The Missing Heir

by Tracy Barrett

  They assured him that they were.

  “So why did you want to take a picture of that paper?” Xander asked as Xena downloaded the photo to the family computer and then enlarged it.

  She shook her head in frustration. “I’m not sure. There’s something about it that looks—I don’t know, wrong.”

  Together, they read the note.

  Dearest Aunt Penelope,

  Don’t bother looking for me because I

  don’t want to come back. I’m very sorry

  to hurt your feelings by leaving, but I

  have to do it. I don’t want to return to

  Borogovia, and I don’t know how else to

  stay here.

  Love,

  Your niece, Alice

  “It’s short and kind of formal,” Xander said, “but I don’t think writing notes like that is something you practice for, is it?”

  “Aha!” Xena said. She jumped up and ran into her room, and then came back with some pages stapled together. “This is the science project that Alice and I worked on together last term. Does the handwriting look the same to you?”

  Xander looked from the school paper to the note. He hesitated. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “It kind of looks the same, but some things about it are different. Do you think Alice didn’t really write that note?”

  Xena was already dialing the phone on the desk. “Dad? I think something funny is going on at Alice’s house.” She explained, then waited. “Okay. Where is it?” She hung up and turned to Xander. “Dad says it’s probably nothing, but we should show the picture and the project to the police. He told me where the police station was.” She pressed PRINT and waited while the cell phone picture printed out, and then made a copy of a page of the project. “You know what it means if Alice didn’t really write the note, don’t you?”

  Xander swallowed. “It means you were right. She was kidnapped.”

  “So what makes you kiddies think that two different people wrote these?” The policeman at the desk tapped the printout of the photograph.

  “Look at the way she crossed the T on her homework and the way it’s crossed on the note. They’re different. Plus, the capital A is different, and—” Xander looked up at a snort from the policeman.

  The man was trying not to smile, without much success. “A couple of amateur sleuths, are you? Good for you! Maybe when you grow up you can join the force and be real detectives.” He gathered up the papers and said, “I’ll see that these go to the … er … to the proper channels.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so they thanked him and left, ducking under awnings to keep out of the pouring rain. The wind made their umbrellas almost useless.

  “I bet I know what he means by ‘the proper channels.’” Xena was bitter. “I bet he’ll throw them right in the trash. Good thing we didn’t give him the original of the class project.”

  “He’s just like Inspector Lestrade,” said Xander.

  “Who?”

  “A policeman who never believed Sherlock, no matter how many times he was wrong and Sherlock was right.”

  Back home, they read the note again. “I just don’t believe it,” Xena said. “Even if Alice didn’t want to leave London, she seemed pretty convinced that she had to become the queen.”

  “Maybe whoever wrote it couldn’t think of any good reason for her to run away and this was the best they could come up with,” Xander said. “Hey—why don’t we send this and a picture of the homework project to Andrew? The SPFD is sure to know someone who can analyze handwriting.”

  Xena faxed them to Andrew with a note explaining what was going on. It felt good to be actually doing something. Xena and Xander hadn’t known for very long that Sherlock Holmes was their great-great-great-grandfather, but once the SPFD had given them his cold-case notebook and they started detecting, they realized that they had been born for this.

  “Okay,” Xena said. “Time to try to figure out who—who took her.” She didn’t even want to use the word “kidnapped.” It was too scary.

  “If that was the only note they found”—Xander indicated the bogus message—“that means there wasn’t a ransom note. Right?”

  “Right. So the motive can’t be money. Do you think it’s just a coincidence that she disappeared so soon after she found the letters? Could the letters have something to do with why she’s gone?”

  Xander considered this for a moment. “Maybe,” he finally conceded. “But what? Do you remember what Alice said about them?”

  Xena thought back. “Not much. There was something that worried her, she said, about when they talked about the baby. And Sherlock was mentioned. Not much more than that.”

  “Maybe it has nothing to do with the baby. Maybe there’s something else in the letters that would make a difference in her coronation—like they changed the age someone had to be when they were crowned or something. The one thing we know for sure is that someone took them. The letters wouldn’t have just disappeared in the short time she was doing those rugby drills. So let’s work on them. Who knew that Alice found them?”

  Xena read from her spiral notebook, “Aunt Penelope, Miss Jenny, Gemma, Jasper, the cook, and a maid named Frieda.”

  Xander chewed his lip. “That’s a lot. Alice said they could all probably read the letters. And any of them might have talked. The servants might have friends in town, or relatives, or any of them could have told the postman, who could have told someone else on his route.”

  “No way,” Xena said. “The kidnapper had to be someone who was known and trusted, or they couldn’t have gotten into the mansion. There’s that bodyguard and the security system. Remember the camera at the gate? If that Jasper guy isn’t involved, he wouldn’t let the mailman or anyone else in. It has to be one of the people on our list.”

  Xander wasn’t so sure. He thought that orderly Xena sometimes relied too much on lists. But all he said was, “Let’s find out more about Borogovia, especially about the kings and queens. You can check online, and I’ll look in the history books in the study.”

  “What are we looking for?” Xena asked.

  “Anything unusual. Not all that stuff about how many square miles it is and the annual average rainfall.”

  After an hour, they assembled their findings. Xena read the list she had made in her notebook. “One: In the seventeenth century, Borogovia was really torn up by wars of succession, between different people claiming they should be the next king. The wars were so bad that when they were finally settled, the Borogovians wrote a new constitution that said that whoever is crowned king or queen is the legitimate ruler, even if later on they figure out that actually someone else should have been crowned. No do-overs.” She looked over the top of the notebook at her brother. “Did you read about those wars in one of the books?”

  He nodded. “This king—his name was Carl—died in 1632. He didn’t have any kids, so normally his younger brother would be the one to take over. But his brother had died before him, so the brother’s son said he was king. The problem was that Carl also had a sister, and she said that she was queen. There was no law against a woman taking over, but it had never happened before, and a lot of people said that it should be Carl’s nephew instead.”

  “So what happened?”

  “There were two different wars and a lot of people died in them, including Carl’s nephew, so Carl’s sister became queen. Then someone found some old legal document that said women couldn’t rule, so there was another war to try to get rid of her and have a male ruler. The queen’s side won, and they were the ones who made the constitution that said once someone was crowned, that was it.”

  “Got it,” Xena said. “Two: Just barely more than half the Borogovians want to stay independent from Rathonia. There was a poll a few months ago, and it was fifty-one percent to forty-nine.”

  “Hmm. So if a new queen said one way or the other about it, probably at least a few people would change their minds.”

 
; “Right. And it wouldn’t take more than a few people to make a difference when it’s that close. Three: Lots of Borogovian rulers have married English people. Alice’s mom was English, and so was Princess Stella’s. They built the mansion right after the wars of succession, and it’s been enlarged lots of times. The most recent time was when Queen Charlotte—she was Stella’s mother, remember?—was homesick, and she added a whole story so her family could visit. Some famous architect made it. A newspaper article from the time said, ‘It is a marvel of both engineering and architecture.’”

  “What does that mean?” Xander asked.

  “Engineering means how it was made, like how strong it was, and architecture means how it looked. So I guess that means it was well built and beautiful.”

  Xander sighed. “I didn’t find anything more than that. All this is interesting, but I can’t see how it helps us find Alice. Let’s take a look at the casebook. Oh, and I thought of something—you know those glass cases in the lobby of the SPFD where they display clues that Sherlock used?” Xena nodded. “Well, one of them holds things that are all about the kidnapping of Princess Stella.”

  “Do you remember what they were?”

  He squinted. “Um, a picture—like a family photo. I guess that was the princess. And a kind of pin—it was a black flower behind glass, like a tiny picture. I didn’t look too closely. We’ll have to go back so I can—”

  His phone rang. “Hi, Andrew. You already heard back?” He said to Xena, “Andrew has the results of the handwriting analysis.” He spoke into the phone again. “Wait, let me put you on speaker so I don’t have to tell Xena everything you say.”

  “—can’t be sure without seeing the originals,” said Andrew’s voice, “but he would be really surprised if the two samples were written by the same person. I’m faxing you the report.”

  Xena stood by the fax machine. When the report came through, she scanned it quickly and handed it to her brother. He read aloud, “‘Less than a five percent chance that the two samples were written by the same hand,’” and then a lot about capital letters, slant, and other details. “So whoever wrote the note wasn’t Alice!” He gave the page back to Xena, who tucked it into her schoolbag. “Do you think the police suspect the same thing we do?”

  “There was nothing about it on the news sites I checked while you were reading those encyclopedias,” Xena said. “So either the police didn’t look at the evidence we brought them, or they’re keeping quiet about it. Sometimes they do that with important investigations, don’t they? I mean, not give out all the details, so they can catch the bad guy when he knows things that only the guilty person would know?”

  “I guess so.” Xander didn’t voice what he was thinking, and he knew that Xena was thinking the same thing.

  If the police weren’t going to do anything with this important evidence, it was up to them to find their friend.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Thank goodness for spring break!” Xander said on Monday morning as he and Xena walked to the back of the Dancing Men, a pub near the hotel where they had stayed when they first moved to London. As they had discovered months ago, the long corridor behind the pub’s dining room led to a concealed entrance to the headquarters of the SPFD.

  “I know,” Xena said as she opened a dark brown door, revealing a dusty room filled with empty cardboard boxes that were scattered and stacked in a way to make any visitor think this was a regular storage room. “This case is really complicated. We’d never have time to investigate it if we were in school today.”

  Xander ducked down and crawled through the false cardboard box that was against a wall. There was a door hidden in the back of this “box,” and he quickly spun the dials of the lock to the right combination to let them in.

  Xena wasn’t crazy about tight spaces, but each time she went through the box and out the door, it was a bit easier. Still, she was always relieved when she climbed out the other side and into SPFD headquarters.

  Mr. Brown, a longtime member of the SPFD, looked up from his desk. “There you are! I was wondering how you two were going to get here. It took me almost an hour on my bicycle instead of ten minutes on the Tube.”

  “Our dad dropped us off on his way to work,” Xander said. “His spring break isn’t until next week.”

  “Andrew is fetching the papers about the Borogovian case from the archives.” Mr. Brown stood up and pulled a large key ring from his pocket. “And in the meantime, let’s take a look at the artifacts that your illustrious ancestor collected.”

  Xena and Xander glanced into the display cases that lined the wall in the corridor between the lobby and the offices and labs of the SPFD. In one, an ostrich-feather fan with what looked like a bullet hole through its handle drooped over two silk gloves, one of which had six fingers. Another case held a stuffed rodent the size of a cat with a neatly hand-lettered label saying “SUNDAMYS INFRALUTEUS.” Its bared teeth were long and yellow, and Xander shuddered and swerved a bit to avoid walking right next to it. He knew the creature wasn’t alive, but he still hadn’t completely conquered his phobia of wild animals.

  Mr. Brown worked a slender key in the opening of the third case. The glass door swung open.

  “This is the picture I was talking about,” Xander said, pointing at a black-and-white photograph of a sleeping infant. “And there’s that flower thing.” He reached in and picked it up carefully.

  “What is it?” Xena asked. What looked like a tiny oval picture frame of gold held a strange rose, shiny and completely black, even the stem and leaves.

  “That’s a mourning pin.” Mr. Brown beckoned to Xena to look at it more closely. “They were popular a hundred years ago and more. They’re made from the hair of someone who died, and were worn in memory of the dead person.”

  “Yuck.” Xena wrinkled her nose.

  “I know, it seems odd now,” Mr. Brown said, “but people from different times show their grief in different ways. This one was made from the hair of Queen Charlotte’s mother, Princess Stella’s grandmother.”

  “She was Alice’s great-great-great-great-grandmother,” Xander said.

  “Right. See, there’s a note that came with it.”

  The spidery handwriting was difficult to read, but Xena managed to decipher: “For Mr. Sherlock Holmes from HRH Queen Charlotte of Borogovia, in gratitude for his efforts on behalf of my late mother’s only grandchild.”

  “It’s strange,” Xander said.

  “To make a dead person’s hair into a flower and then wear it, you mean?” asked Xena.

  “No, I mean it’s really strange that there would be two kidnappings in the same family a hundred years apart. Royal families have bodyguards, servants, lots of people around them. Wouldn’t they be the last people to be kidnapped?”

  “You’d think so,” Mr. Brown said, “but actually, royal families are threatened with kidnapping a lot. That’s why they have so many bodyguards.”

  “Everybody around Alice knew about the kidnapping of Princess Stella,” Xander suggested, “so maybe when they had to get rid of Alice for some reason, kidnapping occurred to them. Plus, just after Alice showed her aunt and the others at the breakfast table the letters that mentioned the kidnapping, the letters disappeared—and then that same night, she did too. We’re trying to find a connection.”

  “I’ll leave that up to you,” Mr. Brown said. “I’ll see what’s keeping Andrew and send him here.” He went back to his office.

  “So what do you think, Xena?” Xander asked. “What do we do now?”

  Xena considered. “I don’t know. We can’t investigate Alice’s disappearance without cooperation from the police, and obviously we’re not going to get that. If we solve Sherlock’s case, maybe we can figure out what upset Alice’s aunt so much when Alice asked her about the letters. That could help us find Alice.”

  “I don’t know,” Xander objected. “It’s a long shot, and Sherlock’s notes are even harder to understand than usual. I mean, what does a sh
ip have to do with anything?”

  “The ship that the king and queen were on when the baby was kidnapped?” Xena guessed, but she knew this was weak.

  Xander shook his head. “I don’t know how that would help, unless Sherlock thought the king and queen were involved somehow. That doesn’t really seem likely. But let’s work on it a little. So far we’ve only looked at that brooch. What else did Sherlock save from the investigation? Anything that could help? We don’t have much to go on. There are lots of clues, but none of them seem related to each other.”

  They examined the other objects in the case. There were some small photographs, chosen for display to visitors of the SPFD to show the most important people involved with the kidnapping. There was one of an uncomfortable-looking Sherlock with the queen, and a few of the princess growing up.

  “The little girl looks a lot like Alice,” Xena said, and Xander agreed. “Look,” she went on, “here’s one that says it was taken right after Princess Stella was born. See, the label says, ‘Her Royal Highness Princess Stella, held by Miss Mimsy, with her parents seated together in front of them.’” The nurse, her light hair pulled back into a severe bun, stood behind the queen, who looked pale and weak, even in the old-fashioned photograph that didn’t exactly bring out the best in anyone. Both women wore dresses with wide, puffy skirts. The king, dressed in a dark suit, held his wife’s hand and stared at her instead of looking at the camera, concern evident on his face.

  “Why would you call someone who looks like that a buttercup?” Xander wondered aloud, remembering what Alice had read in the letter from Queen Charlotte to her friend. Miss Mimsy was a dumpy little woman, not at all flowerlike.

  Andrew finally appeared with a cardboard box full of loose papers. “I don’t think you’ll find anything here,” he said. “They were all catalogued a long time ago, and if anything useful had been mentioned, somebody would have noticed it.” By now, Xena and Xander knew that Andrew could be grumpy and discouraging, so they didn’t remind him that sometimes they could see a clue that other people missed. Besides, if Sherlock hadn’t thought these papers were important, he wouldn’t have saved them.