Perfect Plot (12 page)

“A killer?” Vanessa repeated, looking surprised. “Do you mean it was Bill, and not Erika, who killed Maxine? But why?”

Nancy told the others about the strange conversation she and George had overheard through the heating duct on Friday night and about the implied threat in Maxine's comment to Bill about a taped call from Dorothea. “She obviously knew that he had been stealing from Dorothea,” Nancy concluded. “Maybe she also guessed that he had stolen the figurines. That meant she was a terrible danger to him, so he got rid of her. I imagine he found Erika's scarf somewhere and used it to frame her.”

Professor Coining cleared his throat. “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “That can't possibly be right.”

“What!” Patrick exclaimed. “What are you saying?”

“Am I correct in saying that Maxine was murdered not long before breakfast yesterday?” the professor continued, addressing Nancy.

“That's right,” Nancy confirmed. “Sometime around eight o'clock.”

“Then Bill Denton did
not
kill her. I can give him an ironclad alibi.”

The room seemed to explode as everybody started talking at once. Nancy was just as shocked as the others. She waited for the hubbub to die down, then said, “I'd like to hear about it, Professor.”

“Well, I am a bit of an insomniac, and yesterday morning I awoke at four or so and could not get back to sleep,” he began. “Finally, at around five-thirty, I came downstairs to get a glass of milk. In the kitchen I found Bill, making himself a sandwich.”

“I wondered who'd made that mess in the kitchen,” Kate murmured.

“He seemed preoccupied,” the professor continued. “I guessed that he needed something to distract him, and so, I confess, did I. I proposed a few hands of gin rummy. We returned to my room, where we chatted and played cards until after eight-thirty, when we came down together to breakfast.”

“Let me get this straight,” Nancy said. “Are you telling us that you and Bill were together every single moment from about five-thirty until after eight-thirty?”

“That's correct,” Professor Coining replied with an emphatic nod. “He could not possibly have murdered Maxine Treitler.”

Nancy felt her heart sink. Maxine's murderer
was still at large—and probably in that very room.

In her mind she tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together with what she knew. If Bill didn't kill Maxine, then the murder—and possibly the threat she and George had overheard—wasn't at all connected to the theft.

George interrupted Nancy's thoughts after a few minutes. Looking up, Nancy saw that Patrick was standing with her. “We'd like to go play a few games of tennis. We'll be back right after to help solve this case. Is that okay?”

Nancy didn't see any point in both of them being indoors and stewing. “Go on ahead,” she told George. “I'll see you later.”

Turning her mind back to Maxine's murder, Nancy thought of the scarf and the shoe print in the secret passageway. The police had tied both to Erika, so why did Nancy doubt Erika was the killer?

Nancy thrummed her fingers on the chair arm. If only she had more to go on!

On an impulse, she jumped to her feet. Making an excuse to the others, she left the living room and went up to her room. She grabbed a flashlight and went into the closet to the secret door. If Erika had gotten to Maxine's room through the passages, then so could she. Maybe she had missed some important evidence.

The room that Maxine had occupied was four rooms down, on the opposite side of the hall. The passage from Nancy's room led down a steep flight of stairs, then up another and along a narrow hall. Nancy's first try brought her out in a closet with two tweed jackets. It was obviously Professor Coining's room. Closing the secret panel, she tried again.

Nancy was approaching the second door when her flashlight beam fell on a folded sheet of paper on the floor. Was this something Lieutenant Kitridge's officers had missed? Perhaps they hadn't ventured this far into the secret corridors.

She picked it up and held it in the beam of her flashlight. It was a note, with Dorothea Burden's name printed at the top.

I am speaking to you from beyond the grave. I cannot bear to share what I know with anyone while I am alive, but I don't dare let this knowledge die with me. This “novel” will tell you, and many others, the terrible truth that I have discovered. No one else knows what it contains. Kate does not even know it exists. I sent my dictation tapes secretly to a typing service in another city, and you are holding the only copy of the manuscript. Read it, then decide what you must do with it.

Dorothea Burden

Nancy stared blindly at the note. Dorothea's manuscript had revealed a “terrible truth” of some sort. Maxine had read it and died. Was it because she had learned that terrible truth? What kind of secret would inspire murder?

The answer had to be in the manuscript, Nancy realized—and the manuscript was missing.

Nancy leaned against a beam, trying to piece together all she knew about the book. Erika had admitted taking it from Maxine's room. Then, according to her, it had vanished from her room. Nancy had no way of being sure Erika was telling the truth. Without seeing the manuscript, she had no way of knowing if it implicated Erika—or someone else—in a crime.

As Nancy read through the letter again, she was struck by a sentence. Dorothea had recorded the text of the book, then had a typing service transcribe the tapes. What if the tapes were still around somewhere?

Her pulse racing, Nancy hurried back to her room. She grabbed her shoulder bag and put the flashlight in it. Seeing George's portable cassette player on the dresser, she took that, too. If she found Dorothea's tapes, she wanted to be prepared.

Nancy looked for and found Kate in the dining room, overseeing the setup for the buffet lunch. “I hope we can manage to reschedule the conference,”
she told Nancy. “Maybe for next month sometime. But I don't know. After all that's happened, people probably think that Mystery Mansion is jinxed.”

“That'll just add to its charm,” Nancy assured her. Turning the conversation to Dorothea Burden's books, she asked, “How did Dorothea work? Did she write the books out herself, or dictate them to you, or what?”

“When I first came to work for her, she typed everything herself, then revised it in pencil and gave me the corrected sheets to retype,” Kate replied. “Sometimes we went through three or four drafts that way. But after her husband died and she became ill, she didn't have the strength to keep that up. Her last two books were dictated into a tape recorder.”

“Really?” Nancy said. “Did you save the tapes? That might be an interesting feature for the museum, a chance to hear Dorothea reading—I mean, writing—her work.”

“Good idea,” Kate said, nodding thoughtfully. “I've got an entire file drawer stacked with cassettes. I've been meaning to go through and catalog them, but I haven't had a chance yet. Would you like to listen to one?”

Nancy tried to hide her excitement. “Why, yes, if it's no trouble.”

“Not at all,” Kate told her. “You know the
little file room off Dorothea's study? Look in the top drawer of the right-hand file cabinet. There's a tape player on the desk. Please be careful. Those tapes are irreplaceable.”

“I will,” Nancy promised.

Moments later she was looking in dismay at the dozens of tape cassettes in the file drawer. She picked up one and read the label: Memos, Letters Oct-Nov. Another said Notes for Memoirs. Still another was marked Danger Chaps 12-16.

Taking them out one by one, Nancy stacked the tapes on the top of the cabinet, ordering them as best she could. Some were labeled in ways she couldn't make out.

“Some of these aren't even labeled at all,” Nancy muttered to herself. “This is hopeless!”

Then she noticed that several tapes were marked CHI, CH2, and so on. She had been reading CH as an abbreviation for chapter. But the title of the missing book was
The Crooked Heart
—CH! She grabbed the first of the marked tapes, inserted it into the player, and put on the headphones. Holding her breath, she pressed the Play button.

“The Crooked Heart, Chapter One. Why should he be rich, while I am poor?” said the voice of an elderly woman. “He is old and used up, but I have all of life before me. He is all that stands in my way. I would smash him with a
hammer or throw him from a high window tomorrow, but then they would punish me. Punish me, for daring to claim what should be mine!

“But I am clever, sly, cunning. When I have carried out my plan, no one will know. No one will suspect. Why should they? An old man, an old
rich
man, dies a natural death. He leaves everything to his sick, dying wife, who has only one relative in the world. It happens every day. And it will happen again, very soon, in this house.”

Nancy pushed the Stop button and stared down at the recorder. What was this about? A wealthy, old man and a young person who planned to kill him for his money. Maxine had said that the book was a fictionalized version of a real crime, Nancy recalled. But whose crime, and against whom?

Suddenly an image flashed in Nancy's mind of the portrait of Dorothea's husband in the living room. What was it that Vanessa had told her? That he had been in good shape, that no one had expected him to die as suddenly as he did. Yes, that was it. With him gone, there was only Dorothea, who was quite frail.

And Patrick.

That was it! Dorothea had somehow learned that her nephew, her only living relative, was responsible for the death of her husband. Perhaps she'd been unable to prove it, so she had
found this way of punishing him for his crime—writing a book that everyone who knew him would understand.

Why hadn't she thought of Patrick before? In her mind, Nancy saw Patrick in his purple and green running suit gathering the scattered pages from the ground and handing them back to Erika. He must have recognized the book and then stolen it from Erika's room! By now he had probably destroyed it, not realizing that the book existed on tape as well.

Nancy stood up, gathered the
CH
cassettes, and hid them behind a row of Dorothea's books in the bookcase. She didn't dare risk taking them with her. Next she went to a window and looked out at the tennis court. Patrick and George were still engrossed in their game. She was afraid Patrick might suspect something if she interrupted them. There was no reason to think he'd hurt George, since he didn't realize Nancy was on to him.

Nancy hurried upstairs and set to work on the locked door of Patrick's room. After several minutes the lock clicked open, and she slipped inside.

The first thing she noticed was that the room smelled faintly of smoke. She crossed to the ornate fireplace and knelt down to examine the grate. It was clean
—too
clean. Someone had done a careful job of sweeping away every speck
of ash from the fireplace. Nancy thought for a moment, then reached up and groped around inside the lowest part of the flue. As she had hoped, there was a smoke ledge, put there to stop smoke from blowing back into the room. And caught on the smoke ledge . . .

The blackened fragment of paper was no more than an inch across, but she could still make out the typed letters
ed Heart.

“Crooked Heart!” Nancy crowed softly. Patrick must have burned the manuscript in this fireplace, then swept up the ashes. Nancy hoped that enough ashes remained for the forensic scientists to reconstruct parts of the manuscript. They would be swarming over this room as soon as she told Lieutenant Kitridge what she had learned.

Something warned her—a subtle change in the quality of the light or a faint sound—that someone was behind her. She started to whirl around, but before she could, an arm wrapped itself around her neck in a choke hold. The pressure on her carotid artery was agonizing.

Nancy tried desperately to free herself. She clawed and tore at the arm with both hands, but the pressure only grew stronger. A red haze spread in front of her eyes. Then the room went dark.

N
ANCY'S THROAT
ached horribly. Her left knee hurt, and something was digging into her back. She had a constant buzzing in her ears and a throbbing pain above each temple.

Nancy opened her eyes, then snapped them shut again. A bare bulb hung directly overhead, and the glare made the pain in her head a thousand times worse.

As she became more alert, she realized that her left leg was doubled under her—that was the reason her knee ached. She rolled to the right, onto her side, and straightened her leg.

Gradually the pain in her head subsided. Pushing herself up into a sitting position, Nancy opened her eyes and looked around.

She was on the floor of a steel cage whose bars rose to just beneath the low ceiling. The cage took up most of the space in a narrow, windowless room with a single steel door. Nancy shuddered at the updated version of a medieval dungeon. She didn't want to think about what Patrick planned for her. Even though he wasn't in the room now, Nancy was sure he'd return.