Trapped inside a tinderbox! The words roiled in Nancy’s head. For a second the thickening smoke seemed to deaden her brain. Then something snapped inside of her.
“No way! I won’t give in to this. There’s got to be a way out of here!” Nancy muttered through gritted teeth. She kicked at the door, then pounded it with her fists. She raised some brick dust, but the door held fast. She cast a frantic glance back toward the last chamber. The smoke had cleared slightly, but the fire was burning hotter. Flames licked up the kiln walls.
The smoke was collecting toward the front of the kiln, where Nancy stood. Dropping down beneath the curtain of smoke, she looked around, desperate for something to smother the flames. If only she had worn a sweater, she could have used that.
Just then Nancy heard footsteps outside. Someone was nearby.
She heard someone shout, “Caught in the act, Ellie May!” It was Theresa’s voice. “I can’t believe you’d do this!”
“Do what?” Ellie May sounded nonplussed. “Some idiot started the kiln and—”
“Hey, what’s she doing here?” Jonathan’s voice broke in.
“Jonathan,” Ellie May warned, “I’ll take care of this.”
“Not on your life,” Jonathan snarled. “So far your ‘taking care of things’ has landed us in a real mess. That snoopy Drew person has managed to figure out the whole racket. Not that she’ll do much damage now. But I’m getting out while I still can. For all we know she called the cops before you got this harebrained scheme to lock her in the kiln and fire it up.”
Ellie May laughed sourly. “No, she thinks I already called them, so she wouldn’t bother, I’m sure.”
“What about her?” Jonathan growled.
“Let me go!” Theresa cried out. “You’re hurting me.”
“You don’t know the first thing about hurt,” Jonathan retorted.
“Jonathan, forget about her. We’ve got to get out of here before someone notices the kiln’s lit,” Ellie May urged.
Nancy listened in horror from inside the kiln. “Theresa!” she screamed.
“Nancy?” Theresa gasped. “She’s in there?”
“She got what was coming to her, spying on us,” Jonathan snapped.
“Someone’s coming,” Ellie May blurted in a panicky voice. “I’m getting out of here now. Leave the girl. There’s no time.”
Nancy heard some kind of scuffle, then a thud.
“Theresa!” Nancy shouted through the smoky hole, terrified her friend had been dragged away. “Are you there?” Instead of an answer she heard the pounding of running feet—running toward the kiln, not away from it.
“Theresa!” George sounded horrified. “What happened to you?”
“Forget me,” Theresa gasped weakly. “I’m okay. It’s Nancy. You’ve got to get her out of that kiln.”
“Nancy’s in the kiln?” Bess’s voice was like honey to Nancy’s ears.
“Hey, guys,” she gasped, coughing through the hole. “Throw in something, anything to help put the fire out.”
“There’s a hose behind the shed.” Theresa shouted, sounding stronger.
“I’ll get it,” George volunteered.
“Nancy, are you at the door?”
“Yes!” Nancy replied her voice shaking. The temperature was rising, and she was beginning to feel light-headed from lack of air.
“Take this,” Theresa commanded, and Nancy felt something wet and heavy dangling from the opening in the door.
Her fingers closed around the damp wool. A field blanket, she realized. It must have been lying around the shed. Theresa had wet it. Nancy struggled toward the back chambers. The fire was sparking in a couple of new bundles of kindling. She beat the blanket against the flames, smothering them as George turned on the hose.
There was a loud crack and pop as water splashed onto the red-hot pots. Dense smoke billowed toward Nancy. She reeled backward and sank down against the door. Why wasn’t the door opening? She heard Theresa and Bess grunting, trying to move something.
Theresa was banging something against the door. “I can’t do it, Nancy. The bricks are mortared too tight. And they wedged this big rock in to seal it shut. I’m not strong enough to move it.”
“But I am.” Danny Acero’s voice rang clearly through the peep hole. “Nancy’s in there?” Nancy heard him ask.
“Danny, hurry.” She coughed and gasped. “The fire’s out, but the smoke and the heat … I …”
“Save your breath, Nancy. We’ll have you out in no time. Move away from the door.”
Nancy heard a loud grunt, then a grating sound. “Pull, guys,” Danny commanded. “On the count of three! One. Two. Three.” There was the sound of something heavy dropping. Then strong hands reached in the peephole and yanked. The top half of the bricks fell outward, leaving a gaping hole.
Danny reached in and pulled Nancy through the opening. “Good thing you’re thin,” he said, carrying her away from the kiln. Nancy sank against the shed, gagging and choking. She gulped down lungful after lungful of clean air. For a second she closed her eyes.
Then she remembered. “What happened to Jonathan and Ellie May?” she asked, struggling to her feet.
“They took off in Jonathan’s van the minute they saw Danny coming,” Theresa said.
“We can’t let them get away,” Nancy declared.
“What can we do?” Danny sounded disgusted. “Who knows where they’re headed?”
“I know exactly where to find them,” Nancy said. She turned to Theresa. “Go call the police.” Tell them to go to the barn.”
Theresa clapped Nancy on the shoulder. “Good thinking. Of course.”
Turning to Danny, Nancy asked, “Do you have a car here?”
“No. But I have to tell you that when I got to the pottery studio I caught Michael and David glazing some really interesting pots—duplicates of ones I saw offered in an auction house catalog for some pretty rarefied prices. Michael broke down and told me about Ellie May. He said she came to the studio right after you left tonight, Nancy, and followed you.”
Nancy remembered the footsteps behind her on the gravel path. So what she’d heard wasn’t just a foraging raccoon. “I’m glad you guessed right, Danny. Now let’s get moving. My car’s down by the studio, and then it’s a good twenty-minute drive to the barn where they’ve stashed stuff.”
“No, it isn’t,” Theresa said. “Take the river road. Danny, you show her. You know the shortcut.”
“Bess, George, stay with Theresa,” Nancy told them. “She’s been hurt. Make sure someone looks at her arm.”
On the ride to the barn, Nancy quizzed Danny. “I don’t get it, Danny. Why did you steal Theresa’s sketchbook on the day of the fire?”
Danny slouched down in the passenger seat and let out a dismayed groan. “I’ll never live that down, now, will I?”
“The book, Danny,” Nancy insisted. “Tell me what that was about.”
“As soon as I saw the fire wasn’t serious, and the firefighters had it under control, I used it as an excuse to go up to Theresa’s room to get the book. I had seen it one day in the library when she was drawing copies of ancient pots from one of the books.”
“The book you stole the art plates from!” Nancy surmised, casting a sharp glance at Danny across the seat.
“This is where I’m supposed to grovel with embarrassment, right?” he said with a sheepish grin. “You don’t miss a trick, do you, Nancy?” There was great admiration in his voice.
Nancy moistened her lips and tried not to smile. “Why did you need those plates?”
“I wanted to show them to Ellie May. I know it seems like pure idiocy now. Why not show her the book? I wanted to show them to her to compare with the sketchbook. She’s expert enough that she could tell me whether she thought that Theresa was involved in the pottery scam.”
“Bad move,” Nancy remarked.
“Turn here,” Danny directed. Nancy made a right off the road and headed up the hill away from the river. “Anyway, I should have realized Ellie May hated Theresa’s guts.”
“But why? Ellie May’s a famous potter, too.”
“Famous, yes. But her work is weird. The la-di-das of the ceramic community don’t think she’s versatile enough to merit the big prizes. Just this year she got passed over for the National Crafts Medal.
“Hey, there’s the barn, but I don’t see Jonathan’s van.”
Nancy cut her lights and engine and put her car in neutral. She let it roll silently into a field to the right of the barnyard. “That doesn’t mean he’s not here.”
“You check outside the barn. I’m going in,” Nancy said.
Nancy stole around the corner and sidled up to the barn door. Both sides were open. Nancy crept slowly toward the entrance. She could see the flicker of some kind of light or candle playing against the inside wall of the barn. Nancy took a deep breath and stepped inside.
A big blue van had been backed into the barn. Its engine was running and its cargo doors were open. Ellie May was shoving bales of hay into the van. She was working by the light of a kerosene lantern she’d placed on a bale of hay. Nancy took a quick look around. The woman seemed to be alone. Still, Jonathan had to be lurking somewhere.
Ellie May was so intent on her task that she didn’t notice Nancy creeping up behind her. “Need help?” Nancy asked sweetly.
Ellie May spun around. “How’d you get—”
“How’d I get out?” Nancy folded her arms across her chest and glared at the woman. “It’s a good story. I’ll tell you sometime—when I visit you in prison.”
Ellie May suddenly peered over Nancy’s shoulder. Nancy turned, and Ellie May knocked her to the ground. “I’m not going to jail, or trial, or anything,” she fairly spat, and bolted for the van. But Nancy was quicker. She sprang to her feet and tackled Ellie May from behind. As they tumbled to the ground together, Nancy’s foot kicked over the lantern. The glass cover fell off, and burning kerosene doused the hay bale. It roared into flames.
Gripping Ellie May’s wrist hard, Nancy bounded to her feet and pulled the woman kicking and screaming out of the burning barn. She hauled her clear of the barnyard and into the field. There was a small popping noise, followed by a huge explosion.
“The van!” Ellie May’s cry blended with the wail of police sirens.
Nancy pulled Ellie May to her feet and took off the woman’s belt. She wrapped it around her wrists and brought her out to the road. They stood silently watching the huge building burn.
“Now, that’s pretty dramatic!” Danny said, coming up behind Nancy. He held Jonathan by the collar. “Look what I found trying to hot-wire your car.”
“What of it? You can’t prove anything!” Jonathan jerked his head toward the raging fire. “You’ve got no evidence.”
“Oh, but we do. Andrea took samples of just about everything we found in there,” Nancy told him. “She stowed it somewhere safe until she could bring it to the cops.”
“He was blackmailing me,” Ellie May confessed glumly.
“Blackmail?” Nancy was stunned. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the lights of approaching police cars and heard the fire siren ringing back in town. She wanted to find out the whole story before she had to turn Ellie May and Jonathan over to the authorities. “How? And why?”
“Miss Major League Potter here had a pretty good racket going. Thanks to the winters being dead at the Junction, she was able to cook up a whole pile of fake pots for dealers,” Jonathan said.
He flashed a nasty grin at Ellie May.
She turned away, tears starting to stream down her cheeks. Nancy felt a moment’s pity before she remembered the woman had just tried to roast her alive.
Jonathan continued, “I wanted in. I told her if she didn’t connect me to her ‘dealers,’ then I’d simply call the cops.”
“What’s happening here?” A state trooper walked up, shoving his hat back on his head.
“A lot!” Nancy exclaimed. “But for starters you’d better arrest these two. They’re both forgers.”
“And don’t forget they tried to murder you,” Danny reminded her.
“That, too,” Nancy said, then went with the police back to town to fill them in.