The Case of the Secret Room

John Avery Whittaker sits across from Inspector Ralph Howards at the police station, and he is not there to talk about his bumps and bruises. Someone broke into the basement of Whit's End the night before and shoved him into a stack of boxes, yet nothing was taken. Whit is certain the burglar was not after his belongings at all. He believes the intruder wanted the hidden room that was recently discovered under the building - the room where a skeleton with a bullet hole in it was found. The police have already named the man as Spencer Barfield, a drifter who worked in the building back in 1946 and vanished the same week the Odyssey bank was robbed. Inspector Howards calls it a closed case and tells Whit to leave it alone. Whit refuses. Too many questions have never been answered, including the strangest one of all: what happened to the robber's partner, and where did the money go?

Outside, Jami is waiting with news from the library. Using a newspaper headline that a mysterious woman handed Whit the day before, she has tracked down an article from June of 1946, five days after the robbery. A man named Alfred Myers was pulled over for running a stop sign, panicked, and sped away. The young rookie officer who chased him was none other than Ralph Howards. The chase ended when Myers crashed into a telephone pole, and he died soon after. In his car, police found a .38 caliber pistol - the same caliber as the bullet found with the skeleton.

The mysterious woman turns out to be Miss Barfield, Spencer's sister. She explains that she and Spencer grew up as orphans, that he drifted after coming home from the war, and that she never once believed the newspapers when they said he robbed a bank. For more than forty years she has wondered what became of him. Her brother's letters mentioned a nervous man named Alfred Myers who hung around the community center, poked around the off limits basement, and, oddly enough, was seen talking with the bank manager, Percival Fenwick.

Whit and Jami pay Fenwick a visit in his house full of African masks. Fenwick admits he knew Myers and says he hired him as a private investigator to prove that Inspector Howards helped the robbers. Jami is convinced. Back at Whit's End, though, the group cannot agree on whom to believe. Tom Riley points out that a man who had stolen a fortune probably would not spend forty years working as a police officer, and Whit grieves that two men lost their lives over nothing more than money. Then Tom offers a wild guess that changes everything: what if the stolen money was never carried away at all, but buried in the secret room?

That night Whit keeps digging after everyone has gone home, and his shovel strikes a box. Before he can lift it, Inspector Howards appears. The inspector confesses that he has quietly been working the case all along, pretending to have given up so the real criminals would grow careless, and that he left the money as bait. The bait works. Fenwick steps out of the shadows and claims the box as his own, revealing that he planned the robbery, cut the bank alarm, and sent Myers inside. The strange fainting spells that night were caused by darts tipped with an African sleeping drug, and Fenwick carries a cane loaded with one more. Myers, he says, shot Spencer for seeing too much, then died before revealing where he had buried the money.

Fenwick orders the two men away from the box, and Miss Barfield's voice stops him cold. Though she admits she was tempted to keep the twenty five thousand dollars as payment for her forty lost years, she has already radioed the police from the inspector's car. Fenwick is led away, the money is returned to the bank with a portion promised to charity, and Howards apologizes for treating Whit as an enemy instead of an ally. Whit cannot quite call it a happy ending. He now has a room in his basement that will always remind him how greed hurts people, including innocent ones like Spencer Barfield and his sister, and how the love of money leads people to trade lives for a few pieces of paper that never make anyone happy.