The Vanishing Act

by Carolyn Keene

  Nancy and Cari walked over to the spot and stared down at the shore.

  “It’s kind of windy, you two,” Bess said fretfully. “Get back a little, will you?”

  Cari inched back one foot, but Nancy kept looking down. “I guess I was expecting to see a collapsed cliff,” she mused. “But, of course, that doesn’t make any sense. Three years of tides moving in and out would smooth over the spot, wouldn’t they? So there’d be no trace of a body now or of the rubble.”

  Bess’s voice was edgy. “Nancy, Cari, you know I hate heights! Let’s get out of here and go back and check into the hotel. I’m starving!”

  “In one second,” Nancy promised. “I’m just trying to fix this scene in my—”

  Then she gasped. Under her heels, the cliff was starting to crumble, and the momentum shot her forward.

  Instinctively Nancy threw herself back. Her arms flailed the air wildly—helplessly.

  Cari made a lunge for her, but came up with nothing but a handful of air.

  Nancy’s frantic backpedaling only made things worse. Before she could draw a breath to scream, she was sliding down the rocky face to the treacherous boulders below.

  Chapter

  Four

  NANCY SLID with her arms stretched above her head, grasping for any handhold. She held her breath, waiting for the terrible moment when she’d smash onto the rocks below.

  Then a third of the way down, her shirt shredded and her back skinned, Nancy sped past a small bush rooted precariously in the rock. She opened her hand and clawed at it. Her fall was stopped, but the impact was terrible. Nancy hung, dangling by one arm, her shoulder wrenched and aching.

  But she was alive!

  She eased her toes down onto a narrow outcropping of rock—just a yard wide—jutting out from the cliff. Below her, the sea licked at the rocks as hungrily as ever.

  Nancy lay there trembling. Every inch of her body was throbbing with pain, but she knew nothing was broken. Her shoulder was not dislocated. She ran a hand across her eyes and glanced back up at the cliff top. The others were staring down at her, ashen faced.

  “H-hi,” Nancy stuttered.

  There were tears in Bess’s eyes. She opened her mouth to return Nancy’s greeting, but no sound came out.

  “Don’t move,” George called. “I’ll be right down to help you.”

  “No, I’m okay!” Nancy called back. “Just a little sore. And embarrassed,” she added. “I can climb up myself.”

  Now that she looked, she noticed that the cliff was covered with scraggly bushes. Nancy slid along to the end of the ledge and pulled gingerly on the nearest one. It didn’t move. She gave it a harder tug. The bush certainly seemed well rooted.

  “I can use these bushes to pull myself up,” she called up to the girls. “But keep an eye on me.”

  “We will,” Bess said fervently as Nancy edged herself off the ledge and began her ascent.

  • • •

  “No, Ned, I’m okay. Really!” Nancy insisted. “A little bit scraped up, that’s all.” She felt the pain shoot down her arm when she eased her shoulder back and tried not to groan audibly. “It’s sweet of you to want to fly out here, but I’m just not going to let you. Not with that big paper to finish . . .”

  It was nine at night, and Nancy had just put in a good-night call to Ned at college. She still couldn’t believe her good luck. She’d made it back up the cliff with very little trouble. Her knees and elbows were rubbed raw from the climb—but she would be okay soon.

  “The fall did tell me something,” she said to Ned. “It’s entirely possible that whoever fell in that tape slid down just the way I did—because of the cliff’s collapsing.”

  “So there might not have been any kind of ‘foul play’ involved?” Ned asked.

  “Exactly. But I don’t know what it all proves. It’s just something to file away.”

  “Well, keep me filed away somewhere, too,” Ned said. “I hate having you so far away.”

  “Me, too.” Nancy sighed. “I’d better hang up. I’ve got a lot going on tomorrow—first day on the job, you know. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Nancy. Call me again as soon as you can.”

  • • •

  “Nancy, hi! You’re right on time!”

  Nancy turned to see Dan Kennedy striding toward her. “I’m starting to get the hang of driving around here,” she said. “You just leave an hour earlier than you think you need to.”

  “That’s about it,” Dan said. “What have you done with Bess and George?”

  Nancy hid a smile. Her friends would be delighted to hear that he’d asked about them. “They’re working,” she said. “I gave them their assignments last night. Before we left for L.A., I called Jesse’s estate to find out who his accountants were. It’s a firm called Lawrence Associates, and Bess is over there now trying to get permission to go through Jesse’s financial records. George is at the library looking at old newspaper clippings of that last concert. Something might turn up—you never know.”

  “Well, tell them hi for me. Now, I’ll take you around and introduce you to the people you’ll be working with this week.” Dan lowered his voice. “I’ve told them you’re a guest veejay, even the receptionist.”

  Speaking normally again, he took Nancy by the shoulders and piloted her down the hall. “Let’s go find out what a rock TV station looks like,” he said.

  “Here’s the control room,” he said, stopping beside one door. “There are three directors inside—the director, the associate director, and the technical director. The technical director’s responsible for making sure the right tape’s put on when it’s time to show a video.” Nancy pulled the door open a crack and peered in to see a man and two women sitting at a paneled board covered with what looked like millions of buttons. On the wall in front of them were four television screens, each showing the set from a different angle. She eased the door closed again.

  “And here’s the sound room,” Dan continued, indicating a room with a sliding glass door adjacent to the control room. “It’s just what it sounds like—the technician here monitors the show’s decibel level.”

  Dan stuck his head into the sound room and tapped the shoulder of a man wearing headphones. “Wake up, Ken! This is Nancy Drew,” he said after the technician had turned around. “She’s our new guest veejay. She’ll be—”

  “I have a lot of work to do,” Ken said flatly, interrupting. “I’ll talk to you later.” And he turned his back on them.

  For a second Dan looked bewildered. “Well, he’s sure got something on his mind,” he said. “Maybe one of the higher-ups has been giving him trouble.”

  They peeked into the makeup room, the editing room, and the preview room—a soundproof chamber where tapes could be played at all different sound levels to make sure the sound was undistorted. A bright red and white electric guitar was propped up against one wall of the sound room. “What’s that guitar for?” Nancy asked.

  “Oh, that! We had a demo band practicing in here a couple of days ago, and—if you can believe it—they forgot that. I don’t think they’re going to get far in this business.”

  Dan introduced Nancy to several more people. She couldn’t understand it, but no one she met was very friendly—and a couple of people were even downright rude. As she and Dan continued on, Dan looked more and more confused.

  “They don’t know who you really are, do they?” he muttered.

  “I don’t see how they could!” Nancy whispered back. “And even if they did, why would they be angry at me?”

  “Beats me,” said Dan. “But something’s going on, that’s for sure. Here’s the studio. They’re taping now, so we’ll just slip in the back door. Be very quiet. This is where it all happens.”

  The studio was an enormous room three stories high—the height of the whole building. The first thing Nancy noticed was that it was freezing in there. “It’s so hot under all those lights that the rest of the room has to be kept cold so t
he veejays won’t get too sweaty,” Dan whispered.

  Nancy looked up at the ceiling. It was hung with massive lights, each burning down onto the set.

  “Why do they need three cameras?” she whispered to Dan, staring at the set.

  “One’s for the center, one’s for closeups, and one’s for the guest chair,” he answered.

  The center chair was where the veejay sat. One was sitting there then in front of a large screen that was pulsing with color and weird shapes.

  “What does he do when the video’s on?” Nancy asked.

  “Anything he wants—for as long as the video lasts. They run the tape in from the control room. Well, I’ve got just one more person to introduce you to, and that’s Renee Stanley. I think she’s in the dressing room. She’s the veejay who’ll be your boss this week.”

  “I’ve seen her on TV. She’s great,” said Nancy as they headed down the hall again. “But I thought my boss was going to be you.”

  “I wish I could be.” Dan sounded genuinely regretful. “But all this Jesse Slade-week stuff’s going to keep me too busy. I’ll do everything I can to help you, though.”

  “Okay,” Nancy said. She was trying to fight down the rush of nervousness that was rising in her stomach. I know this is just an undercover job, she thought. But if everyone’s got a grudge against me, I’m going to need an ally. Maybe Renee will—

  But one look at Renee Stanley and Nancy knew she wasn’t going to be on her side.

  The dressing room door was open. Three of the walls were lined with signed photos of rock stars, and the fourth was hung ceiling to floor with one huge mirror. Renee was sitting and brushing her hair, staring fixedly at her reflection when they walked into her office. She didn’t stop brushing—didn’t even turn around—as Dan introduced Nancy. Then, very deliberately, she put her brush down and swiveled her chair around to face Nancy.

  She was even prettier in person than on TV. She was wearing zebra-print tights and a low-cut sleeveless black T-shirt with a loose-fitting leather belt riding down on her hips. Tousled blond ringlets framed her heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a startlingly deep blue—almost violet—with lashes so long they cast shadows on her cheeks.

  But there was nothing pretty about her expression, or about the silence that hung in the air as she stared first at Nancy and then at Dan.

  Dan cleared his throat nervously. “I don’t know whether you have time to talk to Nancy before you go on—” he began.

  “Not really,” Renee interrupted. “But I guess I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” She glanced briefly at Nancy and picked up a hand mirror. “Well, you might as well sit down, Nancy,” she said in a bored monotone. “Got a pad? I want you to take notes.”

  • • •

  “Nancy, you look awful!” George said anxiously as Nancy walked slowly across the lobby of TVR. “I didn’t find out much at the library—but I guess that had better wait. How was your day?”

  Nancy tried to smile. “Not the greatest. I thought four-thirty would never come. If this is the glamorous world of music television, you can have it.” Wearily she ran a hand across her face. “Where’s the car?”

  George had dropped Nancy off that morning. Since Bess had been headed in a different direction, she took a taxi. “It’s over there,” George said, pointing across the street. “Do you want to go back to the hotel? You look as though you could use a rest.”

  “Not yet,” answered Nancy. “We’re going to see someone. I did get one lead today. Do you have the keys, George? I’d like to drive. Okay?”

  “I don’t know what I’ve done, but everyone at TVR is mad at me,” she said as she pulled the car onto the freeway and headed toward the suburbs. “They must have been told something really horrible about me. But what? And by whom, I keep asking myself.

  “Renee Stanley’s really got it in for me,” she continued. “All I did today was clerical stuff—that and errands. Renee treated me like a secretary. She sent me out to get her lunch. She made me type letters for her—thank-you notes for some birthday presents. She made me alphabetize some files. I wouldn’t have minded—I mean, it’s nice to help out—but she didn’t say a civil word to me the whole day!”

  “You should tell Mr. Thomas,” George said indignantly.

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” said Nancy. “I’m sure it would get out if I did, and then people would be angry at me for tattling. I’ll just have to tough it out. But somehow I don’t think I’ll be learning a lot about the music business or meeting the right people to ask my questions.”

  “Say, where are we going?” asked George. “You said something about a lead?”

  Nancy brightened. “Yes. I did get a chance to talk to Dan in the afternoon—he said to say hi to you, by the way—and he suggested that I talk to Vint Wylie. He was Jesse’s bass player, and Dan thinks Vint probably knew Jesse as well as anyone in the business. So I made an appointment with him. He lives in a suburb called North Claibourne—we have two more exits to go.”

  “What’s Vint Wylie doing now?” asked George.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s playing in another band,” Nancy answered. “Whatever he’s doing, I hope he’s nicer to me than the people at TVR,” she added with a sigh.

  They reached the exit and drove for a couple of miles before Nancy reached the right neighborhood. “This is North Claibourne. How gorgeous!” she exclaimed. “Look at all those beautiful gardens!”

  They were beautiful. Every yard was lushly planted, every lawn an emerald rectangle. Flowering trees were everywhere, and their colors were nothing like those near Nancy’s home—flaming reds, corals, and yellows. The houses were no less beautiful. Most of them were one story high, and most looked vaguely Spanish, with red-tiled roofs and stucco walls.

  “It all looks sort of tropical,” George said. “But so respectable, too. I can hardly believe a bass player would live around here. But I guess he has to live somewhere. Are we almost there, Nan?”

  “Right there. Right now,” answered Nancy as she looked at the address Dan had given her. “Wow! Vint Wylie’s certainly done well for himself!”

  At the end of a long, winding, flower-edged driveway, behind impressive wrought-iron gates, was a sprawling Tudor mansion—the only two-story house on the block.

  The gates were open. “He’s expecting us,” Nancy said, turning carefully into the driveway and switching off the ignition. “He sounded very nice on the phone—said to come over.”

  There was no answer when she rang the bell. Nancy stood on tiptoe to peer in through the little lead-paned window in the door. All she could see was a dark, deserted-looking interior. There was no trace of anyone inside.

  Gently Nancy tried the door. It was unlocked.

  She and George eyed each other questioningly. “Should we go in?” George whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Nancy whispered back. “Wait, why are we whispering?” she said in full voice. “Of course we should go in. He’s expecting us. Maybe he’s on the phone or something.”

  But no one was inside the dark, cavernous house with its carpets so thick the girls’ steps were completely muffled. And the phone in the hall was off the hook.

  Nancy stepped into the gleaming kitchen, which looked big enough to serve an entire restaurant. Through the kitchen window she could see the bright turquoise water of a swimming pool. “He must be out in back,” she said, walking resolutely toward the kitchen’s french doors.

  She stepped outside—and gasped.

  Sunlight was dancing on the little ripples in the pool, and a gentle breeze stirred the leaves of the trees overhanging the yard. It was a picture-perfect setting—except for one thing.

  A man’s body was lying facedown next to the pool!

  Chapter

  Five

  OH NO!” NANCY CRIED.

  As George looked on, horrified, she raced up to the motionless figure sprawled on the tiles and grabbed his shoulder. “Call an ambulance!” she ordered George. “There�
�s a cordless phone on that table over there!” George dashed over to it.

  Then the man stirred a little, groaned, and lifted his head. Now Nancy could see that he was very handsome, with a bronzed, appealingly craggy face. But he looked completely stunned.

  His dazed eyes met Nancy’s. “Wha—” he began.

  “Mr. Wylie?” Nancy asked. He nodded. “I’m Nancy Drew. It’s all right. We’re getting help,” she reassured him. “You just take it easy.”

  “But I—” Vint Wylie groaned again and rolled over onto his back, raising himself up on his elbows.

  Nancy patted his shoulder. “You’d better not move too much—just in case,” she said. “Not until the ambulance gets here.”

  “But I’m okay,” Vint Wylie said thickly. George had been dialing, but she stopped and stared at him. He gave an enormous yawn. “Sorry. I was just, uh, meditating.”

  “Meditating! You look as if you were—” George exclaimed. Nancy cut her off quickly. She knew George was about to say “asleep.” And she was sure George was right. But there was no point in embarrassing Vint Wylie unnecessarily—he would talk more freely if he didn’t feel self-conscious.

  “Sorry if we startled you,” she said. “We—well, obviously we thought there was something the matter. I guess I jumped to conclusions.”

  “It’s sure lucky I hadn’t reached the ambulance company yet,” George said, a shade tartly. “It would have been embarrassing to have them get here and find out Mr. Wylie was okay after all.”

  “Call me Vint, you two. ‘Mr. Wylie’ sounds too weird. I don’t think anyone’s ever called me that before.” He brushed the dark-brown hair out of his eyes and yawned once. He had meditated himself right into a deep sleep. Suddenly he grinned at Nancy, a slow, infectious grin.

  “Great intro!” he said. “Shall we start all over?”

  Nancy smiled back. “Sounds good,” she replied. “Vint, this is my friend George Fayne. She’s helping me on my—uh—research.”

  Vint gestured toward some teak chairs, and the three of them sat down while Nancy explained why they’d come. “Dan Kennedy said you knew the most about Jesse,” she finished. “You two were pretty close?”