may not know it, but you’re a very persuasive young lady. I be. lieve that you might be able to get information out of both Harry and Greenman, where we nave failed.”

  After a moment’s thought, Nancy rcplied modestly, “I’ll be happy to try, but on one condition.” She grinned at the officer, “I must talk to these men alone.”

  “Request granted.” Captain Rossland smiled. He added that he and Helen would wait outside and he would have Harry brought in.

  “Good luck,” said Helen as she and the captain left the room.