Kat Wolfe on Thin Ice

by Lauren St. John

  “What made it even worse,” said Bianca, “is that it’s because of us—the Clue Club—that Riley’s bodyguards were ambushed. After Gerry was arrested, we were so desperate to get him out of jail that we were clutching at straws. Gerry used the one phone call he was allowed to tell my dad, Emilio, that he didn’t have the necklace. We believed him. Dad called the cops anonymously and asked them to investigate whether the star witness was actually the thief. We had no idea that Riley was the star witness or that some maniac would take those words as truth and attack the bodyguards. I guess he wanted to steal the diamond necklace for himself.”

  Bianca looked stricken. “Now we’re in quite a tangle. A pickle, as you Brits would say.”

  “Yes, we are,” mumbled Cath Woodward. “As soon as we get a phone signal, I’m going to call the cops and tell them that Riley is here with me. I suspect that Riley’s dad will be here within hours. We’re not sure how much or how little to tell him.”

  “We also need to get Gerry out of jail,” fretted Bianca, “but we can’t do that without confessing to being in the Wish List gang. It’s a calamity.”

  “How did it start?” asked Kat. “You just don’t seem the type to steal fifty million dollars’ worth of diamonds.”

  “That’s a whole other story,” said Georgia.

  Cath put up her hand. “One that might best be enjoyed with cake and company. Shall we go downstairs and join the others?”

  ONE GOOD TURN

  After days of fending for themselves, it was lovely to be taken care of. Kat felt guilty that she didn’t feel more guilty about hanging out with criminals. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be crammed into Cath’s living room with seven crooks, six dozing huskies, Harper, Riley, and the raccoon, who was curled up in Georgia’s arms as if he belonged there.

  “This is what we serve at every Clue Club meeting,” said Cath, dishing out raspberry and coconut slices and the remains of an orange polenta cake. “There’s coffee for those who want it, and we always have homemade lemonade or ginger beer—like the Famous Five.”

  A thrill went through Kat. They were honorary members of the mysterious Clue Club.

  Then she remembered that Cath wasn’t a sweet old grandmother, any more than Gerry Meeks was a sweet old granddad. If even half of what she and Harper had deduced was accurate, these were professional thieves with a multi-million-dollar haul of art and jewels to show for it. Kat scanned the room for any sign of the swag. Was the diamond necklace hidden in plain sight in Cath’s apparently humble house?

  “Where do we begin?” Kiara asked anxiously.

  “We begin at the beginning, with Gerry, half a century ago,” said her husband.

  “Half a century?” gasped Harper.

  Rob laughed and rolled his wheelchair nearer the fire. “Forty-eight years, to be precise. We have to begin with Gerry, because without him there’d be no Clue Club and without the Clue Club, there’d be no us.”

  Some strong emotion rippled through the room. Kat realized that whatever else they’d done, the friends cared deeply for one another.

  Emilio, a handsome Italian, set aside his coffee cup. “Like so many things, the Clue Club started with the best of intentions. Gerry was a brilliant insurance investigator, but his job was immensely stressful and he traveled nonstop. Perhaps inevitably, his marriage broke up. His wife remarried and moved away, taking his daughter with her.

  “Throughout that difficult time, books were Gerry’s constant companions. Sources of comfort and bringers of laughter, hope, kindness, and adventure. Most of all, he loved mysteries.”

  “Like me and Harper,” said Kat.

  “And me,” said Riley.

  “Join the club!” said Bianca, and everyone laughed.

  Georgia took up the story. “Gerry’s daughter grew up and became a high-flying New York City executive. She regularly called on him to babysit his granddaughter, Emily. He had more time on his hands then, and he’d spend hours reading to her. As Emily got older, she caught his passion for mysteries. At school, Emily and I became best friends. Pretty soon, I was hooked on mysteries too. We formed our own Clue Club. Emily wrote us a funny mission statement. She said it would be a book club for readers who like ‘living dangerously.’ That’s how she put it.”

  Bianca laughed. “We still have her mission statement. She said that in order to join, members had to relish cliff-hangers, twists, red herrings, and heart-racing suspense. Most important, readers had to vow to fight every day for justice, mercy, and the truth.”

  Kat wanted to burst out, What would any of you know about justice and truth? But she had a feeling there was more to the story.

  “It wasn’t until Gerry moved to Shady Oaks three years ago—against Emily’s wishes—that the Clue Club became a permanent part of our lives,” Bianca went on. “Papa had been hired to take care of the gardens. He, Gerry, and I discovered a shared love of mysteries. In time, I introduced Rob, Kiara, and Michael to our little book club.”

  “After Emily died, Gerry became one of my closest friends,” said her father, Emilio. “I’d lost my own daughter to cancer, so I knew how he felt. I was forced out of Shady Oaks, but we wrote letters every week. That’s what makes this situation so unbearable. While we’re sitting here, eating cake, Gerry’s in a windowless cell. Because of us. Because of the Clue Club.”

  “We’ll make this right,” Cath said grimly. “I don’t know how, but we will.”

  “I suppose it was around the time Rob had his accident that we realized that the Clue Club had become more than a book club,” said Georgia. “It was a life club. We’d become family. We were there for one another through thick and thin. We nicknamed ourselves the Wrong Writers—a play on words. We righted wrongs. If any of us had a cause—a fundraising raffle for the local animal shelter, or a campaign to save loons—the others would help.”

  “That’s how I got involved,” Cath told Riley. “Michael lives in the Adirondacks too, and he introduced me to the Clue Club. When we weren’t swapping clues on our latest mystery, we were fighting for the loons or trying to raise money for St. Francis of Assisi Children’s Hospital.”

  “How did it go from being a life club to a criminal club?” Kat asked bluntly. “At what stage did you stop righting wrongs and start doing wrong?”

  “Let me guess,” said Harper. “You decided to use the sleuthing skills you’d learned from novels to get away with stealing every luxury you’d ever dreamed of?”

  “No!” cried Bianca.

  “Not exactly,” said Rob.

  “It wasn’t like that,” insisted Cath Woodward. “Not at first.”

  “What was it like?” demanded Riley.

  “It all started two years ago when Gerry saw a magazine photo of Cynthia Hollinghurst wearing her diamond necklace,” said Rob. “He was livid about it. It was only then that he admitted to being haunted by the only insurance case he ever lost.”

  Kat leaned forward. “What was it?”

  “He called it the ‘Case of the Missing Blood Diamonds.’ You’ll have heard of conflict diamonds, I expect. Diamonds mined using child and other slave labor in conditions of unimaginable hardship and wickedness. Clancy Hollinghurst, Cynthia’s father, is rumored to have made his fortune from such a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa.

  “Thirty years ago, Clancy claimed thirty million dollars from Gerry’s insurance company after an apparent break-in at his home. The cops never caught the intruder. Gerry was convinced that the robbery was invented, and Clancy knew he knew the truth. Yet he was so arrogant and certain he’d never be found out, he used to taunt Gerry about it. Gerry did everything he could to prove the man a liar and a fraudster but never managed it. Clancy got away with both the diamonds and a thirty-million-dollar insurance payout.”

  “Fast-forward a couple of decades,” said Bianca, “and there is Clancy’s daughter Cynthia brazenly wearing the very diamonds that were supposedly stolen but designed to look completely different.
Gerry showed us the magazine profile on her. The gems were now worth an incredible fifty million dollars.”

  “At the time,” Cath explained, “we were trying to raise that exact amount of money to build a hospital unit for children with cancer in the Adirondacks, a place where they could heal and be with nature. After months of fundraising, we had a measly ten grand. It seemed hopeless.”

  “I can imagine the conversation,” said Harper. “Somebody joked that if you stole one, you could pay for the other.”

  “Gerry only said what each of us was thinking,” Bianca told her. “If we took the blood diamonds that had been mined by suffering children and exploited by a fraudster, and found a way to sell them—maybe as individual diamonds—we could use the money to ease the suffering of children with cancer, maybe some small good would come out of those sad jewels.”

  “Since Gerry’s in jail and the diamonds are missing, I suppose it wasn’t quite so simple,” said Kat.

  “No,” muttered Cath. “It was not.”

  “We prided ourselves on our cleverness,” said Emilio. “We were sure we’d get away with stealing the necklace. We didn’t realize we were building our own gilded cage.”

  “If anyone’s to blame for how things have turned out, it’s me,” said Rob. “I came up with the stupid wish list. At first, it was all just a game, like Clue. I kidded that since we weren’t proper thieves, we’d each have to practice snatching something. We wrote out a funny robbers’ wish list. A Ming vase, a priceless painting, and so on. It’s not so funny now.”

  “What did you steal first?” asked Harper, intrigued.

  “The next weekend, Rob and I went to a musical instrument exhibition in Austin, Texas,” Michael said. “Rob noticed a guitar that Bob Dylan had supposedly played, only nobody knew for sure. It was worth a million dollars. We couldn’t believe it. Rob tried asking the merchant about it, but the man turned ugly and said that Rob’s wheelchair was putting off customers and costing him business.”

  “I was furious, but Rob said that the man’s attitude would make stealing the guitar a walk in the park. He bet me that if he returned the next day in his prosthetics, set off a stink bomb, and walked off with the guitar, no one would remember him. He was right. It was easy. We’d stolen the guitar and gotten away with it. We were thieves.”

  “We were thieves with a code of honor,” Cath reminded him. “We had rules. The necklace aside, we couldn’t take anything that was worth more than a thousand dollars—in our opinion, that is—and every item had to be carefully stored within a one-mile radius of the theft, so it could be returned a week later.”

  “If everything you stole has been returned, why are the cops still hunting for you?” demanded Harper.

  “That plan went awry early on,” admitted Michael. “We were victims of our own success. We decided to wait for things to cool off, but each time we got away with a new heist, our notoriety grew. The press started calling us the Wish List gang.”

  “How can you say that you never stole anything worth more than one thousand dollars?” accused Harper. “You took a Liberty nickel worth nearly four million.”

  “Oh, please,” said Michael. “It’s a five-cent coin. How can it be worth four million? Who decides these things? Anyhow, it’s quite safe and will be returned just as soon as we can be sure we won’t go to jail for giving it back.”

  “What about the priceless painting you snatched?” Kat said, looking at Bianca.

  Bianca laughed. “Sofia Rossi, the artist, was one of my ancestors. She was a good but eccentric nun and an amateur artist. Papa and I used to laugh about a note she’d written on the back of a ghastly painting of a poppy field. She’d called it The Lost Masterpiece of Sofia Rossi. As an experiment, we sent it to a modern art gallery in New Orleans. They loved it but wouldn’t pay us for it. Then, when I stole it back, they claimed it was worth over one million dollars.”

  “None of us are laughing now,” Cath reminded them sternly. “Because of the Clue Club, Gerry’s in jail, Riley nearly died in the storm, and these girls nearly got themselves killed looking for her. I wish I could wave a magic wand and put things back to how they were, but I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Why don’t you do what you intended to do in the beginning?” suggested Kat. “Return all the stolen items to the art galleries or wherever.”

  “It’s tricky when there’s a nationwide manhunt for us,” said Michael.

  “Send an anonymous email to the cops,” Harper told him. “Tell them where you’ve stashed the goods. I’ll show you how to do it without being traced.”

  “But that doesn’t help Gerry,” said Emilio. “We might save our own skins, but unless we can find the necklace, he’ll still be rotting in jail. I can’t live with that.”

  “I can get him out,” announced Riley. “I’ll—what’s the word?—take back my testimony.”

  “Recant,” supplied her grandmother.

  “I’ll recant my testimony. Say that I made it all up to get attention. Dad and the cops will be angry with me, but it’ll be worth it. Gerry will be free. Without my witness statement, the case will collapse.”

  “No,” said her grandmother. “Gerry knew the risk he was taking. We all did. When you’re on the witness stand, you’ll be under oath. You’ll swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “But, Nan—”

  “No buts. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “Is there any way you could have been mistaken, Riley?” asked Harper.

  “I know what I saw, and so did Gerry,” Riley said stubbornly. “When he glanced up and realized I’d seen him put the diamond necklace in his pocket, his face was sick with shame and guilt.”

  Kat asked, “What happened immediately after that?”

  “Cynthia screamed when she realized her diamonds were gone. There was a stampede in the ballroom. There were celebrities having panic attacks thinking the hotel was on fire, and politicians being raced out by their bodyguards. The Force Ten security guards came tearing in, smelling of smoke and trying to work out what was going on.”

  “Where was Gerry?”

  “He disappeared in the chaos. I thought he’d escaped. I told Dad I’d witnessed the theft. He shouted for the guards, and they found Gerry sitting on the corner of a fake iceberg, looking like his world had just ended. My heart kind of broke for him, but as far as I was concerned, he didn’t have to steal the necklace. He could have chosen not to be a thief. If I’d known he was stealing it to help build a hospital for sick children, I might have done things differently.”

  “If you don’t like the way the story ends, maybe it’s not the end of the story,” said Kat.

  “What do you mean?” Emilio asked sharply.

  Kat took the hotel photos from her backpack. “We printed these off the Royal Manhattan website. In this picture, it’s obvious from Riley’s expression that she’s seen Gerry take the necklace. In this one, taken minutes later, Gerry’s visible from behind. There’s a trolley going by on one side of him, and a waiter with a tray of smoked salmon on ice on the other. The waiter’s bewildered, and there are people running in the background, like Riley described. But look at the streak of silver on the left of the photo.”

  She passed the picture around the room. “At first, I thought it was a flash from the camera, but when I studied it more closely, I realized it was something else entirely. What do you see?”

  Riley gasped. “The diamond necklace. Gerry must have felt guilty about taking it, tried to fish it out of his pocket, and then dropped it.”

  At that instant, Kat caught sight of the clock. “It’s nearly lunchtime! Harper, my mum will be at Nightingale Lodge in three and a half hours! How do we get there? What do we do about the huskies? How will we fetch our stuff?”

  “We have a confession too,” Harper told the thieves of the Clue Club. “We stole these huskies from a cabin that didn’t belong to us, which we’ve unintentionally wrecked.”

  “We m
ight need your help,” added Kat.

  They had to tell their own story then. It was a relief to confess it to these strangers, who had somehow become friends and who listened without judging them. However, even they were shocked when Harper got to the part where Officer Burt Skinner seized her arm in the kitchen of the cabin and demanded to know where Riley was.

  “Oh, what a tangled web we’ve woven,” rued Cath. “Dare I ask if Officer Skinner could have followed you?”

  Kat assured her that he definitely hadn’t and made everyone laugh with her description of the crooked policeman going down in a whirl of arms, legs, and whipped-up snow after Thunder disobeyed orders and nipped him.

  “Last we saw, he was lying on his roly-poly tummy like a dung beetle. I suspect that as soon as he managed to get up again, he’ll have headed for the hills—or the hospital—to get his raccoon and dog bites checked out. The doctor will probably recommend tetanus and rabies shots. Those are painful. I doubt he’ll be thinking about diamonds or Riley for a day or two at least.”

  “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer man,” said Bianca.

  Everyone smiled except Kat and Harper, who were worrying once more about how to return the huskies and get to Nightingale Lodge.

  Georgia giggled. “Don’t look so dejected, girls. You’re talking to people with real problems. Yours are nothing. I’ve just noticed that my phone finally has a signal. We’ll start by calling Riley’s dad. It might be best if only Cath is here with her when he arrives. Sounds as if they have family business to take care of.”

  “Agreed,” said Cath.

  “Meantime, Kiara and Rob will drive you and Harper to Nightingale Lodge. Michael, me, Bianca, and Emilio will return the huskies to the kennels at the Dog House and divide up the chores. Some of us will clean, others can dash to the grocery and housewares store to pick up replacements for the food and cushions or whatever.”

  She grinned. “Start by writing a wish list of things you’d put back in the Dog House if you could.”