The Haunted Carousel (13 page)

Arno Franz explained that he had seen and heard the news stories about the carousel horse at the day-care center and, like Nancy, had suspected this might prove an irresistible bait to the criminal he was after. Accordingly, he had

come to the day-care center late at night, arriving just before Nancy and Ned entered the big, old house.

Franz eyed the wooden steed in perplexity. “You know, I have a strong hunch that what I’m looking for may be hidden inside this thing,” he mused aloud. “But don’t ask me exactly how or where!”

Nancy smiled mysteriously. “I’ll try to answer that question tomorrow, when everyone can be here,” she said, “especially Joy Trent, who owns this carousel horse. In the meantime, I think we’d better let Police Chief McGinnis and Detective Norris know about these two. I’ll go and phone them from the office in the next room.”

A police cruiser soon arrived outside the house, and the two crooks were whisked off in handcuffs. Nancy was praised and congratulated for the clever way in which she had brought the manhunt to a successful conclusion. But the complete solution of the case still remained unknown.

When Nancy walked into the playroom at the day-care center at eleven o’clock the following morning, accompanied by Bess and George, she found an expectant group of people seated and eagerly awaiting her revelations. Among them were Arno Franz, Police Chief McGinnis,

reporter Rick Jason, Detective Norris, a smiling Joy Trent, and her haughty Aunt Selma.

Bess and George found chairs next to Ned, who had arrived a few minutes earlier in his own car. “I’m dying of curiosity, Nancy!” Bess whispered to her friend. “Hurry up and start explaining!”

Nancy smiled and cleared her throat. “We’ve had a number of mysterious happenings in River Heights recently, but one way or another they all have to do with this carousel horse of Joy’s—which, incidentally, happens to be extremely valuable.”

Joy Trent shot a quizzical glance at the young detective. “Glory certainly means a lot to me, Nancy,” she said, “but you mean he’s valuable for some other reason, too?”

“Very much so. He was carved by a famous western artist named Walter Kruse, and the director of the River Heights Art Museum estimates your horse may be worth a great deai— thousands of dollars, in fact!”

Joy’s eyes widened, and the audience gasped at Nancy’s announcement. The teenage detective explained that horses had been one of Kruse’s favorite subjects, as both a painter and a sculptor, and that she had easily identified his style after consulting the library book that contained pictures of his work.

“When Kruse carved this horse,” Nancy went on, “he was an unknown artist. At the time, he was working as a carny roustabout at the same amusement park in St. Louis where the Wonderland Gallop was located. The lead horse on the carousel was damaged by a truck. So as a favor to his girlfriend’s father, who then owned the merry-go-round, Walter Kruse carved a replacement horse.”

“No wonder it’s so beautiful!” Bess murmured.

Nancy related that Leo Novak was only an employee of the owner, Mr. Ogden, when the horse was carved. Later, Ogden moved the carousel to River Heights, but after several years he took it back to the same amusement park in St. Louis. On Ogden’s death, Novak took over the Wonderland Gallop.

“Then last winter,” Nancy went on, “Novak read a newspaper story about the late artist, Walter Kruse, and how his work was now bringing record prices in New York art galleries. He suddenly realized that this was the same Walter Kruse who had carved the replacement horse for the carousel which Ogden had sold to Joy’s father—and if he could get it back, it might be worth a small fortune.”

Unfortunately for Novak, however, he had been unable to recall the name of the little girl or her father. So he devised a clever plan and moved the carousel back to River Heights.

“By playing the carousel spookily at night,” said Nancy, “Novak gained a lot of free publicity for the Wonderland Gallop—which, of course, also helped to make it a popular attraction at the amusement park. But his real purpose was to make sure Joy heard that the carousel had returned to River Heights. He was hoping that the news might draw her out to the park for a nostalgic visit. If so, he was sure he would recognize her by her flaming red hair and different-colored eyes—especially since he still had the photograph of her as a little girl that Mr. Trent had presented to Ogden at the time. It’s still stuck up on the wall of the trailer that Novak took over when he bought the carousel.”

Fingers Malone and Baldy Krebs, however, had spoiled Novak’s plan. They, too, were after the horse which Kruse had carved—for a different reason. They were the two dark figures seen by Ned and Nancy the night they kept watch in the park. After failing to find what they were looking for that night, they realized that a new lead horse had been mounted on the merry-go-round. So they came to Leo’s trailer later on that same night, and scared the truth out of him. He knew the two wanted criminals

were highly dangerous, so he told them the whole story of how the horse had been bought by Joy’s father.

But next day, Nancy went on, when they saw Detective Norris from St. Louis hunting them at the park, they jumped to the conclusion that Leo Novak had betrayed them to the police. So they beat him up as a warning and gave him a black eye. When Joy came to the park, they trailed her home and returned that night to break into the Trent house, but failed to find the horse. Novak, guessing what they would do, had vengefully tipped off the police, but Fingers and Baldy managed to escape capture.

“If you’ll excuse me for interrupting, Nancy,” Rick Jason cut in, “you still haven’t told us why those two crooks—Fingers Malone and Baldy Krebs—were after Joy’s horse.”

Nancy smiled. “I was just coming to that. The reason goes back twenty years to a time when Fingers was first being hunted by the law. He was hiding out in that same St. Louis amusement park where the Wonderland Gallop was situated—working as a carny—but he couldn’t resist picking pockets. He even persuaded one of the young park employees to help him on occasion. Detective Norris says he was arrested the other day.”

The St. Louis officer nodded, then told the

history of Fingers Malone, beginning with a prominent local jeweler who had been robbed at the park. The loot was a small parcel of diamonds which he had just received from New York that afternoon. Fingers Malone was nabbed soon afterward, but the diamonds were never recovered.

“In fact,” said Nancy, “the insurance company that Mr. Amo Franz works for has been trying to trace those diamonds ever since.” “Do you know what happened to them?” Rick Jason inquired keenly.

Nancy smiled and nodded. “I think so. Fingers knew he might soon be arrested, so he entrusted the diamonds to his friend, Walt Kruse.” “You mean a famous artist helped this pickpocket hide his loot?”

“Remember, Kruse wasn’t a famous artist yet at that time,” Nancy pointed out. “As a matter of fact, he was quite a rough-and-ready, happy- go-lucky type—an ex-cowboy and cattle rustler, who didn’t give a hoot for the law. Mind you, I’m not saying he knew the parcel Fingers gave him contained stolen goods. He simply didn’t ask any questions and agreed to keep the jewels.”

Soon afterward, Nancy continued, an art dealer saw some of Kruse’s work and invited him to come to New York and pursue his career.

As an impish joke, Kruse decided to hide the diamonds inside the carousel horse, which he had just about finished carving for his girlfriend’s father. By then, Fingers had been arrested and placed on trial. Kruse, however, managed to get word to him through a confidential letter smuggled to him in the courtroom by a friend.

“As a result,” Nancy concluded, “Fingers went looking for the loot when he broke out of prison twenty years later.”

“And I’ve been trailing him ever since,” said Arno Franz. “But if Fingers received Kruse’s letter, why couldn’t he and Baldy find the diamonds in the horse last night?”

“Because,” Nancy replied with a twinkling glance at Joy, “they didn’t know that John Trent had already found the diamonds when he remounted the horse on a stand of his own design!”

“What?! ” Joy looked astounded. “But, Nancy, Daddy never said a word to me about finding any such thing!”

“No, I think he kept them as a surprise for you, Joy—along with another surprise.”

“Another surprise?” Joy gave Nancy a bewildered stare and giggled nervously. “I’d say there’ve been enough surprises already to . . . oh, wait!” she broke off eagerly. “Does this one have something to do with that drawing we found tucked in the statuette in Daddy’s study?” “Good guess, Joy. Do you have it with you?” “Oh yes, of course!” With trembling fingers, Joy fished the crumpled piece of tissue paper out of her bag and handed it to the teenage sleuth.

Nancy showed the drawing to her audience, all of whom were watching and listening with intense fascination as she unraveled the tangled mystery. “As you see, it’s a drawing of a frog

on a horse. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine what it might mean . . . until I suddenly realized that there is a frog on every horse—in fact four of them!”

“Four frogs on every horse?” Police Chief McGinnis scratched his balding head. “You’ll have to explain that to the rest of us who aren’t expert riders like you, Nancy.”

Nancy grinned back and explained. “The tough, spongy part in the center of a horse’s foot, I mean the part enclosed by the hard hoof, is called the ‘frog.’”

Nancy gestured toward the carousel horse. “Since Glory is a lead horse rather than a jumper, he has three feet on the ground and only one upraised. So I’m sure that Mr. Trent’s sketch of a frog on a horse was intended to draw Joy’s attention to this one particular foot.” Nancy’s brow puckered slightly. “In Glory’s case, of course, his whole foot and leg are made of wood, so . . . No, wait a minute!” An excited look came over Nancy’s face as she pressed hard on the bottom of the horse’s upraised hoof. “The frog on this foot is not wood—it feels more like hard rubber!”

She broke off long enough to get a nail file from her shoulder bag, then returned to her examination of Glory’s foot. The glossy paint

made it appear that the horseshoe, hoof, and frog were all made of wood. But when Nancy ran the point of her nail file around the inside curve of the horseshoe and then began to gouge and pry as deeply as she could, it gradually became apparent that the frog had been crafted separately from the rest of the foot.

At last, after minutes of effort, she succeeded in pulling the frog out of the rest of Glory’s foot, like a cork out of a bottle!

Joy gasped in excitement. “His foot’s hollow!”

“Right.” Nancy probed inside with her fingers and extracted a tightly rolled brown-paper package. When unrolled, it proved to contain a handful of small, glittering gems wrapped in several sheets of letter paper that bore a man’s handwriting.

“These stones,” Nancy went on, turning them over to Police Chief McGinnis and Arno Franz, “are, of course, the diamonds that Fingers Malone stole at the park in St. Louis twenty years ago. And these sheets of paper are a letter to Joy from her father.”

Silence settled over the room as Joy read the letter. Her eyes were misting as she handed the sheets to Nancy, one by one. The first page began:

Joy dear,

This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write. For years I could never decide whether or not to tell you the truth about your mother and the unhappy early days of our marriage. Now I have decided to leave it up to fate.

I have devised a riddle, involving your mother s name, Iris. If you are interested enough and really determined to solve the riddle in order to find out more about her, you may eventually discover this letter. If not, perhaps it is just as well that you never learn the sad truth about our past. As I say, I leave the outcome up to fate . . .

After reading the entire letter, Nancy turned to Joy. “Shall I tell the others what your father saysr

The redheaded heiress blinked and nodded, unable to speak because of her tearful emotion.

Nancy explained to the others that John Trent’s wife Iris had come from a wealthy family in the Midwest, who strongly opposed her marriage to a poor, working-class machinist from a blue-collar background. Nevertheless, the two were so deeply in love that Iris had eloped with him. As a result, she became estranged from her parents.

“At first, the two newlyweds were very happy,” Nancy went on. “But after their baby was born, Iris became gravely ill. The one chance to save her life was by an expensive operation that would cost thousands of dollars—far more than John Trent could raise or borrow. So, reluctantly, he was forced to turn to her parents for help. They agreed to pay for her medical care—but only if he promised to get out of her life forever.”

“That shows you what mean, hardhearted people they were!” Joy’s Aunt Selma blurted angrily.

“It seems so to us now,” Nancy said with a sigh, “but no doubt they, too, were very unhappy over their daughter’s plight. Anyhow, John finally and sadly agreed to their demands. But when he left, he took the baby with him— and covered his tracks by changing his name from Tobin to Trent.”

Later, his letter said, he learned that his wife had undergone a series of delicate operations, which saved her life but left her a permanent invalid. During her few remaining months she had had to be kept on a life-support system, so

that he was never able to communicate with her, even secretly.

“From that time on,” Nancy ended, “John Trent suffered bitterly from feelings of guilt, wondering if he had done the right thing.”

Joy, who was deeply moved by at last learning about her mother, murmured, “Oh, how I wish I could have known her! I don’t even have a picture of her!”

Nancy smiled at the girl. “Perhaps not. But you do have someone who looks very much like her.”