“I don’t know how it happened, Ms. Johnston,” the guard went on. “I came in to make my rounds, and someone beaned me on the head from behind. I don’t know who it was or how he got in here.” He glanced at his watch. “That was about fifteen minutes ago. When I woke up just now, I was tied up, and you all were here.”
“We’re just lucky whoever it was left the door open,” Jill said, with a critical glance at Bess. “If the door is left open too long, it triggers an alarm in the police precinct. By chance, I was on my way over here to pick up some papers I needed, and I saw the police pulling up ahead of me. It was a lucky coincidence.” She glared at Bess.
“Wait a minute. You don’t seriously think Bess did this?” Nancy said defensively. “We weren’t even here fifteen minutes ago. Can’t you see? Someone else did all this, then arranged the phony message so that Bess would come down here. The door was open when we got here. Someone wanted Bess to get in so she would get caught. Call my aunt. She’s the one who took the message.”
Nancy looked beseechingly at Jill, but Jill’s expression still remained stony. Detective Green didn’t look convinced, either. He finished taking Bess’s statement, while the other officers searched the parade studio.
“My men didn’t find a knife or any other sharp object Ms. Marvin could have used to slash the balloons. There’s no sign of forced entry, either,” Detective Green reported to Jill twenty minutes later. “We did find a small piece of cardboard taped over the door so that the lock couldn’t engage.” He nodded at Bess. “Do you want to press charges for breaking and entering?”
Bess grabbed Nancy’s arm, her eyes wide with fear. Jill hesitated a moment, frowning, before she answered. “That won’t be necessary.”
Nancy was relieved when the police finally told the two of them they could leave. The two girls hurried outside to their waiting taxi.
“Nancy, I could’ve gone to jail tonight!” Bess wailed. “Why is someone doing this to me?”
“More importantly, who is doing this to you?” Nancy said, giving Bess’s arm a squeeze. “The real saboteur wants to make sure you get caught, instead of him or her. And I seriously doubt that that person is Greg Willow. Whoever called just used Greg’s name.”
Bess wiped at her eyes and looked at Nancy. “Louis Clark?” she suggested.
“Or his connection at Mitchell’s,” Nancy added. “A lot of people from the store were at Inverted. Anyone could have seen you with Greg and known there’s something intense between you. After we left, they could have left the message for you and then gone to the parade studio and knocked out the guard and slashed the balloons.”
Bess reached into her bag, took out a tissue, and blew her nose. “What about Howard Langley? He was at Inverted tonight, too.”
Nancy let out a sigh. “Maybe, but we can’t pin the sabotage on him or Louis Clark without more concrete proof.” Her next words were swallowed by a huge yawn. “What we need is a good night’s sleep. Maybe in the morning something will come to us.”
• • •
“There’s Jules,” Nancy said Wednesday morning as she and Bess entered a coffee shop near Mitchell’s Department Store.
“I hope he can prove Louis Clark really is stealing Mitchell’s exclusive scent,” Bess said. “Then maybe Louis will admit to the other sabotage, too, and my Thanksgiving will be saved.”
“With any luck, the real culprit will be in jail before the day is out,” Nancy said.
“Hi!” Jules greeted them as the two girls slipped into the booth opposite him. After the three of them ordered coffee and doughnuts, he leaned over the table. “I couldn’t believe it when you called this morning about Louis Clark. So did he really steal our perfume?”
“You’re the one who can tell us the answer to that question,” Nancy said.
She reached into her bag and pulled out the photocopy of the formulas she’d found in Louis’s office. Jules had a file with him. He opened it and looked back and forth from the file to the sheet.
“Let me see,” he said, his brow furrowed in concentration. “Number three—this is it!” he yelled.
“Are you sure?” Bess asked, taking a sip of her coffee.
Jules nodded his head adamantly. “Positive. It’s an exact match to the formula for Forever.” He pounded his fist on the table. “Somehow Louis Clark got his hot little hands on a sample of our perfume! That’s about the only way to re-create the formula exactly.”
“We think that’s why he broke into the lab on Monday,” Nancy said. “We found a handkerchief with his initials on it inside.”
“I don’t know,” Jules said. “It’s virtually impossible to determine the formula overnight, even with a sample. Maybe he actually found the formula in the file,”
“Maybe,” Nancy said. “I’m going over to Louis’s office right now to confront him.”
“Good idea,” Jules agreed. “I’d go with you, but I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.” He gestured to the sling protecting his left arm. “Let’s meet back here in an hour so you can fill me in.”
• • •
“I’m sorry, girls, but you need an appointment,” Louis Clark’s secretary said firmly.
Nancy saw Bess’s disappointed look, but she wasn’t about to give up that easily. “I thought I had an appointment,” Nancy lied, raising her voice. If she made a big enough stink, maybe that would work.
“Yes,” Bess chimed in loudly. “It’s very important that we see Mr. Clark now.”
“Well, you can’t. I—”
Just then the door to Louis Clark’s office opened, and Louis appeared. “What’s going on out here?” he asked.
Nancy held up the photocopy of the perfume formulas. “Recognize these, Mr. Clark?”
Louis’s eyes widened at the sight of the formulas. His gaze flitted nervously around the reception area. “I, er, think I can spare a few minutes for these young ladies,” he told his secretary, gesturing for Nancy and Bess to enter his office.
As soon as he shut the door behind the girls, Nancy squarely faced the store owner. “Mr. Clark, I know you’re trying to steal Mitchell’s exclusive perfume formula. I also happen to know you’re missing a handkerchief—the one with the initials L.C. It was found in Mitchell’s cosmetics lab in Brooklyn.”
Louis stared impassively at Nancy and Bess as he walked to his desk and sat down. His initial nervousness had disappeared. “The police have already called me. A Detective Green, I believe. Nice fellow. He asked me some standard questions, and I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. I’m an important member of New York’s business community,” he added smugly. “No one’s going to believe I would stoop so low as to break into my competitor’s warehouse.”
“You don’t expect us to believe that, do you?” Bess asked angrily.
Louis let out a little laugh. “Business is a funny thing,” he said. “Ideas are stolen every day. By the time they’re released to the public, no one’s sure whose idea it really was in the first place.”
“What are you trying to say?” Nancy asked.
“What if I said Mitchell’s had stolen my scent?” Louis said. “How would they prove me wrong? It’s a very difficult area of the law, not to mention a very expensive one. Mitchell’s would be better off financially to forget about the whole thing than to fight me in court and risk losing.” He smiled broadly at Nancy and Bess. “A photocopy of some formulas isn’t exactly concrete proof.”
Nancy exchanged a quick look with Bess. Louis Clark was smooth, all right. His smug attitude told her that he had stolen the formula—he’d practically admitted it to them! But he seemed to think he couldn’t be caught. And if he wasn’t going to admit to stealing the perfume, Nancy was sure he wouldn’t admit to any sabotage, either. It looked as if she and Bess were back at square one.
• • •
“He’s got some nerve!” Jules exclaimed. As planned, he met Nancy and Bess again at the coffee shop. Over mugs of hot chocolate, the girls told him wha
t had happened in Louis Clark’s office.
Bess frowned and propped her chin in her hands. “He’s a criminal who might never get caught, and I’m a totally innocent person who might go to jail,” she said. “Isn’t there something we can do?”
“We have to tell my father,” Jules said firmly. “He’ll get his lawyers on it right away.”
Suddenly his expression changed, and he looked nervously from Bess to Nancy. “Not to change the subject or anything, but my dad told me about what happened when you saw him yesterday, Nancy,” he said, fidgeting with his mug. “Did you find out anything about the sabotage?”
Nancy shook her head. “Nothing concrete,” she replied. She hesitated, then said, “I know this is a lot to ask, since he’s your father—but is there any way you can help me get into his office when he’s not there, so I can look for clues that might link him to the sabotage?”
Jules didn’t answer right away. For a moment, Nancy was afraid he’d say no. Then he took a deep breath and said, “He’s out at a meeting this morning with some of his creditors. We can go over now and tell the receptionist that we need to see him and that we’ll wait in his office. I do that a lot.”
After finishing their cocoa, the three walked to Mitchell’s and made their way up to Howard Langley’s ninth-floor office. Nancy stood behind Jules, hoping the receptionist wouldn’t recognize her from the day before. She smiled when she saw Jules. When he explained that they wanted to wait for his father, she waved them into the office. She hardly glanced at Nancy and Bess.
“Great!” Bess said as soon as Jules closed the door behind them. “What do we do now, Nan?”
“Look for the same kinds of things we did in Louis Clark’s office,” Nancy whispered. “Anything to do with the parade, the explosion, the missing costumes, the slashed balloons, or anything unusual.”
Nancy walked over to Mr. Langley’s desk and started searching through a stack of papers and files there. Bess went over to a console against the right wall and began looking around the television set and video cassette recorder, while Jules looked on the shelves.
Nancy didn’t find anything unusual on the desktop, so she opened the top drawer. Just as she was about to reach inside, a booming voice startled her.
“What in the world is going on in here?”
Chapter
Ten
NANCY LOOKED UP from behind the desk to see Howard Langley looming large in the doorway, his hands on his hips and an angry expression on his face. “What is going on in here?” he repeated.
Nancy slowly closed the desk drawer. She shot a worried glance at Jules and Bess, who both looked as shocked and surprised as she felt.
“Uh, hi, Dad,” Jules said. “Nancy and Bess were helping me get to work on an important assignment.” His voice was steady, but Nancy noticed that his face was white.
“What important assignment, and how does it at all involve me, my office, and my private papers?” Howard Langley walked across the room, leveling a disapproving gaze at Nancy, who moved away from the desk. “Hello, Ms. Drew,” he said curtly. His eyes drifted to Bess, and he added, “I don’t believe I know your other friend.”
Jules introduced Bess, then said, “Dad, I have some bad news—”
“Jules, I just met with our creditors. I don’t need any more bad news today,” Mr. Langley said wearily.
Jules walked over and stood face-to-face with his father. “Louis Clark has stolen the formula for our new Forever perfume.”
“What!” Mr. Langley exclaimed. His tired expression was immediately replaced by a look of outrage.
Jules, Nancy, and Bess quickly told him about finding the formulas and confronting Louis Clark. “That’s why we were going through things,” Jules concluded. “We wanted to gather any papers we could to prove that Mitchell’s lab invented the perfume first.”
Nancy had to admit Jules sounded believable. She held her breath, waiting to see if Mr. Langley would buy the story.
“I always love a fight,” Howard finally said. He pressed a button on the intercom. “Call the lawyers,” he yelled into the machine. His eyes held a challenging gleam as he turned back to Jules, Nancy, and Bess.
“I’m going to make sure Louis Clark is put in jail for trespassing at the lab and for stealing the perfume formula,” Mr. Langley said. “We have every paper to prove that we created that scent. Louis won’t have enough time to create a paper trail that’s half as convincing.”
Nancy looked over at Bess, who breathed a sigh of relief. Nancy could see that it was easier to be on the same side as Mr. Langley than to work against him. She remembered how sure of himself Louis Clark had been earlier that day. Now she knew that taking on Howard Langley wasn’t going to be half as easy as Louis Clark had predicted.
The intercom on Mr. Langley’s desk buzzed, and the secretary announced that the store’s attorneys were on the line. Howard motioned for Jules and the girls to leave his office so he could speak to the lawyers in private.
Jules led Nancy and Bess out. As they rode the elevator downstairs, they breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“I thought for sure we were goners,” Jules said. “I can’t believe none of us heard him coming.”
“I know! You did a brilliant job of covering, Jules,” Bess said, grinning at him.
“It was perfect,” Nancy chimed in.
With a nervous smile, Jules said, “At least the whole Louis Clark mess took Dad’s mind off why we were sneaking around his office.” His voice dropped to a whisper as he added, “I’ll go home right now and look around his office there. Maybe I’ll find something that links him to the sabotage. Where can I call you if I do?”
Nancy gave him her aunt’s phone number, and then they went downstairs. Nancy paused just before the revolving doors leading outside and checked her watch. It was almost one o’clock.
“Um, Nan?” Bess said, biting her lip. “Maybe we should go to the parade studio and see if we can help repair the balloons,” she suggested. “They can probably use all the help they can get. After all, the parade is tomorrow.”
Nancy hesitated. After last night, she was sure Jill wouldn’t want Bess anywhere near the parade studio. Then again, Bess was innocent. If they went to help out, Nancy would also have a chance to look for more clues as to who the real saboteur was.
Smiling at Bess, Nancy said, “Good idea. Let’s grab a sandwich at the deli across the street, and then we’ll get a cab to the parade studio.”
• • •
Nancy and Bess arrived at the parade studio in Brooklyn just as one of the workers was exiting.
“Good,” Nancy said under her breath to Bess, as the young man held the door open for them. “We don’t have to worry about getting in.”
After thanking the young man, the girls made their way down the hall to the studio. When they opened the door, the first thing Nancy saw was a camera crew over by the balloons. Aileen Nash was interviewing Jill, who explained on-camera that the police thought a neighborhood prankster had broken in and slashed the balloons.
“At least she isn’t accusing me on TV,” Bess whispered glumly as she and Nancy approached the camera crew.
Dozens of people were working to repair the balloons, using needles and a soft, rubbery material. On the other side of the room, final touches were being applied to some floats.
As Nancy and Bess listened to the interview, Jill explained that the balloons and floats would be transported later that afternoon to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. That was the starting point of the parade. Final preparations at the museum would last through the night until the parade began in the morning.
A few minutes later Aileen and Jill wrapped up the report. While the camera crew packed up, Nancy and Bess walked over to the two women.
“Hi, Nancy,” Aileen said, smiling. Nancy introduced Bess to the newscaster. Bess said hello to Jill, but Jill just frowned and turned away. After saying something to one of the workers who was repairing balloons
, Jill headed back toward the hallway.
“I, uh, I guess I’ll ask these workers if there’s anything I can do,” Bess said uneasily.
“I’ll tell Jill what we found out,” Nancy said, purposely being vague about Mr. Clark and Mr. Langley so that she wouldn’t give any information away to the reporter. “I know we don’t have proof yet, but Jill has to recognize that you’re not the only suspect for the sabotage.”
Aileen fell into step with Nancy as she headed toward the hallway leading to Jill’s office. “I take it your friend is the one Jill has been so upset about lately,” Aileen said.
“Bess didn’t do anything,” Nancy said firmly.
“Whatever you say,” Aileen said, but her tone revealed her doubts. When they got to Jill’s office, Aileen waved a goodbye to Jill through the open doorway, then continued down to the outside door.
Nancy was relieved that the newswoman didn’t linger. She didn’t want anyone else around when she told Jill about the perfume formula— and about her suspicions of Howard Langley.
Jill was on the phone when Nancy walked into the office. “Yes, please have the helium delivered directly to the Museum of Natural History,” she said. After talking a few moments longer, Jill hung up.
It took only a few minutes for Nancy to bring Jill up to date on her discovery that Louis Clark was stealing Mitchell’s new perfume.
“Wow,” Jill said, looking surprised. “So that really was his handkerchief you found here the other night.”
Nancy nodded. “I have a theory about who might be responsible for sabotaging the parade, too.” After taking a deep breath, she told Jill of Jules’s theory that his own father was trying to ruin the parade. “I know it sounds crazy, but maybe he’s trying to make sure the store doesn’t ever have to lay out money for the parade again,” she finished.
Jill’s mouth had dropped open during Nancy’s explanation. Now she sat quietly, a thoughtful look on her face. “Mr. Langley does hate the parade,” she finally said. Then she shook herself. “I’m sorry, Nancy, but we can’t rule out Bess,” she said firmly. “All the evidence points to her.”