The Hidden Staircase by Carolyn Keene Page A

carriages stood on its wooden floor, but around the walls hung old harnesses and reins. Nancy paused a moment to examine one of the bridles. It was set with two hand-painted medallions of women’s portraits.
    Suddenly her reflection was interrupted by a scream. Turning, she was just in time to see Helen plunge through a hole in the floor. In a flash Nancy was across the carriage house and looking down into a gaping hole where the rotted floor had given way.
    “Helen!” she cried out in alarm.
    “I’m all right,” came a voice from below. “Nice and soft down here. Please throw me your flash.”
    Nancy removed the flashlight from the pocket of her jeans and tossed it down.
    “I thought maybe I’d discovered something,” Helen said. “But this is just a plain old hole. Give me a hand, will you, so I can climb up?”
    Nancy lay flat on the floor and with one arm grabbed a supporting beam that stood in the center of the carriage house. Reaching down with the other arm, she assisted Helen in her ascent.
    “We’d better watch our step around here,” Nancy said as her friend once more stood beside her.
    “You’re so right,” Helen agreed, brushing dirt off her jeans. Helen’s plunge had given Nancy an idea that there might be other openings in the floor and that one of them could be an entrance to a subterranean passage. But though she flashed her light over every inch of the carriage-house floor, she could discover nothing suspicious.
    “Let’s quit!” Helen suggested. “I’m a mess, and besides, I’m hungry.”
    “All right,” Nancy agreed. “Are you game to search the cellar this afternoon?”
    “Oh, sure.”
    After lunch they started to investigate the store-rooms in the cellar. There was a cool stone room where barrels of apples had once been kept. There was another, formerly filled with bags of whole-wheat flour, barley, buckwheat, and oatmeal.
    “And everything was grown on the estate,” said Helen.
    “Oh, it must have been perfectly wonderful,” Nancy said. “I wish we could go back in time and see how life was in those days!”
    “Maybe if we could, we’d know how to find that ghost,” Helen remarked. Nancy thought so too.
    As the girls went from room to room in the cellar, Nancy beamed her flashlight over every inch of wall and floor. At times, the young sleuth’s pulse would quicken when she thought she had discovered a trap door or secret opening. But each time she had to admit failure—there was no evidence of either one in the cellar.
    “This has been a discouraging day,” Nancy remarked, sighing. “But I’m not giving up.”
    Helen felt sorry for her friend. To cheer Nancy, she said with a laugh, “Storeroom after storeroom but no room to store a ghost!”
    Nancy had to laugh, and together the two girls ascended the stairway to the kitchen. After changing their clothes, they helped Aunt Rosemary prepare the evening dinner. When the group had eaten and later gathered in the parlor, Nancy reminded the others that she expected her father to arrive the next day.
    “Dad didn’t want me to bother meeting him, but I just can’t wait to see him. I think I’ll meet all the trains from Chicago that stop here.”
    “I hope your father will stay with us for two or three days,” Miss Flora spoke up. “Surely he’ll have some ideas about our ghost.”
    “And good ones, too,” Nancy said. “If he’s on the early train, he’ll have breakfast with us. I’ll meet it at eight o’clock.”
    But later that evening Nancy’s plans were suddenly changed. Hannah Gruen telephoned her to say that a man at the telegraph office had called the house a short time before to read a message from Mr. Drew. He had been unavoidably detained and would not arrive Wednesday.
    “In the telegram your father said that he will let us know when he will arrive,” the housekeeper added.
    “I’m disappointed,” Nancy remarked, “but I hope this delay means that Dad is. on the trail of Willie