Carolyn Keene - Nancy Drew Read Online Free Page B

said with a smile. “Especially you three, since your rooms are right along this hall.” She paused, then added, “I hope you and George don’t mind sharing a room, Bess. We don’t have all our furniture yet.”
    “Just being here is wonderful,” Bess and George assured Heather as she pointed to the two doors that opened just beyond the bend in the hall.
    “The front of the house is devoted to the lobby area and the resort office,” Heather explained, “so all the bedrooms open off this hall. Grandfather, Chuck, and I have rooms at the other end at the moment, though we hope eventually to move upstairs and convert all the rooms down here for our guests. ”
    “What about the Tomiches?” Nancy asked. “Do they live at the resort?
    “Yes, on the second floor, as a matter of fact. Ward and Chuck have been working on the modernization up there in the evenings. They have one end fixed, but that’s all.”
    “Where did your grandfather see the Kachina spirit?” Nancy inquired, her mind returning to the reason for her visit.
    Heather frowned. “Well, he said he came out of his room and started along the hall, but he’d only taken a few steps when he saw this thing in the moonlight. He thought it was an intruder, so he went down the hall in a hurry, then he caught his foot and ... well, he said that the figure just seemed to fade into the wall about there.” She indicated the Kachina that had attracted Nancy’s eye.
    Nancy stared at the painting for a moment, wishing that the masked face could give her some kind of clue. But the old paint was uninformative, and, after another moment, she shrugged and allowed herself to be directed to her room.
    “I suppose if we’re going to unpack before dinner, we’d better get started,” she murmured as she stepped through the door which bore a freshly painted number on it.
    “Don’t feel rushed,” Heather told them all. “We’re just family, so Maria can hold dinner if you want to nap or something. ”
    “Oh, no,” Bess said quickly, “don’t have her do that, not the way everything smelled in the kitchen. It must be nearly ready.”
    Nancy laughed as she closed her door and turned her attention to her suitcases, which Chuck had placed on the bench at the foot of her double bed. She got her keys out and started to open the large one first, anxious to hang her clothes in the closet so the wrinkles would come out. However, when she tried to unlock the bag, she found that it was already unlocked.
    Could she have forgotten to lock it? Nancy asked herself as she opened the case. They had been rushed, but still.... Frowning, she began taking things out, trying hard to remember everything she’d packed and the exact order it had been put in.
    Everything seemed all right, but when she reached for her new, blue knit shirt, the wrinkle in it moved and she jerked her hand back quickly. Nothing happened, so she carefully picked up one of the clothes hangers from the bed and lightly touched the “wrinkle.” It moved suddenly, and to her horror, a brownish scorpion nearly two-and-a-half inches long scuttled out of her shirt, its deadly tail moving angrily!

5
    A Scary Apparition
    Nancy shrieked when she saw the ugly scorpion, but managed to control her nerves enough to use one of her unpacked riding boots to kill the creature before it could find a new hiding place. Only then did she catch her breath and really look at it.
    “How did you get in that suitcase?” she asked the dead scorpion. “You didn’t come with me from River Heights, that’s for sure.”
    She picked up the vicious creature, with its poisonous stinger, and disposed of it in the corner wastebasket. Nancy looked around, sighing. It was possible that her unlocked case could have come open in the luggage area of the airport, or even here, but somehow she didn’t think so. She had a disturbing feeling that someone had used the scorpion in another attempt to get rid of her. Was it the driver of the car that