“Maybe he unlocked it himself.” Falco laughed unpleasantly and added, “I told you we’d been bothered by prowlers. Is it our fault what happens to them?”
“I think what happened to this man was your fault,” replied Judy. She was about to mention the beating and then thought better of it. After all, she was just stalling until help came. It would be better to mention something they didn’t already know. There was that broken water pipe, for instance. “Of course,” she added, “it wasn’t entirely your fault. Part of it was accidental. One of the pipes broke and poured water into the room—”
“Which room?” they both interrupted.
“The room where we found the prisoner,” Judy answered. “We broke the pipe by accident when we rammed in the door.”
“You rammed it in? You—you—” Falco was stuttering in his anger. “What about the other door?”
“Oh!” said Judy as if she had just remembered it. “That’s right. There was another door.”
“Did you go in that room, too?” He looked ready to kill her if she had. Judy couldn’t help wondering what secret that other door was hiding.
“We didn’t bother with it,” she replied truthfully. “There wasn’t time. The water was pouring in. I managed to escape, but my poor brother is still down there with that dead man.”
Falco gasped. “Dead man, did you say?”
It flashed across Judy’s mind that it might be safer for Falco to think Dick Hartwell was dead. He mustn’t know Dick had talked. She thought of his story, now in Horace’s pocket, and her brother’s words, “I can keep his head above water if it comes to that.”