034 Vanishing Act

by Carolyn Keene

  "I'd like to believe you, Mr. Rosenay," she said, "and I would like your help now. You can't protect your supplier any longer—not if he knows the truth about Jesse. It's our duty to inform the world if Jesse's still alive."

  Nancy didn't mention the fact that she thought Jesse himself was probably the "supplier." That wasn't information she wanted him to have. "You can understand that, can't you?"

  "Sure," he said after a minute. He stood up decisively. "Let me get this stupid ice cream out of my hands"—he took one more bite—"and I'll go and find the shipment that that picture came in. I haven't cataloged it yet."

  "This is an incredible place," Bess whispered when Rosenay had left. "How can he give up his living room like this?"

  "It's not just his living room; it's the whole house," Nancy whispered back. "The Jesse Slade things are in the kitchen. I hope he can find the shipment he's looking for."

  From the sounds coming from the kitchen, Nancy decided Rosenay was having trouble. There were several thuds as though he'd dropped some boxes, an "ouch!" and then the unmistakable noise of a pile of papers slithering to the ground.

  At last Rosenay reappeared, clutching a large manila envelope. "I think these are the ones," he said. "Let's hope so. I kind of tore the place up looking for them."

  Eagerly Nancy took the envelope. It was postmarked Los Gatos, California. "No address, I suppose," she said to Rosenay.

  "No. Just a post office box—box forty-six. But Los Gatos is tiny—it shouldn't be hard to track someone down there."

  "I hope you're right," Nancy said, taking a stack of photos out of the envelope and dividing them among the three of them. "Just look through these for a sec," she said.

  "What are we looking for?" George wanted to know.

  "I'm not sure. Background details, I guess. Anything that might tell us where the pictures were taken."

  It was eerie seeing so many pictures of Jesse Slade and knowing that he must be alive after all. I wonder who knows about him besides us? Nancy thought. Can it be possible that we're the only ones? She shivered suddenly.

  Bess must have been thinking along the same lines. She looked up from her stack of pictures and said, "I should think it would be lonely, having no one know you're you."

  "Maybe so," Nancy said. "Have you guys noticed anything? Because I haven't."

  "I haven't, either," said Bess, and George shook her head.

  "Then we'll just have to go out to Los Gatos and see what we can find," Nancy said. "And we'd better get going. The afternoon's going to be gone before we know it."

  "And we haven't had lunch yet. . . ." Bess said plaintively.

  "After that giant breakfast?" George asked, amazed that Bess was hungry already.

  "We'll pick up something on the way," Nancy answered to keep peace. "Mr. Rosenay, thanks."

  "No problem," he said a little sheepishly. "I hope you find him."

  "What a gorgeous town Los Gatos is," Bess said gloomily half an hour later. "Really, Nancy, you do take us to the glamor spots!"

  "Welcome to Los Gatos—Pop. 182," said the fly-specked sign just outside town. It was hard to believe such a dusty little place could be just an hour outside of Los Angeles. Los Gatos looked more like a ghost town in an old western movie than anything else—hot, dirty, and empty. There was even an old dog sleeping lazily in the middle of the road in front of the post office.

  Carefully Nancy steered her car around him. "We might as well ask someone at the post office whether they can help us," she said, "since the gas station is closed."

  A woman reading a magazine behind the counter looked up in mild surprise as the girls trooped in.

  "Afternoon, ladies," she said. "May I help you with something?"

  "Well, it's a little complicated," said Nancy.

  "We're looking for the address of one of your boxholders. The box number is forty-six."

  "Let's see." The woman put down her magazine, heaved herself to her feet, and ran her finger down a list of names on the wall. "Mr. Joplin, that is," she said. "Out on Horse Pasture Road. Take a right at the stop sign out front and drive for about a quarter of a mile. You'll see Horse Pasture on your left. It's a dirt road, and his house is the only one on it. You can't miss it."

  "Thank you so much," said Nancy. "We really appreciate it."

  "We're lucky this is such a small town," she said to George and Bess once they were safely back in the car. "In a bigger place I don't think she'd have given us the address like that."

  "Well, we don't exactly look like dangerous criminal types," said George. "She probably knew she could trust us. Look, there's the turn. We're here at last!"

  The modest gray house at the end of the road seemed to huddle forlornly in the shade of the steep hill behind it. Shades had been drawn across most of the windows, and the lawn had gone to seed.

  Nancy's heart was pounding as she switched off the ignition and heard the refrain of a wailing guitar float out an open window. The three girls slid out of the car. Nancy couldn't place the melody. I know I've heard it recently, she said to herself. But when?

  Then she remembered. It had been the night they'd been watching television at Bess's. It seemed so long ago now! The song was "Goodbye, Sweet Life," and it was turned up to top volume on the stereo.

  The melody broke off in the middle, then started up again. It wasn't a record. Someone inside was actually playing the song.

  Nancy pressed the front doorbell, and the music stopped in the middle of a measure. She heard footsteps move toward them.

  The man who answered the door looked thin, and his jeans and grubby T-shirt were threadbare. He looked as if he hadn't shaved for a couple of days. But all three girls recognized him right away.

  "You're—you're—" Nancy had trouble getting the words out.

  "Yeah," said the man with the crooked grin. "I'm Jesse Slade."

  Chapter Twelve

  "So someone found me at last," said Jesse Slade. "I knew it had to happen sometime."

  The face that had smiled out from millions of record covers was now staring suspiciously at the three girls. "Can I do something for you, now that you're here?"

  Nancy found her voice. "I'm a private investigator. Could we possibly talk to you for a few minutes?"

  "Depends," said Jesse. "What are you planning to do with whatever I tell you?"

  "I—I don't know yet," said Nancy. "I haven't thought about that, actually. I guess it depends on what you tell us."

  Slade shrugged. "That's honest, anyway. Come on in."

  He led them into what Nancy guessed would have been called the living room if it had had any real furniture. There were two tattered armchairs, a television, an electric piano, a stereo and compact-disk player, and an amplifier.

  "It's a little primitive in here," Slade apologized. "I hope you don't mind. Let's see—two of you can have the chairs, one can have the piano bench, and I'll take the floor."

  Nancy took the piano bench. From there she could see most of the other rooms in the house. All of them were furnished, or not furnished, like the living room. The walls were bare, the floors were bare. There were no homey touches—it all looked as though Jesse Slade had just moved in.

  "How long have you lived here?" she asked.

  "Going on three years," Jesse answered. "Ever since—ever since I disappeared." He looked around as if seeing the place with an outsider's eyes. "It still needs fixing up, I guess. I just can't seem to get around to it.

  "Well!" he continued. "What brings the three of you to my doorstep?"

  "My name's Nancy Drew," Nancy said, "and I'm a private investigator. These are my friends Bess Marvin and George Fayne." Jesse nodded at them. Bess just stared, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. George did return his nod.

  "We were watching a TVR special—you know what TVR is, right?" He nodded again. "A TVR special about your last concert, and I noticed some movement, what looked like a body falling off a cliff just beside and behind the stage. We began wondering if mayb
e you had fallen off that cliff."

  "So someone finally noticed that," Jesse said grimly. "It sure took long enough. I decided that maybe the cameras hadn't caught the actions."

  "It was on the tape, but a good tape wasn't found until very recently," Nancy told him. "And it was just by accident that I saw the fall. It was very dark, and I only saw it because of the movement. Anyway, Bess called TVR, and they agreed to let me use the station as a base of operations while we looked for you. And—here we are.

  "We thought you could have been hurt," she went on. "That's why we decided to investigate in the first place. If someone had hurt you—or even killed you—and there was some way to catch that person . . ."

  "But I'm that person," Jesse said softly.

  The three girls stared at him, not understanding.

  "I was involved in that accident on the cliff." he said. "But I wasn't the one who fell."

  Nancy's mouth was dry.

  "I knocked him off. My manager, Tommy Road. We were yelling at each other. I took a step toward him—I guess I must have looked pretty scary—and he stepped backward. The cliff crumbled under him, and he went down." Jesse didn't speak for a long minute. "Did he die, do you know?"

  His eyes were fixed on Nancy's with painful intensity. "I don't know," Nancy said. "No one knows. He never turned up after that night—he disappeared just like you."

  Slowly Jesse let out his breath. "So I'll never know if I'm responsible for his death or not."

  "Jesse," Nancy said gently, "maybe you'd better start at the beginning."

  "Okay," he said after drawing in a ragged breath. "You probably know that my career was going pretty well before that concert."

  That broke the tension in the room, somehow. All four of them laughed. "Pretty well," George said.

  "Yeah. Well, I guess that is an understatement. And a whole lot of the credit has to go to Tommy Road. He took a chance on me when no one else would. He practically never slept, trying to get someone in the industry to listen to me—and when Clio Records finally signed me, he got me just about the best deal in recording history."

  He stood up and stared out the window at the drab view outside. "But after a while I began to suspect that Tommy wasn't being exactly straight with me. It's partly my fault, I know. I mean, I let him take control of my money, just the way he

  took control of my career. I didn't want to be bothered with financial details. I hate numbers and making boring phone calls to accountants and things like that. And he was great at it.

  "But every now and then I'd wonder where the money was all going. He said he was investing it for me." Jesse gave a short laugh. "Funny way of investing it—funneling it into his own account."

  "I found out about that, too," Bess put in timidly. "I checked your general ledger at Lawrence Associates."

  "Yeah, that's what I finally did, too. And I figured it all out the day before that last concert. I was furious, as you can imagine. My own manager—the guy who'd been like my best friend for years —embezzling from me practically since day one!

  "I didn't have a chance to talk to him about it until the night of the concert," Jesse went on. "That gave me a lot of time to decide what to say. When I took my break, I found Tommy and said that I was never going to perform again unless he returned every dollar. I figured that would scare him. You know—that he wouldn't want to lose his biggest client.

  "But it turned out he'd been waiting for this," Jesse said savagely. "Tommy told me he didn't want to be my manager any longer! He said he was going to leave the country— with all my money—and that I'd never see a cent of what he'd taken. On top of that, he started insulting me for not having noticed what was going on before then. . . ."

  Jesse's voice faltered. "So I took a step toward him. I don't know if I meant to punch him or what. He—he went down without a sound, just like something in a nightmare. I was terrified to look down over the edge. I was afraid of what I might see. It must have only been a couple of seconds, but it seemed like hours before I looked down." He closed his eyes as if the memory was too painful for him to stand. "Then I looked. There was his body lying down there, all crumpled up on the rocks."

  Bess winced.

  "I looked around the stage," Jesse continued. "No one had noticed a thing! My backup band was still playing, and all the technicians were running around setting up for the finale. If I'd wanted to, I could just have gone back and rejoined the band, and maybe no one would ever have found out what had happened. But I couldn't do it. Even though he'd been cheating me, I couldn't leave him down there."

  "So you climbed down after him?" Nancy said.

  "Right. Boy, I had plenty of time to think about how he must have felt going down! It was pitch dark, and the wind was whipping around, and pieces of the cliff kept crumbling under my feet. . . .

  "But when I got down to the bottom—down to where the rocks were—the body was gone. A wave must have come in and carried it out."

  Jesse sighed. "So there I was. And right then I decided to take off for Mexico. No way could I go back up there without people realizing something had happened—and I couldn't stand the thought of facing a murder charge. I had about two hundred dollars in my pocket. I walked down the beach for about an hour, then climbed up another part of the cliff, found a road, and started hitchhiking. I crossed the border into Mexico the next day."

  "No one recognized you?" George asked.

  "Nope. You know, people don't usually recognize famous people unless they're expecting to see them. They usually just think, 'Gee, that sure looks like so-and-so.' Once in a while someone would say how much I looked like Jesse Slade"— he smiled—"and I'd just tell them I'd heard that before."

  "But how have you been living since then?" Nancy asked.

  "In Mexico things were pretty hand-to-mouth for a few months, until I got a job as a waiter. I scraped up enough money to buy a guitar, and when I could afford to come back here I started giving lessons. But I don't do that too much. Mostly I do odd jobs. I'm a caretaker for the big house back up the road. The owner's great. He lets me use the pickup parked outside."

  Nancy happened to glance over at Bess, who looked as if she were wilting in her chair. Nancy was sure she was crushed that her idol had sunk so low. But to Nancy, it didn't sound as if Jesse was unhappy about the direction his life had taken.

  "You don't seem to mind your obscurity and poverty too much," she commented.

  Jesse thought about it for a second. "Nope. I guess I don't," he said thoughtfully. "It's a relief not having everyone look up to me—and not feeling as if I'm responsible for making a million fans happy. Having all those girls in love with me got kind of—kind of exhausting." Bess looked up, a little startled.

  "Well, I've managed to fool everyone till now," Jesse said. "How did you finally find me?"

  Nancy explained about Martin Rosenay, and Jesse grimaced. "Of course. Of course," he said. "I should have known that car would get me in trouble. It belongs to the guy whose house I take care of."

  "Who took the pictures, by the way?" George asked.

  "I did. I gave some guitar lessons in exchange for a secondhand Nikon. I cleaned myself up, set the timer, and started posing. Selling the pictures was an easy way to get cash."

  "I wonder what did happen to Tommy Road," Nancy said thoughtfully. "Is it possible that he's

  still alive? It seems hard to believe that his body was never found. The police combed that whole site so carefully. What if he survived the fall? What if he slid down the cliff instead of falling?"

  "I guess he could have gone underground like me," Jesse said. "And he was such a crook that he's probably managed to do a lot better for himself than I have," he added bitterly.

  Silence fell. Suddenly the little house seemed as remote and forgotten as Jesse Slade himself.

  "What are you going to do now that you've found me?" he suddenly asked.

  Nancy stared at him. "I don't know. I just don't know," she said. "I don't blame you for
what happened, and you're not a murderer. What do you want me to do? I'm sure that if you came forward with your story, people would believe you. The general ledger will bear you out—"

  "No. I don't want to come forward," Jesse said in a strained voice. "I don't want to live in that fishbowl again. I'm all right where I am, and I'm not bothering anyone. Please, Nancy," he begged, "can't you leave this alone? Can't you forget you ever saw me, and not tell anyone where I am?"

  Nancy looked from him to Bess and George. Almost imperceptibly they nodded.

  "All right, Jesse," Nancy said. "We'll go back to L.A. And we won't tell anyone about you,

  except the people at TVR. I think I can promise that they'll keep it confidential, and I really owe it to them."

  "Thank you," Jesse said. "Thank you more than I can say."

  "You're welcome," Nancy said, getting to her feet. "I guess we'll be on our—"

  Just then they heard a car door slamming, quickly followed by footsteps coming up the walk. Then there was a frantic knock at the front door.

  Everyone froze. "You expecting anyone else?" Jesse muttered.

  The knock sounded again, even louder this time. Jesse strode forward and opened the door.

  A blinding burst of light exploded in his face!

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jesse staggered backward, his hands covering his face. Another strobe light went off, and another and another, as if someone had hurled a bunch of silent firecrackers into the house.

  Now the three girls could see the reporter framed in the doorway, a cameraman at his back. He jammed a microphone into Jesse's face. "You're Jesse Slade, aren't you?" he asked. "I'm from Channel Six. What a story this will make! Hey, who are the girls?"

  "Get out of here!" Jesse shouted, hurling himself against the door. Quickly he slipped the bolt shut. Then he leaned against the door, breathing hard.

  "You didn't tell anyone you were coming here, did you?" he asked Nancy.