Not A Girl Detective (29 page)

“Of course not. He actually lives near you. In a nice duplex on Croft. It’s got Moroccan decor.”

“What about Asher Farrell?”

“What about him? That’s ancient history.”

“What about the dog?”

“He came with. He played with Dr. Dan’s beagle,

Moo.”

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Was it me or was that sort of unappetizing? Lael, be-

ing the earthy sort, wouldn’t have thought so. I fluffed my pillow and went back to sleep, dreaming about frol-icking—puppies. Frolicking puppies.

The drive home later that morning was uneventful.

And things in L.A. were pretty much as I’d left them.

There was no change in Jake’s condition.

Andrew was still missing.

Bridget didn’t want to talk to me.

Gambino was back in Yucaipa, trying to figure out

who killed Tiffani Lowrie’s boyfriends.

And the painting of Grace Horton was still out there, which meant I still had to find it if I still wanted to know why any of this was going on, and I did.

I’m happy to report that Buster and Mimi harbored no

ill will about my spur-of-the-moment trip. Less happy that another tofu dish had been left on the doorstep, along with some gritty oatmeal raisin cookies—at least I hoped they were oatmeal raisin. God knows what those little black things were if they weren’t raisins. I called my daughter to thank her, but she was out.

I spent the next day organizing my closet, which is

what I do when I’m at a loss about how to organize my life. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. I came to the realization that I own five full-length evening gowns, which is comical given the fact that I have no use whatsoever for even one. I also have too many

scarves. And silky pajamas, the kind you’d wear in your stateroom on a luxury liner, not that I had any experience with staterooms or luxury liners.

At two in the afternoon, Victoria called from the

bookstore to say hello and to let me know that they’d received a shipment of some children’s series books.

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They were getting ready to send them off to a colleague who handled such things when it occurred to her that I might want to take a look. There were some Nancy

Drews in the lot.

I changed out of my sweats and into a white blouse,

thick raffia belt, and printed cotton circle skirt that evoked Portofino circa 1956, probably to no one but

me. I think I was still fantasizing about luxury liners and day-tripping in glamorous ports of call.

“You look like our mother on her honeymoon!” said

Victoria when she saw me. “Look, Dena!”

Dena grunted, her mouth full of jelly beans. She had

no imagination, that woman.

“The box is in the back room,” she finally managed

to get out. “I would say take your time, but the UPS guy is supposed to pick it up by five, so don’t take your time. Victoria and I are keeping a few things. They’re stacked on the table. Don’t touch those!”

I wandered back through a maze of dark and dusty

rooms lined floor to ceiling with leather-bound vol-

umes embossed with gold. In the center of one room

were old maps of California from the mission days,

curling at the edges. Yellowed photographs of railroad depots and cowboys in chaps covered the walls of another. The Dalthorp sisters specialized in California history and Western Americana. They owned multiple

pairs of cast-iron spurs.

I found the box sitting on the floor between the bathroom and the water cooler.

I sat down on a step stool and opened the lid. Perched right on top was
Ruth Fielding at Cameron Hall,
which I recognized right away as a Stratemeyer book from the twenties.

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Ruth Fielding was a plucky orphan who became an

internationally celebrated screenwriter, actress, director, and studio head. She was a typical Stratemeyer

heroine, embodying the get-up-and-go spirit of the new era of women’s rights. Before her—before the Motor

Girls, the Moving Picture Girls, the Radio Girls, and eventually Nancy Drew—all that girls had to read was

nineteenth-century sentimental rot, equal parts linensorting and tears. No wonder they had to satisfy their desire for adventure with books written for boys.

I put down
Ruth Fielding
and picked up
Dan Carter
and the Great Carved Face
by Mildred A. Wirt. This was one of the books Mildred had written under her

own name. At least she finally got her due, poor

woman, stuck all those years with that vow of secrecy.

And, ironically, it was the doing of her great nemesis, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.

After a seventy-five-year relationship between Gros-

set & Dunlap and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Harriet was looking for a more creative approach to marketing, and a bigger share of her series’ royalties. Grosset & Dunlap sued, claiming exclusive rights and charging

the publishing house Harriet wanted to bring in with

meddling into their contract negotiations with the

Stratemeyers.

The trial took place in 1980. Mildred was subpoe-

naed, and lo and behold, it turned out that oaths of silence were irrelevant to district court judges.

Everything came out—every last bit of correspondence

and every last release form, which pretty much made

clear the true identity of Carolyn Keene.

You had to feel a little sorry for Harriet. She must’ve gotten pretty used to being celebrated as the beloved N O T

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authoress. “I thought you were dead,” she was said to have stammered when she saw Mildred take the stand.

But Mildred wasn’t dead, just a ghost.

I grabbed a cup of water, then dug deeper into the

stack, past some well-worn Frank L. Baum books,

Ozma of Oz
and
Glinda of Oz
. Harriet died while watching
The Wizard of Oz,
as Edgar had reminded me the day we met. Some people made a big deal out of the fact that Nancy’s dog was named Togo, and that her fictional hometown, River Heights, was as fantastic a

fairyland as Oz, but I wasn’t sure. River Heights

must’ve had one of the highest crime rates in the country. Car bombs, home invasions, heists, kidnappings,

dognappings. But I suppose there was a lot of crime in Oz, too.

More Oz books. A Vicki Barr book (flight stew-

ardess). A Cherry Ames (war nurse). A Beverly Gray

(newspaper reporter). Two Trixie Beldens in excellent condition (a farm girl bored with the usual chores). Finally, I saw the only one of these plucky girls to survive, way down at the bottom of the stack.

Number 32,
The Scarlet Slipper Mystery
, 1954. In poor condition. Tape on the obverse side, stains on the spine.

Number 34,
The Hidden Window Mystery
, 1955.

Very good condition. Like many of the late ones, actually written by Harriet. Nancy, Bess, and George search for a missing stained-glass window and encounter a

mysterious ghost. It, by the way, had a fantastic cover image: Nancy shining a flashlight on an enormous peacock, straight out of Mogul India. I’d loved anything even vaguely Indian from the time I’d learned that Di-ana Vreeland, legendary editor of
Harper’s Bazaar,
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said that pink was the navy blue of India. I didn’t know if that was true (it sounded vaguely colonialist), but I liked the sound of it. Maybe Victoria would sell the

book to me. I could frame the dust jacket. Look at the peacock for inspiration. Peacocks are so beautiful.

Only the males, however.

Suddenly, I had a feeling of déjà vu. The dust jacket reminded me of something. Not the peacock.

The girl.

The high beam of light.

The burst of white.

I knew.

It reminded me of the black-and-white photograph

Edgar Edwards had sent me from beyond the grave.

3 3

I drove home too fast and threw open the front

door, which crashed against the wall of the entryway, leaving a knob-shaped dent. Now I could add replaster-ing to the list.

I headed straight back to the bedroom, yanked open

the chest of drawers, pushed aside my Lanvin cape, and pulled out the photograph.

Buster started to bark and Mimi started to whimper.

They hated being ignored. I tossed them both into the hall and closed the door, gently this time.

I sat down on the edge of my bed with the picture in

my hand. What was it trying to tell me?

The woman in the picture was holding a flashlight,

pointing it straight out in front of her, hoping it would illuminate something. Her path. An object. She was alert, attuned to sounds, smells. She may have been frightened. Her head was turned slightly, as if she might have heard someone coming up behind her, looking for her,

or maybe looking for the very thing she couldn’t find.

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The woman could’ve been my double. Edgar saw

the resemblance, no doubt. What I couldn’t figure out, though, was how he could have known that the picture

looked exactly the way my life felt. I was looking for something and I wasn’t even sure what. All I knew

was why.

For him. And for Jake.

I turned the photograph over. L. Sands. L. Sands.

Who was L. Sands? If I could just figure that out. I’d searched the Internet for the name half a dozen times, but maybe I’d missed something. I exited the French

doors in the bedroom and walked through the soggy

grass to my desk. I shoved everything in my way into

the top of a cardboard box from Office Depot contain-

ing five thousand sheets of white paper, typed in

“google.com” and then “L. Sands.”

I waited.

A real-estate broker named Boris L. Sands. A physi-

cist named Eunice L. Sands. The Lost Sands of Kuwait, a French video game. No, no, no.

I checked my e-mail.

The usual garbage. Mortgage refinances. Wrinkle

creams. A snippy note from my editor, Sally, telling me she’d be out of the office for two weeks and was expecting the completed manuscript upon her return. Sally

needed downtime. She was very tightly wound. Burn

fat while you sleep. Enlarge your penis. Another posting from the Society of Chums. Bette from Cleveland

had been given a Newfoundland puppy. Joe from East

Aurora, NY, warned her that puppies are attracted to the glue in the spines of books. A heads-up: Turner Classic Movies was screening
Nancy Drew—Detective
from N O T

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the 1930s, which I’d never seen, on July 17. A big ker-fuffle: an English edition of
The Clue in the Crumbling
Wall,
misprinted as
The Glue in the Crumbling Wall,
was for sale on eBay. Edgar would’ve loved that. Another curiosity for his memorabilia category.

Memorabilia. I looked away from the screen. Edgar

was a collector of Nancy Drew memorabilia. And it was a Nancy Drew dust jacket that had reminded me of the photograph he’d sent me. Was that yet another coincidence—

or was there no such thing? Then something occurred to me. I could take the question directly to the source.

Because I owned a scanner.

I’d gotten it last year as part of a package deal on my new printer. They’d thrown it in for almost nothing,

which I’d always assumed meant it wouldn’t work. I’d

stuck the thing in the corner, thinking I’d get Vincent, a computer whiz, to hook it up for me one day, only I kept forgetting to ask him. Uncharacteristically, I’d saved the instructions. How hard could it be to hook up?

Two hours, two calls to the Hewlett-Packard help-

line, and the rest of the bad Chianti later, I put the photograph on the glass, hit the button, and attached the image to a query to the Chums’ Listserv. It read:

I was given this by a Nancy Drew collector and I’m

baffled. If there’s anyone out there who can deci-

pher it, or who knows who L. Sands is, I’d be eter-

nally grateful.

Yours in sleuthing, Cece Caruso

It was worth a shot.

I went back inside and checked my phone messages.

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Annie had returned my call. They were raisins, thank

god. Gambino had called, too, from Yucaipa. I plopped down on the couch and called Annie back first.

She sounded good. Things were going well on
Testament,
the
Star Trek
-esque TV show for which she was head set designer. She’d blown everyone away with her new idea for a podule for the ecologically minded

Commander Gow, which she described as a 100 per-

cent recyclable holographic cocoon. Her garden was

thriving. She’d bought a set of bamboo chairs at the

Rose Bowl flea market. And on Friday, she and Vincent and Vincent’s three-year-old little boy, Alexander,

were driving up to Big Sur for the weekend. Annie

wanted to know what I used to do to amuse her on long car trips, but to be honest, I couldn’t remember any

long car trips.

Then it was my turn. I told her in long and gory detail how I’d set up the scanner. She was impressed. Then I gave her the
Reader’s Digest
version of the rest of my life, not particularly eager to get into my recent encounters with myriad officers of the law. She knew me well enough to know I was dodging something or other, but Vincent took that moment to sneak up on her and

scare her half to death, or so she said between giggles, and she had to go.

I called Gambino next.

“You were right,” he said. “I hate to admit it.”

“Right about what?”