Nancy Drew Mystery Files #68: The Elusive Heiress (1982)
Carson has a big and
important job for Nancy. Millionaire Arlo Winthrop desperately wants
to track down his daughter Clarinda before he dies. The only problem
is that she went missing 40 years ago. After she fell in love with a
solider, her father forbid her from seeing him, so she ran away to be
with him. Winthrop tracked her to Wyoming, but no one has seen her in
at least 30 years. When Carson gets a call that Clarinda is actually
in Canada, he decides to try and find her and send Nancy and Ned to
Wyoming. They can stay with Grace, the best friend of Nancy's mother.
At the airport, they
randomly stumble upon this little girl Jennifer. She's been attending
boarding school in River Heights while her mother recovers from a car
accident, but her mom called and asked that she come home. The head
of the school recognizes Nancy and asks her to keep a watch on her
during the flight. Ned winds up really bonding with her.
Once they get to the
airport though, her mother isn't there. They look up and call her
phone number to find it disconnected. Grace, being a super nice
woman, invites Jennifer to stay at her house. Nancy then notices two
men staring at them and especially keeping a close eye on Jennifer.
Instead of focusing on
the missing heiress, Nancy focuses on finding Jennifer's mom. She and
Ned check out the house and find a car in the garage, a newspaper
dated a few days earlier, and no sign of the woman anywhere. Two men
in a blue car, who look suspiciously like the men from the airport,
drive by the house and stare at them before speeding off. None of the
neighbors have seen her either.
Also strange is that
Carson never calls Nancy to update her on his own situation. She
calls Hannah to see if maybe he checked in with her and learns that
he hasn't called anyone. Nancy finally calls the lodge where he's
staying, but the man who answers is really gruff and says Carson is
too busy to talk. When Carson finally calls her back, he doesn't ask
any questions or even check on Grace and just says that he's found a
lead and is super busy.
Cheyenne, where they're
staying, is in the middle of a big rodeo days celebration that lasts
all week. This gives Nancy and her group the chance to go to a bunch
of parades, square dancing, and rodeo events. At one, someone shoves
Nancy in the street and she comes close to getting trampled by a
horse before Ned saves her. At another, someone grabs Jennifer and
runs off, but she kicks him in the shin. He drops her before hopping
in a blue car.
Next, someone hits Grace
from behind and steals Jennifer again, only this time, they actually
get away. Nancy begins meeting with people to talk about the missing
heiress and finds out that the woman actually did come to Cheyenne
but that she changed her name before marrying her soldier. They lived
on a big ranch until someone robbed the local bank. Police found some
of the missing money on their property and blamed them, which led to
them leaving the town in disgrace. The real robbers were later caught
and admitted to hiding the money there.
Friends of the couple
stepped up and took care of their ranch in the hopes that they might
one day come back. They leased the land to other farmers and ranchers
for their animals. One friend lets them check out the ranch. Nancy
finds a diary kept by the woman that mentions people by their
initials and learns that two of those initials match the names of
friends who later moved to California. Oddly enough, Jennifer has an
“aunt and uncle” in California by those same names. See where
this is going?
To make a long story
shorter, Nancy finds out that the two lived in a small cabin set back
from the main ranch. She and Ned then see the same blue car in town
and follow it to the ranch. They wait until the car leaves again,
track down the cabin, and find both Jennifer and her mother. After
breaking the window, they get them out and take them back to Grace's
house.
It doesn't take long for
the full story to emerge. Jennifer's grandmother is the missing
heiress, who now lives in California. They call her on the phone, and
she tells Nancy that she actually wrote to her father to make amends
and got back a letter from him that basically told her to go to hell.
Nancy realizes that the woman's cousin, a man literally mentioned one
time on page two, is behind everything. He took care of his uncle and
assumed that he would inherit everything. Nancy comes up with a plan
to get Jennifer, her mom, and Ned out of town and back to River
Heights while she flies to Canada.
After learning the lodge
her dad stayed at actually went out of business, she sneaks over and
finds that someone is keeping him drugged. She sets fire to a shed
nearby to distract the guard and then helps her dad escape. They fly
back to River Heights and meet the former Clarinda as she flies into
town. Clarinda and her dad make up, and I assume everyone lives
happily every after while her cousin and all his helpers do serious
jail time.
*Ned says that there
being a car at Jennifer's house isn't proof her mom was there because
a lot of people rent out their garages to people who have cars when
they don't own their own cars. Is that actually common or just
something from the west in the early 80s?
*So, Grace is roughly
the same age or slightly younger than Carson, yet Nancy always
describes Carson as kind of a catch and makes Grace out to be some
dowdy middle aged woman.
*Someone sends Nancy a
note to meet them at the rodeo's animal corral and then locks her in
the paddock with a charging bull. Remembering something she saw in
the show, Nancy does some crazy and evasive maneuver to roll under
the bull and through the fence. Surprisingly, no one really seems
worried that a tourist was almost killed...
*Clarinda changed her
name to Lindy, which is the name of the woman who lived in Cheyenne
and then moved to California, but it somehow takes Nancy way too long
to put the pieces together.
*I pretty much figured
out Jennifer was the granddaughter of the missing heiress as soon as
she showed up.
*There really is no
explanation for why they kidnapped Jennifer and her mom. Clarinda
already thought her dad didn't care about her anymore, so it's not
like she was coming back to town.
I live in the west and have never heard of anyone
ReplyDeleterenting out their garage.
So they really had no reason to kidnap Jennifer and her mother? That's really weird that they'd go to all that trouble for nothing.
I think they hoped that they would kidnap her, the old guy would die, and they'd get all of his money. Given that they didn't know about the old man though and that his daughter thought he hated her, yeah they did it for no reason.
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