“Yes,” Nancy replied. “Let’s check his store. He may know all about this. Or he may not. He and Stryker haven’t exactly seemed the best of friends lately. Maybe they’ve had a falling-out, and he’ll be willing to tell us everything he knows. If he understands the trouble he’s in, he should be willing to.”
“Let’s go then,” George said.
She and Nancy helped Bess into the car. They knew Bess wouldn’t want to stay in the house by herself. And Nancy didn’t know how safe she’d be if she did.
Most of the stores on the green were closed by the time they arrived there. They couldn’t believe their luck when they saw that Fairport Hardware was still open. Mr. Bremer was behind the cash register.
Bess stayed behind in the car, and Nancy and George went into the store.
“Hello,” Nancy said, making her voice much more friendly sounding then she actually felt.
“Evening,” he said.
“Are you about to close?” Nancy asked.
“Not if you want something,” Mr. Bremer replied.
“Tell me, if I wanted to find gold in a stream, what would I need?” she asked. “I figure that I could probably find the right tools here, in a hardware store.”
An uneasy look passed over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, coming out from behind the cash register. “But I’m about to close for the night. Could you come back tomorrow?”
He was going to be tough, Nancy could tell.
“Not until you tell me what you and John Stryker have been up to out in the woods near Hank Tolchinsky’s place,” she said calmly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mr. Bremer said.
“Yes, you do,” Nancy insisted firmly. “And you’d better tell us what you know, because I think your friend has just done something that’s going to get him into a lot of trouble.”
Mr. Bremer looked stricken. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it looks as if he’s kidnapped Elizabeth Porter,” Nancy told him bluntly. “If I were you, I’d tell me everything, or you’ll be charged as an accomplice.”
“I know nothing about this!” Mr. Bremer shouted.
“Well, what do you know about this?” Nancy asked, pulling the receipt pad Sarah had given her out of her jeans pocket and slapping it on the counter. “It was found in Sarah Connor’s car the night it pushed my car off the road. You dropped it there, didn’t you?”
“Stryker made me take her car!” Mr. Bremer yelled. “I tell you, the man’s crazy.”
“Why not tell us what you know?” Nancy asked again. “We’ll find out anyway. If you cooperate, maybe the police will go easier on you in the end.”
Mr. Bremer walked over to a stool and sat down wearily.
“You don’t know how bad it’s been,” he began with a sigh. “My business has been failing for the past year, and I’ve been hard pressed for money. So I approached Stryker with a deal. There’ve always been rumors about gold in that stream near Tolchinsky’s, and I told Stryker if he bankrolled a sluicing operation, I’d split the profits when we found the mother lode.”
“And he agreed?” Nancy asked. At last he was talking.
Mr. Bremer nodded. “He said he was having his own money troubles. He loved to sail, and he’d sunk a lot of money into a boat and needed more money to enter races. So we went in on it together.”
“And then the road controversy hit?” Nancy asked. It was a logical question.
“Right. We’d just begun to find some gold, although not enough to keep Stryker happy. But he went ballistic over this bat thing. He knew if the town decided to widen the road, our operation was doomed.”
“Is he the one who was threatening my aunt?” George asked.
“Yes.” Mr. Bremer gave a nasty laugh. “He said he knew Mrs. Porter well and that if she got her back up about something, she’d be unstoppable. So he egged her on with those threats—the phone calls, the stuffed bat, causing the car accidents. It was all done to make her even more resolute.”
Ah! At last, Nancy understood Stryker’s motive. It was a fiendishly clever use of reverse psychology. And he must have thought that killing the bats would be the best possible way to get Elizabeth working for his evil purpose.
“So you ran us off the road,” Nancy said. “But how did you know my car?”
“I saw you getting into it in front of my store one day,” Mr. Bremer admitted.
“And the bats that were killed. Did you two do that?”
At this point, Mr. Bremer looked genuinely surprised. “No, it wasn’t me. I started to distance myself from Stryker after we ran you off the road. I figured I’d shut down the sluicing operation and try to find my money some other way, rather than do what Stryker wanted.”
Nancy believed him. He looked tired. Tired and relieved to have confessed.
“Do you have any idea where he could have taken Mrs. Porter?” Nancy asked. “It looks as if he must be the one who kidnapped her.”
Mr. Bremer thought for a moment. “Stryker has a cabin, a shack really, out in the woods not far from Tolchinsky’s house,” he said. “That’s the only place I can think of.”
“Tell us how to get there,” Nancy said.
Mr. Bremer quickly gave them directions and even drew a rough map on the back of a piece of paper.
“Look, if we go, will you try to get to him first?” Nancy asked him. She wasn’t ready to trust him completely, after all.
