Ned leaned over and whispered to me, “Mr. Walton is going crazy because besides whatever is in that missing box, the only real evidence he has against Smallwood are the store’s security tapes. And those only show that Mr. Smallwood was the last man in the jewelry shop on the night it was robbed.” He took my hand and led me out of the locker so we could have a minute alone. “If he hadn’t been previously convicted of burglary, I don’t think he’d be a suspect at all.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“As it is, he got out of prison last month after serving a year for armed robbery,” Ned continued.
“What did he steal?” I asked.
“Diamonds,” Ned replied. “Two millions dollars’ worth of them from a shop in Switzerland.”
“Really?” I inhaled sharply. “What was missing from the shop here?”
“Emeralds.” Ned pinched his lips together and wrinkled his forehead. “And rubies.”
“No diamonds?” I considered that.
“No. It’s something in your dad’s favor for the defense. Your dad might be able to say that Mr. Smallwood was only interested in diamonds, so he couldn’t possibly be the thief.” He quickly added, “Plus, Smallwood just got out of prison. Why would he want to risk going back there?”
“Is he the only suspect in the burglary?” I asked.
“So far.” Ned frowned. He pointed at the storage locker. “That’s why they took everything from his hotel room. He’d been staying there a week and was supposed to leave tomorrow. He’s not being held in jail, but he’s not allowed to leave town yet either. So he’s staying with a friend in River Heights.”
I nodded. The police couldn’t keep Mr. Smallwood in town indefinitely. They were going to have to either file charges against him or let him leave River Heights.
Ned motioned toward the crates against the wall. “Every scrap of paper from Smallwood’s trash, the book he was reading, even his toothbrush is in one of those boxes. They are going to investigate him down to the hairs on his head.”
We moved back to where the police were now showing Mr. Walton the lock to the storage room. My dad was hanging at the back of the group.
“There’s no sign of forced entry,” Officer Collins was saying. “And Judge Nguyen has the only key.”
As I got closer, my father raised his shoulder at me, just a tiny bit, and tilted his head. It was his way of asking me to move in closer. I could tell that he wanted me to take a look around, so I gave him the smallest of nods.
Then, with a silent signal of my own, I brought in George. If anyone could figure out how that locker had been opened, she was the one.
George had been standing with Bess, chatting with Hugo and the two assistants. I had no doubt Bess was asking about their designer skirts. The speed with which George came over to me confirmed it. Skirts were definitely not a topic she enjoyed. All I had to do was look at her, then glance at the locker, and she came rushing across the room.
“You saved me,” George said gratefully. “Apparently Hugo is dating that designer . . . Gritty Grand.” She made a face. “Who names a child that?”
As George stepped away to check out the storage room lock, a second officer, a woman whose name tag read FERNANDEZ, approached me.
“Got a minute, Nancy?” she asked. Her dark hair was pulled back in a dancer’s tight bun.
“Sure,” I said. I was confident that George would find out anything I might want to know about the lock, and Bess was probably gathering important information by speaking to Lonestar’s staff.
“We suspect that Drake Lonestar had something to do with the box’s disappearance,” Officer Fernandez told me. “Did you see anything onstage that might have indicated he was up to no good?”
“Up to no good?” I repeated. “No.”
“You didn’t see him disappear during the trick or stash something or . . .” She fumbled for the right question before settling on a direct approach. “In your opinion, is there any chance he slipped away during the trick, snuck into the courthouse, and stole the box?”
I considered the question. Lonestar had told me not to think too much about how the trick worked, so I intentionally hadn’t concentrated on details. As far as I could remember, he was onstage the whole time. He did disappear at the end, but only for a second, and then he disappeared again with his assistants. Would that have been enough time to get into the courthouse and take a box? I didn’t think so, but in this world of magic, nothing seemed certain.
“No,” I admitted, then asked Officer Fernandez a question of my own. “Have you talked to Mr. Lonestar?”
“We would if we could find him,” she said. “It seems that the magician has disappeared.”
“No one has seen him since the show?” I asked, glancing over at Bess with Lonestar’s staff. They were all laughing at something Bess had said.
“No,” the officer reported. “When he vanished from the stage that last time, he never reappeared. We have a team of officers searching River Heights. They’ll track him down.”
“Can you excuse me for a moment?” I asked. I hurried over to Lonestar’s assistants.
“Hi,” I said, noticing that they weren’t much older than me.
Bess introduced us. “This is Ayela.” She indicated the one on her right. “And Ariana.” The other one smiled. “They’re twins. And their aunt is fashion designer Gritty Grand.”
“Ah.” If Hugo was dating Gritty, it stood to reason that he would hire her nieces as Lonestar’s helpers. I shook hands with each of them, then asked, “So, where is Mr. Lonestar?”
They didn’t know.
“But you performed the last trick with him,” I said. “You vanished together from the stage.”
“Oh, we can’t reveal how it’s done,” Ayela said.
“We’d be fired,” Ariana added.
“I don’t need to know how it’s done,” I said, though I was curious. “I just wondered where Lonestar went afterward.”
“The police already asked them,” Hugo told me. “They don’t know.”
He moved toward me in a way that almost seemed threatening. I stepped back to give myself some space from the burly bodyguard and looked to Ayela and Ariana. “Where did you reappear?”
Ayela and Hugo exchanged glances before she replied, “In the dressing-room tent.”
“But Drake wasn’t with us,” Ariana said. “I guess you could say he dropped us off.” She smiled.
“You don’t know where he went?” I asked.
“No,” they said at the same time.
“Who can ever guess what that man is up to? Drake Lonestar’s got kangaroos loose in the top paddock,” Ayela said with a giggle.
I decided to give the girls a rest. I wouldn’t get anywhere by badgering them with the same question over and over.
The facts were clear:
• Drake Lonestar was missing.
• A box that had been in evidence storage was missing.
• More than a million dollars’ worth of gems were missing.
I was standing in the middle of a major mystery with a lot of unanswered questions. Still, one question loomed over the entire scene, bigger than the rest: What did any of this have to do with my dad’s client, John Smallwood?
CHAPTER FIVE
No Coincidence
A HALF HOUR LATER THE same crowd from the basement had moved to just outside the courthouse. Officer Fernandez continued to question Lonestar’s staff, while the rest of the police investigated the evidence locker. The sun was bright in the sky. Bess absentmindedly fanned herself with one of Lonestar’s programs.
“Whew, it sure warmed up out here,” Hugo muttered, removing his jacket. As he swung his coat over his arm, a stack of small white cards fell out of the pocket.
He leaped forward to pick them up, but Officer Fernandez stopped him.
“Can that wait? I have a question for you,” she said, putting her hand on his chest.
His eyes went to the cards. “Give me one minute.
I need to—”
“Mr. LaBlanca, please. This is important,” she said firmly.
My curiosity was piqued. What was on those cards? And why did he need to gather them so badly? I kneeled down to pick up the cards myself, but before I could find out what was on them, Bess dropped to her knees next to me.
“Nancy,” she whispered. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
Bess picked up a few white cards. “While I was speaking to Ariana and Ayela, I suddenly remembered an article I read recently about Gritty Grand. If the report is accurate, she’s broke. According to a rival designer, her company is shutting down.”
“Do you think it’s true?” I asked.
“Probably. Bad news often is,” Bess said. “The thing is that Gritty Grand’s response to the report was that this rival designer ‘has kangaroos loose in the top paddock.’ I thought it was such a strange thing to say that I remembered it.”
“I’m guessing it’s simply Australian slang,” I suggested. “It’s possible that it’s just one of those phrases everyone says, like ‘she’s got a screw loose.’ ”
“I’m not sure.” Bess pinched her lips together. “I mean, we are looking for a jewel thief, and there’s the possibility that Gritty Grand, who we’ve now connected to Drake Lonestar through her boyfriend and nieces, might be broke.”
The wheels started turning in my head. “I get what you’re saying,” I told Bess. “If she needed money to save her business, she might be interested in gems. That could be the connection we need to attach Lonestar to Smallwood.”
“While you’re thinking about that,” Bess said, “I have something else for you to consider.”
She handed me two of the cards we’d picked up from the floor. “They all say 5A on one side and 5B on the other,” Bess pointed out.
They were the white cards from the barrel that Lonestar had used to choose his onstage guest! Me.
So it wasn’t a coincidence that I was onstage for the performance. My dad had given me two tickets: seats 5A and 5B. Whichever seat I chose, I’d have been selected.
The moment Hugo and Officer Fernandez ended their conversation, I leaped forward.
“Hugo,” I said, thrusting out my hands filled with the white cards. “Care to explain?”
He laughed as he took them from my hands and tossed them into a nearby trash can. There was distinct humor in his eyes and a smile on his face.
“It was part of the marketing plan,” Hugo explained easily. “Drake heard about you, Nancy Drew. You’re famous around here.”
I wrinkled my nose. Sure, I’d solved a few mysteries, but I would never consider myself famous. Not like Drake Lonestar. He had fans screaming his name, jumping fences for him, and begging for autographs. I had a couple of articles in the local paper. There was no comparison.
“Drake decided he wanted you onstage. So he sent the tickets to your dad under the name of a past client that he’d read about in the news.”
“How did you know my father wouldn’t give them to our housekeeper, or take someone else himself ?”
“It was a risk,” Hugo admitted. “But Drake’s a magician, Nancy. He’d have found a way to get you to the show, and anywhere you’d have sat, he would have picked you.”
I nodded.
“Drake figured that it would be much more impressive to have a known detective onstage, watching the trick with eagle eyes.” He added, “He also made sure that the ticket desk let your boyfriend in when he showed up. Just another pair of eyes confirming the wonder created by Drake Lonestar.”
My conversation with Hugo answered the question of how Ned got to his seat without a ticket. And it answered how my dad got tickets to the show. The problem was, there were so many questions still left unanswered.
CHAPTER SIX
A Midnight Chat
“HEY, GEORGE,” I HISSED. “YOU awake?”
It was late at night, and I was standing outside my friend’s bedroom window after having given up on sleep. All the excitement of the day had made my head feel full, and I figured that if George could clear up a couple of important things, maybe I’d be able to rest.
“George!” I banged my knuckles on the glass pane.
“Go away, Nancy!”
That wasn’t George. It was Bess. I’d forgotten she was sleeping at her cousin’s house.
I could see Bess roll over and put her pillow over her head.
“Go back to sleep, Bess.” George sat up. “I’ll take care of the intruder.” She opened the window. “Come on in,” she said, moving aside and giving me space to crawl through the frame.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I wasn’t sleeping anyway,” George admitted. She tipped her head toward her bed, and I could see a faint blue glow under the covers.
“Late night Internet research?” I asked with a grin.
“You know it.” She glanced at Bess. “Had to be quiet, though . . . don’t want to disturb the princess.”
“I heard that,” Bess grunted from the bed next to George’s. “The princess needs her beauty sleep. Now shhhhh.” She turned her back to us.
I whispered to George, “This case is making me crazy. I don’t see a connection between Smallwood and Lonestar.” I sat on the edge of George’s bed. “I mean, we could guess that Lonestar hired Smallwood to steal the gems for Hugo to give to the nieces to give to Gritty Grand, but that seems like a long and winding chain of relationships. There’s no evidence to prove any of that.”
“I hear you,” George agreed. “We need some hard facts.” She turned her computer screen to face me.
“Ack, the light!” Bess whimpered from the other bed. “It’s coming into my head through the back of my skull.”
“Oh, good grief,” George moaned. She packed up the computer and led me into the bathroom. She sat on the closed toilet lid. I shut the door so we wouldn’t bug Bess anymore and sat on the edge of the bathtub.
“I wasn’t searching for connections between the suspects,” George told me, typing on her laptop. “I was thinking more about the trick.” She showed me a site and scrolled down the page. “I was right about the helicopters. They are an old military model that’s been retired. Anyone can hire them for air shows . . . or magic shows.”
“Do you think the helicopters have a connection to the missing box?” I asked.
“No,” George admitted. “But I am obsessed with figuring out how the trick worked. Right now I have two theories: One is that the audience was hypnotized, and the other is that somehow we were still watching a video even after Lonestar dropped the hoop. So we weren’t seeing the actual building, but a screen with doctored images of the empty space. The helicopters were there to throw us off.”
“I guess both are possible.” A big part of me wanted to have George figure it out, but Lonestar’s voice in my head told me to let it be. As much as I wanted to ask more about her theories, especially the mass hypnosis, I let it drop.
Instead I asked George, “Do you have any idea how the locker was opened in the courthouse? Or when? We need to know if Lonestar had enough time during the trick to get into the evidence locker and take that box.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” she told me. “There are many different kinds of magic, but most magicians specialize in one or two and hone their craft. From everything I’ve read about Lonestar, he’s what one would call an illusionist. That means he does big, showy tricks that seem impossible, like cutting people in half, levitating, and making things disappear.”
George had done her homework. She went on, “Illusions take a lot of planning. Not that this is set in stone, but if an illusionist was the one to open the lock, he’d probably have manipulated it earlier—like sawed off part of the barrel or wedged something inside to prevent it from really closing all the way.” She bit a fingernail thoughtfully.
“And?” I prodded.
“When I looked at the lock, nothing seemed altered. I looked for markings, like scratches from picking tools
; I searched the floor for rubber bands or cork or gum that might have held the locking mechanism open. Nothing.”
“So what’s your verdict?” I asked.
George leaned back on the toilet tank and closed her eyes. “Officer Fernandez told me that the police have two theories. Either someone had keys to the evidence locker and stole that box or an accomplice let the thief into the locker while the show was going on. I think there is another possibility. . . .”
“Magic?” I asked.
“Yes. But not Lonestar’s kind of magic. He’s a showy guy with big costumes and setups. I just don’t see this as his kind of trick.” She went on. “This is essentially an escape. Someone opened the lock and then escaped from the sealed evidence room with the box. When I think about it like that, it fits in with the kind of magic that’s about picking locks and getting out of tight spaces, which is called escapism. Harry Houdini was the most famous escape artist. He once did a trick where he was locked in a jail cell and managed to get out in less than twenty minutes.”
“That’s amazing!” I was going to have to look up that one later. I asked George, “So, from everything you know about magic, it sounds like you think Drake Lonestar isn’t our number one suspect.”
“I’ve searched the Internet to see if he’s ever done any escapes from boxes or secure rooms, but can’t find anything. He might know how to do some of those tricks, but from everything I can see, he doesn’t. He’s all illusion all the time.” George shook her head. “From a magic point of view, he simply doesn’t make sense.”
I slipped down into the empty bathtub and put my head against the cool tile wall. It seemed like we’d hit a dead end. Usually I had a list of suspects and clues. But this case was filled with suspects without clues and clues without suspects.
What I did have was a previously convicted thief who denied he stole anything, missing gems, the cast of a magic show, a locked door, and a mysterious box that had disappeared—all pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit together.