A Crime for Christmas

  “Which explains why nothing was taken in any of the break-ins,” I said to myself, fitting the pieces of the mystery together.

  “And why our new chef guarding all her goodies like a tapas tyrant is such a problem,” Jackie added, glancing at her watch. “Oh, where does the time go? Sometimes I get chatting and can hardly stop. The treasure isn’t going to find itself, though! So what do you think about keeping all this our little secret and helping me get rid of Chef K so I can find the rest of the gold?”

  I leveled with her. “I think this will go a lot easier for you if you come clean to the authorities now before your list of crimes gets any longer. If you try to kidnap me on top of everything else, you may spend the rest of your life behind bars.”

  “Didn’t think so,” Jackie sighed. “That’s why you’re going to have to come with me. Such a shame. I didn’t want to hurt you, but it doesn’t look like you’re leaving me any choice.”

  “Didn’t want to hurt me?” I shouted, pointing out the open window. “What do you call sending those two snowmobiles out there after me earlier today? Clyde and I barely survived!”

  “I would never do anything to harm Clyde!” she shouted back, slamming the ax back into the table and pointing to the fresh stitches on her forehead, where she’d been cut when Clyde knocked her over. “Do you think I did this to myself?”

  I gave her a hard stare and decided I believed her. I knew she really had been hurt from what Brady told me, and the stitches on her forehead confirmed that at least one of her injuries was real.

  “I was just trying to keep tabs on you and give you the runaround to make sure you didn’t get too close,” she growled. “I don’t have anything to do with those dreadful hooligans—well, at least not until I got your little extortion note I didn’t.”

  Jackie’s scowl turned back into a grin as she looked past me out the window. “I wondered if they might show back up.”

  “Call them off right now before someone gets hurt really badly,” I urged. “It’s not too late for you to put an end to this.”

  “I’m sorry, dear, calling them off isn’t up to me. Why, I wouldn’t even know how to reach them if I wanted to,” she said. “And putting an end to it is exactly what I’m doing.”

  “If you didn’t call them, who did?” I demanded.

  “The fall guy I set up to take the blame for all that pesky sabotage around here would be my guess,” she said cryptically. “But it sounds like he called in some friends to take his place. From what I heard you yelling to your friend, you both might disappear tonight, and then I guess all the bad guys will get away with it! Although taking him down in the process would have been a nice cherry on top of the fruitcake.”

  “Taking who down?” I insisted. I was getting fed up with Jackie’s riddles. Joe was in danger, and I needed to figure out how to stop it.

  “You see, I got your clever little invitation to the maze, but I figured if you really knew who you were leaving it for, you would have mentioned me by name,” she reasoned. “So instead of taking your bait, I edited your invitation and left an anonymous version of my own for a certain someone else to find. Not much goes on around here that Jackie-of-All-Trades doesn’t learn about, and it turns out I’m not the only person with something to hide.”

  “So when he, whoever “he” is, showed up in the maze in your place, Joe and I would assume he was the one responsible for the sabotage and the break-ins,” I said, reconstructing how she’d turned our trap around on us. “When he’d really been sent by you to take the fall for your crimes.”

  “I know, it’s just brilliant, isn’t it?” she said, congratulating herself. “I knew he had a guilty conscience and would try to cover his tracks by either paying off the blackmailer, in which case you’d pin the crime on him . . .”

  “Or he’d call their muscle back in to take us out of the picture,” I finished Jackie’s sentence for her, my stomach dropping as I thought about the chain-saw-wielding thugs stalking toward the maze.

  “Either way, I’d be in the clear and could just lie low for a while,” Jackie said.

  “Only your not-so-perfect plan went sideways when little Kelly found your bells somewhere a person in a walking boot shouldn’t have been able to go, and you got scared it might implicate you instead of the fall guy,” I deduced.

  “Those stupid bells keep getting lost in the most inconvenient places. I only found out about the ones in the reading room because Liz had Kelly ask me if she could keep them,” Jackie lamented. “I wasn’t worried about anyone else figuring it out, but you are the famous Nancy Drew after all. I knew if you got wind of it, you’d piece together that it was me eventually.”

  “So you revised your plan to take me out first while the setup you orchestrated was going on in the maze,” I said.

  “They say the best defense is a good offense,” Jackie asserted.

  The faint hum of distant chain-saw motors carried through the open window along with the sound of the storm. I turned around and looked down the hill. The whiteout-condition blizzard had lessened back to a heavy snowfall, but the storm was far from over for Joe and me. The thugs’ flashlight beams formed snowy halos of light inside the darkened maze. If I didn’t figure something out quickly, both Joe and I might be goners.

  “All the fall guys in the world don’t do me much good if you’re still around to pin everything on me,” Jackie said, stalking toward me with the ax. “Time to go, Miss Drew.”

  I grabbed the wheels of my chair, preparing to race for the table with the coffee cup full of habanero powder, when the tiny sleigh bells hanging from the knob of the suite door jingled.

  We both turned as the door swung open and Doc Sherman stepped inside.

  Jackie’s eyes narrowed.

  “It’s about time you showed up,” she snapped. “I’m always the one doing the hard work. Now help me get her back into the passage before someone else walks in.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Rear Window

  THERE WAS A REASON DOC Sherman had been so jumpy every time he saw me. He was Jackie’s accomplice. The same person who had put me in my cast had given Jackie her phony one.

  He closed the door behind him and looked nervously from Jackie gripping her ax to me in my wheelchair to the snow blowing through the open window behind me.

  “What kind of doctor helps someone hurt his patients?” I cried, ready to yank the fishing line connected to the booby trap over his head and shower him in hot pepper.

  “Not a very good one,” he said, blowing out his checks. “I’m sorry for what we’ve put you through, Nancy.”

  I lightened my touch on the fishing line.

  “Help me grab her,” Jackie commanded, but Doc Sherman didn’t budge.

  “No,” he said quietly.

  “What?!” Jackie raged.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said meekly. “This has gone too far.”

  Sweetie? Jackie-of-All-Trades and Doc Sherman weren’t just coconspirators, they were a couple!

  “What are you talking about, Sherm?” she snapped. “We’ve been over this already. We can’t run away together and start a new life in the Caribbean without the gold, and we can’t get the gold without getting rid of her.”

  “I want our dream life as much as you do, but it’s not worth harming this young woman to get it. I should have put a stop to this as soon as Nancy wiped out on that ice instead of Chef K,” he said. “I never should have let you talk me into putting her in that phony cast.”

  “The phony what?!” I exclaimed. “You mean my leg isn’t really broken?”

  Doc Sherman chewed his lip and looked down at the ground. “The small fracture of your ankle is real, but your hip is perfectly fine. I could have just put you in an ankle cast and a walking boot, but we knew you were a skilled detective, and Jackie wanted me to make sure you couldn’t look too closely into what happened.”

  No wonder my hip hadn’t hurt! And no wonder he’d been so insistent about confin
ing me to bed rest! I realized then that the orders I’d heard Jackie giving someone over the walkie-talkie after the accident had been her instructing Doc Sherman to take me off the case before I realized there was one.

  “We’d already faked one broken bone to give me my cover story,” Jackie said. “It was easy enough to fake another to keep you from figuring it out.”

  “So I swapped the X-ray of your femur with another patient’s, hoping a full leg cast would put you out of commission for the week,” Doc Sherman explained. “We hadn’t planned on you cracking the case from a wheelchair.”

  “I told you we should have put her in a full-body cast,” Jackie said bitterly.

  “We would have had to send her out to the hospital, and they would have seen through the ruse in a second,” he said. “I would have lost my license.”

  “You should lose your license!” I shot back. “Everything you’ve done is completely unethical!”

  I was tempted to pull the fishing line and unleash the hot pepper on him, but acting out of anger wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Doc Sherman’s appearance may have helped me piece together their scheme, but now I was facing two bad guys instead of one. Or was I? I wasn’t feeling optimistic enough to think the doc’s regret made him my ally, but he definitely wasn’t as committed to the plan.

  “The ice trap that took you out may not have been meant for you, but we were still able to use it to our advantage, just like we can turn this situation to our advantage,” Jackie said, then turned her glare on the doctor. “Now get over this guilt trip of yours, and help me get her into the secret passage before we get caught.”

  “And what do you plan to do with her once we take her there?” Doc Sherman asked.

  “I hadn’t gotten that far,” Jackie admitted. “Things were moving too fast. We can figure it out later.”

  “Unless Nancy agrees to just forget about all this—” Doc Sherman began.

  “Not likely,” I interjected.

  “Then we have to silence her,” the doctor concluded ominously.

  “Wait a second!” I objected. What happened to that other, nicer doc?

  “Now you’re talking, Sherm!” said Jackie. “Let’s get to it!”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I just can’t do that. You have a concussion and you aren’t thinking clearly,” he said gently, assuming the kind, doctorly bedside manner that had been missing when he’d mistreated me in the clinic.

  “I’m the only one thinking clearly,” Jackie barked. “The way I see it, we can spend our retirement either living large on a tropical island or behind bars.”

  “That’s a chance I’m willing to take,” Doc said sadly. “It took you and Nancy almost being killed in that horrible snowmobile attack for me to realize it. That phony cast I put on Nancy put her life at risk, and our greed nearly cost me yours.”

  He walked over to Jackie and lovingly took her hand. “I can’t bear the thought of you not being here anymore. And I can’t bear to be the cause of any more misfortune. I took an oath to preserve life when I became a doctor. We got so caught up in chasing our dreams that we let it cloud our judgment. But we’re good people, and I can’t let a young woman come to more harm because of me. Sweetie, will you help me set this right?”

  Jackie met Doc Sherman’s pleading look. Then she lifted the ax.

  “Fine, I’ll do it myself,” she said. “You’ll thank me later when we’re on the beach sipping banana daiquiris out of coconuts.”

  Jackie pulled her hand away from the doc and rushed toward me with the ax raised.

  It suddenly dawned on me that if my ginormo cast was bogus and my femur wasn’t really broken, then there was no reason for me to be confined to my chair. I pushed myself onto my feet, ignoring the pain in my ankle, and lunged clumsily for the buffet table by the window. It had been so long since I’d walked, my legs felt like Jell-O, but I didn’t let that stop me from grabbing the coffee cup containing the leftover habanero powder.

  “Jackie, no!” I heard Doc Sherman cry out behind me as her footsteps closed in.

  I swung around, flinging the cup’s contents at Jackie’s face just before she reached me. She dropped the ax instantly and stumbled back, screaming.

  Bull’s-eye! The cupful of pepper powder hit her flush in the face!

  But I didn’t get to celebrate for long.

  I backed up, trying to keep my balance as Jackie grabbed her face and started flailing around in a blind panic. First she careened into the table, sending a lamp crashing to the floor. Then she careened into me . . . knocking me right out of the open window!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Free Fall

  GRAVITY INSTANTLY TOOK HOLD, PULLING me toward the ground two stories below. My body twisted in the air as I fell, and I somehow managed to grab hold of the window frame, first with one hand, then the other. My body slammed into the lodge’s log exterior, but I managed to keep hold. Barely.

  I tried to pull myself up, but the snow-covered frame’s icy-cold exterior was too slippery. All I could do was hold on as tight as my frozen fingers let me and dangle. And look down. Big mistake! Vertigo made my head spin, and I nearly lost my grip.

  A broken ankle was about to be the least of my worries if I fell. My only hope was that snow might break my fall enough that I didn’t hurt myself too badly. One thing seemed certain—I was about to find out.

  I looked up to see Doc Sherman appear in the window just as my fingers began to slip.

  “Give me your hand!” he called, reaching down to grab me.

  Jackie shoved him out of the way before he had a chance. Squinting at me through furious, painfully bloodshot eyes, she clawed at my hands, trying to pry up my fingers in one last desperate attempt to cover up her crimes.

  The last thing I saw before I lost my grip and began to fall was Doc Sherman conking Jackie over the head with a candlestick.

  And then I was falling. Freezing, snowy air rushed past me as I plummeted two stories toward the cold ground below. I shut my eyes, bracing myself for impact. The last thing I expected was to land in a fluffy fleece blanket.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw two Christmas angels standing over me.

  “Oh my God, Nancy, are you all right?” Liz asked.

  “You’re alive!” shouted Brady.

  “Thanks to you guys I am—I think,” I said in confusion, looking down at the cozy red blanket decorated in reindeer and candy canes I found myself lying on. “Did I really just fall out of a window, or am I dreaming?”

  “We were taking a walk in the storm when we heard yelling coming from your room,” Liz said in an excited rush. “Next thing we knew, you were falling from the sky!”

  “Liz grabbed one of the blankets we used as a cape for the kids’ snow vampires,” Brady chimed in, pointing to a handful of snowmen with baby carrot fangs near the lodge’s front door. All of them had blanket capes except one.

  “We rushed over, held it up between us like one of those firemen’s nets in the old cartoons, and hoped for the best,” Liz said, looking me up and down with concern. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I took a quick inventory of my body. My ankle throbbed like crazy, which wasn’t surprising, but so did my previously fine, fake-broken hip! “Ugh, I think I messed up my leg again. I don’t think anything else is broken, though. I’m just a little more banged up than I already was.”

  “So, um, did we really just see Doc Sherman whack Jackie over the head with a candlestick?” Brady asked.

  I looked back up at the empty window, the events of the last few minutes starting to come back to me in a jumbled rush after the shock of my fall.

  “I think you did. We need to make sure Jackie doesn’t go anywhere,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure Doc is going to cooperate.”

  “You cracked the case?” Liz asked.

  “Along with my leg, possibly,” I said, wincing.

  “You mean Jingly Jackie and the doc are the bad guys?” Brady asked in disbelief.

&nbs
p; “Some of them,” I said, my gut sinking as I looked down the hill, where the whine of chain saws carried up from somewhere inside the maze. “But right now the only bad guys I’m worried about are the ones down there.”

  “Nancy! Are you all right? What happened?” Archie yelled, running over to us with Henry and Carol right behind him, each of them wearing boots and jackets haphazardly thrown on over their pajamas. “Someone get the doctor!”

  “He’s up there,” I said, looking up at the window I’d just fallen out of and then pointing down to the maze. “Don’t worry about me—we need to help my friend Joe. The snowmobile thugs are chasing him through the maze!”

  “Thugs in the maze? I don’t understand.” Archie looked down at me in bewilderment, along with the rest of the growing crowd of staff and guests who’d ventured outside to see what all the commotion was about. The lodge’s backup generator must have kicked in, because lights started to come on all over the hotel, and I could see people pressed up against the glass in nearly all the occupied rooms too. And everyone was gawking down at me, the girl in the cast lying on a Christmas blanket in the snow in the middle of a snowstorm. Everyone except for one person. The guy in the corner suite on the other end of the lodge.

  Grant was looking out his window as well, only he was too busy watching the maze through his camera’s telephoto lens to pay attention to the commotion going on right in front of the lodge.

  There was only one reason why someone would be watching the darkened maze in the middle of a snowstorm: they knew what was going on inside it. Seeing him fixated on that instead of the girl who’d just fallen out of the window told me all I needed to know about the identity of Jackie’s fall guy.

  Jackie said the person she’d left the blackmail note for had something to hide, and I had a pretty good idea what it was.

  Grant must have felt the psychic laser beams shooting from my eyes, because he finally turned away from the maze and looked down to see me pointing an accusing finger in his direction. He froze for a second, then dropped the camera and bolted from the window. I didn’t need my binoculars to know there was a look of pure panic on his face.