The Crooked Banister (7 page)
Read The Crooked Banister Online
Authors: Carolyn Keene
“Unless there’s a seeing eye around here,” she remarked, “no one will find that key easily.”
“Do you think,” Ned asked, “the man who ran away from here might have taken the robot out?”
Nancy nodded. “Furthermore, I believe he inserted a tape. When Bess and Dave came into the kitchen, the sound of their voices activated the robot. But what could he have done to them?”
Nancy and Ned stood still, surveying the entire room.
“I don’t see a thing,” Ned said finally. “Let’s go outdoors. Maybe Bess and Dave ran into the yard.”
He and Nancy hurried to the front door and called to George and Burt. “Have you seen Bess and Dave?” Nancy queried.
The answers were no. “Did they come outside?” Burt asked.
“I don’t know,” Nancy replied. “They’ve disappeared.”
“What!” George exclaimed in alarm.
Burt said he would circle the house and see if he could find the missing couple. In a few minutes he returned, shaking his head.
“Then they must be inside,” Ned declared. “Come on, Nancy. We’ve got to find them.”
George and Burt wanted to help, but the bridge had to be guarded. The whole group did not want to be marooned on this side of the moat!
Nancy was convinced that whatever had happened to their missing friends had taken place in the kitchen. She and Ned went directly there. Presently Nancy snapped her fingers.
“See something?” Ned asked.
“Yes,” Nancy replied.
She pointed to the floor. It was covered with linoleum in a pattern of large black and white squares. Nancy got down on hands and knees, took her flashlight from a pocket, and beamed it on the various blocks.
Carefully she went over the surface. Ned used his light too. Near the center of the floor Nancy spotted a section where the tiles definitely were not cemented together. She tried to pull one up. It stuck tightly to the floor.
“Ned,” she said, running the beam of her flashlight around an area about four feet square, “I believe there’s a trap door underneath herel Bess and Dave went through it!”
CHAPTER IX
A Puzzling Discovery
“A TRAP door!” Ned repeated. “But we’ve been walking all over this place and it didn’t open.”
“Right,” Nancy agreed. “And there isn’t any sign of a way to move it.”
“Do you think that Bess and Dave fell through, then the door snapped shut?” Ned asked.
“Yes,” Nancy replied.
“Perhaps there’s a spring hidden somewhere in this kitchen,” Ned suggested. “Suppose we see if it’s in the cupboards?”
Nancy was thinking hard and did not answer. Finally she said, “I believe Old Robby is programmed to open and close the trap door when it is stepped on. But maybe so long as anybody is down below, he can’t pull the trick again.”
“And the trap door can’t be pushed up from the underside?” Ned asked.
“Evidently not. Unless,” Nancy added fearfully, “Bess and Dave fell into such a deep hole, or onto rocks—”
Ned guessed her thought, and his face became very sober. “You think they could be lying down there injured?”
Nancy nodded. “I’m worried, Ned, terribly worried. This was probably all part of Rawley’s plan.”
“Well, one thing is sure,” he answered. “We must get the trap door open. And how are we going to do that if the robot won’t work?”
Nancy said they might have to break a section of the floor. “But first I want to try something.”
“What?” Ned queried.
Nancy said, “Perhaps the tape came to the end. If we turn it back and start over again, the program may repeat itself.”
“It’s worth a try,” Ned remarked. “But from what you’ve told me about this sneaky mechanical man, I think we’d better be on the watch for an attack.”
Nancy went for the key and unlocked the closet. Ned rolled the robot out and stood him in the exact location where he and Nancy had found him.
They took off his head. The tape had already rewound itself and turned off the main switch. Nancy reset it and instantly the whirring sound began. She and Ned were careful to stay away from the trap-door area. But they wondered if, without their weight on it, that section of the floor would open.
As they stood watching, the two heard a faint click, then a sound as if machinery were working down below. But the door did not move.
“It’s just waiting for someone to step on it!” Nancy stated.
She and Ned reached down and pushed with all their might, but carefully avoided stepping on the suspected section. Their efforts were finally rewarded. A trap door opened downward.
“You were right, Nancy,” said Ned. He dropped to his knees and called into the dark area below, “Bess! Dave!” There was no answer.
Fearing that the trap door might close again, Nancy disconnected the tape. The whirring sound stopped immediately.
Nancy got down on her knees and shone her flashlight into the depths below. The hole was about six feet deep and had an earthen floor.
She and Ned gave sighs of relief. It was unlikely that Bess and Dave could have been injured by falling through the trap door!
“So far so good,” Nancy murmured. “But where did they go?”
The beam of her flashlight revealed an opening to what looked like a tunnel.
“I’ll go down,” said Ned. “You’d better stay here until I see what’s there.”
“Oh, I hope you find Bess and Dave and they’ll be all right!” she replied anxiously.
The front-door knocker pounded loudly. Nancy said she would answer. George stood there.
“What’s going on?” she asked worriedly. “Did you find Bess and Dave?”
“No,” Nancy replied, “but we just uncovered a possible clue to where they went. I’ll show it to you.”
She led the way into the kitchen and George stared in amazement at the open trap door. Nancy explained that the robot had unfastened it.
“George, I’d like to go down and search with Ned. Will you stay here and guard this tricky door? I’m sure it can’t close by itself because I’ve disconnected the tape. But just the same I’d hate to be trapped underground.”
“I’ll do anything to help find Bess and Dave,” George replied. “I’d like to go down there myself, but I’ll do as you say and wait up here.”
Nancy gripped the edge of the opening and then dropped lightly to the ground below.
“Ned!” she called loudly. Her voice echoed in the tunnel. But presently she received a mumbled reply from him.
“Here I am!”
Nancy hurried along the vaulted corridor, which was made of stone and earth. There were no openings on either side. The corridor turned sharply to the left.
Just ahead she saw Ned. He was tugging at a heavy door. Nancy hastened toward him.
“You found something?” she called out.
“I think so,” he replied hopefully. “This door must lead somewhere. I pounded on it several times, thinking if Bess and Dave were on the other side, they would pound back. But there wasn’t any response.”
As Nancy ran forward, her foot kicked a hard object. She stopped and shone her flashlight on it.
“Oh!” she murmured. “It can’t be!”
She leaned down and picked up the object. It was the missing end of the railing and newel to the banister which disappeared so mysteriously into the wall of the entrance hall!
“Ned!” Nancy cried out. “Look at this!”
He hurried back and stared at the piece of wood.
“Do you know what this means?” Nancy asked excitedly.
“No. What?”
“At one time,” she replied, “that railing and newel must have gone all the way to the bottom of the stairs.”
In the thrill of her discovery, Nancy had momentarily forgotten her reason for being in the tunnel.
“Ned!” Nancy cried out. “Look at this!”
She said quickly, “Solving the mystery of the crooked banister will have to wait. I’ll give you a hand with that big door, Ned. I wonder what we’ll find.”
“Bess and Dave, I hope.”
They laid their flashlights on the ground, and both tugged as hard as they could at the stout handle. The door began to give a little.
“Pull harder!” Ned urged.
The next moment the door opened with a rush, sending Nancy and Ned over backward onto the ground!
CHAPTER X
Tom Sleepy Deer
NANCY and Ned picked themselves up. Straight ahead was a stairway that led upward into darkness.
“Bess! Dave!” Nancy shouted. They did not answer.
“Let’s go up,” Nancy suggested.
Ned beamed his flashlight and went first. Nancy followed. At the top of the stairway they saw another heavy door. Both yanked hard but it would not open.
“Bess! Dave!” Ned called loudly.
This time there was a response. A muffled voice replied, “We’re here! Locked in! Let us out!”
“Bess!” Nancy shouted in relief. “Is Dave there too?”
“Yes, I am. Look for a hidden button near the door latch.”
Nancy and Ned beamed their flashlights on the area and searched. At first they could detect nothing, then Nancy said, “This thing that looks like a knot in the wood may be it.”
Ned pressed it hard and the door opened.
Bess literally fell into Nancy’s arms. “Oh, I was so frightened! Dave and I began to think we would never get out of here.”
The couple’s prison was the round turret encased with unbreakable glass windows, which did not open.
“We tried every way to signal somebody,” Dave said. “Bess had a flashlight and we used that but apparently nobody noticed it. Finally the battery went dead.”
The four friends descended the stairway, each one asking questions about the trap door.
Bess replied first. “That robot was in the kitchen when we went in. Dave was curious about Robby, so we walked directly toward him. Suddenly he began to make that spooky whirring sound and the next thing we knew the floor under our feet opened and down we went.”
Dave took up the story. “Then the trap door shut. I found a box to stand on and tried my best to get the old thing open. But that was hopeless. I pounded on the door but it has some kind of covering that deadens sound. It was impossible to make you hear us.”
Bess said, “We decided to investigate the tunnel. Dave and I thought maybe there was an opening to the outdoors at the far end of it. But all we found were the steps leading upward.”
Dave told Nancy and Ned that both the lower door to the stairway and the one at the top had swung shut behind the couple.
Bess shuddered. “Maybe we weren’t Rawley Banister’s first prisoners! It gives me goosebumps to think about it.”
When they reached the foot of the stairs, Nancy picked up the piece of railing and newel.
“What’s that?” Bess asked.
Nancy told her to take a good look. Bess gasped upon realizing that it was part of the hallway banister.
“You found this down here?” she queried.
“Yes. Do you all realize what this means?”
“One of two things,” Ned replied. “Either the piece of railing and newel was sawed off before the staircase was installed, or else it was removed later.”
“But why would it have been removed?” Dave asked. “If the builder knew that the one banister was going to end at the wall three feet above the floor, why would he have built it and thrown the piece away?”
Nancy chuckled. “That’s another part of the mystery I’ll have to solve. And if I do,” she added, “I’m sure it will tell us a great deal about Rawley Banister, his swindling operation, and perhaps where he is.”
Bess and Dave asked how Nancy and Ned had discovered the trap door. “Did you fall through?” Bess queried.
“No,” Nancy replied, and explained what had happened.
They were now below the opening to the kitchen and one by one the four swung themselves up with some assistance from George.
“You’re okay!” she cried. “No need to tell you how glad I am to see you. Where were you?”
As Bess and Dave related their harrowing experience, a clock in Mountainville tolled the hour of midnight.
“We’d better go back to the motel,” Nancy suggested, looking at Bess who seemed very weary.
Dave grinned. “I could use a little sleep myself,” he said.
Nancy took the piece of banister with her. An idea for tracking down this clue was formulating in her mind.
The trap door was closed by hand and Robby was locked in the closet. Nancy hid the key, then the five went to the front of the house. The young detective paused a few moments to compare the newel of the sawed-off banister with the other post. The pieces matched exactly, except that the railings curved in opposite directions.
The lights were extinguished and the front door locked. Nancy put the key in her handbag.
Burt called out, “So you finally made it back! I sure was worried about you but I didn’t dare leave this sapling bridge. By the way, I’ve been trying to find out what happened to the regular bridge. It’s too dark to see much. But I have a good idea that it’s down in the water.”
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