“Give me your best wild guess, Kat Wolfe,” instructed Harper, as if she were a TV quiz mistress. “Don’t worry, there are no wrong answers. Is the Clue Club a book club or a robbery club?”
“Maybe both,” said Kat, sipping at a tall glass of OJ. She and Harper were both owl-eyed after a much-needed afternoon nap on the sofas with the huskies.
“If that’s really how our gangsters met—playing boring board games,” Harper went on. “How does the club work? Do they roll the dice remotely, then send Clue challenges by snail mail: ‘I suggest it was Colonel Mustard, in the library, with a candlestick … Oh, and by the way, let’s steal a priceless painting next Wednesday.’ Doesn’t seem very practical.”
She nudged the box of games she’d rejected with a woolly-socked foot. “Although I have to admit even I enjoy Clue. Six weapons, six suspects, nine rooms, and three hundred and twenty-four possible solutions. What’s not to like?”
“It’s easy to like murder mysteries when they’re just a game,” said Kat, taking another newspaper from the pile she’d brought in from the garage. “We’re dealing with real humans. There seem to be three hundred and twenty-four possible solutions to our case too, and we can’t fathom any of them. Meantime, it’s nearly four P.M. The kidnappers could be in Outer Mongolia by now.”
“Not unless they’ve chartered a rocket ship,” Harper said drily. “The roads around us are either ice rinks or ski jumps. Anyone driving is risking their lives.”
It seemed impossible to believe that the roads would be cleared by the following day, yet their parents insisted they’d be at Nightingale Lodge on Thursday afternoon as planned. The girls had texted them using Harper’s home messaging account. Professor Lamb replied in minutes. His flight was on time, and he expected to arrive at the cabin around 4:00 P.M. the next day.
Dr. Wolfe took hours to respond.
Sorry, been at the spa having a facial! So relieved you’re coping in the storm. Good news. Lake Placid Car Rental will have a vehicle for me by 2pm tomorrow. I should be with you by 3:30pm.
“A facial?” Kat was put out. “I thought she’d be sitting by the phone worrying.”
“You told her not to worry,” Harper reminded her. “Something about being placid in Lake Placid. Do you want her to be stressing that we’ve been buried alive in a blizzard or need our fingers amputated after frostbite?”
Kat was affronted. “I want Mum to be relaxed and happy more than anything on earth. She deserves all the pampering she can handle. It’s just that … Oh, Harper, I’m so tired, and I miss her and Tiny so much. I love investigating cases with you, and I’m desperate to help Riley, but somehow solving this mystery seems especially hard.”
“It does, but like you always say, we know more than we think we do. Breathe. Hug a husky. Or me. It’ll turn out okay, I promise.”
Humor restored, Kat fetched the scissors. Harper had made lightning progress online. By comparison, Kat’s old-fashioned methods had uncovered few useful nuggets. She snipped around the edges of a piece from USA Today: DYLAN GUITAR THEFT CAUSES A STINK. The gist of it was that a rare Bob Dylan guitar had vanished from a glass case during a touring exhibition in Austin, Texas. Looking at the timeline, this must have been the gang’s first successful robbery.
Shortly before the guitar was snatched, some prankster set off a stink bomb. There’d been a stampede. No one witnessed the theft. Nobody saw the stink bomb being planted either. A cleaner claimed she glimpsed a “bionic” man sprinting away from the trash area where the smelly device was found. Police didn’t believe her.
By now, Harper and Kat had pieced together the basics of every robbery. It was the same story every time. Some kind of distraction followed by a robbery with no witnesses.
“Brenda from the Sleepy-Time Inn was right about the Wish List gang being ghosts,” said Kat. “In nine robberies, Riley was the only witness.”
Harper looked up from her laptop. “Even ghosts leave traces.”
Kat giggled. “What traces do they leave?”
“How should I know? Steam, vapor, smoke … Do you believe in ghosts, Kat Wolfe?”
“No,” Kat said firmly. “I do not. Do you?”
“Not sure,” admitted Harper. “I don’t believe in ghosts on the internet. Sooner or later everyone leaves footprints online. Not me, naturally, but the average person. The Wish List gang will have left a trail. It’s just a question of finding it.”
She reached for Kat’s watercolor pad. “There’s a thread that runs through everything. We’re just not seeing it.”
WISH LIST CRIMES
1. 1964 Fender Stratocaster Guitar Played by Bob Dylan
2. Green-Enameled Ming “Dragon” Vase
3. 1913 Liberty Head Nickel
4. Lost Eighteenth-Century Masterpiece by Sofia Rossi
5. Rare First Edition of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
6. Fifth-Century Bronze Sculpture of a Horse and Hare
7. 1918 Inverted Jenny Stamp
8. Dress Worn by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady
9. $50,000,000 Hollinghurst Diamond Necklace
“I’ve been over and over it,” said Kat, “trying to see what links them to the Clue Club, other than a passion for mysteries. Some of the gangsters grew up in the same town, some like nature and wildlife, some have experienced trauma. Rob lost his legs and his career, and Gerry, Bianca, Emilio, and Georgia lost their loved ones to cancer. But there’s no one thing that connects all of them. We don’t even know for sure if they were all in the Clue Club.”
“Let’s say we’re sort of correct and each of the gang stole one item on the wish list…,” said Harper.
“Except for Gerry. We think he stole two.”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t working alone when he lifted the diamond necklace. Wrong Writer Six told him in the letter: ‘Don’t be nervous. We’ve got your back.’ WW6 also said there’d be a ‘full house’ of operatives. The entire gang must have been at the Royal Manhattan that evening. Where’s that article you read me on our first night in the cabin?”
Kat dug it out, and they studied it together.
“There were too many dramas during the event for them all to be coincidence,” said Kat. “What if we assume that the four climate-change activists who took a blowtorch to the polar bear were Wish List gang members? There was the lobster incident too. A kitchen hand and an accomplice liberated the sad creatures from their tank.”
“Good for them.” Harper smiled. “Okay, we have six potential members, plus Gerry. Seven. Anyone else? Did we ever find out the name of the shop that caught fire across the street? That was the biggest diversion of the night.”
“Fabulous Furs.” Kat shivered at the thought of the mink and leopards that had died so that fashion victims could strut about in their coats. “There was something about them in the New York Post. But on the night of the fire, the shop was vacant. The owners had gone out of business because they’d been caught selling coats made from endangered animals. Nobody was harmed in the blaze apart from a military veteran. He had to be rescued, suffering from smoke inhalation after his wheelchair got stuck in—”
She stopped and looked at Harper. “You don’t think Rob…?”
“If the military vet was a Wish List gangster, our case would break wide open. That’s what I think.” Harper straightened in her chair, detective radar on red alert. “Kat, what if one reason the Wrong Writers have been so invisible is because the gang members are the kind of people society often doesn’t see?”
“You mean, people in wheelchairs, senior citizens, immigrants, climate-change activists, the hired help…?” Were humans really that shallow and insensitive? Kat felt unwell at the thought.
“Precisely,” said Harper. “But that doesn’t change the fact that the Wish List gangsters are criminal masterminds who may have abducted Riley. Let’s not forget about that. Where did you put that article on Bob Dylan’s guitar? Didn’t the cleaner report seeing a ‘bionic’ man fleeing the scene after the stink bomb went off?”
“Yep. She called him the ‘Blade Runner.’”
Harper looked thoughtful. “Rob uses prosthetics when he’s doing his personal training. Says he can run faster than he did when he was playing college football. Other times, he uses his wheelchair, so that would fit too.”
Distant thunder rattled the windows. Matty and Rebel raced to the door, whining and growling.
“Each time I think we’ve seen the back of Storm Mindy, she has a new evil plan to punish us,” groaned Harper. “She’s dumped a Mount Everest’s worth of snow on us, a whole Lake Superior of rain on us, and almost crushed us with a tree branch blown by one of the many gales she’s sent our way. Now we have to endure a thunderstorm?”
“For once, Storm Mindy’s not to blame,” said Kat, peering out of the window. “There’s a snowplow clearing the road on the west of the lake.”
They both knew what that meant. Once the lane was open, they were on borrowed time.
“Don’t panic,” said Harper. “It takes a snowplow around seven hours to clear fifteen miles of road, and it’s four thirty P.M. now. Even if it continues working overnight, what’s the likelihood of the owner turning up before morning?”
Kat didn’t reply. She was taking in the utter devastation that they and the huskies had unintentionally wreaked on the cabin. How were they going to fix it before dawn? Apart from anything else, they’d demolished the entire contents of the fridge. The raccoon had helped, but the owner wouldn’t believe that.
“Let’s take the dogs out and get some air,” said Harper. “It’ll wake us up, and I need to think.”