The Scarlet Slipper Mystery by Carolyn Keene Page A

received a startling telegram, a night letter from Cliffwood. “Why, listen to this, Hannah!” she exclaimed, and read:
    YOUR HELP NO LONGER NEEDED. ANY CONTINUED
INTEREST IN OUR CASE ON YOUR PART WILL PROVE
EMBARRASSING TO US AND DANGEROUS TO YOU.
    HELENE.
    “Well, that’s gratitude for you!” Hannah remarked. “Never a thank you!”
    Before Nancy had a chance to respond, the telephone rang. The girl answered it.
    A weak, frightened voice asked, “N-Nancy?”
    “Yes. Who——?”
    “This is Helene. Please come right away to—”
    There was a scream and the sound of a crash as though the instrument had been torn from Helene’s grasp. Then the line went dead!

CHAPTER XV
    A Chase
    NANCY sat still for several minutes, pondering the telegram and the phone call. The messages were completely contradictory. One of them was a fake. But which one?
    “Hannah,” said Nancy, after returning to the breakfast table and telling her about the call, “I’m going to drive over to Cliffwood and see if I can learn anything about the sender of that telegram.”
    “All right, dear, but do be careful.”
    On the way Nancy spotted George strolling on the main street and asked her to go along. When Nancy told her about the latest developments in the case, George whistled.
    “Sounds as if Helene and Henri really have been kidnapped.”
    Nancy nodded.
    At the Cliffwood telegraph office she explained to the clerk that she suspected a hoax. The woman was very cooperative and checked the original message. The sender had refused to give an address.
    “It was a counter telegram,” she explained, “written here and paid for in cash. I have no way of tracing the sender. I do recall that it was filed by a woman, though—kind of loud in her dress and speech. Does that help you?”
    “Very much,” said Nancy, her mind instantly conjuring up a picture of Mrs. Judson.
    Nancy went back to the car and relayed the information to George.
    “I’ll bet,” said George emphatically, “that this whole business was staged.”
    “In what way?”
    “Both the telegram and the phone call,” George replied, “were sent to sidetrack you from the case.” George chuckled. “But they don’t know Nancy Drew and the way she thrives on challenges. But where has this one led us? Into a blind alley.”
    Nancy smiled, then said, “When I run into a dead end on a clue, I go back to the beginning and start all over again.”
    “The beginning?” George repeated. “You mean all the way back to the bisque figurines?”
    “That’s as good a place as any, George.”
    The girls had lunch; then Nancy drove back to River Heights. George left her, and Nancy went to her father’s office. After describing the morning’s happenings, she made a request.
    “Dad, would you please find out from customs if those bisque figurines were imported? I suspect they as well as the paintings may have been shipped to Mr. Duparc.”
    “I can try,” the lawyer readily agreed.
    Nancy said she would be at the dancing school if he should want her, and headed for the Fontaines’ studio. She found things running smoothly, with Mrs. Nickerson in charge. Since there were twenty minutes before the next class, Nancy donned a leotard and practiced for her dance in the forthcoming charity show.
    “That’s excellent,” Ned’s mother commented enthusiastically after watching her.
    When Nancy’s class of young students arrived and had gotten into their costumes, she began a story she loved about the great ballerina Pavlova.
    “One of Pavlova’s favorite dances,” Nancy said, “was called ‘The Swan.’ It’s said she floated across the stage in a filmy white-feathered costume even more gracefully than this lovely bird swims! And how do you think Pavlova learned to imitate it?”
    “How?” chorused the little girls.
    “In her garden at Ivy House in Hampstead, England,” Nancy said, “Pavlova had a small lake with tame swans swimming on it. She used to watch them for