“In the pocket of Irene’s brown suit. I put it in my own hand bag for safe-keeping.”
“Rather suspected it fitted something, didn’t you?” he said sarcastically. “Well, to me it doesn’t prove a thing.”
“It does to me,” Judy put in, “although not what you think. This must have been Joy Holiday’s room when she was a child! And if Irene had the key surely Joy Holiday is related to her—perhaps her own mother!”
“It sounds like pretty sound figuring to me,”’ Peter agreed, flashing a look of boyish admiration in Judy’s direction.
Then, as the door swung open, they followed the policemen into the tower. Peter pushed a button and the light revealed a circular room with a gay panorama of nursery rhyme characters frolicking across the wall.
Upon closer inspection, however, the room was seen to be six-sided with shelves built into two of its corners. On one of these dolls and expensive toys were neatly arranged. Books and games for a somewhat older girl adorned the other shelf.
A curtained wardrobe concealed another corner, while a white cot bed, all freshly made, occupied the corner at the left of the door. The two remaining corners were cleverly camouflaged by concave mirrors with uneven distorting surfaces, such as are sometimes seen in amusement park funny houses. In spite of Judy’s anxiety, she could not suppress a smile when the two policemen walked by them.
So this was the room where the poet had locked Joy Holiday! Did she think those silly mirrors and a roomful of books and toys could make up for a lack of freedom? Judy, who had always been allowed to choose what friends she liked, could easily see why the poet’s daughter had wanted to run away—or vanish as people said she had done. How strange it all was and how thrilling to be standing in the very room where Irene’s mother had stood twenty years before!
“It’s so quiet and peaceful here,” Judy said. “Nothing very terrible could have happened in this pretty room.”
She had momentarily forgotten that the whole lower structure of it had been burned away, that she had seen a tall yellow specter peering out of its window.