Confessions of a Teen Sleuth (9 page)

Send help, beware the turtle. Dad

Foxy had grilled the cab driver for more information, but, satisfied that he knew nothing and could not describe the man in
the hat with any accuracy, she let him go on his way.

"This is extremely mysterious," I observed.

Foxy nodded vigorously.

We sat yogi-style on the floor of the living room and went over our options. "He probably checked into the hotel before he
came here, right?" I looked at Ned Junior.

Ned Junior said, "Yes."

"Okay. So that's where we start. Who has a car?"

The hippies looked around at one another helplessly.

"No one?"

They all shrugged.

"Ned Junior?" I pleaded.

"I have a motorcycle with a sidecar," he offered.

"Okay." I sighed. "Foxy and I will take that, because we are the most experienced at sleuthing and I know how to handle a
chopper. All the rest of you find a car and get down to the hotel as soon as you can."

"Should we call the cops?" asked Ned Junior.

"In my experience," I explained, "the police should not be called until the very last minute."

The hippies all nodded in agreement.

"Okay," I declared. "Let's go."

At the hotel, we had to spend several minutes in the ladies' room while I restyled my hair, which had been whipped up ferociously
by the wind on the ride over. Foxy did not seem to mind the state of her sandy blond curls, though I encouraged her to wash
the dirt off her face, which she did. Once my bottle-titian tresses were combed so smooth they shone, we marched to the front
desk.

"I'm Mrs. Nickerson," I declared pleasantly. "I seem to have lost the key to my room. I believe it's under my husband's name,
Ned Nickerson, the famous life insurance agent?"

The balding man behind the counter gave me only a momentary glance before handing me a key with the room number stamped on
it: 405.

Foxy and I proceeded to the fourth floor and down the hall to Ned's room. I knocked softly on the door. No one answered. I
put the key in the lock and opened the door.

"Jeepers!" Foxy exclaimed breathlessly.

The room had been ransacked!

Foxy and I cautiously examined the damage. The mattress had been pulled off the bed. All the dresser drawers were upended.
Ned's suitcase lay open, and all of his neat slacks and jackets were strewn about the room. It broke my heart to see all his
tidily pressed plaid slacks and wide ties thrown into disarray.

Foxy was already on her hands and knees on the carpet looking for tracks.

"See anything?" I asked, offering Foxy my magnifying glass.

"There's been a scuffle," Foxy reported. "I see men's tracks all over the place. There were either several of them with roughly
the same shoe size, or just one intruder who was a real wildcat."

A note on the bedside table caught my attention. I picked it up. "Look at this!" I exclaimed. It was another handwritten note
on an index card. It read:

Room #204. Hurry. Dad

"I think this is a clue," I told Foxy.

She cocked her freckled face. "Do you think the gang of men with the same shoe size kidnapped him and are holding him two
floors down?"

"Maybe," I mused.

"We should go check," she suggested.

"Yes," I agreed.

The hotel's second floor hallway was deserted. Foxy and I approached room 204 stealthily and with great haste. I placed my
ear against the door. Nothing. I tried the doorknob. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open, and Foxy and I entered the dark
hotel room, despairing of what we would find. We had taken only a few steps when we heard a terrible groan. Foxy threw on
the lights.

Ned was seated on the floor tied and gagged! What dastardly villain was at work? I rushed to his side, kneeled, and untied
the gag, while Foxy began cutting away at the ropes that bound his ankles with her pocketknife. I had not seen Ned in months
and could not help but feel that had I been there for him, this might not have happened.

"What happened?" I asked him urgently.

"Don't know," he mumbled. "I walked into my room and saw a ghostly hand!" He grinned at us in a silly sort of way, then tried
to stand up but sank to the ground.

"Are you ill?" I cried.

"I've been drugged. Chloroform. Or something equally powerful. I fought as hard as I could, but I couldn't breathe. Then I
went out like a light. Didn't know another thing until I heard your voice."

"Wait a minute," I asked slowly. "Didn't this happen in that book Carolyn wrote,
The Ghost of Blackwood Halt?"

Ned looked sheepish. "I thought you didn't read those."

My eyes narrowed. "I've read a couple. Just to see what all the fuss was about." I turned to Foxy. "Can you excuse us for
a minute?"

Foxy's eyebrows shot up, but she did as I asked and walked out into the hallway.

"You faked this whole thing, didn't you?" I asked Ned evenly.

"What happened?" I asked him urgently.

Ned began to cry. "I saw you with Frank Hardy," he explained tearfully. "I was on my way to Ned Junior's in the cab and I
saw you walking arm in arm with Frank. Seeing you with that Hardy boy made me realize how much I still loved you. I remembered
how much you used to like to rescue me, and I thought that if I faked my kidnapping and you could rescue me again you'd realize
how much you missed me. So I came back here, ransacked my room, disguised myself, and sent the cabbie with the note, and then
I trussed myself up and waited for you to come." He sniffed. "I knew you would."

"What about the turtle?"

He grinned. "I just threw that in for a little color."

I put my hands on my hips and regarded Ned gravely. He had grown out his sideburns to a ridiculous degree. "You scared Ned
Junior silly, you know. He's probably stealing a car right now so he can make it here to help find you."

"I'm sorry."

"And what about Foxy? You know that's Foxy Belden-Frayne out there in the hallway. Her mom's a pretty famous detective in
Westchester County, New York."

"I'll apologize to her," Ned promised quietly.

"This was all for my benefit?"

He wiped a tear from his cheek with the back of his wrist and nodded.

Ned Nickerson. My Ned. My attractive, paunchy, balding, bumbling Ned. Even though I didn't feel that we should be married,
I felt that we belonged together somehow. He was a good man. And he truly did love me.

"I can't be married to you," I told him. "It's not in my nature."

He nodded.

"But maybe we could try being special friends?"

His eyes lit up. "Do you mean it?"

"No pressures about marriage. No housework. No smothering."

"What about Frank?"

I thought about this. I loved Frank Hardy. I always would. But sometimes it was like we were from different universes, like
our stories didn't entirely intersect. "I'm not meant to be with Frank," I declared finally. "I'm meant to be with you."

Foxy and Ned and I ran into Ned Junior and the hippies in the hotel lobby. They had indeed stolen a vehicle. It took us most
of the afternoon to return the mail truck to the post office without detection and before the mailman realized it was missing.
But that's another story.

VIII THE MYSTERY OF THE SEVEN SISTERS, 1975

A
ctually," I announced to the auditorium, "I think that books about girl sleuths should be an integral component of the
feminist canon."

There was a smattering of applause in the audience and nodding from my panel mates. It was the first annual Female Protagonists
in Young Adult Series Literature Feminist Conference at Vassar College, and George Fayne, now a distinguished, tenured professor
and author of the book
Clitoris! Clitoris! Clitoris!
had invited me to participate. Others on the panel included Cherry Ames, who had recently been hired as a Teamsters nurse;
Kim Aldrich, who was fighting the glass ceiling as a secretary for the international insurance firm WALCO, Inc.; and Judy
Bolton, the attractive wife of an FBI agent, who had her own series of books, though they did not sell as well as mine.

A serious-looking young woman with very straight hair, no makeup, and wire-rimmed glasses raised her hand.

"Yes?" I asked.

"My name is Madge Hollings," she announced. "Isn't Cherry Ames a more important role model than you are, since she actually
showed young girls that they could make their way in the world as working women?"

I paused. "I guess so," I allowed. "If you consider nursing the pinnacle of female success." A shocked murmur ran through
the crowd. I continued, "She can't even hold down a job. Dude ranch nurse. Cruise nurse. Private duty nurse. Army nurse. Rest
home nurse. Ski nurse. One right after the other."

Cherry glared at me, her black eyes flashing. She had not aged well. Though she was younger than I was, her weight had ballooned,
a fact that was not well disguised by her blinding white size-sixteen (and too-snug) uniform. I had heard that she was diabetic.
"My skills were in great demand. That's what attracted Helen to my story."

I threw my hands up dramatically. "You always knew how to promote yourself, Cherry. That's why you started writing stories."
I looked out at the crowd, waiting until I had all of their attention, before I dropped the bombshell. "Under the pen name
Helen Wells."

The crowded gasped.

Cherry's chubby cheeks turned scarlet.

I surveyed the auditorium. "I bring this up only to show you that you too can make up your own stories. We are not slaves
to the perception of others. We are each of us our own biographers. As young women today you are in a unique position. The
obstacles are crumbling. The world is opening itself to possibility. Look for mystery behind every corner. And when you think
you have it figured out, look closer and work harder, because the truth takes time and effort, but it is worth it. Thank you."

The crowd burst into enthusiastic applause.

George approached the microphone on stage. She still wore her hair short, though she had let it gray. Her features had grown
more masculine as she had aged, a fact only highlighted by her lack of cosmetics and the fact that she appeared to have a
fine mustache. She was wearing her uniform of black turtleneck, long macrame vest, and black slacks. "Thank you. Thank you,
everyone, for coming. We'll see you all tomorrow for Donna Parker's lecture on girls and large horses."

As the young women in the audience stood and began to form a line to talk to the panel, out of the corner of my eye I saw
Cherry waddle from the stage.

After the auditorium had cleared out, George, Kim, Judy, and I had dinner at a restaurant near the college. Cherry did not
show. I regaled the threesome with stories of Ned Junior's courtship of Foxy Belden-Frayne, who had stayed in San Francisco
and become a well-regarded record jacket artist.

They had finally married the year before, and Foxy was pregnant with their first child. After dinner, George took us all back
to our hotel and we said good night in the lobby. When I returned to my room, I called Ned and told him about my day. I took
an Ex-Lax, as was my evening routine. Then I fell asleep.

It was nearly three A.M. when the phone rang. It was George. "You better get down here to Grover Hall right away," she declared
urgently. "It's Cherry Ames! She's been murdered!"

By the time I had pulled on my control-top panty hose, corduroy skirt, turtleneck, blazer, and sneakers, styled my hair, applied
tasteful cosmetics, and caught a cab to the campus, almost a dozen police cars had arrived at the crime scene. I ducked under
the yellow crime tape and headed toward the door of the building. A uniformed police officer stopped me.

"I'm Nancy Drew," I explained. "The sleuth."

He looked me up and down. "Whatever, lady," he shrugged.

I whipped out my identification and presented it to him. He looked at it, then at me. "Shut up!" he cried. "You're real?"

"I am," I replied wearily. He stammered for a moment, then nodded and let me through the door. I walked directly through the
lobby into the back of the auditorium. Detectives and uniformed officers swarmed the stage. George was speaking to a detective
near the stage. And then I saw Cherry.

What I saw caused me to gasp in horror. She was tied to the chair she had sat in during the panel. Her striking white uniform
was drenched with blood. I turned my head away, aghast—in all my years of sleuthing, I had never seen anything so gruesome.

My spell was broken when George spotted me. "Nancy!" she exclaimed.

The young detective who was interviewing her stopped short and took a step toward me. He was wearing a brown suit and a fedora.
"Nancy Drew?" he asked.

I nodded bleakly, still shaken by the scene on stage.

"I'm Detective Ross," he explained. "We'll need your statement. I hear you had some sort of altercation with Ms. Ames during
the panel tonight."

I sank into a chair at the end of a row, absentmindedly rubbing my lower back, which often grew tight when I was tense. "It
was an abstract theoretical argument. Nothing personal. I was trying to make a point."

"So you and Ms. Ames were on friendly terms?"

I looked down at my hands. They were freckled with age spots. Confronted with the passage of time, my rocky relationship with
Cherry suddenly seemed a great waste. "She was my nemesis," I admitted frankly.

He looked interested. "Your nemesis? You mean enemy?"

"No. We were colleagues. We were just very different. Opposites. We played well off each other. We have a very different fan
base."

"Where were you tonight?"

I told Detective Ross about our dinner out and my phone call to Ned, and how I had then fallen asleep.

He wrote something in his notebook. "Ned is your husband?"

"He used to be. Now we're just special friends."

"Special friends?"

I searched for an explanation. "We date."

"Oh."

"What happened to Cherry?"

"She was bludgeoned to death with a magnifying glass. Sometime within the last two hours. Which means sometime while you say
you were asleep in your room. Do you have one?"

I reached into my purse, pulled out my heavy magnifying glass, and handed it to him.

He turned it over in his hands. "I'll have to take this down to the station."

"So I'm a suspect?"

He looked around the room and raised an eyebrow. "You all are," he replied ominously. "This is the work of a pro. As far as
I'm concerned, none of you lady sleuths are leaving town until we know what happened to the nurse."

Kim Aldrich widened her blue eyes and pushed her shiny brown hair behind her ears. "They can't keep us here," she lamented,
adjusting her stylish secretary's ensemble of a checkered pinafore and blouse with bow collar. "I've got to get back to WALCO,
Inc. I've just taken a new secretarial course and I'm sure this time I'll get a promotion."

Kim and George and I were sipping Sanka in George's brownstone, located just off campus. We had been questioned by the police
all morning, and now Judy Bolton and Donna Parker were experiencing the same treatment down at the station.

George ran a hand through her spiky gray hair and muttered, "I just can't believe that Cherry is dead. And how can they question
Donna Parker? She's not quite fifteen."

"She's at least thirty," groaned Kim, "and everyone knows it. I don't know why she insists on wearing that camp outfit."

"She says she's fourteen, and we have to respect that," George cautioned. "It's her lifestyle and we can't judge it."

Kim rolled her eyes. George continued to pace around the sitting room until her lower back began to bother her and then she
sat down. "Hypers!" she growled. "We've got to solve this mystery soon or the conference will be ruined!"

Kim smiled wanly. "I know shorthand. If it'll help."

George's roommate, V, brought in a fresh electric pot of coffee and refilled our mugs. V had become an artist, and the brownstone
was full of her work: large watercolors of blossoming flowers. I found them quite lovely, though they made me feel a little
funny in a way that I couldn't identify. In any case, I considered it very admirable that George had invited V to move east
with her; I had rarely seen such devoted roommates.

The doorbell rang and Judy and Donna walked in. Once they were seated, the two women excitedly reported their experiences
down at the station. They had been questioned separately for several hours, and then each girl had been required to turn over
her magnifying glass, just as Kim and I had.

"They're looking for the murder weapon," I theorized.

"But it's a red herring!"

"So what do we do?" quizzed Donna. The dark-haired, rose-cheeked woman looked stricken. She slumped forward and set her chin
on two fists. "Oh, pooh!" she added. "I thought this was going to be fun like camp." With her headband, camp shirt, and shorts,
Donna did look younger than thirty but also vaguely creepy. I had felt a nagging responsibility for the young woman since
I had met her at the conference launch cocktail party. She had been inspired to teen sleuthdom after reading Carolyn's stories
of my exploits, but after peaking in her middle teens, she had been unable to find success since. Trapped by the public's
inability to let her age, she toured malls selling books dressed like a teenager. But she seemed to have taken her ruse a
little too much to heart.

Judy sighed deeply and rose from her seat. I had always found her single-minded and politically progressive. "I think we should
consider the social ramifications of inequality. Clearly there is a social problem at the heart of this matter.

If we can address the big picture, perhaps we can effect real change."

We all looked at her blankly.

She sat back down. "Or we can call my husband, Peter. He's in the FBI."

"Or my dad," piped in Kim. "He's in the FBI too."

"I don't think we need to call the FBI yet," I declared. "Not until we know more about what's going on."

"Golly, how do we do that?" asked Donna.

"We go back to the scene of the crime," I declared matter-of-factly. "George, do you have a key to Grover Hall?"

George grinned. "You bet I do!"

We waited until dark and then made our way to Grover Hall, where George let us in the back faculty entrance. George turned
on the lights, and we all crept along the wall to the stage, so as not to destroy evidence.

"Everyone split up and look for clues," I instructed.

We climbed on stage and fanned out. Of course we were at somewhat of a disadvantage without our magnifying glasses, but several
of us had reading glasses, which worked in a pinch. With so many sleuths, it didn't take long to turn up a clue.

"Goodness, look at this!" Donna exclaimed. She was standing at the side of the stage, next to where the curtain stood open.
She reached into one of the folds at the base of the curtain and pulled out something small and shiny. "What is it?" she asked.

We all gathered around and examined the piece of jewelry.

"It's a sorority pin," Judy explained to Donna.

Donna looked misty eyed. "I hope one day I'm old enough to go to college."

There was an awkward silence.

Then Judy held the pin toward George. "Do you recognize it?" Judy asked.

George furrowed her thick unplucked brow. "Why, that looks like a Seven Sisters pin!" she exclaimed. She lowered her voice.
"That's a secret society of female students at the seven sister colleges. It's very elite. Very hush-hush. Rumor has it that
most of the women go on to join the CIA."

"It's pretty," sighed Kim.

"This pin could have been left here anytime," Judy pointed out.

George shook her head emphatically. "The curtains were taken down and cleaned right before the conference."

"So a sister must have had something to do with what happened to Cherry," I theorized. "Do they have a meeting place here
on campus?"

George nodded. "There's a secret hall just up the street. They meet secretly every Saturday night at the secret hour of midnight."

"Why, that's in only one hour!" observed Donna.

Deciding that our best course of action was to go undercover, I disguised myself as a co-ed, donning blue jeans and parting
my hair down the middle in the style of the day. Then I affixed the Seven Sisters pin to my college sweatshirt and went to
the secret meeting hall. The others agreed to wait hidden behind trees outside until I emerged or one hour had passed.

I watched as several young women rang the doorbell and were ushered inside. With a few deep breaths to steady my nerves, I
approached the large oak door, rang the bell, and waited. In a few minutes, a young woman wearing a red cloak that obscured
her face opened the door.

"Uh, are you somebody's grandmother?" she asked.

"Returning student," I answered nonchalantly, drawing her attention to my pin.

She hesitated, but after glancing at the pin allowed me to enter.

Once inside the stately stone building, I watched as the women ahead of me approached a wardrobe stand hung with red cloaks
just inside the door. Each donned a cloak over her clothes, poured a cup of punch, and headed downstairs to the basement.