Trial By Fire

Chapter Six

The next time Nancy looked at her watch, it was four forty-five, and the judge’s body was being carried out the front door. Mrs. O’Hara had been mistaken. Jonathan Renk had not fired the weapon himself. A neat round hole in the window behind him made it clear that he had been shot from outside. And proof of Carson Drew’s innocence had died with him.

The house and grounds were swarming with police. Nancy felt as if she had been there for days. She had told three different officers what happened in minute detail. She had also been fingerprinted to eliminate her prints from the others in the room, even though it was obvious the shot had come from outdoors.

Her announcement that the judge had been planning to admit his part in the frameup had been met with raised eyebrows. The police had only her word for it, and that wasn’t enough considering the situation with her father. Discouraged, she stopped trying to convince them after a while.

Now the pace of activity had begun to slow. Nancy sat near the bottom of the staircase and tried to sort out her feelings.

She had gone through her ordeal alone. Her father was in court. Ned was out job hunting.

She’d had to be the professional Nancy Drew and react to the emergency-checking for a pulse she knew would not be there, getting the police, trying to calm Mrs. O’Hara, answering the same questions again and again.

That phase was over. She could be plain Nancy Drew for a few minutes and feel the pain of her loss. Her uncle Jon was dead, a friend she had known all her life. And even though he’d proven himself to be less than admirable during his last few days, at the end he had shown himself to be a friend of the Drews, ready to do anything to clear Nancy’s father. Her head lowered, her arms wrapped around her knees, Nancy let herself grieve for Jonathan Renk.

Finally the mournful chime of his grandfather clock reminded her of the time. She had work to do, a case to solve. And with her father’s accuser dead, she was back to square one.

But first there was a nagging question to deal with. How was it that her uncle Jon had been shot immediately after he had decided to come clean? It was as if his murderer had been right there with them. Was it possible-?

Nancy got up and peeked into the library. Two men in shirt-sleeves were talking in a corner. Behind them a police photographer hopped around taking pictures, his flash attachment flaring. Nancy backed away and headed for the kitchen.

Mrs. O’Hara was resting in her room next to the kitchen. She was stretched out on her bed, eyes closed. Her television was on with the sound turned down.

“Mrs. O’Hara, how are you feeling?” Nancy asked gently.

The housekeeper opened her eyes and gave a weak smile. “Better, lass. Are they done? Have they taken him away?”

“Yes. Do you feel like talking?”

“Aye.” Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she sat up. “It’s time I pulled myself together. There’s so much to do. There are the funeral arrangements to start-”

“Don’t worry. I’ve called Hannah, and she’s on her way here. She and my dad will help you.”

Dad. Nancy had been almost glad he hadn’t been home. She didn’t want to be the one to have to tell her father about the murder of his old friend. Giving the news to Ann and Bess had been bad enough.

“Mr. Carson would do that? Help with services for the judge?” the housekeeper was asking. “Even after everything-”

“Of course. He thought the world of Uncle Jon. Mrs. O’Hara, have any workmen been here recently? Perhaps someone from the telephone company?”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with our phones.”

“No strangers at all?”

“Not a one, until that crowd of reporters showed up yesterday morning. Pesky bunch. One of them had the brass to follow the cable TV man right in the back door. I told him what I thought of him, that I did. The repairman, too, until he told me who he was and what he wanted.”

“You weren’t expecting a repairman?” Nancy’s pulse quickened.

“No. He said some kids had been tampering with the cable junction box out on the street, and he was checking to make sure they hadn’t interfered with the pay-channel service-the movies and such.”

“That was yesterday morning?”

“No, I’m wrong. It was afternoon.”

“How long was he here?”

“No time at all. Maybe fifteen minutes.”

“And you were with him the whole time?”

“Goodness, no. I was fixing the judge’s lunch, so I showed the man where the sets were and left him to it.” She stopped when she saw one of the detectives standing in the doorway.

“Are you up to talking to me now?” he asked kindly.

He was just the excuse Nancy needed to leave. “I’ll wait outside, Mrs. O’Hara.” She had some searching to do.

The library was empty. The black dust of the fingerprint experts and the tiny hole in the window were the only signs that anything unusual had happened there. A television was set into the wall behind sliding doors. Nancy opened them and gazed thoughtfully at the big blank screen.

The channel-selector box was on a shelf beneath the set. It was small and rectangular, about the size of an answering machine. Nancy slid the shelf out until she could see the phone numbers of the cable company printed on a label stuck to the side of the selector. Unwilling to touch anything on the judge’s desk, she went out into the hall to use the phone.

After two minutes of conversation with the dispatcher of the cable TV’s service department, her suspicions were confirmed-they had not sent a repairman.

Nancy went back to stare at the set. She ran her fingers along the outer edges of the television, reaching as far into the recess as she could. There was nothing there, and the set was too heavy for her to pull out alone.

The shelf below was still extended. She slid it back into position, then remembered she hadn’t examined the channel selector. She picked it up and looked at all sides. Nothing. She checked the bottom. Nothing. She had set it down before she realized she had seen something after all.

Nancy turned the selector over again. It sat on four rubber rings that protected the furniture from being scratched. About the size of dimes, the thick rings had screws in their centers attaching them to the base of the box. In three of the rings, the screws were visible. But in the fourth was a tiny, metallic cylinder.

She found what she had been looking for. The room was bugged.

Nancy went back to Mrs. O’Hara’s room. Mrs. O’Hara’s television sat there, the selector on top, a silent witness to the conversation between the housekeeper and the detective. Finger to her lips, Nancy beckoned them out to the kitchen and into the pantry.

“What’s up?” the detective asked impatiently.

Nancy told him what she had found. “That’s how they knew he was about to admit everything! They must have had someone nearby, just in case.”

The detective’s face told her he wasn’t ready to take her word for it. “I’ll go check,” he said.

“And I let him in!” Mrs. O’Hara said tearfully after he had left. “It’s all my fault!”

“You couldn’t have known,” Nancy said to assure her. “When a man shows up in a cable company truck, you expect him to be what he says he is.”

“But he didn’t-show up in the usual truck, I mean.” She pulled a handkerchief from her apron and dabbed at her eyes. “It was a white van like the one the cable company uses, but I didn’t notice until he was leaving that it didn’t have the purple letters on the sides.”

“It didn’t?”

“There was tape on the sides, long strips of it. Maybe there was a sign under it. I was busy. I just didn’t think- And it had a bent front fender that ripped into some of the rosebushes as it came through the back gate.”

“Ms. Drew?” the detective said softly, pausing on his way past the pantry door. “My apologies. You were right.” He smiled. “Thanks.” Then he was gone again.

Chalk one up for our side, Nancy thought and then turned back to the housekeeper. “What did the man look like, Mrs. O’Hara?”

“Oh my. Forty, maybe. Not tall, not short. Average, he was, wearing the purple cable company cap. That’s all I really looked at.”

Nancy decided not to pressure her to remember any more. The police would be doing that soon enough.

One of the officers who had been stationed out front interrupted them. “Excuse me, but were either of you ladies expecting a Hannah Gruen and a Bess Marvin?”

“Hannah’s come?” Mrs. O’Hara rushed out of the pantry.

“It’s okay,” Nancy said to the officer and followed him to the back door.

There were two cars outside. One of them was Nancy’s.

Hannah was lifting a cake carrier from the rear of her station wagon. “I baked a cake this morning,” she called to Mrs. O’Hara. “Thought I’d bring it along so you’d have something in the house to serve to visitors.”

“Oh, bless your heart.” The judge’s housekeeper pecked Hannah on the cheek and led her into the kitchen.

“Are you all right?” Hannah asked as she passed Nancy at the door.

“I’m okay.” Nancy managed a smile for her, then turned to stare at Bess, who stood nervously in front of the Mustang. “How’d you pick up my car?” she asked her friend.

“As soon as you talked to me, I called Hannah and asked her to wait for me. She found the spare keys to your car and drove me to the Grand so I could follow her here in it.”

Nancy hugged her. “You are a real pal. Thanks.”

“Sure. I just thought that if it stayed there too long, somebody might steal it. Is there anything I can do? In there?” Bess nodded toward the house.

“No. Now that Hannah’s here, she’ll take over. Your timing’s great. I was just about to call a cab.”

After checking with the detective, Nancy said her goodbyes and promised to keep in touch with Mrs. O’Hara. As she and Bess drove through the back gate, she saw where the rosebushes on her left had been ripped by the van. Its fender must have been sticking out quite far to have done as much damage as it had.

Nancy poured out her worries to Bess about how much more difficult it would be to clear her father now. She wasn’t paying much attention to the road-until a hard bump against the back of the Mustang alerted her to what was happening behind her.

“What was that?” Bess asked, turning in her seat.

“Some idiot is tailgating me at fifty-five miles an hour!” Nancy said. Her eyes flew to the rearview mirror, and she saw the ebony-tinted windshield of a dirty white van. It was so close that its front bumper might have been locked with Nancy’s rear one.

“He must be crazy!” Bess said.

“I hope that’s all he is,” Nancy responded. It might be pure coincidence that it was a white van, she told herself. There were a lot of dummies on the road who got a kick out of driving recklessly. She sped up to put a little distance between them.

The increase in speed didn’t work. The van simply closed the distance and banged her again, so hard that she and Bess were thrown forward violently. Only her seat belt prevented Nancy from hitting the steering wheel. If there had been a car in front of her, she’d have been pushed into it.

“Can you see his fender?” she asked Bess anxiously.

Bess peered in the outside mirror on her door. “Uh-huh,” she said, her teeth clenched.

“Is it bent? Sticking out on the side?”

“Uh-huh. Do you know who it is?”

“Sort of.”

There was no time to explain. The van was closing in for another attack. The driver intended to force them off the road and over an embankment. From there it would be about a forty-foot drop. Straight down.