Confessions of a Teen Sleuth

by Chelsea Cain

  "It's the first robot ever powered by Swiftonium," Tom explained mechanically. "That's the radioactive isotope we discovered in South America. Of course, his shell is made of Tomasite, for heat resistance and to absorb gamma rays, but I've taken the extra step of covering the Tomasite with a coat of black Swiftonite paint, so the fellow can move unnoticed at night through populated areas." As if to illustrate his point, we watched on the monitor as the robot passed several Secret Service agents who remained unaware of its presence.

  The robot approached the front door of the residence, and we watched entranced as it reached an extendable arm up, picked the lock, turned the doorknob, and entered the home of the vice president of the United States. We breathed a collective sigh of relief when the robot was safely inside, only to have that sigh turn to a gasp when an enormous racket exploded over the speakers on either side of the monitor. Tom expertly spun the robot around to face the source of the noise. We all immediately recognized Checkers, the Nixon family's cocker spaniel, who now stood snarling and barking at the invading robot.

  "Quick," Frank demanded. "Steer the robot into the den before someone comes to check on the dog!"

  With lightning reflexes, Tom guided the machine from the foyer to the den, using an extendable arm to quickly shut the door behind him, locking the crazed canine in the hallway.

  "Nice job, old man!" complimented Bud.

  "We're not done yet," Tom cautioned.

  Our eyes were glued to the monitor as Tom guided the robot over to the wall safe behind the desk. Frank knew about the safe from the day he had come to the residence to break the news to Truman that Roosevelt was dead. Truman had removed some important papers before Frank drove him to the White House.

  "The reception is good enough to activate the sonic inter-ferer," Tom announced. He pulled a lever in the hovercraft. "That should absorb the noise of the hydraulic jack." He manipulated several other controls, and the robot retrieved the jack from its hollow body and began drilling into the lock on the safe's door. After several long moments, the door swung open. Tom activated a penlight on one of the robot's arms, and we examined the contents in the safe on the grainy monitor. We could see a metal lockbox, several bundles of Cuban pesos, and a stack of files. The top file was labeled "Hannah Gruen."

  "That's it!" I exclaimed.

  Tom directed the robot to pick up the file and insert it and the jack into its torso compartment. With steady motions, he guided the machine back to the hallway, past a wall display of framed photographs of Tricia and Pat, around the corner to the foyer, and back out the front door, just as Checkers, alert again to the intruder, came scrambling from his resting spot at the base of the stairs.

  We waited until we were all safely aboard the Sky Queen to examine the file. Inside was a Communist Party meeting log that showed that a Miss Hannah Gruen had attended three party meetings in 1913. Affixed to the log with a paper clip was a smiling photograph of Hannah Gruen and Dwight David Eisenhower at the 1915 Sam Houston Sweetheart's Dance & Rodeo.

  Frank used the Sky Queen's radiotyper to send a coded message to the White House, informing the president of our success. A few minutes later, the instrument picked up and decoded a response.

  "What does it say?" demanded Bud.

  Frank read the message aloud: " 'Good job, team. Leave the rest to me.'"

  "What do you think he's going to do?" I asked Frank.

  "They should lock Nixon up!" Tom suggested arrestingly.

  Frank looked thoughtful. "If I know the president," he murmured, "he'll find a way to turn the tables on Nixon. It may take years, but he'll find a way to make sure Nixon gets exactly what he deserves."

  Tom, Bud, and Frank flew me home in the Sky Queen. Tom and Bud stayed below in the pilot's compartment, and Frank and I rode in the astrodome.

  "Back to River Heights," Frank declared.

  "Yes," I replied.

  "How is Ted?"

  "Ned."

  "Sorry."

  "He's fine. He's a vice president now at R.H. Mutual."

  "And your son?"

  I reached up and smoothed a piece of Frank's dark hair into place underneath his jaunty army cap. "He looks just like his father," I whispered. My voice caught and I turned away. "Sometimes it breaks my heart to look at him."

  Frank's voice was small. "I ought to be getting back. The president needs me."

  I gave him a brave smile. "It's what I love about you."

  Tom poked his blond head into the astrodome. "I'm afraid the wind's too strong to land," he announced. "We'll have to lower you down." I held Frank's gaze for a moment longer and then followed Tom down to the bay of the craft, where the young scientist lowered me with a swaying magnetic cable into dark expanse of my own backyard.

  I could see my father and Ned through the kitchen window as I approached the back door. Hannah Gruen would be home soon. My own true aunt. (Eloise Drew, my supposed spinster aunt who lived in New York City, was a complete fabrication constructed by Carolyn Keene. In fact my father was an only child.) I used to think that I had not lived enough. I had a few great summers pursuing mysteries as a teenager, and I had been chasing them ever since. It was at that that moment, standing in our backyard looking at my family behind the glass, that I finally accepted that those summers were over. One morning you wake up and realize that the world has moved on. It was time to grow up. It was time to stop sleuthing and embrace my life as a mother and as a wife. Perhaps, I told myself, embracing domesticity would prove to be my greatest adventure yet.

  It turned out to be my most harrowing.

  VI THE MYSTERY OF THE CONGOLESE PUPPET, 1959

  This is strictly dullsville," my pretty chum Bess Marvin sighed, adjusting the Moroccan tunic she had brought back from the trip to Tangier that had followed her third divorce. "Dig?"

  "Dig?"

  "Hoo-boy, Sister," Bess exclaimed. "You're one real gone chick." She stretched out on my davenport and went back to reading Exodus, which she had just been assigned to condense for Reader's Digest. Bess's perceived weight problem, thanks to Carolyn Keene's character assassination, had led her to a life spent trawling for men in search of affirmation. Her most recent husband, a beatnik poet, had abandoned Bess at a North Beach coffee house after telling her that she had been "weighing him down." He had immediately gone on to publish a well-received chapbook of poetry titled "Pretty, Plump Blond." Still heartbroken, Bess flew to River Heights after her trip to Tangier and had been staying with us for almost six weeks. Fast approaching fifty, Bess held stubbornly to her youth and had coped with her breakup by adopting the jive talk of the current youth culture. It was getting on my nerves.

  "I have no idea what you just said," I sighed, returning to my dishes.

  Hannah Gruen had died two years before. Though I had investigated her demise in great detail for several months, even I had to admit, finally, that it was due to natural causes. She had kept my secret to the end. And I had kept hers. What's more, per my backyard promise, I had committed to the life of a dutiful housewife. I was not good at it and was often distracted by my ongoing pursuit of missing socks and waylaid keys. My greatest memories of those days revolve around a missing hamster. Sadly, we did not recover him alive. But it was still thrilling.

  The back door burst open and in flew Ned, followed closely by teenage Ned Junior. Their clothes were caked with mud and their eyes were wild. My back tensed reflexively at their approach.

  "Wipe your feet," I cautioned.

  Ned grinned excitedly. "I think we're making real pro­gress!"

  He and Ned Junior had been building a bomb shelter in the backyard for several months. Ned had gotten it in his head that I wanted one after I had made a passing comment after reading an article in Ladies' Home Journal about the A-bomb. He could not be dissuaded.

  "That's nice, dear," I remarked.

  "Want to see the fallout minibar we built?" Ned asked, eyes bright. "If you huddle under it, it doubles as protection against atomic radiation. I
painted it blue, your favorite color."

  The phone rang. I picked it up and immediately recognized the urgent voice of my father, Carson Drew, the world-renowned attorney-turned-judge-turned-losing-city-council-candidate. While he had grown more wizened, he maintained his healthy spirits.

  "Nancy!" he croaked. "Can you come over right away? I've come across something you'll want to see."

  I hesitated only for a moment. "Sure, Dad," I agreed, with a sideways look at the Neds. "I'm on my way."

  I sped to my stately childhood home behind the wheel of my blue 1958 Ford Ranch Wagon. I had traded in my latest roadster two years before, after Ned decided that it wasn't practical for a woman my age. I checked my appearance in the rearview mirror. My hair had started to gray and I now dyed it. At first I had tried blond, but it didn't suit me, so I had finally gone back to titian. I had grown accustomed to my aging features. I was still a handsome woman. My breasts were just a little lower and my hips a little wider. Cherry Ames, I happened to know, had gotten quite fat. Beside me, Bess twirled a piece of her silver blond mane and looked bored in the passenger seat. She was tanned and bedecked with beaded jewelry from her travels. I envied her freedom, if not her insecurities.

  The house was the same as it always had been: a comfortable, three-story brick Colonial with a large front yard planted with rosebushes. How many eavesdroppers had we caught behind those rosebushes over the years? How many times had my father's study been burgled? But now a moving van sat outside. I stared at it gloomily. I had lived the happiest days of my life in that house. Now my teenage years would finally be truly lost to me. The acute passage of time seized me with despair.

  Bess, seeming to sense my difficulties, straightened up. "Well, are we going to make the scene or what?" she demanded.

  I sighed and tried to think of something pleasant like hula hoops and coonskin caps. "Let's go," I replied, forcing a smile.

  My stepmother, Marty Drew, nee King, and I had never gotten along, though I had made an effort to remain civil toward her. Now she had convinced my father, who was retiring, to sell my childhood home and move to Flagstaff to be closer to her relatives.

  When Bess and I walked inside, we found my spacious, comfortable former home stripped of the belongings I had known and instead stacked full of moving boxes. Even the mantel, always a focal point of the living room, was bare. Marty had sold the old clock, fan doll, and ivory charm that I had displayed there since high school at a garage sale a few weeks before.

  My father, still distinguished looking though far less handsome, approached us from the living room with an excited expression. He was slightly stooped and his hair had thinned to just a few wisps that seemed to tremble independently of his movements.

  "Hello, girls," he wheezed. "You'll never believe what came in the mail."

  He led us to the kitchen, where a strange wooden figurine sat propped next to the electric refrigerator.

  "What's the beef, Daddy-o?" asked Bess.

  "It's a Congolese puppet," my father explained. "A nice one, if I'm not mistaken."

  "Where did it come from?" I quizzed him.

  "It was delivered yesterday." He paused. "It was addressed to your mother!"

  "My missing mother?" I asked, momentarily taken aback.

  "Yes. To Constance Drew."

  "Far out," exclaimed Bess.

  I examined the puppet and the open packaging that lay beside it. There was no return address. The postmark indicated that it had been mailed from overseas. But my mother had not gone by the name Constance Drew in more than thirty years.

  "It's a pretty nice puppet," my father commented.

  "What am I supposed to do with it?" I asked. My enthusiasm wavered. "It looks hard to clean."

  "I don't know," my father shrugged. "Take it home? I'd take it, but Marty says there's no room in Flagstaff."

  The puppet, carved out of ebony, was in the shape of a laughing man. It was dressed in tribal finery and looked quite old. It wasn't really my style, but I thought it might look nice displayed in the new bomb shelter, so I stowed it carefully in the back of the station wagon. I admit that I allowed myself a small thrill at the notion that some small relic had been saved from Marty.

  Once it was safely tucked away in the wagon, we said goodbye to my father and started home. We had just turned off Center Street onto River Drive when I noticed that we were being followed by a handsome, blond, well-muscled young man in a black Jaguar.

  To confirm my suspicions, I made a quick turn onto River Lane, past Riverside Hospital. The black Jaguar was still behind us!

  I doubled back and pulled into the hospital parking lot. The Jaguar followed.

  "Where are we going?" Bess asked, sitting up. "Are you sick? Is it your cholesterol?"

  "I think we're being followed," I explained. I watched the young man get out of his car and stride purposefully toward us. "And I want to see what he wants."

  Bess's eyes widened.

  I placed my hand lightly on the car horn, so that I could attract help if needed, and watched as the young man appeared at my window. He was wearing a slim, dark suit and wore his blond hair stylishly feathered. He smelled faintly of hair spray.

  "Nancy Drew," he declared. "I'm Christopher Cool, TEEN agent."

  "You're a teen agent?" I asked.

  "Actually I'm twenty. I work for TEEN, the Top-secret Education Espionage Network. We're so top secret the world won't even hear about us for another ten years!" He grinned affably. "I'm a sophomore at Kingston U."

  "Never heard of it."

  "It's Ivy League," Chris replied defensively.

  "Why are you following us?" I asked.

  "That's classified, I'm afraid."

  "What do you want?"

  "We want the puppet."

  Bess leaned forward. "I dig your skinny tie," she purred.

  Chris Cool's cheeks flushed. Though Bess was nearly fifty, she could easily pass for forty-five. "Thanks, ma'am."

  My head was spinning. How did he know about the puppet? Why was it so valuable? And what did it all have to do with my mother?

  "What does TEEN want with a Congolese puppet?" I stammered.

  Chris looked uncomfortable. "So you know it's Congo­lese?"

  "It's obvious to anyone who knows anything about sub Saharan folk puppetry," I answered smartly.

  "Both of you and the puppet are going to have to come with me," Chris ordered, brushing a blond forelock off his forehead in frustration.

  "Okay!" exclaimed Bess brightly, hopping out of the car.

  "If we come with you, will you explain what this is all about?" I asked.

  Chris sighed. "I'll do what I can," he promised.

  We left the station wagon in the parking lot and took Chris's Jag to the River Heights temporary TEEN headquarters, located in the basement of Wishing Well Shoes. The room was empty except for a small oak table and a dark-haired young man with high cheekbones and obsidian eyes. He stood when we entered.

  "This is my Apache Indian roommate, Geronimo John­son," Chris announced, introducing us.

  "Your roommate?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.

  Chris cleared his throat. "At school."

  Bess heaved a small sigh of relief.

  The Apache glanced at Chris with humor in his eyes. "You were just supposed to bring back the puppet, choonday."

  "They know it's Congolese," Chris explained.

  "So what's this all about?" I demanded steadily.

  "Better get TEEN Control on the phone, Gerry," Chris barked to his roommate, ignoring me.

  Chris's youth was charming, but his manners weren't. "I thought his name was Geronimo," I observed.

  Chris bit his lip. "It is Geronimo. Gerry for short."

  "You could try to be a little more respectful of his Apache heritage," I suggested.

  "I am respectful!" Chris exclaimed.

  Geronimo nodded thoughtfully. "You know, she's right," he agreed. "I do prefer my full name."

  "You've
never said anything," Chris floundered.

  "You never asked."

  They stared at each other in stony silence.

  "So listen, what's the deal with the puppet?" I tried again.

  Chris sighed. "I just know that we're supposed to recover the item and report with it to the River Heights airport." He raised his head slightly. "It's a matter of extreme international importance."

  Bess slid next to Chris, pressing her ample, if slightly sagging, bosom against his chest. "So, if you're twenty, when do they let you join the real CIA?"

  Chris took a small step back. "TEEN is a unit of the CIA, ma'am. And it is an honor to serve my country as a TEEN operative."

  "I'm sure it is," Bess whispered huskily.

  "I demand that we be taken to your leader," I announced.

  "Excuse me?" Chris's eyebrows shot up in alarm.

  "Your boss. The head honcho. The big enchilada. I am a citizen and my personal property has been confiscated and I want to speak to the man in charge."

  Chris swallowed hard. "Please, ma'am."

  "I am Nancy Drew," I declared, "and I smell a mystery." My blue eyes flashed. I may have been middle-aged, but I was still a teen sleuth at heart. "About such things I am never wrong."

  TEEN HQ was located on a secret floor of the Luxury Motors Building on Broadway and Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan. We flew to New York, where we picked up another black Jag and drove to the building's service garage. Chris and Ger­onimo led us through several checkpoints, past several men with submachine guns and several pretty secretaries, until we were face to face with a man sitting behind a massive walnut desk. He looked like a crazed yacht enthusiast: blue blazer, yachting cap, unlit pipe, grayishblond beard.

  "Your boss is a sea captain?" Bess inquired of Chris skeptically.

  The man rose from behind his desk, his face red and sweating. "What is the meaning of this?" he growled in a decidedly fake British accent.