006 White Water Terror Read Free Page A

George asked, jumping out of the car and stepping cautiously to the edge of the drop-off.
    “Maybe the slide just happened,” Ned suggested.
    Nancy got out and looked around. “I don’t think so,” she said. “There are signs of erosion down there, and even a few weeds in the rubble. I’d say this road has been out of commission for weeks, at least.”
    Bess came to stand beside Nancy. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to something orange half-hidden behind a pile of brush a dozen yards below. “Isn’t that a barricade?”
    George scrambled partway down the slope. “It is a barricade,” she called. “It looks as if somebody tried to hide it!”
    “You mean somebody tried to kill us?” Bess asked.
    Nancy frowned. “I don’t think we can draw that conclusion from the evidence,” she saidslowly. “All we know is that the road is out and the barricade is missing.”
    “That barricade was deliberately hidden,” George corrected her breathlessly, climbing back up to the road. “There’s no way it could have accidentally gotten covered up under all that brush.” She shivered. “You know, Nancy, as Ned was saying a few minutes ago, if we’d driven up here last night after dark—the way we were supposed to—we wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
    “That’s true,” Nancy said. “But we don’t know that the barricade was removed just for our benefit. A road crew might have come to inspect the slide and forgotten to put it back up.”
    “Well, maybe you’re right,” Bess said, looking pale and shaken. “But I don’t know. Between this and your phone call, Nancy, the whole thing looks really suspicious.”
    “You’re right,” Nancy agreed. “I’d say that we have to be on our guard.”
    “In fact,” Bess said hopefully, “maybe we ought to reconsider.” She turned to George. “Haven’t we already had enough excitement for one trip?”
    Ned had managed to turn the car around, and the girls got back in. “Well, what now?” he asked.
    Nancy looked at the others. “Do you want to go back to Great Falls and take the next planehome? Or do we keep trying to find Lost River?”
    “I want to get to the bottom of this thing,” said George. “And I’m stubborn. I don’t want to give up my prize.” She looked around. “But just because I’m crazy, doesn’t mean you all have to stay. I’ll understand if anybody decides to go back home.”
    Bess heaved a sigh of resignation. “If George is staying, I guess I will, too.”
    Ned reached over and ruffled Nancy’s hair. “I’m in this as long as you are, Nan,” he said.
    “In that case,” Nancy said briskly, “we’d better find an alternative route. This road isn’t going anywhere but down.” She pulled a state highway map out of the glove compartment and began to compare it to the map they had been given. “I think I see how to get there,” she reported after several minutes. “Let’s go back to the last fork in the road and take a left. Then it looks like we take two more left turns—we’ll be there in thirty or forty minutes.”
    “You’re the detective,” Ned replied cheerfully, and drove back down the mountain.
    Thirty minutes later, they pulled up at Lost River Junction, a small cluster of weathered, tired-looking wooden sheds huddled under tall pine trees beside the road. As Nancy got out of the car, she saw that one of the sheds sported a crude sign that said White Water Rafting in crooked letters. The sign looked new, she noticed,in contrast to the old building. Down the hill, behind the building, she glimpsed a group of people standing on the bank of a river, next to two big rubber rafts.
    “Looks like we’ve made it—finally,” Ned announced, turning off the ignition.
    “Fantastic!” George exclaimed. She got out of the car, her concern about the trip momentarily forgotten. “Listen to that river!”
    “I hate to tell you guys this,” Bess remarked, “but I hear roaring. Loud roaring.”
    “Right,”