Ocean Parkway, lined with its modern dwelling houses and new apartment buildings was as unlike Gravesend Avenue as anything could be. Still, the two were only a few blocks apart. The driver turned his cab down a side street, sure of his bearings; and Judy, watching, saw the sudden change. The boulevard with its lights and stream of traffic, then queer old Parkville, a village forgotten while Brooklyn grew up around it.
The police station looked all the more imposing in this setting. Two young policemen were already there, waiting beside the high desk and talking with the captain.
Sarah Glenn’s house was only a short distance away, and together they walked it. Soon they were turning down the unpaved end of the street that bordered the railroad cut.
“There it is!” Judy shivered a little and drew her coat closer as she pointed.
The house was dark and silent. The windows were black—black with an unfathomable blackness that must be within. Peter sensed Judy’s fear for he took her arm and guided her as they came up the broken walk.
On the steps Dale stopped and picked up a white flower.
“What can it mean?” Pauline whispered. “How would a rose get here?”
He shook his head. “It’s beyond me. What’s this?” He fingered a lavender ribbon that was still attached to the door.
“Looks as if there’d been a funeral here,” one of the police officers observed.
Both girls stood trembling as he banged and pounded on the door and then shouted a threat to the still house.
“Nobody home,” he turned and said. “Do you think it’s necessary to force our way in?”
“More than ever,” Judy replied. “We must see what’s in the tower!”
“Okay! Give me a hand, partner, and we’ll smash the door.”
Underneath the porch they found a beam which would serve their purpose. Peter and Dale helped the policemen, and soon the heavy door gave way and crashed into the empty house. A sickening, musty smell combined with the heady odor of flowers greeted them as they stepped inside.
“A funeral all right!” the policeman reiterated. “Get the perfume, don’t you? But everything’s cleared up—except.…” He and Judy had seen it at the same time but the policeman was the first to pick it up. “…this card.”
“Let me see it.”
Obligingly he handed it to the girl. She turned it over in her hand and passed it on to Dale. It read:
With deepest sympathy
Emily Grimshaw
“Do you know the party?” the other officer asked.
“My employer,” Judy replied simply.
The question in her mind, however, was less easily answered. Was Emily Grimshaw’s absence from her office explainable by this death? Whose death? If Emily Grimshaw had sent flowers certainly she must know.
The policemen were busy searching the house, and Judy and her three companions followed them. The rooms upstairs, like those on the first floor, were empty of furniture. But the tower room was found to open from a third floor bedroom. To their surprise, this room was completely furnished, even to bed coverings and pillows. A little kitchen adjoined it and there were evidences that food had recently been cooked there. An extra cot was made up in the hall.
So the poet and her brother had lived in their immense house and occupied only two rooms! Or three? They had yet to explore the tower. Peter Dobbs tried the door and found it locked.
“We’ll have to break this one, too,” the policemen said, and Dale offered to get the beam.
Pauline’s hand kept him. “Wait a minute,” she pleaded. “It’s a shame to spoil the door and maybe this key will fit.”
She took a queer brass key from her hand bag. Judy and Peter frankly stared. The policemen, though obviously doubting its usefulness, consented to try it. To their astonishment, it turned.
“Where did you find that key?” Dale questioned.
“In the pocket of Irene’s brown suit. I put it in my own hand bag for safe-keeping.”
“Rather suspected it fitted something, didn’t you?” he said sarcastically. “Well, to me it doesn’t prove a thing.”
“It does to me,” Judy put in, “although not what you think. This must have been Joy Holiday’s room when she was a child! And if Irene had the key surely Joy Holiday is related to her—perhaps her own mother!”
“It sounds like pretty sound figuring to me,”’ Peter agreed, flashing a look of boyish admiration in Judy’s direction.
Then, as the door swung open, they followed the policemen into the tower. Peter pushed a button and the light revealed a circular room with a gay panorama of nursery rhyme characters frolicking across the wall.
Upon closer inspection, however, the room was seen to be six-sided with shelves built into two of its corners. On one of these dolls and expensive toys were neatly arranged. Books and games for a somewhat older girl adorned the other shelf.
A curtained wardrobe concealed another corner, while a white cot bed, all freshly made, occupied the corner at the left of the door. The two remaining corners were cleverly camouflaged by concave mirrors with uneven distorting surfaces, such as are sometimes seen in amusement park funny houses. In spite of Judy’s anxiety, she could not suppress a smile when the two policemen walked by them.
So this was the room where the poet had locked Joy Holiday! Did she think those silly mirrors and a roomful of books and toys could make up for a lack of freedom? Judy, who had always been allowed to choose what friends she liked, could easily see why the poet’s daughter had wanted to run away—or vanish as people said she had done. How strange it all was and how thrilling to be standing in the very room where Irene’s mother had stood twenty years before!
“It’s so quiet and peaceful here,” Judy said. “Nothing very terrible could have happened in this pretty room.”
She had momentarily forgotten that the whole lower structure of it had been burned away, that she had seen a tall yellow specter peering out of its window.
Peter, however, remembered the fantastic story Judy had told him. It did not surprise the young law student that no one was in the tower. He and the two policemen immediately set about looking for clues to Irene’s whereabouts. But it was not until Dale drew back the wardrobe curtain and they found her yellow dress and jacket hanging there that they became truly alarmed. Now they knew, past any doubt, that Irene had visited her grandmother’s house. There had been a funeral! Even if it had been Sarah Glenn’s, Irene might have been with her when she died. Alone with a crazy woman…timid little Irene!
It was a sober moment for all of them.
“That girl’s been held captive all right,” one of the policemen said in a voice more troubled than one would expect of an officer of the law. “It looks as if we’ve found the evidence right here.”
He stood examining the folds of her yellow dress. It appeared to have been hanging in the wardrobe for some time. Other clothes were there, too, but the full skirts and puffed sleeves were in the style of twenty years ago. On a shelf above them were two or three queer little hats, all decked out with feathers and flowers. Irene would have laughed at them. She would have tried them on and posed before the comical mirrors. Judy wondered if she had done that.
Someone, apparently, had tried on one of the aprons. It was a simple gingham affair such as girls used to wear to protect dainty dresses, and it had been thrown carelessly over a chair. When Judy made a move to hang it up she was warned to leave everything exactly as it was.
“If this turns out to be a murder case,” one of the policemen said, “this bedroom may contain important evidence.” He turned to Dale who still held the rose he had found on the steps. “That flower proves that the funeral must have been held today. It’s still sweet,” he continued, making a grimace as he sniffed it. “We’ll get together all the facts on the case and have the place watched. If this man, Jasper Crosby, returns ton
ight there’ll be a policeman here to nab him. A general alarm will be dispatched to our radio cars, and we’ll find out whose funeral it was, too, and let you know first thing in the morning.”
“Oh, if you only would,” Judy cried gratefully. “Perhaps you can find out from my employer. She’s decided to take a vacation for some unknown reason but you may be able to locate her here.”
She gave them Emily Grimshaw’s home address. Peter Dobbs, who had taken a keen interest in the legal aspect of the case, jotted it down, too. Much to Dale’s discomfiture, he kept talking about Irene.
“If we find her,” he declared, “this may be my big opportunity. She would contest the will, of course, and I might be able to help her then.”
“If we find her,” Dale repeated doubtfully.
Later Peter gave Judy the address and telephone number of the hotel where he was staying. He would be either there or at the police station in case she needed him.
“If I do call you,” Judy promised, with an attempt at lightness, “you may be sure that I’m in trouble because it’s really your place to call me.”
CHAPTER XXI
ANOTHER JULIET
No matter what happens the trivialities of life must go on. Food must be cooked and eaten, no matter how dry it tastes. Work must be done. Judy knew that and dragged her tired body out of bed. She dressed and went down into the kitchen where Mary made coffee and brought out the toaster. Pauline had left for school, she said. Would Judy mind the toast herself?
She nodded, staring at the coffeepot and wondering if Irene would ever sit across the breakfast table and drink coffee with her again. She let the toast burn and threw it away. Then she put on a second piece, watched it until it turned golden brown and flipped it over.
The doorbell rang!
Always, when the doorbell rang, there came that sudden exaltation. It might be news of Irene! Peter might have found her! With each new disappointment Judy’s hopes for Irene’s safe return sank lower.
This time it was not Peter. It was Arthur Farringdon-Pett, the young pilot-engineer, who owned his own airplane and had taken Judy for a never-to-be-forgotten ride far above the beautiful St. Lawrence River. Judy’s brother, Horace, stood in the doorway beside him, and both of them looked as if they had not slept for a week. Horace’s usually sleek hair was disordered and Arthur needed a shave. He was the first to speak.
“Any news of Irene?”
“Didn’t you bring any?” she asked. And before they could answer she went on saying how sure she was that they must have news or they wouldn’t have flown all the way to New York. She could tell they had been flying as they were still dressed for it.
“We were in too much of a hurry to bother changing these togs at the hangar where I left the plane,” Arthur explained.
“That’s all right,” Judy murmured, trying to shake off the queer feeling she had that he was some stranger.
“We do have news,” Horace told her finally, “but, I’m sorry to say, it’s not news of Irene.”
“What is it then?”
“News of her mother. We thought it might help you find her. I mean Irene. Her mother, of course, is dead.”
“I knew that,” Judy said. “But she has relatives. I’m sure your news will help me.” Taking their things, she invited the boys to sit down and share her breakfast while they told her. She poured out the extra coffee Mary had made and pushed her brother into a chair. Arthur found his own and soon all three were seated beside the table. The boys explained their delay.
They had expected to arrive a day earlier but when Horace and Honey called at the sanitarium they found that Mr. Lang was gone. Immediately, Horace telephoned Arthur who agreed to help search for him in his plane. It would have been easy to find him if, as they expected, he had taken the straight road for New York. But his crippled legs gave out and, toward evening, they found him helpless in the edge of a deep wood. Here, while they were waiting for the ambulance to take him back to the hospital, Mr. Lang told his story.
When Tom Lang was a young man, only eighteen or twenty, he had worked as a chauffeur for a wealthy family in Brooklyn. The daughter of the house gave parties, a great many of them, and after the parties Tom would drive the whole crowd of young people home. He never paid much attention to them until, one night, a new girl came to a party. She was different from all the others. She had glamour, radiance, all the qualities a man wants in a girl. But the young chauffeur dared not hope that she would have any use for him. She only came to the one party—like a princess in her golden dress and slippers. He took her home and remembered the house. After that he would drive past it, always hoping that she would see him.
And one day she did! She waved to him from the tower window. Finally he understood, from the motion of her hand, that she wanted to come down—and couldn’t. The door locked from the outside, and her tiny key was of no use from within. Clutching it in her hand, she leaned farther and farther out of the tower window.
Just like the princess in Tom’s old fairy book. He would be the brave knight and rescue her. There was a rope in the car. It had been used as a towing rope but would now serve a nobler purpose.
He swung one end of it up to the tower; he saw the slim white hand reach out and grasp it, the lithe body throw itself over the window sill and descend—slowly, slowly. She was almost to the ground when the rope came loose from where she had fastened it.
She fell!
Quick as a flash, Tom Lang caught her in his strong young arms. That same day he made her his bride. She lived just long enough to bear him a little daughter, the image of herself. Heartbroken, Irene’s father had never spoken of her. But he had saved her golden wedding dress and on Irene’s seventeenth birthday sent it to her with a letter explaining his gift and enclosing the key to her tower room. His Annie had been just seventeen.
“Romantic, wasn’t it?” Arthur asked after Horace had told the story as only a reporter could tell it.
Judy, who had listened to it all without making any comment, admitted that it was the most romantic true story she had ever heard.
“But Mr. Lang didn’t give Irene the name or address,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “He only sent the key to her mother’s room because he wanted her to have it as a remembrance. In fact, he told so little in his letter that it seems impossible—unthinkable—that she could have found her grandmother—”
“Unless she found the same description somewhere else,” Judy interrupted.
“Yes, but where?”
“In her grandmother’s poems. She and I read them together.”
Judy did not add that the manuscripts were now missing and that she felt almost certain that Irene had taken them to help locate her relatives. That knowledge was confined to four persons: Pauline, Dale Meredith, Peter and herself.
The fact that Irene’s grandmother wrote poems surprised Arthur. He had heard the popular song, Golden Girl, but had never connected it with Irene, probably, because he had never seen her in her mother’s golden dress.
“And you say the poet’s name is Glenn?”
“It’s really Holiday,” Judy explained. “She wrote under a nom de plume.”
But the boys couldn’t remember ever hearing the name Joy Holiday. Mr. Lang had called his wife simply Annie.
When Judy had finished a complete account of the police search through Sarah Glenn’s house they were more puzzled than ever. But they appeared to be simply puzzled—not alarmed.
“We’ll find out all about it,” Horace promised, “when we find Irene.”
It was good to hear them saying “when.” It gave Judy new courage. She would need courage to get through that day. She told them her plans. First they were to get in touch with the police to learn what they could of the funeral that had been held in Sarah Glenn’s house. Judy then suggested that Horace and Arthur call on Dale Meredith and ask his advice whi
le she spent a few hours in Emily Grimshaw’s office.
“I’ll be of more use there than anywhere else,” she said. “Besides, it’s my job and I’m being paid for it. Irene comes first, of course. But the police are doing all they can, and if I could see Emily Grimshaw and talk with her—well, I might find out some things that even the police don’t know. We discovered a card on the floor when we searched the poet’s house. It showed that my employer must have attended the funeral.”
Both boys agreed that Emily Grimshaw’s office was the place for Judy. Knowing that there must be stacks of papers for her to read and correct, Judy even consented to their plan that she go to the office at once and await news of Irene there. They would go on to the Parkville police station and telephone her. Peter had gone there and they might meet him.
After giving them explicit directions, Judy walked with them as far as the subway station at Union Square. There they separated, Judy taking the uptown train while the boys boarded an express for Brooklyn.
Horace turned to Arthur and spoke above the roar of the train.
“What puzzles me is how Irene found that house with nothing but a few crazy verses to go by, and I think that Judy knows if only she would tell.”
“She certainly knows something more,” he agreed, “but I’m not worrying. Judy is on the square.”
“I believe she is,” Horace replied, “but what about Irene?”
CHAPTER XXII
TRAPPED
Just as she had expected, Judy found plenty of work waiting for her. The clerk at the hotel desk gave her a pile of manuscripts left by hopeful young authors. She glanced through these, waiting for the telephone to ring. All of them seemed inexcusably bad. Why, she wondered, did so many people waste their time trying to write when they had no idea of plot construction or character development?… Why didn’t the telephone ring? Peter must have had time to reach the police station.
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