Confessions of a Teen Sleuth

  Love,

  Your mother, Ai Sato

  I had just finished reading the note and was folding it up to put in my pocket when Cherry Ames burst in, followed by four camp MPs!

  "That's her!" Cherry shouted. "She stole my uniform!"

  I was quickly arrested.

  What a queer development, I thought as I sat on a hard bench behind bars.

  "Hello, Nancy."

  I looked up as Cherry Ames sashayed through the door. She was wearing her spare nurse's uniform and cap, and she looked particularly rosy cheeked and smug.

  "Can you give us a minute?" she asked my guard seductively.

  "Uh, sure," the young guard stammered as he quickly exited.

  Cherry approached the bars, clutching her woolly white sweater around her shoulders.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "I have my own series now," she announced icily, black curls bouncing. "Thanks for mentioning it, by the way. I really appreciate your support." Her eyes went through me like knives. "But who wants to read about an adventuring nurse when she can read about a teenage detective? There's a nurse shortage right now, you know. It's a war job with a future. If my books can inspire little girls to go into nursing, then it might help us win this thing. But no! Everyone wants to read about a sixteen-year-old, uptight, self-centered, control freak daddy's girl. You couldn't earn a cap if your life depended on it! By tomorrow all the papers will know that Nancy Drew was arrested! Don't you get it? If I can discredit you, your book sales go down, and mine go up." She flared her nostrils patriotically. "Then maybe the Allies will stand a chance."

  The door flew open, and the young guard came back in along with a diminutive, elderly gentleman who turned out to be the camp director. Cherry's and my jaws dropped. It was the gentleman who had collapsed in the airport!

  The young guard walked past Cherry, took out a great set of keys, and opened the door to my cell. "You're free to go, Mrs. Nickerson."

  Cherry's rosy cheeks paled. "What? You're not going to arrest her? She stole my uniform? She snuck into the camp!"

  The camp director smiled amiably. "After what you girls did for me in the airport, I wouldn't dream of pursuing this. Besides, we decided that we shouldn't bring any extra attention to our internment project here. We don't really like publicity." He turned to me jauntily. "Mrs. Nickerson, may I drive you back to town?"

  "Uh, sure," I replied. I was still very shaken by the day's events. I had found my mother only to lose her again. Could I count this case as solved, or would it skew my percentages? Even more pressing, why did my heart ache with such sorrow? I supposed it was the mother thing. There would be no tearful reunion. She had made her choice. She had chosen true love with an Oriental over me. Yet her note and the books made me believe that I inhabited a place in her heart. She could leave me—and love me. It was all pretty complicated. Then, the most amazing thing happened. Standing there in that internment camp jail, I felt something for the very first time: I felt like a mother.

  I followed the camp director out of the building into the slanted light of the desert's setting sun. How I suddenly missed River Heights! As we were leaving the camp jail, he turned back to Cherry. "Nurse Ames," he called over his shoulder, "there are some children projectile vomiting in Barracks Two. You better report for duty."

  V THE SECRET OF THE AGED HOUSEKEEPER, 1953

  "Nancy, I'm worried about you," commented Hannah Gruen, putting down her dish towel long enough to stand looking at me with her gnarled, fisted hands on her hips. Hannah had grown quite elderly, and as her helpfulness to my father diminished along with her stature, so did her housekeeping opportunities elsewhere. When Dad remarried, Ned and I agreed to take Hannah in. I loved her dearly and had come to think of her as family. Of course the arrangement was contingent on some light household chores.

  Ned Junior was ten now and quite active. A student at the prestigious River Heights Laurel Leaf Girls' School (they had made an exception and accepted him in part due to my fund-raising efforts), he excelled at academics and field hockey.

  "What an odd thing to say," I exclaimed to Hannah.

  "You just don't seem yourself," Hannah muttered.

  I examined my reflection in the kitchen window. I was still attractive, my hair as titian as ever (I had recently cut my bangs), my eyes a sparkling blue, but my perky cheeks had slackened and my eyes were lined with crow's feet. Even though I was still slim, I must confess that I had noticed that my skirts were fitting me a little tightly around the waist. "Whatever do you mean?"

  "It seems as if you're avoiding your husband. You don't enjoy cooking. Or cleaning. You barely garden."

  "Oh, Hannah," I smiled. "That's silly. You're talking about last weekend. I couldn't go to Ned's office party. I had to rescue Ned Junior from the old well in the backyard."

  "But how did he get in the well?"

  "I lowered him. We were playing rescue from the old well.' "

  Hannah untied her cotton apron and sat down across from me. "There's something I should have told you a long time ago."

  My ears perked up and I looked at Hannah with rapt attention.

  "I knew your mother."

  "You did?" I exclaimed.

  "She was my sister."

  My head felt light as I motioned for her to continue.

  "Yes," she went on. "In addition to being your faithful housekeeper, I am also your aunt. Your father and I thought it best you never know the truth. We thought it prudent that she be pushed from your mind completely, to spare you a similar fate. Your father suggested that I work for free as a maid in your home. I agreed. But now I see that we made a terrible mistake. We should have been honest with you. I was the one who warned Ai Sato that you were coming to Los Angeles. If I hadn't, she might not have vanished forever, and you might have had your tearful reunion. Then perhaps you would not be smothering your sweet bastard son while ignoring your household chores and your devoted, hapless husband."

  "You know?" I stammered.

  "He is the spitting image of Frank Hardy."

  I felt a crashing wave of relief flood over me. I had been so consumed with guilt over my deception that I had let my anguish eat away at my relationship with Ned, unable to qualify my overwhelming love for my son with my affection for my youthful sweetheart. Was it possible that, in my effort not to repeat my mother's mistakes, I had overcompensated? Then it struck me.

  "You're my aunt?"

  In the heat of the rippling revelations, I must admit that my detection skills were dulled. In most cases I would have heard the anxious footsteps quickly approaching the back door. As it was, I was as surprised as Hannah when the back door fairly flung open and eleven armed men stormed our comfortable home.

  They surrounded my housekeeper/aunt, lifted her to her feet, and handcuffed her.

  "Mrs. Hannah Gruen," one of them announced sternly, "you're under arrest. For being a Communist spy!"

  Willing myself to remain calm, I phoned my father and told him that our housekeeper had just been taken into custody to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I did not tell him about Hannah's revelation. Then I phoned Ned at River Heights Mutual. Within fifteen minutes, both Ned and my father were sitting in our living room, my father still wearing his judge's robes.

  Excitedly, I relayed the shocking events that had taken place during their absence. I cannot say why I chose not to reveal Hannah's stunning disclosure, except that at the center of my being I feared its volatility. As the keeper of my own astounding secret, to which Hannah was privy, I knew well the noxious gas that lurked in untruths and I pledged silently to contain it. Or maybe I was just chicken. "Well," I asked, "what should we do? We just have to prove that Hannah is innocent!"

  My distinguished father looked grave. "This is serious business, Nancy," he stated. "I'm not sure that any of us should get involved until we know what's really going on."

  "But Hannah's no Commie!" I pleaded.

  Dad shook his head grimly. "S
he never talked politics in front of you. But she was very progressive. She supported unions for coal miners."

  Ned, now a vice president at the life insurance company, sat up tall in his smartly tailored sharkskin suit. He wore his hair handsomely slicked back and favored colorful ties. "You know I'd love to help," he offered consolingly. "But this sort of red scare could really hurt the business. Maybe it is best if we just keep this cat in the bag."

  My eyes burned as I steadied myself on the davenport.

  "Okay," I agreed slowly. "We wait to hear the specific charges." Ned stood and kissed me on the cheek. "Where's the little guy?" he asked, looking around, a flicker of concern in his eyes. "You weren't playing 'trapped in the old well' again, were you?"

  "No," I answered. "He's upstairs. Reading."

  Ned bit his lip. "Maybe I'll go ahead and take him into the office with me for the rest of the day. You seem excitable."

  "Fine," I retorted.

  I waited for Ned, Ned Junior, and my father to leave the house before I flew to the phone. I dialed the number I had memorized so many years before.

  "Hello?" a voice answered.

  My pulse raced as I gripped the receiver to my ear. "It's me," I gulped. "I need you."

  "I'll send someone to pick you up," replied Frank Hardy.

  I packed only the essentials: lipstick, rouge, foundation, mascara, eye shadow, eye liner, cold cream, curlers, a hairbrush, a magnifying glass, two pairs of stockings, two pairs of pumps, three pencil-straight skirts (two with elastic waistbands), four fitted blouses, a cashmere cardigan, two boxy jackets, an assortment of undergarments, and a bottle of Estee Lauder Youth Dew. Then I waited by the back window.

  It was about forty-five minutes later that I saw the light in the sky and watched the three-decker plane soundlessly lower itself vertically into our backyard. No sooner had the great silver craft come to a stop then a blond, lanky young man leapt out of the plane and dashed to my back door.

  "I'm Tom Swift Junior, ma'am," he exclaimed, extending a hand. "Frank Hardy sent me."

  "I'm Nancy Drew," I greeted him. "I knew your father."

  Once we were aboard the Sky Queen, Tom introduced me to his adventuring companion, a husky young flier named Bud Barclay. The two youths set the plane on gyropilot and offered to show me around the flying laboratory. Bud, who had the well-built, supple body of an athlete, led the way, while Tom explained the various purposes of supersensitive electronic controls and levers.

  "So how do you know Frank?" I asked Tom.

  "Well," Tom explained, "I was back at Swift Enterprises—our gleaming four-mile-square compound of modern facilities and airstrips—working on a method of using an alcohol—liquid oxygen fuel combination designed to absorb the hyper and powerful radiation of the sun and shoot this solar energy into the liquid oxygen supply, converting it into highly explosive, poisonous rainbow liquid ozone. I had just juiced up the electromagnets and was in the process of lowering them into the acid vat full of electric eels, when who should walk through the door but Frank! He said that the government needed my experiment. On the double. So of course I handed it over, no questions asked. How about you?"

  I became very interested in a nearby gadget. "Oh, I helped him find a missing waitress once," I replied, shrugging.

  "Hey, watch the thermograph potentiometer!" Tom cried alertly, pulling me away from the instrument I had been fingering.

  I hurried to catch up with Bud, who had climbed into the transparent blister above the pilot's compartment.

  "This is the astrodome," Bud explained, proudly gesturing to the view.

  It was a remarkable vista. Nothing like commercial air travel. I could see for miles in every direction.

  "Is that Washington?" I asked, pointing to the skyline we were approaching.

  "Yep," answered Bud. "We should be safely on the ground at the naval air strip shortly. I'd better return to the landing instruments. Tom will want to activate the patrol scope before we descend."

  Fifteen minutes later, the sliver-winged laboratory had landed and we had all been quickly ushered into an underground hangar. A young uniformed man led us down a series of well-lit hallways until we came to a closed, unmarked door.

  "You can go in," he declared.

  I suddenly found myself consumed with self-consciousness. I had not seen Frank Hardy in eleven years. I was forty-three years old. Would he still find me attractive? My face burned with embarrassment at my schoolgirl awkwardness. What a fool I was! I had abandoned my romantic hopes years before. Sentiment and passion had no place in the life of a middle-aged wife and mother. I gathered my senses, smoothed down my titian tresses, adjusted my brassiere, and with a determined nod to Bud and Tom opened the door. It was some sort of conference center. A large table surrounded by chairs sat in its center. Maps of the world papered the walls. Sitting with his hands folded at the far end of the table was the love of my life, Frank Hardy. He stood when I came in. His hair was graying around the temples and he had a mustache, but I noticed that his tailored uniform fit crisply over his still strapping physique. A small tremble snaked its way from my ankles to my knees.

  "Major Hardy," I purred, despite myself. "How nice to see you again."

  Frank smiled. "Now what's this I hear about Hannah Gruen?" he asked.

  Tom and Bud and I sat down at the table, and I told Frank everything I knew, including Hannah's familial confession. He nodded thoughtfully and several times consulted notes that he had laid out on the table.

  "Nancy," he commented, "let me be straight with you. Hannah Gruen is a highly skilled Soviet agent bent on selling our most precious atomic secrets to the highest bidder."

  I gasped.

  "Just kidding!" he exclaimed.

  He cleared his throat and continued. "Actually, Hannah is no spy. She was a member of the Communist Party for three weeks in 1913. But why the House Committee on Un-American Activities would choose to go after an elderly housekeeper for a youthful indiscretion, I don't know. They refuse to share their files with the military, but I can't imagine that they have any information that we don't." He looked up at me meaningfully. "I can only theorize that there is some dastardly plan at work here."

  "Like that time when we were drilling for molten iron at the South Pole with the atomic blaster?" asked Tom boringly.

  "Something like that," Frank answered, nodding.

  "What are we going to do?" I asked.

  Frank's eyes steeled. "We're going to go straight to the top."

  We took Tom's four-person atomic-powered scooter straight to the White House, and moments later we were sitting in the Oval Office across from President Eisenhower. Frank relayed the situation.

  President Eisenhower nodded. "I'll make some calls, Major Hardy," he offered. "But before I do, I should tell you that I think I already know why HUAC had targeted your Hannah Gruen."

  "You do?" I gasped.

  The president pursed his lips grimly. "In 1915, I was a second lieutenant stationed in Fort Sam Houston, Texas. I fell in love with two women. One of them I married. The other, a young suffragette in town to campaign for the vote, was named Hannah Gruen."

  "Jumpin' jets!" exclaimed Bud.

  The president continued, his face reddening. "I think that my enemies discovered my relationship with Miss Gruen and decided to charge her, knowing that I could not let our relationship come to light."

  "What are we going to do, sir?" queried Frank.

  "What my enemies want me to do," the president lamented. "I have no choice but to resign."

  "You can't!" Frank gasped.

  "Good night!" exclaimed Bud.

  "It's not fair!" Tom cried darkly.

  "Just wait a minute, Mr. President," I remarked. "You're saying that this is all an elaborate scheme to force you to step down as leader of the free world?"

  The president nodded curtly.

  "And that the only evidence they have that Hannah is a Communist is the fact that she was a party member for three weeks
in 1913?"

  He nodded again.

  "So if those records were to disappear, then they would have nothing? And a youthful affair with a suffragette is far less harmful politically then an affair with a Communist."

  The president considered this. "They probably wouldn't even go public with that," he mused.

  "Mr. President, sir," I declared, "I ask that you give us twelve hours."

  The president met my eyes with resolve. "Twelve hours, Mrs. Nickerson." He looked us all up and down, a flicker of apprehension behind his deep-set blue eyes. "I hope that you are as good as the books say you are. For all our sakes."

  Back aboard the Sky Queen, hovering fifteen-thousand feet above the Capitol, Frank, Bud, Tom, and I considered our options.

  "All right, gang," Frank declared, "let's go over this again. Who would stand to benefit the most from Ike's resignation?"

  "Russia?" offered Bud.

  "The Netherlands?" Tom asked flatly.

  "Richard Nixon," I declared.

  They all looked at me. "Think about it," I continued. "Who's to benefit directly? Eisenhower resigns. His vice president takes office. Richard Nixon. He used to be a member of the Un-American Activities Committee. He's arranged this whole thing."

  "Which means that he's bound to have the evidence under lock and key in the vice presidential residence!" Frank gushed. "The only safe in the residence is in the first-floor den."

  "We could use my hydraulic jackscrew!" Tom suggested inventively.

  "But how do we get in the house?" mused Bud fretfully.

  Tom's eyes lit up. "We don't," he declared. A broad smile spread across the face of the lanky young inventor. "We send a robot!"

  As soon as night fell, we huddled in Tom's atomic-powered hovercraft on a quiet street near the vice presidential residence and set about recovering the evidence that could force a presidential coup.

  Tom's eyes lit up. "We don't. We send a robot!"

  Tom manipulated the robot using two levers on an instrument panel inside the hovercraft. A binocular camera was mounted on the robot's head, allowing us to view its progress on a monitor. The robot was two feet tall and had two extendable arms on each side of its boxy torso.