Nancy thanked him and hurried back up to the room, her heart pounding. After consulting the address book in her shoulder bag, she picked up the room phone, asked for an outside line, and dialed Dallas Curry’s number.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re home!” she blurted out when the photographer answered. “I can’t explain now, Dallas, but I need to know the exact location of that tower in Westchester County . . . the one you showed me, where you took that photograph of Clare Grant. You said the building used to be a straw-hat theater.”
She listened intently for a few moments, then said, “Thanks, Dallas—I’ll tell you all about it later!”
Nancy turned to her companion, who by now was staring at her questioningly, startled by Nancy’s anxious manner and tone of voice.
“George, we have to leave here right now and get going fast! I’m afraid Pamela Kane may be in danger!”
20. Tower of Danger
Luckily the rush hour was past, but traffic was still fairly heavy on the expressway leading north from Manhattan through the Bronx and up into Westchester County.
As she drove, Nancy explained her theory to George, who at first was so surprised she could hardly believe what her friend was telling her. “You can’t be serious, Nancy?” she gasped.
“You bet I am, George. It’s the only possible answer!”
Nancy debated stopping at a roadside phone to alert the police to Pamela Kane’s danger. But a glance at her wristwatch frightened her. Time was running out, and every minute might
be precious! Then she thought of the time it might take to get through to the right police jurisdiction, followed by the problem of identifying herself and convincing the police operator that her call was neither a youthful prank nor a case of hysteria!
Part of the problem was that her story sounded so wildly improbable, and the explanation of her theory even more so. Even George had had difficulty in taking her seriously!
In the end, Nancy stayed in her seat and kept on the road, her fingers gripping the wheel tightly and her foot pressing down on the accelerator as hard as she dared.
Her tension communicated itself to George, and the last dozen miles or so of the trip sped by in fearful silence, both girls sitting stiffly upright with their hearts thudding.
The castle like architectural “folly” that Dallas Curry had described to her lay well beyond the outskirts of the nearest small town. Dusk was gathering as the tower itself loomed into view. Nancy’s pulse skipped a beat as she glimpsed two figures swaying on the parapet. They appeared to be either embracing or struggling!
Nancy braked to a halt, flung open her door, and leaped out. George nimbly did the same!
As they raced toward a shallow flight of steps and a heavy, oaken door in the front wall of the castle, George cried, “What if it’s locked?”
“It can’t be!” Nancy shouted back. “They got in!
Sure enough, it opened on their first try. Inside, beyond a flagstoned vestibule, lay the gloomy, balconied great hall of the castle.
“Over there!” George exclaimed, pointing to a circular flight of stone stairs in one comer, which wound upward into darkness.
Nancy reached it first, with George close at her heels. To light their way, Nancy switched on a flashlight, which she had snatched from the car’s glove compartment, almost without thinking, before jumping out.
Panting for breath, their hearts pounding, the girls came to an overhead trap door. They pushed it open and scrambled on through to the roof of the tower.
A few yards away, Oliver Snell was locked in a struggle with Pamela Kane. His one hand was clamped to her throat, while his other sought to push her backward over the brink of the parapet! Despite their difference in size and strength, Pamela fought back fiercely. But her glasses and blonde wig had come loose, and the hand squeezing her throat had cut off her cries for help.
Nancy and George darted to her rescue. Nancy hit Snell over the head with her flashlight as hard as she could. As he started to crumple from the blow, George hooked an arm around his throat and dragged him backward.
Pamela collapsed into Nancy’s arms. Her lips were trembling and she struggled for breath. Not only her pearl-rimmed pixie glasses but her blonde wig were completely off now, exposing her own pinned-up dark hair underneath.
“There, there, it’s all over,” Nancy murmured soothingly. “You’re safe now, Clare!”
Much later that same night, Nancy stood facing a number of people in her own living room at home. Among them were Carson Drew and Hannah Gruen, her friends Bess and George, Police Chief McGinnis, and Dallas Curry.
The girl detective had just finished describing Clare Grant’s elaborate scheme to “disappear” and assume the identity of a visiting friend from California with the made-up name of Pamela Kane.
Nancy explained how, in the early hours of darkness on Monday morning, Clare had crawled out her bedroom window at the Fyfes’ house with her appearance disguised, and then had borrowed a bicycle from the garage and ridden to the gas station down the road.
There she had loaded her bike onto the station’s pickup truck and driven back via Possum Road to the cinder path toward the woods. By backing from the path toward the quarry and returning to it by the same method, she made it appear that the vehicle had approached from and driven off in the direction of Highway 19. While at the quarry, she had also returned the bicycle to the garage and scattered her tom-up photograph through the woods so as to lead searchers toward the quarry. The man’s footprints that were found must have been made some other time, probably by a fisherman.
“But how was she able to get the gas-station truck started in the first place?” Bess asked.
“She had made a soap impression of the extra key during an earlier visit to the station,” Nancy explained.
After returning the pickup truck to the gas station, Nancy continued, Clare had gone to the bus depot in town, where she later hailed a cab to the airport. She had retrieved a suitcase that she had earlier stashed in a rental locker.
In the ladies’ room, Clare took a blonde wig, glasses, and a change of clothes from the suitcase and donned her new disguise as Pamela Kane, before starting off in a cab to the Fyfes’ house.
“But hold on, dear,” Mr. Drew said with a frown. “I thought my private investigators found out she’d flown here from California.” “That was her friend, Sylvia Salmo,” said Nancy. “Meanwhile, their other roommate back in California was all primed to answer any questions detectives might ask.”
She added, “That ether can under the window, by the way, was planted by Clare-alias- Pamela early the next morning, in order to try to convince me she’d been kidnapped.”
“All clear so far,” said Dallas Curry. “But now tell us about this plot by Oliver Snell to ruin my reputation.”
“It all started when he dated Clare one evening and saw the photograph of your Statue of Liberty layout. He passed a sketch of it to his pal, Roscoe Leff, who copied it for a fashion layout of his own and made sure it got published before yours.”
This mean trick tickled Snell so much, Nancy explained, that he decided to repeat it and wreck his hated enemy’s career. Having heard that Ted Yates was working on a furniture ad, Snell hired a street hoodlum to break into the Stratton Agency and steal it. Then he inserted images of this layout in a rock-music video tape and sent it to Curry anonymously, followed soon afterward by another tape of the same sort. As an expert in subliminal perception, he was confident that this would implant the image deeply enough in Curry’s subconscious mind so that Curry would eventually use the same image to “create” an identical layout of his own.
“And later on,” said Nancy, “Snell dreamed up the cosmetic flower-face layout, and again used the same trick to make it appear as if Dallas had stolen his idea.”
She added that Snell had also had the same hoodlum trail her and plant the cherry bomb under her car as a warning to get off the case. He had also filched several parts from her CB radio at the
same time, to keep her from ever calling the police while he was trailing her. Snell was now under arrest in Westchester County, and the hoodlum was being hunted by the police in New York City.
There was still more to Clare Grant’s story, however. “She suspected that Oliver Snell had seen the photo of the Statue of Liberty layout at her flat and was behind the plot to ruin Dallas Curry. So she did her best to tie her own fake disappearance in with the lawsuit against him, which she was sure would get plenty of TV coverage.”
“But why on earth would a talented young actress do such a thing, Nancy?” asked Hannah.
“I’m afraid it was a rather pathetic attempt to clinch the leading role in a new play. She had the mistaken idea that if she got her name in the headlines, the director would be more eager to hire her for the part. Eventually she planned to reappear and pretend she had suffered temporary amnesia, which would prevent the police from proving she had disappeared on purpose.” George Fayne grinned faintly. “You still haven’t told them how you guessed who Pamela really was.”
Nancy smiled back. “It was the cute way Clare Grant had of turning her head slightly and smiling in a flirtatious way out of the comer of her mouth. Only Oliver Snell wasn’t amused. He decided he would have to stop her from exposing his own plot.”
For a moment, Nancy wondered if her next mystery would prove to be as dangerous. She would find out when she solved The Emerald- Eyed Cat Mystery.
“But you outguessed him just in time said Bess, interrupting Nancy’s thought. “Same old story—Nancy Drew to the rescue—ta-daaah!”
Carolyn Keene, The Mysterious Image
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