Judy drank a glass of water in the darkness, preferring not to disturb any of the sleepers by switching on a light. In the kitchen, the damp, unpleasant odor which the girls had noted earlier, seemed especially strong.
“I’m sure it comes from the basement,” she thought, sniffing the air close to the locked door. “Maybe this is why Mr. Krumm wants us to keep it closed. But what can cause such an odor?”
Judy had started to move away when she was startled by an unusual sound which seemed to come from beneath the floor of the kitchen. The noise assaulted her ears as a series of loud thumps.
“Gracious!” Judy thought, backing a step away from the locked cellar door. “What’s going on down there in the basement? Maybe this place does have a ghost!”
If the loud thumping, bumping noise had startled Judy, she was to suffer an even greater shock.
As she held herself rigid, straining to catch the slightest sound, there arose from below, the clear melodious notes of a flute!
Chapter 5
SONG OF THE FLUTE
JUDY stood transfixed, listening tensely. The musical notes now had died out and in the kitchen there was only silence. Had the strange notes of the flute been no more than a trick of the imagination?
Suddenly she was aware of a sound in the room beyond the kitchen. Judy whirled to see a white apparition framed in the doorway. She uttered a choked cry and then laughed aloud in relief. The figure was no ghost, only Miss Ward in a white bathrobe.