“Sh!” Judy warned her. “You don’t want Roger Banning and his heavyweight friend to follow us, do you? It’s only a piece of that broken statue.”
“I know. I guess I’m nervous,” Lorraine confessed.
“There’s no need to be,” Lois put in. “You can see this part of the estate is deserted. Lots of old showplaces like this are going to pieces. We may find they were telling the truth about there not being any fountain. People just don’t go to the expense of keeping up these big estates.”
Judy didn’t think this was true of the Brandts. Everyone knew Mr. Brandt had made millions with his chain of department stores. He might employ a caretaker for the estate in his absence, but she didn’t really think he would lease it.
“Except, of course, to friends,” she added.
“The Bannings could have been friends. It’s their friends who worry me,” Lorraine admitted.
“That one we met in the car when you hid your face?” Lois questioned. “You were afraid of him. I could see that.”
“I just didn’t want him to recognize me,” Lorraine said, and quickly changed the subject.
They had reached the rose trellis, now bare of roses. It, too, had been broken. A bird bath Judy remembered leaned at an angle. She found a tree with a hook in the trunk and cried out excitedly, “This is the hook that held one end of the hammock. Now I know exactly how I walked to reach the fountain. I should think you could hear it from here. I did then.”
She stood for a moment listening and then walked on, growing more puzzled by the minute. Lois and Lorraine followed. It was a strange walk. Everything was familiar and yet oddly different. Not a sound could be heard except the crunch of their own footsteps along the path toward the fountain.