Kat Wolfe on Thin Ice

by Lauren St. John

  “We’re detectives,” said Harper, steering Kat beneath the shelter of the porch. “Let’s use detective techniques to track Rocky down. When you saw him up close, was his fur wet? Did he look bedraggled?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Trust me, if Rocky was outside in this beast of a storm for even five minutes, he’d have looked like a raccoon Popsicle. I think his den is indoors.”

  Kat, who was rapidly turning into a Kat Popsicle, was sufficiently interested in Harper’s theory to allow herself to be led back into the cabin. There, they evicted two huskies from the hearth and unthawed their hands over the flames.

  “Say you’re right and Rocky’s den is in the Dog House,” said Kat. “Any idea where it might be? We’ve explored every corner of it. We’ve unlocked every door, opened every cupboard.”

  As she spoke, she felt an unpleasant prickle of conscience. Sooner or later, the storm would be over and the cabin’s owner would come roaring up the drive. There’d be a reckoning. Her mum and Harper’s dad would go berserk once they learned the truth and saw the state of the Dog House. They could be sued. Kat was not looking forward to it.

  “You read more mysteries than I do,” Harper was saying. “When the detective stumbles across secret passages or hidden rooms, where are they generally located?”

  “Behind bookcases,” Kat answered at once. “Or under floorboards or rugs.”

  “We can rule out this room or the kitchen because the huskies would have sniffed out any raccoon den days ago. And there can’t be a secret passage behind the bookcase on the top floor because the shower’s on the other side of the wall.”

  “Also, I keep tripping over the rug in our room,” said Kat. “So I can tell you for sure that there’s nothing hidden under there. And the front of the cabin is on stilts, so there’s nothing under there.”

  Their eyes met. There was only one other possibility.

  They flew to the door that led to the main bedroom with such enthusiasm that Kat skidded in her socks and almost did need to be stretchered off to the ER.

  It was the only bit of the cabin that they and the huskies hadn’t managed to destroy. The geometric rug at the foot of the bed was pristine. Harper lifted it with the flourish of a stagehand raising a theater curtain.

  The trapdoor beneath wasn’t even locked.

  “Before, when I said you were a genius, I didn’t mean it,” said Kat.

  “Thanks…?”

  “Now I do.”

  * * *

  They descended the steps with extreme trepidation, frightened of what they might find.

  “What if the owner has been here all along—frozen into a statue in the basement?” said Harper when they were halfway down. “Could be a whole family.”

  Kat’s head filled with images of skeletons sagging amid piles of moth-eaten clothes, rusty bikes, or three-legged Adirondack chairs. If she hadn’t been so anxious about Rocky, she’d have refused to go on.

  The first surprise was that the light flickered on. “Must be solar or be powered by some external source,” said Harper. “Why else would this light work and the rest of the place be in darkness?”

  The second surprise was that a husky racing sled was parked on the gleaming linoleum floor of a large storeroom. Harnesses, snow boots, and other husky equipment was stacked nearby or hung neatly on hooks. Kat realized now that the snow-covered trellis they’d glimpsed when they walked back from the kennels must have disguised the garage-type door, cut into the side of the hill.

  At the back of the storeroom was a dog bed and water and food bowls—both empty. Curled up in the bed, looking dejected but unafraid, was the raccoon.

  Kat realized immediately that she’d been mistaken about his wilderness den. “He’s somebody’s pet,” she said, picking him up and cradling him in her arms. “Probably an orphan. Look, there’s the doggy door so he can go outside, and there’s the pipe he uses to climb to the kitchen. He must have been so frightened and hungry when his rescuer didn’t come home.”

  While Kat examined Rocky for cuts and abrasions, Harper took a look around. She tried the door of a tall steel cabinet and gave a low whistle.

  “Whoever lives here is a prepper.”

  “What’s a prepper?”

  “Someone who believes in preparing for worst-case scenarios like a war or a natural disaster. They’re survivalists. They tend to believe that if there’s a super volcano, say, and things fall apart, everyone’s on their own. They don’t depend on the government.”

  “We are on our own,” said Kat. “And nobody from the government has come to help us. What do you need to be a prepper?”

  Harper waved an arm. “This stuff. Cans of lentils, beans, carrots, and tomatoes. Massive bags of rice and pasta. Waterproof matches. Flints to start fires. Water purifiers. Space blankets. A tent, a sleeping bag, and a camping stove. Solar panels. Oh, goody, there are wind-up flashlights and lamps. Candles too. Let’s take everything upstairs.”

  Kat put down Rocky. He’d suffered a minor nip but was otherwise unharmed. “Pass me the first aid kit.” She unzipped the bulging bag. “This is ten times better than mine. Antibiotics, dressings, painkillers, and Steri-Strips. They’re used for stitching wounds. A scalpel too. Who needs a doctor? What have you found?”

  Harper was wrestling a heavy black case from the bottom shelf. She hesitated for a moment, hands trembling, before popping the silver catches. “Forget what I said about the cabin being cursed. I’m starting to think it’s my dream house. This, dear Kat, is an Earth2Sky 4800 portable satellite terminal. It’ll connect to the internet in under sixty seconds whether you’re on the Southern Ocean or the summit of Everest. Works off a car battery as well, so electricity is optional.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying that if we want to find Riley, this is our best shot.”

  THE WRONG WRITERS

  Fueled by the honey-and-coconut granola they’d discovered in the cellar, the girls set to work at once. They’d made a little progress after Harper set up the Raspberry Pi the previous night. Now, as she put it, they were “jet-propelled.”

  “Riley won’t be sleeping, so neither should we,” she said. “We’re racing the clock. With every passing minute, the danger that the kidnappers will get rid of her just to shut her up or because she’s no longer useful increases.”

  “Also, if everything goes smoothly with your dad’s flight and my mum’s car rental, they’ll be cruising up the drive of Nightingale Lodge on Thursday afternoon,” Kat reminded her. “That’s tomorrow. Approximately thirty-six hours from now.”

  “No pressure, then,” said Harper. “All we have to do is pack up our stuff, clean the Dog House from top to bottom, mosey around the lake, and move into our other cabin. I’m longing to see them, but once the adults show up, our search for Riley is over.”

  Kat was 99 percent sure she was right. Her mum and Professor Lamb were kind, reasonable people. They’d say in their kind, reasonable way, Girls, you have to trust that the police are pulling out all the stops to save Riley. The professionals will find her, you’ll see.

  They’d never believe that Kat and Harper—bear-spray-forgetting strangers to the Adirondacks wilderness—could succeed at finding Riley when local detectives and search-and-rescue teams had failed.

  Harper was at the window. “It’s so still and silent outside. Storm Mindy must have peaked. Soon she’ll be moving on.”

  Kat wasn’t convinced. Ten minutes earlier, she’d taken two of the huskies outside. The cold was so extreme that she’d wrapped her scarf around her face and peered through the stitches lest her eyeballs turn to sorbet. The only positive was that the wind had died down. Nothing ruffled the huskies’ thick silver fur.

  Even so, there was something crouched about the weather, as if Storm Mindy were a snow leopard, not a wolf. Her claws were sheathed for now. Kat didn’t trust her not to lash out.

  In the Dog House, Harper stationed herself at on
e end of the dining room table with the Raspberry Pi she’d built and boosted with added bits and pieces. The Earth2Sky satellite terminal wasn’t the only gadget she’d discovered in the storeroom.

  Kat had been impressed when Harper had managed to power up the satellite and get online in under a minute, but the real magic was watching her turn the cheap and dinky laptop into a flying machine that met her high standards.

  Harper polished her glasses and flexed her fingers.

  Kat giggled. Her best friend was like a pajama-clad jockey at the starting gates at Ascot Racecourse. She could almost hear the commentary: Champion rider Harper Lamb is balanced low over Raspberry Pi’s withers, ready to explode onto the track …

  Kat sat at the other end of the table with her low-tech watercolor pad and red Sharpie, plus a pile of yellowing newspapers she’d found in the garage.

  Harper tapped the laptop keys experimentally. “Ready, Kat? You practice your old-fashioned detective methods and I’ll use my twenty-first-century detective methods, and we’ll see who wins.”

  “We win when we rescue Riley,” said Kat.

  Strong emotion rippled through Harper. She’d been so focused on creating the fastest machine possible for their detective task force that she’d temporarily forgotten that they were trying to save a living, breathing, terrified girl. She blinked away a tear.

  “We win when we rescue Riley,” she agreed.

  * * *

  Before anything else, they checked that Riley did in fact still need rescuing. There was no point in beginning any investigation, twenty-first-century or otherwise, if the American girl had been plucked from the snow by a search team and bundled away to a hospital or her father’s penthouse since they’d last watched the TV the previous afternoon.

  Riley was still missing.

  Photos of a haggard Wainwright Matthews plastered local and social media. The only news was that there was no news. The twin rewards—$1 million for information leading to Riley’s safe return, and $1 million for information leading to the recovery of the diamond necklace—had flooded police hotlines with hoax calls.

  In the words of one detective, they were struggling to “sort out the jokers” as they sifted through possible sightings.

  Storm Mindy had strained resources further as police and emergency workers dealt with record numbers of traffic accidents, power outages, and snow-related injuries. Kat had the impression that while Riley’s case was important to the cops, it was not the priority.

  There was something unsettling about being online again. Even Harper found it disconcerting, as bleak or gaudy images of pop stars, award ceremonies, vicious politicians, wars, and natural disasters streamed into their wilderness cabin. She had to fight the temptation to slam the lid on them.

  “Now we have Wi-Fi, we could video-call your mum and my dad and say hi,” she told Kat, who was reading a news story over her shoulder. “If you want to, that is.”

  Kat stiffened. “It’s nice to know we can, but they’ll be sleeping. Let’s think about it later in the day.”

  Harper was equally hesitant and not just because of the time. As soon as they opened a connection to their parents, their investigation was over.

  “What about asking one of our deputies to do some research for us?” asked Kat. “Edith, Kai, or maybe even Jasper?”

  Jasper was Harper’s father-approved mentor when it came to hacking. A former student of Professor Lamb’s at Yale University in Connecticut, he was often called upon to help the FBI. He’d lent Kat and Harper a hand on their first-ever case.

  Harper shook her head. “If Dad gets the smallest hint that I’ve been online on our vacation, I’ll be toast. Kai was so brilliant on our last case, he would have been perfect, but he’s in China with his dad. Too bad that he’s on a screen ban too.”

  “Looks as if we’re on our own, then,” said Kat, returning to her end of the table.

  “That’s all right,” said Harper. “I kind of prefer it that way.”

  She brought up the website of the Royal Manhattan. “If you make notes on what we know so far, I’ll attempt to hack the hotel website.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Legal schmegal,” Harper said airily. “It’s not like I’m after credit card details or people’s private information. If the police haven’t already taken it, I want the CCTV footage for the last couple of hours of the event on September twenty-seventh, the night the diamond necklace was stolen. We might be able to identify Gerry’s accomplices—if he had any. If we crack the case, we’ll be doing the hotel a favor. They’ll thank us.”

  Her fingers flew as she tapped in computer code. “While I’m doing this, tell me more about Riley.”

  With those words, Kat was transported back to the forest. She could hear the loon’s haunting call and see Riley as clearly as if she was sitting there with them. Her striking blue eyes and choppy, strawberry-blond hair. Her ready smile and bubbling laugh.

  “Underneath, though, she seemed lonely and a bit sad,” she told Harper. “Now we know she was away from her family and with bodyguards, but it was more than that. She said she didn’t have many friends—not real ones.”

  As she talked, Kat made notes on her pad. “She didn’t mention a mum, only her father. He won’t let her have a cat because of his allergies. She thought he might be making them up.”

  “I bet he’d give her a kitten in a heartbeat now, hay fever or no hay fever,” said Harper. “The other night, on the news, he looked cold and supercilious. Now he looks destroyed.”

  She started typing again. “Go on. Anything else you remember?”

  “Riley adores her nan, who’s crazy about the environment and birds. I got the idea that Riley’s dad was as allergic to her grandmother as he is to cats. Riley hadn’t seen her for ages. She was proud that her nan had gone up against some company that leaked toxic metal into a lake near her house, making the loons sick and forgetful of their chicks.”

  “Did her grandmother win that battle?”

  “She must have done. According to Riley, the toxic metal company were the sorriest people on earth once she’d finished with them.”

  Harper lifted both arms, like a boxer celebrating a knockout. “Kat, I’m in! I’m prowling the hidden passages of the Royal Manhattan. Imagine spending millions on renovations and sparing no expense on a star-studded grand opening while saving every possible dime on internet security. What were they thinking? I’ll leave them a friendly note. Remind them that they have a responsibility to protect the data of their guests.”

  In the time it took Kat to walk around the table, Harper had found the cache of CCTV videos.

  “As I suspected. We’re too late. The tape for the week of the September event is missing. The cops must have it. Doesn’t matter. There would have been a zillion photos taken that night. We won’t be able to download the official ones, but … Ah, here are some taken by the assistant manager. He has a desperate case of the camera shakes, but they’re better than nothing. There’s a printer downstairs. We can print them out later.”

  “Harper!”

  “Do you want to find Riley or not? Over to you, Kat. What do we know about Gerry Meeks and his gang of merry thieves?”

  “Only his age and that he’s a retired insurance salesman. Didn’t you say that the director of Shady Oaks mentioned that his granddaughter had died? As far as we know, he’s alone in the world. Before his arrest, he enjoyed reading mysteries and doing yoga in his room. He supposedly beat everyone at chess. That’s it. That’s all we know.”

  “We also know that he snatched an heiress’s diamond necklace, while she was wearing it and in a crowded ballroom,” said Harper. “That’s quite a brazen move for an old guy.”

  Kat glanced up from her notebook. “Don’t forget there were a whole series of diversions that night. There were climate-change activists with blowtorches, lobsters being liberated from their tanks, and the fire across the street. The Force Ten security guards who were supposed to be keep
ing watch over the necklace were helping put out the blaze.”

  “Thanks for the reminder, Detective Wolfe. If the fire was also a diversion, that could mean it was started deliberately.”

  “Good thinking, Detective Lamb!” said Kat, making a note on her pad with the red Sharpie. “I’m working on the theory that there are at least five or six members of the Wish List gang.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Kat counted them off on her fingers. “Gerry Meeks, plus his three visitors, plus the man and woman who took Riley from the snow shelter we found. I’d say the man’s boots were size eleven, so he must be tall. The other person was a small woman. That’s if the Wish List gang were responsible for her disappearance.”

  Kat passed the list she’d made to Harper.

  WISH LIST GANG

  Gerry Meeks

  Tall, elegant woman

  Petite woman

  Woman with thick, curly hair

  Man with huge boots who took Riley from the snow

  Female accomplice (may be a new person or the petite visitor)

  “The curly-haired visitor could have been wearing a wig,” observed Harper.

  Kat made a note. “On paper, we don’t have a lot to go on, but I’ll start looking for patterns. The gang members might be linked by age, job, or geography. The items stolen might give us clues too.”

  Harper was back at her screen. “Before you start working on that, come watch me hack into the Shady Oaks website.”

  Kat was horrified. “Harper, you can’t. That’s an invasion of privacy. It’ll be full of patients’ medical details.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of poking around in people’s medical details. Anyway, I’ll be in and out in five minutes. Shady Oaks is not the sort of place I’d want to linger. All I’m going to do is run a teensy-weensy search for Gerry’s name in the director’s emails. What was her name again? Ah, here we are: Sylvia Jarman.”

  She entered code faster than a pianist playing Rachmaninoff.

  Kat held her breath. “Are you through their firewall?”