“Okay. You got me.” Ian stood up. “Can you undo this? It takes me forever. Reaching around to the back is hard.” Xena unsnapped him and Ian stepped out of the costume. “Sorry if I scared you.”
“Sorry?” Xander asked. “Wasn’t that what you were trying to do—scare people?”
“Well—yes,” Ian admitted.
“Why?” Xena asked.
Instead of answering, Ian looked back at the house. Then he sighed and said, “I love this place, you know. I love everything about it.”
“You sure don’t act like it,” Xander said. “Remember that first day we met you and you said it was dull here?”
“I know. I was just trying to convince myself I’d rather live in London. It made me sad to think that I’d never live here again. My parents were going to sell the paintings of my ancestors,
and my great-grandfather’s souvenirs from when he was an explorer, and—” He stopped, his voice a little shaky.
“What made you think of using the Beast costume to scare people?” Xena tried to change the subject.
When Ian answered, his voice was steadier. “Oh, I’ve always been crazy about the movies, and when the film students came and my parents gave them permission to use the property to film a documentary, I hung around and watched them a lot. I saw the Beast costume. I couldn’t figure out how it fit into a documentary, but I didn’t care. That Beast costume was really scary, especially in the dark, and it gave me an idea for how to stop the sale of the house. I even took some really old newspapers from the library to find out how the Beast acted when it was here before. I tried to return them but every time I go in, the librarian’s watching, so I haven’t been able to put them back.”
Ian dug the toe of his shoe into the ground, and when he spoke again he sounded miserable. “I thought that if we didn’t sell the house, my parents would come up with some other way to make money.”
“Like what?” Xena asked.
“I don’t know. Open a tearoom or give tours or something. But it’s no good.” Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Well,” Xena said finally, “if you give me the newspapers, I can sneak them in without the librarian noticing.” Ian looked as if he didn’t believe her.
“Really, she can do it,” Xander assured him. “People don’t see her if she doesn’t want them to.”
“Okay.” Ian picked up the Beast costume and disappeared into the stable with it, and then emerged again with a stack of yellowing newspapers in his arms. “Thanks,” he said. “That librarian scares me.”
“More than the Beast?” Xena asked, trying to make him laugh.
He didn’t laugh, but his voice sounded more relaxed. “It’s too late for you to cycle back to town. Why don’t you spend the night? We have plenty of space.”
“Cool!” Xander said. “I can’t wait to see inside the house.”
The house lived up to their wildest dreams. The rooms were huge, and there were fascinating things in most of them. A room like a den was decorated with exotic rugs and statues that Ian
said had come from India, and in one of the sitting rooms (there were three) was the most enormous fireplace Xena and Xander had ever seen. It was topped by a mantel carved with strange twisted figures. Everywhere big paintings of ladies and gentlemen and fat babies hung on the walls.
Finally, after they had explored enough to satisfy even Xander, Ian showed them their bedroom. It was paneled in warm, dark wood. The two beds were so high there were step stools next to them for climbing in, and mattresses so soft Xena thought she might never want to get up.
When they woke the next morning the sun was shining brightly.
“What time is it?” Xander asked.
Xena, who seemed to have an internal clock, said, “Past ten o’clock, I think. Let’s go find Ian.”
When they reached the bottom of the huge sweeping staircase, they heard voices from inside one of the sitting rooms. Xena cracked open the door and peered in. There were Ian’s parents, whom they had seen in the tourist office; the film crew that had been working on the Beast project; a man with a gray beard; and Ian. Xena caught Ian’s attention and beckoned to him.
“You’ll never believe it!” He came up to them, his eyes shining with happiness. “The best thing has happened!”
“What?” Xena and Xander asked together.
Ian pulled them a bit away from the door. “Do you see that man?” he asked, pointing through the opening to the gray-bearded man, who was now in deep conversation with Ian’s parents. “He’s the head of the film school. He came down to Blackslope to see how the students were coming along. And he’s best friends with a famous director, and he said that his friend has been looking for a house and a property just like this to use for his next movie. They’re going to pay my parents enough money that we’ll be able to stay here!”
Xena and Xander said in chorus, “Wow! Congratulations!”
“And I’m going to work with them on the weekends and after school.” Ian looked embarrassed. “Kind of to pay them back for messing with their things.” He smiled at them and then waved as he went back into the sitting room.
“Let’s go,” Xena said. “We don’t want Mom and Dad to start worrying.” She put the newspapers into one of the bike’s saddlebags and they took off for town.
The clock in the church tower struck eleven as they passed it. When they got back to the B and B, they found that Mrs. Roberts had left a pile of scones on the table and a note saying there was some cocoa ready for “hotting up” on the stove in the kitchen. She added that their parents were taking a last drive through the country and would be back soon to pick them up to go home to London.
As they were eating their late breakfast Xander said, “You know, Xena, we didn’t really solve the mystery.”
“What are you talking about?” She was indignant. “Of course we did!”
He shook his head. “I didn’t mean our Beast mystery. I meant Sherlock’s Beast, the one in the cold-case file. Plus there’s still that missing sheep.”
Xena thought for a moment. “I haven’t heard anyone else say anything about the missing sheep since that day in the library. It must have found its way home. But you’re right about Sherlock’s case.”
Suddenly she was as disappointed as her brother. She spread bright red preserves on her scone and took a bite. When Xander didn’t answer her she looked up. He was sitting with a
blank look in his eyes, his mouth hanging open. “Hello? Earth to Xander!”
He shook his head like a dog shaking water off itself. “I just thought of something! Quick—where are those newspapers that Ian had?”
They carefully washed all the crumbs and jam off their hands before touching the fragile old newspapers.
“It was something in one of the illustrations,” Xander said. “Whoever drew the pictures made them look almost as realistic as photographs.”
Xena looked over his shoulder. Ladies with feathered hats and gentlemen carrying skinny canes and wearing tight suits strolled arm in arm down a busy street. “What a funny little dog that lady has. And look, you can even read the signs on the wall.” There were posters advertising a haberdashery, whatever that was, a charity tea, and a traveling circus. “Look at that!” She marveled at the intricate detail. “An aerialist? I wonder what that is.”
“A trapeze artist.” Xena didn’t question him; she knew he had memorized most of the dictionary. “And look.” He pointed to the circus poster. “They had a dancing bear and jugglers.”
“Must have been a great circus!” Xena said.
Xander wasn’t listening. Instead he pulled out another paper, this one dated a week later. “Same circus in the next town, but nothing about a bear.”
“Let me see,” Xena said. Sure enough, there was no mention of a bear on the poster of the circus a week later in a different town.
“Hmm,” she said, sitting back and closing her eyes. “I wonder …”
Xander sat still.
“I think I’ve got it.” Xena opened her eyes. “What if they called it a dancing bear because it had a hurt foot, like it was missing a toe, and it walked funny?”
“The four-toed footprint!”
“Exactly,” Xena said. “And what if the bear escaped from the circus, and people who saw it reported it as some kind of beast? They were so scared they imagined the beast had horns. The circus people wouldn’t have told them what really happened, because they’d get in trouble for not keeping track of a dangerous animal, so they just moved on without reporting it. Maybe they found the bear, or maybe it lived in the woods for a while and then died. That’s why they didn’t advertise a dancing bear when they got to the next town. They didn’t have one anymore!”
“But what about Adeline the cook?”
“I bet she ran away from that awful husband of hers,” Xena said. “We’ll never know for sure, but I bet she joined the circus.”
Xander stood up and went upstairs. He came down with the cold-case notebook of their great ancestor, Sherlock Holmes. He rummaged around in a drawer of an end table and pulled out a pen and a pad of sticky notes. He tore one off and then took the notebook from Xena. He flipped to the page at the end of the section on the Beast of Blackslope, attached the note to it, and with a flourish wrote the words:
CASE CLOSED.