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underlined.”
    “That might be a clue,” Nancy said. “Did any thing else happen to cause Mr. Stromberg to discharge you?”
    Lily Alys gave a great sigh. “Just before that happened, he went into his office in the back. I wanted to ask him a question, so walked to the door. I was just in time to hear him say on the phone ‘Don’t use books again to get your message across.’ ”
    The Chinese girl said she felt sure that Mr. Stromberg knew she had heard him and this actually was the reason he had discharged her. “Oh, I am sorry I failed in my mission,” Lily Alys added woefully.
    “Please don’t worry about it,” said Nancy. “You’ve been a big help. Besides, I’m sure you can find a safer position somewhere else with no detective work to do.”
    Lily Alys agreed. “But I had hoped to do more to help find Chi Che,” she said.
    “You may learn something yet,” Nancy told her. “If you do, be sure to let me know.”
    Lily Alys promised to do so, then hung up. Nancy told Aunt Eloise and George what she had just learned, then went back to the book and began to look for shops selling mah-jongg sets. There were several, and since Lily Alys had not mentioned the name of any shop, the young sleuth suggested that Lily hardly had a chance to notice the name. “She probably had to close the book in a hurry, before Mr. Stromberg saw her looking in it,” Nancy surmised.
    “But I’ll bet anything he did,” George said.
    Aunt Eloise, who had been gazing out the window, said worriedly, “I’m really becoming frantic about Bess. I can’t imagine why she’s staying away so long. She told me she would come directly home, since some of the groceries were needed for supper tonight.”
    Nancy urged that she and George delay no longer in trying to locate Bess. They got a list from Aunt Eloise of the three stores to which Bess intended to go, then set out. At the first two stores they learned nothing, but the cashier at the third one, a large market, said she remembered pretty, blond-haired Bess.
    “That girl was loaded down with bundles,” she told Nancy and George. “She and a woman behind her were laughing and talking about going in the woman’s car to help the girl get all her packages home.”
    “Have you any idea who this woman was?” Nancy asked quickly.
    “No, I haven’t,” the cashier answered. “I had never seen her before tonight.”
    George and Nancy went out to the street, trying to guess where Bess could have gone.
    “Frankly, George, I’m terribly worried,” Nancy said. “That woman who offered to give Bess a ride may be part of the gang that’s holding Chi Che. The woman could even be the forger of the letter to Grandpa Soong!”
    “Oh, Nancy, I hope you’re wrong!” George said fervently. “We’d better report Bess’s disappearance to Captain Gray.”
    But Nancy was not wrong. At that very moment Bess was seated on a chair, her eyes blindfolded and her hands tied behind her back. She had no idea where she was.
    Bess’s heart pounded in fright. She berated herself, “Oh, what a fool I was to get into this mess!”
    Her mind raced over events of the past hours. First she had encountered the pleasant woman with Eurasian features in the supermarket. The woman had said that she was a good friend of Miss Eloise Drew, and had offered to drive Bess and her many bundles to the apartment house.
    Bess had accepted and the two had gone out to the car. Behind the wheel was a man who, the woman said, was her husband. Bess had noted only that he had red hair.
    The moment they had climbed into the rear of the car, the woman had dropped her purse on the floor. Bess had leaned over to pick it up. The next instant she had been pushed down to the floor and warned to keep still or she would be sorry.
    Now, Bess thought desperately, she was a prisoner in some unknown place. Was the red-haired man the same one who had taken George from the Columbia campus? The Eurasian woman, who was far from pleasant