Read The Nancy Drew Sleuth Book Online

Authors: Carolyn Keene

The Nancy Drew Sleuth Book (16 page)

BOOK: The Nancy Drew Sleuth Book
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“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 which 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
W
s. 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.”
BOOK: The Nancy Drew Sleuth Book
4.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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