Troubled Waters (Nancy Drew (All New) Girl Detective Book 23) (8 page)

The prints became clearer and thicker as we followed them down the corridor. They led us straight to the back corner apartment on the ground floor. As soon as we stepped through the doorway, I felt a cool breeze.

“Uh-oh.” Owen frowned at the half-open window in the living room. Through it, we could hear the steady churning sounds of the rushing river below. “I guess we know
how
the person got in,” he said.

I leaned out the window—and shuddered. The corner of the foundry came right up to the rocky cliffs. I could see over the craggy edge to the churning, rushing river fifty feet below.

“Ugh,” I said, shivering. “That muddy bank is too close to the cliffs for me. Whoever climbed up here doesn’t mind taking chances.”

“Or getting dirty,” Owen added. He nodded at the slippery mud beneath the window, at the edge of the rock.

As I stared down at the mud, an image flashed inside my head. Of Brad, covered with mud as he got out of Tanya’s car the night before.

F
or a moment I just stood there staring at the muddy windowsill and floor. Questions swirled inside my head like the churning waters of the river outside.

Could Brad have anything to do with the damage to the Helping Homes renovation? Was that why he’d been acting so secretive? But then, why would he do something so destructive, especially when he and Cathy were getting one of the foundry apartments? And why would he write hate messages to J.C. Valdez? J.C. was a hero to the Cedar Plains kids.

Brad couldn’t be the person in the car we’d followed, though—he’d been right with me in
George’s
car. . . .

“Nancy? Did you hear me?”

Owen’s voice snapped me from my thoughts. He was gazing at me expectantly from the doorway.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking myself. “Um, what did you say?”

“The other volunteers will be arriving soon. Let’s see if we can get those broken sinks cleared out,” Owen said. “I don’t want people getting spooked. If volunteers start to quit, then we’ll
really
be in trouble.”

He definitely had a point. “Let me just take a look up on the balcony first,” I said to him. “I want to see if there are any clues to who did this.”

It was already a quarter to seven. While Owen grabbed a trash bin and began throwing chunks of broken sink into it, I ran up the steps to the balcony.

“Uh-oh,” I mumbled, stopping short next to the sinks. “Owen, you’d better come see this!”

I stared at the corner where the new balcony jutted up against the bricks of the old second-floor offices. When we’d left the day before, the sinks had been stored neatly next to orderly piles of plywood and boxes of tiles for the bathrooms and kitchens. Now some of the sinks lay on their side. Sheets of plywood had been pulled away from the walls and lay in a disorderly mess. Boxes of tiles had toppled to the floor. It looked as if someone had been in a hurry to get to the walls.

More precisely, to
ruin
the walls. Huge, ragged holes had been smashed into the newly polished bricks of the old walls. Reddish brown chunks of brick were strewn over the plywood, tiles, sinks, and floor.

“This is worse than I thought,” Owen said, appearing next to me. He raked a hand through his spiked hair, his eyes grim.

My work boots scraped on gritty brick dust as I hurried over to the two holes. One was shallow and didn’t break completely through the bricks. But the other one . . .

“Hey!” I said, bending close to it. I stuck my hand through the opening, stifling a sneeze as I breathed in stale-smelling, dusty air. “It’s another blocked-off room!”

“
Another
one?”

Owen was next to me in about three nanoseconds. We stared into the dark, dusty space. Like the other walled-off space we’d found, this one was filled with cobwebs and dust balls. I saw the outline of a doorway that had been covered over with cinder blocks at some point—years before, judging by the layers of cobwebs and dust on the walls, ceiling, and floor. In the dim light that filtered through the hole, I spotted scraping footsteps on the dusty floor and more holes that had been smashed into the inside walls of the little room.

I was definitely sensing a pattern here, right down to the silver spray paint. There on the inside wall was another dripping message:

VALDEZ STINKS

“Just like yesterday,” Owen said. He took a breath and let it out in a frustrated rush. “I thought it would be good for Helping Homes to have J.C. working with us. Now I’m starting to wonder. . . .”

Owen’s cool, can-do attitude was starting to crack. Seeing how worried he was, I was even more determined to stop the person who’d caused the damage. “It’s weird,” I said, thinking out loud. “Whoever did this couldn’t have uncovered
two
secret rooms by accident. Something else is going on. Something more than just trying to hurt Helping Homes—or J.C. Valdez.”

“Well, the damage
is
hurting us, whether that was what the person intended or not,” Owen said. He turned away from the ragged hole and glanced down toward the lobby. We heard the double doors opening, then voices exclaiming over the smashed sinks.

“I’d like to try to find out more about these hidden spaces,” I said. “Why don’t I head over to the Historical Society to talk to Luther Eldridge right now? He knows more about the foundry than anyone else.”

Owen was already starting down the stairs, but he paused to glance back at me. “Well, all right,” he said reluctantly. “But come back as soon as you can. I need every pair of hands I can get!”

I pulled up in front of the River Heights Historical Society about fifteen minutes later. Cathy’s Catered Table van was parked right in front of me. I was surprised to see an RH News truck there too, as well as Deirdre Shannon’s bright pink, two-seat convertible.

Inside, Cathy and Hannah were busy setting up a breakfast buffet of coffee, juice, cereal, and cinnamon rolls. At least, they were
trying
to; the room was so crowded, it was hard to move. J.C. Valdez, Travis, and a handful of their teammates were milling about the tables, talking with flood victims. Deirdre was pelting the RH News reporter with instructions. She kept bumping into Cathy and Hannah as she pulled the cameraman around with her.

“Be sure to get some close-ups of J.C. Valdez—and me, of course,” Deirdre was saying. “Viewers should know all we’re doing to lift people’s spirits after those horrible floods.”

“Why don’t you let me direct the cameraman, Miss Shannon?” the reporter suggested dryly.

“As long as you people get it right,” Deirdre said curtly. “J.C. is handing out Bullets basketballs to the
kids. Is your cameraman getting that? Excuse me! You, there, with the coffee. You’re in the way.”

Hannah rolled her eyes as she finished handing out coffee mugs around the two long tables. Ignoring Deirdre, she stepped in front of the camera on her way to join Cathy and me by the buffet table. She leveled a critical look at J.C., who grinned for the camera while he handed out basketballs to some boys and girls.

“I know everyone loves a sports star. But if you ask me, that boy loves his own fame more than any person ought to,” she said. She gave a knowing shake of her gray-haired head. “He’s just like my cousin Peter after he won the hot-dog-eating contest at the state fair. He was insufferable!”

“He and Deirdre
do
seem to like the cameras a lot,” I agreed. “Owen Jurgensen won’t be happy that J.C. and the guys are late this morning, but at least they’re cheering up the kids,” I said.

I chuckled as Deirdre elbowed her way in next to J.C., but my smile faded when I saw the distracted, worried expression on Cathy’s face. She was just bringing a cinnamon roll and a glass of juice to the elderly, white-haired man I’d seen talking with Brad two days earlier. He was still going on about his dog, but Cathy didn’t seem to be listening very closely.

I had a feeling I knew what was bothering her.
“Cathy’s still worried about Brad?” I asked Hannah.

“As if she doesn’t have enough to think about—losing her home and trying to keep her business together,” Hannah said. “I don’t know what’s troubling that boy—sneaking off at odd hours. And when he
is
home, he barely talks to your father or Cathy or me.”

I decided not to mention Brad’s mud-stained clothes or the muddy prints Owen and I had discovered at the foundry. At least, not until I had more information to go on.

“Um, have you seen Mr. Eldridge? I need to ask him something,” I said.

“I think I saw him go into his office,” Hannah told me. She pointed to a door at the back of the library, set in among the bookshelves that lined the wall. The door was ajar, and through the opening, I saw Luther Eldridge sitting behind his desk. A moment later I pushed the door open wide, and Luther smiled up from his newspaper.

“What took you so long, Nancy?” he asked

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Owen Jurgensen called yesterday to tell me about the photographs that were stolen from the foundry,” Luther said. “I figured it wouldn’t be long before you’d come around asking about them. I’ve had the
originals ready for you to look at since yesterday afternoon. They’re right over there.”

“Am I that predictable?” I asked, laughing.

“Just thorough,” Luther told me. Getting up, he gestured to a table next to the window. On it, I saw two black-and-white photographs in protective plastic sleeves. Next to them was a building floor plan, yellowed with age and cracked at the edges.

“Actually, just two of the things taken were photographs,” Luther explained. “The third was a framed photocopy of this floor plan. It dates from nineteen twenty-seven.”

“Of course!” I said, smacking my forehead. “I wondered what the stolen photos had to do with the damage. Whoever took the floor plan must have used it to find the secret rooms!” I looked at the floor plan. “Does it show any parts of the original factory that were sealed off?” I asked.

“Sealed off? Sure,” he told me. “The Davis Foundry was altered several times over the years, to suit the changing needs of the factory. It wouldn’t have been unusual for odd spaces to be sealed off if they didn’t serve a purpose any longer,” he said.

I was already poring over the plan. “Here . . . and here,” I said, pinpointing the two hidden rooms the person had broken into. “It looks like this one on the
first floor was blocked off when something called a stamping room was created.”

Luther looked down at the plan and nodded. “Mmm. The Davis Foundry began making metal signs about that time,” Luther said. He gazed down at the second hidden space I pointed to, next to the old second-floor offices. “And that was walled over when storage space was converted to new offices.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s the big deal about those little rooms?” I murmured, thinking out loud. “Why is someone busting through to them after all this time?” I tapped my fingers against the yellowed floor plan, wishing an explanation would jump out at me, but none did.

With a sigh, I picked up the photographs in their protective sleeves. One showed a crew of men pouring molten metal into some kind of mold, with the big Davis Foundry clock visible on the wall above them. The second showed a row of men in suits standing on a platform overlooking a vast room filled with huge machines, stacks of metal sheets, and coils of some shiny metal.

“That’s Mr. Kenneth C. Davis himself,” Luther said, pointing to the stout, bearded man at the center. “I’m not sure of the exact date, but it’s sometime around nineteen fifty-five. Mr. Davis closed the factory not
long after this. There was quite a scandal surrounding the closing, actually.”

“Really?” I said.

“There was a theft at the foundry. A half million dollars in cash was taken from the safe in Mr. Davis’s office,” Luther explained. He pointed at a photographed image of the man who stood to Mr. Davis’s left. “That’s Bernard Tilden, Mr. Davis’s accountant. Police were fairly certain it was he who took the money.”

“Fairly certain? They didn’t arrest him?” I asked.

Luther shook his head. “Tilden died in a car crash before they could. The money was never found.”

I bit my lip, staring at the grainy black-and-white image of Bernard Tilden. He was taller and thinner than Mr. Davis. He wore glasses, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, as if he were used to hunkering down and working hard.

“I wonder . . . what if
that’s
why someone’s wrecking walls and punching holes into sealed-off rooms?” I murmured. “The person could be looking for the missing money. . . .”

“What’s this about missing money?” a voice spoke up at the doorway.

I turned to see J.C. Valdez standing there. His smile faded as he saw the photographs I was holding.

“There was another attack at the foundry last night,” I told him. “Someone likes putting holes in walls—and writing not-so-nice things about you.”

“Again?” J.C. frowned and shoved his hands in his pants pockets. “Craig doesn’t know when to stop, does he?”

“If it was him,” I said. “Anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt to find out about the photographs that were stolen yesterday.”

“Nancy was just wondering if the damage to the foundry might have something to do with some money that was stolen from the factory a good many years back,” Luther put in. “The man who took the money is in one of the photos that was taken from the foundry.”

“Really?” A spark of interest lit up J.C.’s eyes, and he came over to look at the photo.

I wasn’t sure why, but I wished Luther hadn’t mentioned the stolen money. Call me cautious, but I don’t usually share my investigations with just anyone. J.C. Valdez was nice enough. But the intense curiosity in his eyes made me uncomfortable.

“I guess it’s pretty unlikely,” I said quickly. “I mean, why would anyone think the money is still in the factory? The place closed more than fifty years ago. If someone
was
going to look for the money, they would have done it a long time ago.”

J.C. nodded, his eyes on the yellowed building plan on the table. “Besides,” he added, “why would a person who’s looking for money bother to write hate messages about me?”