"That was brilliant of him to tip off the police and the press that I was stealing from my elderly clients," Carson observed. "It kept the press and the police occupied, and it gave me a good reason to want to put the blame on a burglar, which must have been his original idea."
"And meanwhile," Nancy said, "he pretended to help me with my investigation as a way of keeping tabs on me. And I fell for it. Even when he pretended to show up at Broughton's apartment and rescue me from the closet he himself had locked me in, I didn't question the coincidence. And it didn't occur to me that he had booby-trapped my car while I was waiting inside the restaurant for him. He had me completely snowed."
"Don't be so hard on yourself, Nancy. You broke the case," her father pointed out. "That's what counts."
Nancy rubbed her temples. "Yes, I guess so. The fact is, I liked him. I respected his drive to find out the truth. I have that drive myself. What
I didn't realize about David was that he was perfectly willing to suppress the truth once he'd found it out,"
"He and his friend Broughton both liked to discover other people's secrets to use against them," Washington observed.
"And all his life," Nancy said, "David had been guarding the biggest secret of all—that when he was only four, he killed his own mother."
"Is that true?" Carson asked.
Washington shrugged. "We'll never know. According to the computer, Megali's father died years ago. And there weren't any other witnesses to the accident. Megali obviously thinks he did it, and his grandmother probably does, too. Why else would she cut her only heir out of her will?"
Nancy shook her head sadly. "I guess growing up thinking he was a killer made it easier for him to kill Broughton," she said. "And when it looked as if I was getting too close to the truth, he decided he had to kill me, too. He obviously planted that car bomb as a warning. But I think crashing into the phone booth I was in was for real."
"How did he manage to track you to the library?" Detective Washington asked.
Nancy rolled her eyes and gave a sigh of exasperation. "I guess he was following me all along," she replied. "But I made the library easy for him. I told him I was going there, and why, and when. I did everything but hand him a weapon!"
As Nancy and her father were leaving the police station, Bess and Kyle came rushing up to them.
"Nancy, are you all right?" Bess demanded. "I called your house and Hannah told me what happened."
"I've been better," Nancy said with a little laugh. "No, I'm fine. Really."
"I want to hear all about it," Bess continued. "And don't forget you promised to tell Brenda about it, too."
Nancy let out a heartfelt groan.
Kyle took Nancy's hand and shook it. "You cleared my name," he declared. "You also gave me a new aim in life."
Bess gasped. "Kyle! You mean you're not going to law school after all?"
He laughed. "Sure I am," he said. "I'm more determined than ever. But now I know that I want to go into criminal prosecution and put guys like Broughton and Megali behind bars where they belong.
"With," he added, a twinkle in his eye, "an awful lot of help from brilliant detectives like Nancy Drew!"
Carolyn Keene, 088 False Pretenses
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