“Bess, are you all right?” Nancy called into the darkness.
Bess whimpered softly. “I stepped on something and—it moved,” she said in a plaintive voice. “I’m sure it was a rat!”
As if to confirm her fears, tiny scrabbling noises rose from the dirt and debris on the tunnel floor. Bess gasped and grabbed Nancy’s arm.
Then, farther down the tunnel, a clanging boom echoed off the brick walls. It sounded like a heavy door slamming shut.
Nancy’s shoulders sagged in disappointment. She realized that she couldn’t blame Bess for screaming, but it was frustrating to know that their suspect had escaped.
“Nancy, I’m sorry,” Bess said miserably. “I couldn’t help it. I hate rats.”
“It’s okay,” Nancy replied, slipping her arm around Bess’s quivering shoulders. “Without a flashlight, I doubt if we could have caught our eavesdropper anyway. Come on—let’s see if we can find our way back to the daylight world.”
A faint rectangle of light outlined the door they had come through. They slipped back through it into the murky stairway. Nancy started up, then stopped so suddenly that Bess bumped into her from behind.
“What is it?” Bess demanded, grabbing Nancy tensely. “Another rat?”
“No,” Nancy replied, backing away from the stairs. “But I do see a pretty clear footprint in the dust, and I’m sure neither of us made it.”
Digging into her jeans pocket, Nancy found a ballpoint pen and the slip of paper Charmaine had given her with Ann Bowers’s address on it. On the back, she started to make a rough sketch of the footprint. “The person we were after is wearing running shoes,” she reported. “It’s a brand I’ve never heard of—Ourson.”
“If you’ve never heard of it, how do you know the name?” Bess asked, puzzled.
Nancy grinned and pointed to the footprint. “Elementary, my dear Bess. The name is molded into the sole of the shoe,” she explained.
She bent down and used the edge of the paper to measure the print. “Somewhere around a size ten,” she added. “I wonder if many stores in Chicago carry Ourson shoes.”
“Let’s go ask Charmaine,” Bess suggested. “She’s really up on fashion.”
“We should also find out if many people know about this entrance to the tunnels,” Nancy said. “Whoever we were chasing sure didn’t come down here by accident. He or she knew exactly where to go.”
Nancy and Bess continued up the stairs to the basement level and rang for the elevator. As they rode back up to the fourth floor, Bess thought out loud, “Why would he—or she—go to the trouble of leaving by the freight tunnel? Why not simply walk out the front entrance?”
“Because he wanted to be sure nobody saw him here,” Nancy suggested. “And come to think of it, I guess we don’t need to say ‘he or she’—very few women wear a shoe that big.”
“That means Ann Bowers wasn’t our eavesdropper,” Bess concluded. “No surprise. Somehow, I couldn’t see her prowling around downstairs in all that dirt anyway. She might break a nail or something.”
Upstairs, Charmaine met them at the door to the studio. Before they could ask her about the shoe brand, she silenced them with a warning look. “Brace yourselves,” she muttered out of the side of her mouth. “Trouble ahead.”
Carlo saw them and came over. Looking shamefaced, he said, “I have been told to ask you to leave. I am sorry, but . . . ”
“Asked by whom?” Nancy replied calmly.
“Mr. Pike says there is no mystery here for you to solve,” Carlo told her, with a slight shrug. “He feels that Cindy has simply broken her contract. And he worries that your investigation will only create bad publicity for his product.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Bess said loudly. “What about that set wall falling over? What does that have to do with Cindy’s contract?”
Nancy nudged Bess with her elbow. She could tell from Carlo’s manner that he had been pressured into this decision. “We understand,” she said. “We have to get back to River Heights anyway. But I’ll give you my phone number, just in case you want to get in touch with me.”
Carlo, looking relieved, tucked the number in his pocket and turned away.
“Nancy, how can we quit, just like that?” Bess muttered fiercely after the director walked away. “We can’t just abandon Cindy.”
“Later,” Nancy murmured, heading for the door.
Once they were on the street, Nancy picked up the conversation. “Look, Bess, we can’t force Carlo to let us hang around,” she pointed out. “Besides, this may be a good thing for the investigation.”
“How could it be good?” Bess asked skeptically.
“If everyone thinks we’ve given up, maybe the culprit will get overconfident and make a blunder,” Nancy said. “And meanwhile, we have plenty of detective work to do.”
• • •
That night at home, before going to bed, Nancy called Ann Bowers to ask if there was any news of Cindy. “I’m afraid not,” Ms. Bowers replied with a sigh. “I called the police and the hospitals again an hour ago, but they had nothing to report. I must say, the police didn’t seem terribly concerned.”
“A lot of people occasionally drop out of sight for a day or two,” Nancy told her. “The police generally don’t start really looking until someone’s been gone for forty-eight hours.”
“Well, that won’t bring Cindy back in time to make this commercial,” Ms. Bowers complained. “I’ll have to have a serious talk with Stella first thing tomorrow, to try to save the situation.” After promising to let Nancy know the moment there were any new developments, Ms. Bowers hung up.
• • •
Bess arrived at the Drew house before eight o’clock the next morning, carrying a box of fresh doughnuts. Nancy’s father, attorney Carson Drew, was leaving for the office, but he paused long enough to sample a doughnut.
“Excellent,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “I’m sure you two are planning to leave some for later—when I get home, for example.”
Nancy was making a pot of tea. “We’ll make a point of it, Dad,” she promised with a laugh.
She and Bess sat at the breakfast table. “What next?” Bess asked, between bites of a jelly doughnut.
