Free Hidden Meanings by Carolyn Keene Page A

then a piercing whistle rang through the atrium. Nancy and Bess craned their necks to look up. Leaning over the seventh-floor railing, Ralph was madly waving his arm. He blew a kiss to Bess, then gestured urgently for her to come upstairs.
    â€œI could die, I could just die,” whined Bess, scrunching up her body to seem as small as possible.
    â€œWhy don’t I go and see what he wants?” Nancy said as an elevator came. “It may have to do with the case, anyway.”
    Bess nodded. “I’m just going to stay here and stuff myself with chocolate,” she announced with a groan.
    Nancy stepped into the elevator. When she reached seven, she called down the hall to Ralph as she approached him. “Everything okay?”
    â€œOh, sure,” Ralph said, toying with the braid on his uniform shoulder. “But I just thought I should tell someone. A maintenance worker came to the room to fix the light in the bathroom. I didn’t know anything about it, so I sent him away. Did I do right? I don’t want Mr. Wasilick to get mad at me.”
    â€œYou did just right,” Nancy assured him. “What did the guy look like?”
    Ralph looked confused. “Uh—brown hair. Not too tall,” he said.
    Was it the same man Rosita and Paul had run into? Nancy wondered. Nick Kessler? The bearded man? “Let me just look around to check things out,” she said.
    â€œBy the way, did he have a beard?”
    â€œUh . . . I can’t remember,” Ralph answered, struggling to remember. “Well, I’ll see you in a bit.” Leaving Ralph, she went around the corner and walked through the open steel doors to the service corridor. Near the elevator she spied green coveralls tossed carelessly on the floor.
    She knelt quickly beside them. Nancy bet that whoever had discarded them wasn’t one of the hotel’s real workers. She held them up, looking for clues.
    Suddenly the corridor light went off. A second later, the steel doors slammed shut with a heavy clatter. Nancy was plunged into darkness, without a single ray of light to see by.
    Then, outside, a high-pitched siren went off.
    A fire alarm! Nancy was trapped.

Chapter

Nine
    O N THE OTHER SIDE of the steel doors, Nancy heard people shouting and footsteps pounding as the fire alarm wailed on. She also heard several loud metallic clangs—probably more fire doors swinging shut, Nancy guessed. The noises echoed and reechoed throughout the hotel.
    From arson cases she had worked on, Nancy knew that a series of fire doors should clap shut as soon as an alarm went off. Held shut by heavy springs, the doors would contain any fire in each sealed-off area. She had no hope of opening these doors by herself.
    She groped along the wall to the service elevator and pushed the button. Pressing her ear to the door, she listened for cables and gears turning in the shaft. She heard nothing. Then she quickly remembered that once a fire alarm sounds, all elevators are halted. Otherwise, the shafts could become vertical fire tunnels, channeling flames and smoke to other floors.
    Discouraged, Nancy realized that someone had hoped she would come in here to investigate Ralph’s report about a maintenance worker. Slumping onto the floor, she sat in the dark. Had that same person switched off the light and pulled the fire alarm, knowing she would be trapped completely?
    Then another possibility occurred to her. What if the alarm wasn’t a fake? What if there really was a fire? Could this enclosed compartment become a death trap? The hotel’s fire system had most likely not yet been tested in a real fire, she thought in horror.
    Nancy fought down a wave of fear. Yes, she was trapped, but she didn’t have to sit in the dark, she reasoned. If she could find the wall switch, she could turn the lights back on. She rose and began to feel her way along the wall.
    Just then the fire siren stopped. With a crackle of static, a