The Third Girl Detective

by Margaret Sutton

  “No dragons,” he announced, peering about with the help of his flashlight. “It’s wet and slippery down here, and there are holes where a person could break a leg. Watch it, Judy!”

  The warning came just too late. Judy tripped on something that turned out to be a removable drain cover and fell into what seemed to be a tunnel.

  “This would make a good hideout for a gang of thieves,” commented Horace when he had helped Judy to her feet. “I hope we’re not getting into something we can’t handle. Shall we proceed?”

  “Of course.” Judy was determinedly cheerful in spite of a scraped elbow. “There’s nothing dangerous down here.”

  Horace was not so sure. Cautiously, he led the way along the tunnel, which seemed to be leading directly under the fountain. Suddenly, in the circle of light from Horace’s flash, they saw a closed door.

  “Maybe this is where Mr. Banning lives!” exclaimed Judy. “Wouldn’t it be exciting to live right under a fountain? He could really take care of the pipes—I mean if he is a plumber. It’s locked,” she added, trying the door. “Shall I knock?”

  “What’s the use?” asked Horace. “Nobody would answer.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” declared Judy, rapping loudly on the door.

  “I told you,” Horace began, but stopped suddenly as the same moaning voice Judy had heard before called out, “Please, go away!”

  CHAPTER XII

  A Mysterious Prisoner

  “That,” announced Judy when she could find her voice, “was not a noise in the pipes. Someone’s in there, and I think he’s hurt. Shall I try again?”

  Horace did not answer. He stood there as white as a ghost, with his mouth half open. The beam of his flashlight was directed upward. Judy saw a great many water pipes interlaced overhead. She supposed they could carry sound as well as water. But someone had to be in the room to make the sound, and she had a feeling it was someone who needed help and needed it badly. She rapped again, and this time there was no answer.

  “Do you need help?” called Judy.

  She didn’t know this man. She had no idea who he was. But, being Judy, she was ready to be a friend to anyone in trouble.

  “Please answer me! I’m your friend,” she called again.

  She had to call a third time before the man answered. His voice was fainter now.

  “I have no friends,” he replied. “Why can’t you just go away and let me die in peace?”

  For a moment Judy didn’t know what to say. She was ready to help him. But how could she?

  “He wants to die,” she whispered. “Oh, Horace! We must do something. Do you think he’s a prisoner in there? Maybe he can’t open the door.”

  “Ask him,” Horace suggested.

  “Are you locked in?” called Judy. “We’ll get you out, somehow, if you are.”

  “It’s no use,” the man replied. “I’d rather die here than in prison. Now go away!”

  “I think we’d better. We’ll have a look around and then notify Peter. This is news, all right,” declared Horace. “Probably this man is one of a gang. Maybe he was hurt escaping from the police.”

  “But Horace,” Judy objected, “this man’s hurt, and he needs help. We should call Dad.”

  “Maybe we should. Tell him we’ll bring a doctor.”

  Judy told him, but “Leave me alone!” was the only answer.

  “Who are you?” called Horace. To this and more questions both he and Judy asked there was no answer. The man was through talking and told them so by silence. The air became heavy and oppressive as they waited. From time to time they would call more questions or offer help only to hear their own echoes sounding hollow in the tunnel. There was, Judy noticed presently, one other sound.

  “Hear it!” she whispered. “Let’s find out what it is. It sounds like someone breathing.”

  “Maybe it’s a dragon breathing fire.” Horace was trying to be funny to keep up his spirits. “I’m not feeling like St. George this morning.”

  “You are a hero,” Judy reminded him. “It was in all the papers. ‘Hero of the Roulsville flood—’”

  “Cut it out, sis! You know I was scared silly. I’m not wearing my suit of armor.” Judy knew he was remembering another equally shivery adventure in a ruined castle. “I could use it, though,” he added. “Now what are we up against?”

  “It looks like another pipe,” replied Judy, turning on her own flashlight to see it better. “There’s a brick wall beyond it. But what’s beyond that?”

  Led on by curiosity, Judy soon discovered another locked door. No moans came from behind it, and when she knocked and called there was no answer. There wasn’t a sound except—

  Judy turned quickly. The sound now came from a definite direction. Was it something burning? The air was suddenly warm against her face.

  “Hey, sis! You know what?” Horace said in a whisper. “There’s heat down here, and I don’t like it. What do you suppose makes it so warm?”

  “It could be only a furnace,” Judy said.

  She came upon it so unexpectedly that she let out a little shriek and then laughed at herself for doing so. She had been right.

  “It is!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Horace! That’s all it is. I don’t know what I thought it was at first, but it’s a little pot-bellied stove with pipes branching out in all directions. Come and see!”

  Horace came at once and saw the furnace. There it sat like a squat, red-eyed demon in a little lair of its own. It was burning coal from a bin beside it, and the fire showed through a grate in the door. Horace opened it to show Judy the blaze.

  “Comforting, isn’t it?” she said. “Though I wonder how they get the coal down here. And who shovels it? I hope, whoever it is, he doesn’t shovel us in.”

  “He might. How do we know he doesn’t have horns and a tail? This place needs more than heat to take the chill out of it,” Horace said with a shiver. “A little warm sunlight would help.”

  “There is a little light where we dropped into the tunnel,” Judy remembered. “There may be other openings, too. A coal chute, maybe. There must be light of some kind in those locked rooms.”

  “I hope there is,” agreed Horace. “It would be pretty dismal in there where that man is without any light at all.”

  “He could live down here, I suppose, with light and heat,” Judy went on thinking aloud. “But why? Surely nobody would choose to live underground like a mole. If he’s hurt, Horace, why doesn’t he want us to help him? He said he wanted us to leave him alone to die. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does to me,” declared Horace. “Obviously, someone has imprisoned him under the fountain for a reason. Maybe he thinks we’re his captors and that’s why he doesn’t trust us.”

  “But I told him we were his friends,” Judy protested.

  “But are we? How friendly can we be if he’s a criminal?”

  “Oh, Horace! He’s a human being,” cried Judy. “No matter what he’s done, he has a right to decent care. We must get him out of there and call Dad or else notify Peter—”

  “And have him send the man back to prison?”

  “I suppose he’d have to, wouldn’t he? If he’s an escaped prisoner, or if he’s being held here by criminals, Peter may be looking for him. The police weren’t. They were looking for jewels. You don’t think they’re hidden in the room with him, do you? Maybe he is a thief. Maybe he was hurt trying to escape from the police—or Peter.” This thought alarmed Judy. “You know, Horace,” she went on more urgently, “he does have to shoot at people sometimes. To make them halt, I mean. If he wounded this man—but he couldn’t have done it! It isn’t like Peter at all. Oh dear! I’m all mixed up. If I help this prisoner escape I won’t be helping Peter, will I? Why do I get into these dreadful situations?”

  “It’s your instinct to help people,” Horace tol
d her with what sounded like real sympathy. “I know how you feel about that man in there, but what can we do if he won’t cooperate?”

  “We can keep trying,” replied Judy. “No matter who he is, we can’t leave him in there to die. I’ll call him again. Not you, Horace! He might think you were a policeman or something. We can’t even let him know you’re a reporter. The thought of publicity might scare him, and there’s enough down here to terrify him as it is.”

  “You’re not just talking,” Horace agreed as they moved closer to the locked door.

  “Oh, mister!” Judy called out sweetly. “We’re still here, and we still want to help you if you’ll let us. We may be strangers, but we want to be friends—”

  “Yeah?” The voice behind the door was less polite. “I know. Friends like Roger Banning—ready to jump on a guy when he’s already down.”

  A friend? Roger Banning? That rang a bell in Judy’s mind, but for a moment the thought that followed didn’t register.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  “You might tell me who you are before I do any more talking,” the man replied.

  CHAPTER XIII

  A Desperate Situation

  Judy and Horace looked at each other in bewilderment. They both knew they couldn’t tell the prisoner who they were without further antagonizing him. A newspaper reporter and the wife of an FBI agent were hardly the right people to trust with whatever secret the fountain was hiding. Suddenly an idea came to Judy.

  “The main thing right now is that you need help,” she called out. “If you’re hurt we can have Dr. Bolton here in no time. How far is it to the nearest telephone?”

  “Too far,” the man replied. “I know you now. You’re Dr. Bolton’s daughter. Is that your husband with you?”

  “N-no,” Judy stammered, really confused now. “It’s my brother.”

  “The newspaper reporter? Well, why don’t you hurry back to your paper and tell them you’ve rounded up the last of Vine Thompson’s boys single-handed? Or didn’t you know the Brandts had leased their estate to a gang of jewel thieves? Go ahead, tell them—” Suddenly the excitement died out of the man’s voice and he finished in despair. “But it’s too late to tell them anything. There’s no help for it now. They’ll have to send me back to prison.”

  “What is the story?” asked Horace. “Maybe we can help.”

  “No, it’s no use.”

  Judy pulled her brother aside where the man wouldn’t hear her whisper, “Horace, I know who he is now. He said Roger Banning was a false friend, and he’s been in prison, so he must be Dick Hartwell. Don’t you see? If he knows us, then we must know him. That’s who he is. I’m sure of it. No wonder he’s afraid they’ll send him back to prison. But he forged some checks. He wasn’t a jewel thief. And what did he mean about the last of Vine Thompson’s boys?”

  “They were jewel thieves. Remember the stolen jewels I found in the hollow tree that used to lean over our house? But of course you remember! You were the one who took them to the police station and met Chief Kelly and solved most of the mystery—”

  “No, Horace,” Judy objected. “You solved most of it. You knew what was haunting our attic long before I did. I thought maybe it really was Vine Thompson’s ghost.”

  “If her ghost is anywhere, it’s here with the gang her sons started. I didn’t think Dick Hartwell was in it, though, and it’s news to hear that Roger Banning is a jewel thief. Do you suppose that explains the diamond in the fountain?”

  “Sh!” Judy cautioned him. In his excitement, Horace had spoken louder than he intended. It was all very confusing. Judy had supposed the Thompson gang was past history. The sons of the notorious fence, Vine Thompson, had all received long sentences in prison. But a gang like that, as Peter had once pointed out to her, spread its evil influence far and wide. Always there was a criminal on the fringe of it who didn’t get caught. That criminal usually followed the pattern of his hero, the original gang leader. And so crime spread, like a bad weed in a garden. That was the way Peter explained it. How Judy wished he were here to explain things now!

  “Horace,” she said suddenly, “you can’t breathe a word of this story until we’ve talked it over with Peter and his office has released it. If that man is Dick Hartwell, he was in a Federal penitentiary. He forged his father’s signature to a government bond.”

  “But he was out on parole,” Horace began.

  “He’s right, though,” Judy interrupted. “They’ll put him right back in if they find him. A man is on parole only as long as he keeps out of trouble, and this man is in trouble—way in. I still feel sorry for him, but I know now what we have to do.”

  “Name it and we’ll do it. Of course you’ll notify Peter—”

  A rushing sound in the pipes overhead interrupted Horace in the middle of what he was saying. His face went suddenly white.

  “He heard us!” cried Judy. “I think that man in there heard what we were saying and turned on the fountain!”

  “Come on,” Horace exclaimed. “We have to get out of here fast, before the fountain fills, and report what he told us. Come on, Judy! The exit must be in this direction. There’s that drain cover you tripped on before.”

  Judy beamed her flashlight toward it and saw that Horace had replaced it.

  “Wait!” she called to him. “That drain is there to keep the tunnel from being flooded. If any water seeps in from the fountain it probably runs off down that drain. You shouldn’t have put back the cover!”

  “I was afraid someone would fall down the hole. Either way, it’s a trap!”

  Horace’s voice sounded hollow, echoing back through the tunnel. Already he was way ahead of her. Judy soon caught up with him, but they were too late. The rushing sound in the pipes overhead continued as the water flowed through them to spray out in all directions from the fountain. Judy couldn’t see out. But, remembering, she knew what it must be like out there where she had felt the enchantment.

  “Lift me up, Horace,” she begged. “You can do it. I want to see.”

  He lifted her until she could step from his shoulder into the hiding place behind the cupids. The spaces between them where they had entered were now covered with falling water, cutting off escape.

  “How bad is it?” asked Horace from below.

  “Real bad,” she replied. “I can’t see a thing through the water. I’m standing right in back of it. There’s no way out.”

  “There must be! We came in that way.”

  “Not when the fountain was on, Horace. It’s like being under Niagara Falls. The pressure is terrific.” Niagara Falls made Judy think of her honeymoon there with Peter, and she added, “I wish Peter were here to help us. He would know what to do.”

  “He can help us better where he is,” Horace told her when she had dropped back into the tunnel and stood on the wet floor beside him.

  “But where is he?” wailed Judy. “We shouldn’t have come here without letting him know. Now we’re trapped, and no one knows it except Blackberry. If he were a dog he might go for help, but cats are too independent. Of course, if Peter sees him—but will he come back today?”

  “He might,” Horace replied cheerfully. “Dad knows where we are. You promised to call, and if I know Dad he’ll suspect something’s wrong when you don’t keep your promise. If he tells Peter and if they find Blackberry—”

  “More ifs!” Judy interrupted. “Don’t look so cheerful about it just because it’s news. If we drowned in here that would be news, too, but we wouldn’t be around to read the paper. We’ll just have to find out how to shut off the water. That man must be able to control the fountain from in there. There’s nothing out here that we can turn.”

  “There may be,” Horace said. “We haven’t examined the pipes.”

  “There isn’t time!” Judy was panicky now. “You’ll
have to remove that drain cover before the tunnel is flooded. You should have left it open—”

  “I know. I made a mistake,” Horace admitted. “Now it’s stuck, and I can’t budge it. There’s nothing to hold on to. Help me, Judy! We’ve got to get it off!”

  CHAPTER XIV

  A Forced Entrance

  Horace was right. There was no ring, no notch, nothing on the drain cover except a few crisscross ridges and the name of the manufacturer in an oblong box. It was what Judy used to call a skunk box when she was a little girl in Roulsville before the flood. If you stepped on one of them you were a skunk. But now the skunk box was no longer funny. Someone, evidently, had stepped on the drain cover.

  “Did you, Horace?” Judy asked.

  “Did I what?”

  “Step on that skunk box?”

  He knew what she meant. “I guess I did,” he admitted. “I didn’t want anyone else to trip over it the way you did. I guess I stepped on it too hard. It would take a crowbar to pry it up.”

  He tried working around the edge of it with his jackknife. The drain cover was slippery now that it was wet. Judy helped, prying and pushing as the water splashed down from the fountain above, getting deeper and deeper all the time. It was up to her ankles before Horace remembered having seen some lumber stacked up against the wall somewhere above the tunnel.

  “If we could work a plank under the edge of that drain cover to give us leverage—” he began, but Judy had another idea.

  “Why not the door? If we rammed the door to that locked room with a beam we could get in there and turn off the water before it gets any deeper. Then we could try opening the drain.”

  “Good idea!” agreed Horace.

  First they called to the prisoner. “The drain is covered! The tunnel will be flooded if you don’t turn off the fountain.”

  There was no answer.

  Suddenly they both realized that they didn’t know for sure that the man beyond the locked door had turned on the fountain. It had been a guess and they could have guessed wrong. Why didn’t the man answer? Already the water was seeping in under the door. Judy banged on it, calling and shouting.