Troubled Waters by Keene Carolyn

Author:Keene, Carolyn [Keene, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Childrens, Young Adult, Mystery, Adventure, Crime, Age Range 1 Younger Audience
ISBN: 9781416925132
Amazon: B01GY1Q49O
Goodreads: 557144
Publisher: Aladdin
Published: 2007-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Search for Secret Rooms

For a moment I just stood there staring at the muddy windowsill and floor. Questions swirled inside my head like the churning waters of the river outside.

Could Brad have anything to do with the damage to the Helping Homes renovation? Was that why he’d been acting so secretive? But then, why would he do something so destructive, especially when he and Cathy were getting one of the foundry apartments? And why would he write hate messages to J.C. Valdez? J.C. was a hero to the Cedar Plains kids.

Brad couldn’t be the person in the car we’d followed, though—he’d been right with me in George’s car. . . .

“Nancy? Did you hear me?”

Owen’s voice snapped me from my thoughts. He was gazing at me expectantly from the doorway.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking myself. “Um, what did you say?”

“The other volunteers will be arriving soon. Let’s see if we can get those broken sinks cleared out,” Owen said. “I don’t want people getting spooked. If volunteers start to quit, then we’ll really be in trouble.”

He definitely had a point. “Let me just take a look up on the balcony first,” I said to him. “I want to see if there are any clues to who did this.”

It was already a quarter to seven. While Owen grabbed a trash bin and began throwing chunks of broken sink into it, I ran up the steps to the balcony.

“Uh-oh,” I mumbled, stopping short next to the sinks. “Owen, you’d better come see this!”

I stared at the corner where the new balcony jutted up against the bricks of the old second-floor offices. When we’d left the day before, the sinks had been stored neatly next to orderly piles of plywood and boxes of tiles for the bathrooms and kitchens. Now some of the sinks lay on their side. Sheets of plywood had been pulled away from the walls and lay in a disorderly mess. Boxes of tiles had toppled to the floor. It looked as if someone had been in a hurry to get to the walls.

More precisely, to ruin the walls. Huge, ragged holes had been smashed into the newly polished bricks of the old walls. Reddish brown chunks of brick were strewn over the plywood, tiles, sinks, and floor.

“This is worse than I thought,” Owen said, appearing next to me. He raked a hand through his spiked hair, his eyes grim.

My work boots scraped on gritty brick dust as I hurried over to the two holes. One was shallow and didn’t break completely through the bricks. But the other one . . .

“Hey!” I said, bending close to it. I stuck my hand through the opening, stifling a sneeze as I breathed in stale-smelling, dusty air. “It’s another blocked-off room!”

“Another one?”

Owen was next to me in about three nanoseconds. We stared into the dark, dusty space. Like the other walled-off space we’d found, this one was filled with cobwebs and dust balls. I saw the outline of a doorway that had

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