Neither Peter nor Dale stopped to count the cost of taxicabs that night. The driver hesitated only a moment. Their request that he make the fastest possible time to the distant Brooklyn police station was not a usual one. Knowing that it must be urgent, the driver made good his promise and soon they were speeding across Manhattan Bridge, through side streets in reckless haste and then down the long stretch of boulevard. Judy leaned out of the window and searched the scene ahead for a trace of anything familiar.

Ocean Parkway, lined with its modern dwelling houses and new apartment buildings was as unlike Gravesend Avenue as anything could be. Still, the two were only a few blocks apart. The driver turned his cab down a side street, sure of his bearings; and Judy, watching, saw the sudden change. The boulevard with its lights and stream of traffic, then queer old Parkville, a village forgotten while Brooklyn grew up around it.

The police station looked all the more imposing in this setting. Two young policemen were already there, waiting beside the high desk and talking with the captain.

Sarah Glenn’s house was only a short distance away, and together they walked it. Soon they were turning down the unpaved end of the street that bordered the railroad cut.

“There it is!” Judy shivered a little and drew her coat closer as she pointed.

The house was dark and silent. The windows were black—black with an unfathomable blackness that must be within. Peter sensed Judy’s fear for he took her arm and guided her as they came up the broken walk.

On the steps Dale stopped and picked up a white flower.

“What can it mean?” Pauline whispered. “How would a rose get here?”

He shook his head. “It’s beyond me. What’s this?” He fingered a lavender ribbon that was still attached to the door.

“Looks as if there’d been a funeral here,” one of the police officers observed.

Both girls stood trembling as he banged and pounded on the door and then shouted a threat to the still house.

“Nobody home,” he turned and said. “Do you think it’s necessary to force our way in?”

“More than ever,” Judy replied. “We must see what’s in the tower!”

“Okay! Give me a hand, partner, and we’ll smash the door.”

Underneath the porch they found a beam which would serve their purpose. Peter and Dale helped the policemen, and soon the heavy door gave way and crashed into the empty house. A sickening, musty smell combined with the heady odor of flowers greeted them as they stepped inside.

“A funeral all right!” the policeman reiterated. “Get the perfume, don’t you? But everything’s cleared up—except....” He and Judy had seen it at the same time but the policeman was the first to pick it up. “... this card.”

“Let me see it.”

Obligingly he handed it to the girl. She turned it over in her hand and passed it on to Dale. It read:

“Do you know the party?” the other officer asked.

“My employer,” Judy replied simply.

The question in her mind, however, was less easily answered. Was Emily Grimshaw’s absence from her office explainable by this death? Whose death? If Emily Grimshaw had sent flowers certainly she must know.

The policemen were busy searching the house, and Judy and her three companions followed them. The rooms upstairs, like those on the first floor, were empty of furniture. But the tower room was found to open from a third floor bedroom. To their surprise, this room was completely furnished, even to bed coverings and pillows. A little kitchen adjoined it and there were evidences that food had recently been cooked there. An extra cot was made up in the hall.

So the poet and her brother had lived in their immense house and occupied only two rooms! Or three? They had yet to explore the tower. Peter Dobbs tried the door and found it locked.

“We’ll have to break this one, too,” the policemen said, and Dale offered to get the beam.

Pauline’s hand kept him. “Wait a minute,” she pleaded. “It’s a shame to spoil the door and maybe this key will fit.”

She took a queer brass key from her hand bag. Judy and Peter frankly stared. The policemen, though obviously doubting its usefulness, consented to try it. To their astonishment, it turned.

“Where did you find that key?” Dale questioned.

“In the pocket of Irene’s brown suit. I put it in my own hand bag for safe-keeping.”

“Rather suspected it fitted something, didn’t you?” he said sarcastically. “Well, to me it doesn’t prove a thing.”

“It does to me,” Judy put in, “although not what you think. This must have been Joy Holiday’s room when she was a child! And if Irene had the key surely Joy Holiday is related to her—perhaps her own mother!”

“It sounds like pretty sound figuring to me,”’ Peter agreed, flashing a look of boyish admiration in Judy’s direction.

Then, as the door swung open, they followed the policemen into the tower. Peter pushed a button and the light revealed a circular room with a gay panorama of nursery rhyme characters frolicking across the wall.

Upon closer inspection, however, the room was seen to be six-sided with shelves built into two of its corners. On one of these dolls and expensive toys were neatly arranged. Books and games for a somewhat older girl adorned the other shelf.

A curtained wardrobe concealed another corner, while a white cot bed, all freshly made, occupied the corner at the left of the door. The two remaining corners were cleverly camouflaged by concave mirrors with uneven distorting surfaces, such as are sometimes seen in amusement park funny houses. In spite of Judy’s anxiety, she could not suppress a smile when the two policemen walked by them.

So this was the room where the poet had locked Joy Holiday! Did she think those silly mirrors and a roomful of books and toys could make up for a lack of freedom? Judy, who had always been allowed to choose what friends she liked, could easily see why the poet’s daughter had wanted to run away—or vanish as people said she had done. How strange it all was and how thrilling to be standing in the very room where Irene’s mother had stood twenty years before!

“It’s so quiet and peaceful here,” Judy said. “Nothing very terrible could have happened in this pretty room.”

She had momentarily forgotten that the whole lower structure of it had been burned away, that she had seen a tall yellow specter peering out of its window.

Peter, however, remembered the fantastic story Judy had told him. It did not surprise the young law student that no one was in the tower. He and the two policemen immediately set about looking for clues to Irene’s whereabouts. But it was not until Dale drew back the wardrobe curtain and they found her yellow dress and jacket hanging there that they became truly alarmed. Now they knew, past any doubt, that Irene had visited her grandmother’s house. There had been a funeral! Even if it had been Sarah Glenn’s, Irene might have been with her when she died. Alone with a crazy woman ... timid little Irene!

It was a sober moment for all of them.

“That girl’s been held captive all right,” one of the policemen said in a voice more troubled than one would expect of an officer of the law. “It looks as if we’ve found the evidence right here.”

He stood examining the folds of her yellow dress. It appeared to have been hanging in the wardrobe for some time. Other clothes were there, too, but the full skirts and puffed sleeves were in the style of twenty years ago. On a shelf above them were two or three queer little hats, all decked out with feathers and flowers. Irene would have laughed at them. She would have tried them on and posed before the comical mirrors. Judy wondered if she had done that.

Someone, apparently, had tried on one of the aprons. It was a simple gingham affair such as girls used to wear to protect dainty dresses, and it had been thrown carelessly over a chair. When Judy made a move to hang it up she was warned to leave everything exactly as it was.

“If this turns out to be a murder case,” one of the policemen said, “this bedroom may contain important evidence.” He turned to Dale who still held the rose he had found on the steps. “That flower proves that the funeral must have been held today. It’s still sweet,” he continued, making a grimace as he sniffed it. “We’ll get together all the facts on the case and have the place watched. If this man, Jasper Crosby, returns tonight there’ll be a policeman here to nab him. A general alarm will be dispatched to our radio cars, and we’ll find out whose funeral it was, too, and let you know first thing in the morning.”

“Oh, if you only would,” Judy cried gratefully. “Perhaps you can find out from my employer. She’s decided to take a vacation for some unknown reason but you may be able to locate her here.”

She gave them Emily Grimshaw’s home address. Peter Dobbs, who had taken a keen interest in the legal aspect of the case, jotted it down, too. Much to Dale’s discomfiture, he kept talking about Irene.

“If we find her,” he declared, “this may be my big opportunity. She would contest the will, of course, and I might be able to help her then.”

“If we find her,” Dale repeated doubtfully.

Later Peter gave Judy the address and telephone number of the hotel where he was staying. He would be either there or at the police station in case she needed him.

“If I do call you,” Judy promised, with an attempt at lightness, “you may be sure that I’m in trouble because it’s really your place to call me.”