Nancy Drew

by Micol Ostow

  “Look, you guys—you know I’ll make it up to you. Save me a job. I’ll be there as soon as I can to get it done.” I hoped that meant this afternoon, but there was no way to be sure, and making promises I couldn’t possibly keep felt like a terrible tactic, all things considered.

  “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll save you a job,” Lena promised ominously. “It’ll be an unpleasant one.”

  “I would expect nothing less.”

  Daisy gave me one last harrumph as we said our good-byes. She was tolerating me, but just barely.

  Meanwhile, Lena linked an arm through my own and led me to the parking lot exit of the school. “Do I want to know more about this errand?” she asked, once we got there.

  I glanced at her. “Do you?” I didn’t think so.

  She shrugged. “Plausible deniability is probably better for me.”

  What did I tell you?

  “But, look—between us? I support whatever it is you’re doing. I think Daisy’s taken the Naming Day fever a little too far, and I’m worried.” Lena looked worried too.

  “Me too.” It was a relief to be able to say it so plainly.

  “So, you know—do what you gotta do, Drew.” She smiled. “That rhymes.”

  “Cute. And it does take some of the sting out of the possible-impending-danger aspect of this whole thing.”

  “Eh.” Lena shrugged again before turning to go. “If you’re on the case, I’m not too worried,” she tossed over her shoulder.

  That makes one of us.

  * * *

  “Nancy!”

  I was at my car, shoving books onto the passenger seat, when I heard my name. Not Lena or Daisy this time—they’d both be in the shop studio, working on the mermaid float by now. Possibly with Daisy finding the time to construct a voodoo doll in my image in a spare moment. The good news was, it was hard to find a match for the particular red shade of my hair… .

  I turned. It was Parker. “Hey,” I said, warmth flooding through me at the sight of him. His hair flopped over one eye, and he was slightly out of breath. He carried a soccer ball under one arm. Had he come running after me straight from gym class? I decided I liked him even better mildly disheveled.

  Get your head out of the clouds and into the game, Drew.

  Way easier said than done, with Parker standing in front of me, looking nervous.

  “Hey,” he finally replied. Then he reddened. “Sorry, that was uninspired.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” I teased. “Sometimes you’ve gotta stick with the classics.”

  “Are you not helping out with the mermaid float?” he asked. “I’d—well, I heard from Lena you were going to be there.”

  He’d heard I was going to be there? As in, he’d asked someone (Lena, apparently) whether or not that was true?

  As in, he was asking questions about me?

  The idea bubbled up inside me, delightful.

  I’d known I was curious about Parker as soon as he’d noticed me pocketing that note from the raven’s beak. It was exciting to know he was curious about me, too.

  I had to wonder what about me, specifically, had piqued his interest.

  Facts: yes.

  Science: please.

  Love: ask again later.

  That was my philosophy, as per the Magic 8 Ball in my brain. My last epic crush, David Cates, had crashed and burned freshman year. It happened right after I’d uncovered his father’s e-mail flirtations with our town’s then-pharmacist. David had told me his dad was acting weird, but it turned out that he hadn’t really meant it when he’d mused that he wanted to know why.

  Let’s just say I learned the hard way that curiosity kills more than the cat, to use the lovely Ms. Beekman’s choice of cliché. Sometimes it also kills a burgeoning relationship.

  Since then I’ve been a little more cautious about my crushes.

  But—crap—it was my turn to talk, and here I was, stuck in my head, being all bubbly and swoony in a decidedly un-Nancy way.

  “Um,” I started, aiming for “smooth” and missing it by at least a mile. “I was. Going to be there,” I stumbled. “But something came up.” I flushed. “Are you? Going to be there, I mean?”

  So, so far from smooth.

  “Well, yeah,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “I have to admit, I’m a little nervous. I’m not exactly a natural with all those shop tools and things. I’m guessing there’s a ninety percent chance I walk away from this thing with at least one less finger than I started with. Maybe ninety-five.”

  “Those odds are … not good,” I laughed. “Why’d you volunteer, then? If it’s not your thing? I mean—it’s nice that you did,” I added, seeing a brief look of confusion cross his face. “But I just meant that there are other ways of helping. That don’t involve … power tools and potentially severed extremities. There’s always a bake sale. For instance. Very little personal disfigurement involved in the bake sale.”

  “Oh, but see—I’m special,” Parker said. “I’m definitely likely to do just as much damage in the kitchen as I am with a buzz saw. Maybe more. Microwave pizza is as far as my culinary skills go.”

  “You can use store-bought,” I teased. “It’s frowned upon, but I won’t tell.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at me, direct and unwavering. “You do seem like the kind of girl who knows how to keep a secret. That’s a compliment, by the way.”

  “Thank you, by the way,” I said, that bubbly feeling stretching all the way to my toes. “I am.” If he only knew.

  “It was for you,” he blurted suddenly, abrupt. His cheeks flamed red again, and he ran a hand through his hair, looking intensely anxious all of a sudden.

  “What was?” I’d been too focused on the bubbles in my stomach—and the twinkle in his eyes—and I’d missed some key moment in the conversation, obviously.

  “I mean, I’d heard you were working on the float. From Lena. It’s why I volunteered to work on the float.”

  “Oh,” I stumbled, mildly (but pleasantly) taken aback. Oh.

  “Yeah, ‘oh,’ ” he said. “And here I had to psych myself up for the whole working-with-power-tools thing just to get a chance to spend some time with this mysterious girl from the newspaper … and then it turns out she’s blowing it off.”

  “I promise it’s for a good reason,” I insisted, hoping more than ever that was true. For once, the prospect of a mystery had the slightest twinge of obligation. “And—bonus! Now you probably won’t lose a thumb today.”

  “Nah, I’ll still go and help out,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pocket. “I signed up and everything, I can’t just bail now that the gorgeous, mysterious girl is mysteriously otherwise occupied.”

  “I’m … glad to see you have enough guilt about it for the both of us?” Of course, his level of guilt being so high meant mine was probably lower than it should be. But if I could uncover even one single, concrete fact about this curse, it would be worth it.

  Right?

  Also? It did not escape my attention that he’d called me “gorgeous.”

  Looking at Parker’s face, playfully disappointed, a date with a contact at town hall suddenly felt like a terrible use of time.

  “I’m a very responsible person,” he said. “So responsible, in fact, that I feel like we should arrange right now to meet up later, just so that I can be sure you make it back from this secret mission—”

  “Errand,” I corrected. He didn’t need to know the details about my penchant for deep-cover investigation.

  “Mission, errand, whatever. I just want to be sure you make it back in one piece.”

  I tried to play suave. “How very gallant,” I said, hoping he couldn’t hear the slight tremor in my voice. “I can … text you? Tonight?”

  “Texting is fine, I suppose,” he said. “But ‘gallant’ is more than a text. ‘Gallant’ is maybe a snack and some face time. Like, say … at the Claw? Maybe around six?”

  One by one, the bubbles in my stomach popped … with
glee, and something more difficult to define. My insides were goo, and my throat was filled with butterflies. But somehow, the cumulative sensation of it all was amazing.

  “A date,” I said cautiously. The prospect was heady. Was it a good idea to be going on dates when there was a possibly dangerous mystery in the air? Maybe not. But looking at Parker, I wasn’t sure how to resist. This was the guy who’d witnessed my sleight of hand and called me out on it too, where most guys I’d dated were more annoyed by my detective skills than anything else. That felt different. Maybe even dangerous? Promising, but also scary.

  Dates were fine. Fun, even. But this was something new. Something that might be more than just casual fun. Something that could be a distraction.

  And a sleuth on a case can’t always afford a distraction.

  “It doesn’t have to be a date,” Parker said, reading the ambivalence on my face. “It can just be … a bite to eat? I’ll make sure your secret mission went off without a hitch; you’ll check me for grievous bodily harm. And if things start to feel date-like … well, we can put a stop to that nonsense right away, should it feel necessary.” He tilted his head. “What do you say?”

  I had to laugh. “Well, as long as there’s a contingency plan in place. In case things get too romantic.” My cell phone, still in my jacket pocket, buzzed, snapping me back to reality and reminding me that I did actually have a secret mission to get to.

  “I have to run,” I said reluctantly. “But yes. I’ll see you at the Claw. Six.” It was only a few hours away, but I knew it would feel like so much more.

  “Every good love story starts with a solid plan B,” he said. I tried not to shiver at the words “love story.” “See you then.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Horseshoe Bay City Hall. Like so much of our town, it was a building straight from a Norman Rockwell painting: faded, sun-bleached brick, Grecian columns flanking the entrance, and a jaunty turret standing tall against the cloudless blue sky. The salt air had scarred the clapboard shingles a weathered hue that stood stark and gray against the seascape backdrop that surrounded it.

  It was also possibly my last hope for finding any information about the history of the Naming Day curse.

  Not to put too much pressure on this mission or anything.

  I checked my watch: 4:13 p.m. My contact had told me that while city hall officially closes at four thirty on weekdays, the records room was managed by a cranky septuagenarian game show enthusiast, who unfailingly raced home at three forty-five every day to catch Supermarket Sweep in syndication. And while I wondered why he was so resistant to the age of streaming, I had to admit that his old-school ways were extremely helpful to my investigation.

  Walking in the front door was out of the question—the receptionist knew my parents and would have recognized me in a heartbeat. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I didn’t need any questions or interference from authority figures. Luckily, the side door was unguarded. (Small-town life could often be charmingly, misguidedly trusting, but just this once, I wasn’t complaining.) A quick glance over my shoulder told me I wasn’t being watched, and given that no one had any idea I was even looking into the curse, why would anyone have been watching? But still: I was always thankful for small favors and all that. I turned the door handle.

  Locked.

  Okay, small-ish hitch. But only ish. After all, I’d been picking locks since I was seven. I pulled my lockpick from the kit I kept in my bag, and with a few quick twists, the handle gave way and I was inside.

  Another benefit of living in a small town was that our town hall, too, was relatively small. The records room was in the basement, just around one corner and down a hall and then a flight of stairs. I could hear footsteps at the front of the building—not everyone in the building was obsessed with the Game Show Network, clearly, which was sort of a relief, on a purely sociological level—but I slipped inside totally unnoticed.

  And then my stomach dropped.

  Because even if Horseshoe Bay was small, somehow, its history, when stacked file box on file box, row after row, shelf after shelf, looked absolutely endless. The section marked PERIODICALS towered against an entire wall, taller than I was. By a lot.

  At least they’re labeled.

  As bright sides went, it was a reach.

  The boxes were in alphabetical order: Beacon, the Bangor; Chronicle, the Boston; Daily, the Montpelier … Tribune, the Horseshoe Bay was a column of the wall unto itself, with the oldest papers lowest to the ground. I had to narrow down the time frame. But when had that one random online hit been from? Suddenly, my mind went blank. I pulled out my phone.

  No service. Of course. Not even a broken link would be useful to me down here, in the bowels of this building.

  Good thing I’d taken a quick snapshot of the original search results screen with my phone the other day.

  Let’s just say I’d learned the hard way the importance of covering one’s bases.

  I opened my photo album; the picture was one of the first images to come up. “A Blessing or a Curse?,” a piece in the opinion section of the paper, though the name of the author wasn’t listed in the heading. But the year was: 1971. Bingo.

  Or … sort of “bingo.” 1971 was only three boxes. Great. That would take … I didn’t have the heart to do the math.

  But no. The op-ed piece was about Naming Day, obviously, meaning it probably ran around the same time of the year. That further narrowed down the time window considerably.

  Relieved, I pulled out the box that I needed, sneezing as a cloud of dust erupted with it. I pored through the paper-thin pages as quickly and gently as I could, mindful that age had made the newspapers fragile.

  Twenty minutes later, and I had it. So much for fuzzy math; every now and then a girl got lucky. A 1971 issue of the Tribune with a teaser on its front page, “Longtime rez sees silver lining to so-called Naming Day curse,” with a directive to “see page 13.”

  I flipped, trying to tamp down the eager curiosity building in me.

  Slow and steady, girl.

  It was a good call, not letting my enthusiasm run away with me. Because when I got to the page?

  The article was missing.

  Scratch “lucky,” then.

  Not the whole page, mind you. Apparently, whoever it was in this world that was either deliberately or inadvertently trying to sabotage me thought that would be overkill. No, only the bottom half of it was absent, excised so cleanly a person might have thought it was meant to be that way. If that person weren’t me, on a tear, desperate to find the article in question.

  I blinked, confused and unwilling to believe my own eyes. I rechecked the front page of the paper: see page 13. I looked again to the top right-hand corner of the page: 13.

  Definitely missing. And probably not by coincidence.

  But … maybe it hadn’t been removed that cleanly, after all.

  An old-school detective might have used a magnifying glass—think Sherlock Holmes, or Hercule Poirot. But this was the twenty-first century. I pulled out my smartphone.

  The page had been sliced along the fold. At first glance—at my first glance, that was—it looked as though anything useful had been cut away.

  Thank goodness I know better than to rely on first glances.

  I clicked my camera and immediately blew the image up, fingers skating along the smooth glass of my phone screen. Slowly, shapes that had seemed like little more than random squiggles revealed themselves to be inside-out, fun-house reflections of letters. It took me a moment to piece them together into something whole in my brain.

  S-T-R-A-T-H-M-O-R-E.

  It wasn’t an obvious word, nothing I—or anyone else—would have guessed. But that was okay. Because I’d been doing this for long enough. It wasn’t an obvious word—it was a surname.

  The surname of the person who’d written the piece.

  Here were the facts:

  First, a total lack of online footprint. Then, a missing hard copy in the of
ficial city hall record. Someone out there sure didn’t want anyone reading this article. I was going to find out why. This partial byline—just a last name, and who knew if it would yield anything more than my first online search had—was a small lead. A minuscule clue, at best.

  But I’d solved cases with less to go on. A lot less.

  I rolled the ancient, ruined newspaper into a slim tube, gentle as ever with the crackly material. Then I slipped it carefully into my messenger bag, replaced the boxes I’d been digging through, and retraced my steps, up and out of the building, back into the waning sun of the early evening.

  * * *

  I’d been so busy keeping an eye out for any adults who might be keeping eyes on me, it somehow didn’t even occur to me to be on the lookout for other high school students my own age.

  “Caroline!” I literally walked directly into her, slamming against her with enough force to send us both rocking back. She, too, had her school bag with her, and she looked flustered from the impact.

  “What the hell?” she asked, looking genuinely irked. I didn’t blame her. “I know you and your friends think the world revolves around you, but you could maybe try not to walk directly through other people, you know.”

  “Sorry, I was—distracted. And I don’t think the world revolves around me.” She gave me a look that told me my protests were pointless.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, forging ahead. Just outside of town hall, I meant, which wasn’t exactly a high school hangout. But I could see where, from her point of view, it was exactly none of my business what she was doing walking around on a public street on a random Tuesday evening.

  She looked at me like I was out of my mind. Or, maybe more precisely, like I was sticking my nose into things that were exactly none of my business. “Walking down Main Street, just like you are.”

  I held my hands up—hey, no trouble here. “Fair. Never mind.”