Foxy and Ned and I ran into Ned Junior and the hippies in the hotel lobby. They had indeed stolen a vehicle. It took us most of the afternoon to return the mail truck to the post office without detection and before the mailman realized it was missing. But that's another story.
VIII THE MYSTERY OF THE SEVEN SISTERS, 1975
Actually," I announced to the auditorium, "I think that books about girl sleuths should be an integral component of the feminist canon."
There was a smattering of applause in the audience and nodding from my panel mates. It was the first annual Female Protagonists in Young Adult Series Literature Feminist Conference at Vassar College, and George Fayne, now a distinguished, tenured professor and author of the book Clitoris! Clitoris! Clitoris! had invited me to participate. Others on the panel included Cherry Ames, who had recently been hired as a Teamsters nurse; Kim Aldrich, who was fighting the glass ceiling as a secretary for the international insurance firm WALCO, Inc.; and Judy Bolton, the attractive wife of an FBI agent, who had her own series of books, though they did not sell as well as mine.
A serious-looking young woman with very straight hair, no makeup, and wire-rimmed glasses raised her hand.
"Yes?" I asked.
"My name is Madge Hollings," she announced. "Isn't Cherry Ames a more important role model than you are, since she actually showed young girls that they could make their way in the world as working women?"
I paused. "I guess so," I allowed. "If you consider nursing the pinnacle of female success." A shocked murmur ran through the crowd. I continued, "She can't even hold down a job. Dude ranch nurse. Cruise nurse. Private duty nurse. Army nurse. Rest home nurse. Ski nurse. One right after the other."
Cherry glared at me, her black eyes flashing. She had not aged well. Though she was younger than I was, her weight had ballooned, a fact that was not well disguised by her blinding white size-sixteen (and too-snug) uniform. I had heard that she was diabetic. "My skills were in great demand. That's what attracted Helen to my story."
I threw my hands up dramatically. "You always knew how to promote yourself, Cherry. That's why you started writing stories." I looked out at the crowd, waiting until I had all of their attention, before I dropped the bombshell. "Under the pen name Helen Wells."
The crowded gasped.
Cherry's chubby cheeks turned scarlet.
I surveyed the auditorium. "I bring this up only to show you that you too can make up your own stories. We are not slaves to the perception of others. We are each of us our own biographers. As young women today you are in a unique position. The obstacles are crumbling. The world is opening itself to possibility. Look for mystery behind every corner. And when you think you have it figured out, look closer and work harder, because the truth takes time and effort, but it is worth it. Thank you."
The crowd burst into enthusiastic applause.
George approached the microphone on stage. She still wore her hair short, though she had let it gray. Her features had grown more masculine as she had aged, a fact only highlighted by her lack of cosmetics and the fact that she appeared to have a fine mustache. She was wearing her uniform of black turtleneck, long macrame vest, and black slacks. "Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming. We'll see you all tomorrow for Donna Parker's lecture on girls and large horses."
As the young women in the audience stood and began to form a line to talk to the panel, out of the corner of my eye I saw Cherry waddle from the stage.
After the auditorium had cleared out, George, Kim, Judy, and I had dinner at a restaurant near the college. Cherry did not show. I regaled the threesome with stories of Ned Junior's courtship of Foxy Belden-Frayne, who had stayed in San Francisco and become a well-regarded record jacket artist.
They had finally married the year before, and Foxy was pregnant with their first child. After dinner, George took us all back to our hotel and we said good night in the lobby. When I returned to my room, I called Ned and told him about my day. I took an Ex-Lax, as was my evening routine. Then I fell asleep.
It was nearly three A.M. when the phone rang. It was George. "You better get down here to Grover Hall right away," she declared urgently. "It's Cherry Ames! She's been murdered!"
By the time I had pulled on my control-top panty hose, corduroy skirt, turtleneck, blazer, and sneakers, styled my hair, applied tasteful cosmetics, and caught a cab to the campus, almost a dozen police cars had arrived at the crime scene. I ducked under the yellow crime tape and headed toward the door of the building. A uniformed police officer stopped me.
"I'm Nancy Drew," I explained. "The sleuth."
He looked me up and down. "Whatever, lady," he shrugged.
I whipped out my identification and presented it to him. He looked at it, then at me. "Shut up!" he cried. "You're real?"
"I am," I replied wearily. He stammered for a moment, then nodded and let me through the door. I walked directly through the lobby into the back of the auditorium. Detectives and uniformed officers swarmed the stage. George was speaking to a detective near the stage. And then I saw Cherry.
What I saw caused me to gasp in horror. She was tied to the chair she had sat in during the panel. Her striking white uniform was drenched with blood. I turned my head away, aghast—in all my years of sleuthing, I had never seen anything so gruesome.
My spell was broken when George spotted me. "Nancy!" she exclaimed.
The young detective who was interviewing her stopped short and took a step toward me. He was wearing a brown suit and a fedora. "Nancy Drew?" he asked.
I nodded bleakly, still shaken by the scene on stage.
"I'm Detective Ross," he explained. "We'll need your statement. I hear you had some sort of altercation with Ms. Ames during the panel tonight."
I sank into a chair at the end of a row, absentmindedly rubbing my lower back, which often grew tight when I was tense. "It was an abstract theoretical argument. Nothing personal. I was trying to make a point."
"So you and Ms. Ames were on friendly terms?"
I looked down at my hands. They were freckled with age spots. Confronted with the passage of time, my rocky relationship with Cherry suddenly seemed a great waste. "She was my nemesis," I admitted frankly.
He looked interested. "Your nemesis? You mean enemy?"
"No. We were colleagues. We were just very different. Opposites. We played well off each other. We have a very different fan base."
"Where were you tonight?"
I told Detective Ross about our dinner out and my phone call to Ned, and how I had then fallen asleep.
He wrote something in his notebook. "Ned is your husband?"
"He used to be. Now we're just special friends."
"Special friends?"
I searched for an explanation. "We date."
"Oh."
"What happened to Cherry?"
"She was bludgeoned to death with a magnifying glass. Sometime within the last two hours. Which means sometime while you say you were asleep in your room. Do you have one?"
I reached into my purse, pulled out my heavy magnifying glass, and handed it to him.
He turned it over in his hands. "I'll have to take this down to the station."
"So I'm a suspect?"
He looked around the room and raised an eyebrow. "You all are," he replied ominously. "This is the work of a pro. As far as I'm concerned, none of you lady sleuths are leaving town until we know what happened to the nurse."
Kim Aldrich widened her blue eyes and pushed her shiny brown hair behind her ears. "They can't keep us here," she lamented, adjusting her stylish secretary's ensemble of a checkered pinafore and blouse with bow collar. "I've got to get back to WALCO, Inc. I've just taken a new secretarial course and I'm sure this time I'll get a promotion."
Kim and George and I were sipping Sanka in George's brownstone, located just off campus. We had been questioned by the police all morning, and now Judy Bolton and Donna Parker were experiencing the same treatment down at the station.
George ran a han
d through her spiky gray hair and muttered, "I just can't believe that Cherry is dead. And how can they question Donna Parker? She's not quite fifteen."
"She's at least thirty," groaned Kim, "and everyone knows it. I don't know why she insists on wearing that camp outfit."
"She says she's fourteen, and we have to respect that," George cautioned. "It's her lifestyle and we can't judge it."
Kim rolled her eyes. George continued to pace around the sitting room until her lower back began to bother her and then she sat down. "Hypers!" she growled. "We've got to solve this mystery soon or the conference will be ruined!"
Kim smiled wanly. "I know shorthand. If it'll help."
George's roommate, V, brought in a fresh electric pot of coffee and refilled our mugs. V had become an artist, and the brownstone was full of her work: large watercolors of blossoming flowers. I found them quite lovely, though they made me feel a little funny in a way that I couldn't identify. In any case, I considered it very admirable that George had invited V to move east with her; I had rarely seen such devoted roommates.
The doorbell rang and Judy and Donna walked in. Once they were seated, the two women excitedly reported their experiences down at the station. They had been questioned separately for several hours, and then each girl had been required to turn over her magnifying glass, just as Kim and I had.
"They're looking for the murder weapon," I theorized.
"But it's a red herring!"
"So what do we do?" quizzed Donna. The dark-haired, rose-cheeked woman looked stricken. She slumped forward and set her chin on two fists. "Oh, pooh!" she added. "I thought this was going to be fun like camp." With her headband, camp shirt, and shorts, Donna did look younger than thirty but also vaguely creepy. I had felt a nagging responsibility for the young woman since I had met her at the conference launch cocktail party. She had been inspired to teen sleuthdom after reading Carolyn's stories of my exploits, but after peaking in her middle teens, she had been unable to find success since. Trapped by the public's inability to let her age, she toured malls selling books dressed like a teenager. But she seemed to have taken her ruse a little too much to heart.
Judy sighed deeply and rose from her seat. I had always found her single-minded and politically progressive. "I think we should consider the social ramifications of inequality. Clearly there is a social problem at the heart of this matter.
If we can address the big picture, perhaps we can effect real change."
We all looked at her blankly.
She sat back down. "Or we can call my husband, Peter. He's in the FBI."
"Or my dad," piped in Kim. "He's in the FBI too."
"I don't think we need to call the FBI yet," I declared. "Not until we know more about what's going on."
"Golly, how do we do that?" asked Donna.
"We go back to the scene of the crime," I declared matter-of-factly. "George, do you have a key to Grover Hall?"
George grinned. "You bet I do!"
We waited until dark and then made our way to Grover Hall, where George let us in the back faculty entrance. George turned on the lights, and we all crept along the wall to the stage, so as not to destroy evidence.
"Everyone split up and look for clues," I instructed.
We climbed on stage and fanned out. Of course we were at somewhat of a disadvantage without our magnifying glasses, but several of us had reading glasses, which worked in a pinch. With so many sleuths, it didn't take long to turn up a clue.
"Goodness, look at this!" Donna exclaimed. She was standing at the side of the stage, next to where the curtain stood open. She reached into one of the folds at the base of the curtain and pulled out something small and shiny. "What is it?" she asked.
We all gathered around and examined the piece of jewelry.
"It's a sorority pin," Judy explained to Donna.
Donna looked misty eyed. "I hope one day I'm old enough to go to college."
There was an awkward silence.
Then Judy held the pin toward George. "Do you recognize it?" Judy asked.
George furrowed her thick unplucked brow. "Why, that looks like a Seven Sisters pin!" she exclaimed. She lowered her voice. "That's a secret society of female students at the seven sister colleges. It's very elite. Very hush-hush. Rumor has it that most of the women go on to join the CIA."
"It's pretty," sighed Kim.
"This pin could have been left here anytime," Judy pointed out.
George shook her head emphatically. "The curtains were taken down and cleaned right before the conference."
"So a sister must have had something to do with what happened to Cherry," I theorized. "Do they have a meeting place here on campus?"
George nodded. "There's a secret hall just up the street. They meet secretly every Saturday night at the secret hour of midnight."
"Why, that's in only one hour!" observed Donna.
Deciding that our best course of action was to go undercover, I disguised myself as a co-ed, donning blue jeans and parting my hair down the middle in the style of the day. Then I affixed the Seven Sisters pin to my college sweatshirt and went to the secret meeting hall. The others agreed to wait hidden behind trees outside until I emerged or one hour had passed.
I watched as several young women rang the doorbell and were ushered inside. With a few deep breaths to steady my nerves, I approached the large oak door, rang the bell, and waited. In a few minutes, a young woman wearing a red cloak that obscured her face opened the door.
"Uh, are you somebody's grandmother?" she asked.
"Returning student," I answered nonchalantly, drawing her attention to my pin.
She hesitated, but after glancing at the pin allowed me to enter.
Once inside the stately stone building, I watched as the women ahead of me approached a wardrobe stand hung with red cloaks just inside the door. Each donned a cloak over her clothes, poured a cup of punch, and headed downstairs to the basement.
I followed suit.
There were scores of red-clad sisters gathered in the basement of the hall, but my attention was immediately drawn to the small stage at the front of the room where an altar stood. On it was a nurse's cap!
My mind reeled. Could these women have killed Cherry? And if so, why?
A red-cloaked figure emerged from the crowd and took a position behind a podium next to the altar. She raised her arms, and all the women immediately gave her rapt attention. I was not prepared for what happened next. The figure threw back her hood, revealing straight hair, glasses, and a serious expression. I stifled a gasp. It was the woman who had asked me a question at our panel: Madge Hollings!
With a wicked gleam in her eye, Madge Hollings walked over to the altar, picked up Cherry's cap, and placed it on her own head. Then she faced the gathered sisters.
"Sisters!" she announced. "We have an intruder amongst us! Throw back your hoods!"
They were on to me! I was trapped!
One by one the women threw back their hoods, revealing their faces. I had no choice but to do the same. Madge Holling stepped offstage and walked among us, inspecting each face. When she came to me, she stopped short.
"Nancy Drew," she hissed between clenched teeth.
How she had seen through my disguise, I'll never know. In that moment, the crowd surged forward.
When I regained consciousness I was locked in a trunk in the secret meeting hall of the secret sorority of the Seven Sisters.
The coffin prison was just large enough for me to lie flat.
I listened for sounds of my captors but heard nothing but silence. After much effort, I managed to reach down and take off one of my sneakers. Crying out for help, I knocked on the walls with it, attempted to tap out a code, but the sound did not carry. How I longed for a pump with a good hard heel! I felt a cold chill come over me as I realized that my prison tomb was airtight. Soon I would be out of oxygen!
The minutes ticked by in the darkness, and though I tried to breathe shallowly, I could feel my head
growing light as the oxygen waned, and a wave of sleepiness came over me. Resolutely, I willed myself to stay awake, knowing that if I fell asleep, I might never awake.
I thought of the twinkle in Ned's soft eyes. Frank's dark hair. Ned Junior. My hometown of River Heights. The mighty Muskoka. The photos Marty sent of my father's wizened face and omnipresent oxygen tank. I thought of whispering statues and haunted bridges, of tolling bells and hollow oaks. Perhaps Frank was right. Perhaps the world of the teen sleuth was coming to a close.
I was just slipping back into unconsciousness when the small door to my prison burst open and the concerned faces of Judy, Donna, George, and Kim appeared.
"We've found her!" George cried. "She's over here!"
Presently I was lifted from the secret room into the light of the secret meeting hall basement. The room was teaming with police, and several angry-looking, red-cloaked women sat handcuffed against the wall.
"Oh, Nancy!" Kim exclaimed. "We were worried sick!"
"It was Kim who found you," George explained. "We discovered some sister meeting minutes hidden in the altar. They were written in shorthand."
"I knew that course would come in handy," Kim declared proudly. "I can also operate a mimeograph."
Detective Ross came over and kneeled beside me. "You're a courageous lady, Nancy Drew," he exclaimed admiringly. "You broke up a sorority cult and caught Cherry's killer."
My head was beginning to clear. "So Madge Hollings did kill Cherry?"
"She's confessed to everything," Detective Ross answered.
"But why did she do it?" asked George, turning to me.
"The sorority," I told her simply. "Enrollment numbers have been down. Madge thought that it was because we weren't the right kind of role models. When I told her that Cherry was Helen Wells, she thought that by getting rid of Cherry she could take over authorship of the Cherry Ames franchise. With that kind of access to young minds, Madge could mold a whole generation of teenage girls. By updating Cherry Ames as a gum-chewing, Mustang-driving, Seven Sisters sorority girl, they thought that they could create a legion of young girls who would one day join the Seven Sisters. Of course," I added matter-of-factly, "what she didn't realize is that Cherry lost her publishing contract years ago."