The Case of the Secret Room

It is an ordinary day in Odyssey, and John Avery Whittaker is down in the basement of Whit's End, tinkering with an invention he has been fiddling with for years. It is meant to be the opposite of a microwave oven, an instant freezer that could cool anything down in seconds, and Whit thinks it would be awfully handy in an ice cream shop, if he could ever get it finished. Tom Riley comes downstairs with his grandniece, Jami Martin, who has come to town for a couple of weeks, and Whit shows them the tiny computer transistor he special ordered to serve as the brain of the whole contraption. Then he drops it. The little part rolls away and disappears under a tall old cabinet that has stood against the basement wall since before Whit ever bought the building.

Whit and Tom heave the cabinet aside so Jami can reach in after the transistor, and what she finds is far more interesting than a lost part. There is a door back there, a door nobody knew about. Jami is thrilled and imagines a secret room stuffed with treasure. Whit warns her it is more likely cobwebs and spiders, and pries the stuck door open with a flashlight in hand. Inside are empty shelves, a musty smell, and a fully dressed skeleton propped up in a chair with a bullet hole through the shirt.

The police arrive, and Inspector Ralph Howards explains that the discovery may have solved a mystery that has sat unanswered in Odyssey for more than forty years. A wallet in the pocket identifies the man as Spencer Barfield, a drifter who came to town in 1946 and worked as a maintenance man in the building back when it was a community recreation center. That same year, the Odyssey Bank was robbed of about twenty-five thousand dollars, and Spencer vanished. Everyone assumed he had taken the money and run. Howards figures a partner double-crossed him, shot him, hid the body, and kept the cash, and he sees no point in chasing a trail that cold. Whit disagrees. A man was killed, nobody truly knows by whom or why, and everyone has spent forty years assuming the worst about him.

So Whit takes Jami to the library, where old newspapers preserved on microfilm fill in details the inspector left out, including the fact that a young rookie officer named Ralph Howards was knocked unconscious outside the bank the night of the robbery. Whit and Jami then visit Percival Fenwick, the bank's retired manager, who lives alone in a gloomy mansion crowded with African masks and weapons. Fenwick is prickly and unwelcoming, but he lets slip that only three parties knew where the bank's hidden alarm box was, and he believes to this day that someone on the police force tipped the robbers off. Whit leaves feeling sorry for the lonely old man, and finds a typed note tucked under his windshield wiper: leave well enough alone.

When Whit questions Inspector Howards, the inspector admits he has been embarrassed ever since that night, because he never was struck. He simply saw the robber and blacked out, and he cannot explain how. He urges Whit to drop the matter and use the very same phrase from the note. Back at the shop, Connie Kendall reports that a strange old woman came in asking about the secret room and left an envelope containing a 1946 headline about a police car chase. Whit begins to wonder whether the inspector has been following him, and whether the missing partner might be closer than anyone imagined. Then a noise sounds from the basement. Connie calls the police while Whit goes down to look, finds the door window broken, and hears someone in the dark just before the lights go out. Connie's calls down the stairs go unanswered, and the mystery of the secret room is left hanging.