The Mystery of the Blinking Eye

face two very puzzled cleaning women.
    “See here, girls, you just get out of here. You’re not supposed—”
    “Oh, please let us stay!” Trixie cried. “Please! Lock the door! Some terrible men are following us—they followed us from the promenade deck—please!”
    The older woman looked at her companion. “Well, now, the two little girls seem to need help. Two little girls—and nice-lookin’ little girls they are, too—can’t do a body any harm now, can they?”
    “What’s up?” the younger woman asked. She opened the door and peered down the hall. “There’s no one after you that I can see.”
    “There will be! There surely will be as soon as they know we’ve slipped away!” Diana trembled.
    “Well, they’re not goin’ to harm you, whoever they are!” The older woman snapped the lock on the door. “Calm down, darlin’s. There’ll be no one harmin’ you. I’ll just call the maintenance department. Sit down there, the two of you. We’ll get to the bottom of this in no time at all.”
    She telephoned to another floor, and in a few minutes a service elevator stopped far down the hall. A man from the maintenance department came to the door.
    Trixie, unnerved now that help had come, told her story in a shaking voice.
    The man and two women listened as she related everything that had happened since she bought the statue.
    “I wasn’t sure before that it was the idol they were after, but I am now,” Trixie said positively.
    “You’re right. They’ll stop at nothing now to get it,” the maintenance man said. “How does it happen that two young girls like you are out by yourselves at this time of night?”
    “We’re not by ourselves,” Trixie told him. “Six boys and two other girls went up to the tower. I thought I told you that. They’re waiting downstairs for us right now. Where do you think those men went?”
    “It’s anyone’s guess,” the man said. “Come with me now, on the service elevator. If there were men following you, and if they’re still going down the stairs, maybe we’ll get to the first floor ahead of them.”
    Trixie and Diana thanked the cleaning women and went with the man. He operated the service elevator himself and slowed the pace so he could glance down each floor as he passed.
    When the elevator stopped at the first floor, Jim and Brian were pacing up and down impatiently in front of the passenger elevators. When Trixie ran up to Jim, he threw his arm around her. “I thought you were lost! Oh, Trixie, I didn’t know what had happened to you! Mart’s up on the eighty-sixth floor now. We have the whole building staff looking for you!”
    As quickly as she could, supplemented by the comments of Diana and the maintenance man, Trixie told
    the waiting, worried group what had happened.
    Before long Mart came back. Several men were with him. A large crowd had gathered and passers-by stopped to listen. A policeman dispersed the onlookers. “Now, let’s hear what this is about,” he said.
    Wearily, Trixie and Diana told their story again. The policeman made notes. The maintenance man made notes. The elevators resumed their continuous up, down, up, down.
    There was no sight of the two men. They were not seen again that night, either, though the maintenance staff searched each floor.
    Finally, exasperated, the maintenance men turned the matter over to the policeman.
    “There’s only one thing to do, the way I see it,” the officer announced. “It’s this. The hands of the police are tied unless they have some real description of the men. All you seem to know now is that one is tall and one is short and has a scar.”
    “I know that,” Trixie said unhappily. “No matter where I saw them, I’d know them, but I can’t describe them any better than I have. What makes it even more puzzling is that we’re so mixed up about the short man. He either looks different almost every time he shows up, or there is a third man. It’s so confusing.”
    “Then do this. The minute you catch sight of them anyplace, call a policeman. We can hold anyone as a suspect for twenty-four hours if we have a shred of evidence. They’ve given us the slip tonight. It’s not hard to figure out how this happened. There are thousands of tourists in the building right now. You just happened, by some freak of chance, to be up there in a slack time. For a second, you were the only ones on that observation deck, aside from those men. When you escaped, they could have gone