006 White Water Terror (2 page)

W
HAT’S STILL NOT
clear to me,” Nancy told George and Bess the next day, leaning across the table at Bennie’s Ice Cream Parlor, “is whether the phone call I got last night was a warning or a threat. I mean, I couldn’t tell from the tone of voice whether the caller meant to threaten me with harm or keep me from getting hurt.” She chewed her lip, puzzled. “I couldn’t even tell whether the voice was female or male.”

George dug into her favorite chocolate-mint ice-cream sundae. “Why in the world would anybody want to keep you from going on the
trip?” she demanded. After a moment’s hesitation, she turned to Bess. “That phone call . . . it wasn’t
you,
was it?” she asked suspiciously.

Bess looked hurt. “I went to a concert last night and didn’t get back until after midnight. Anyway, you know I wouldn’t do something that ridiculous. If I wanted to keep you or Nancy from going on the trip, I’d try to convince you in person.”

George sighed. “I know. Sorry.”

Nancy took the last bite of her banana split, watching George intently. “Are you sure you’ve told us absolutely everything you know about the contest?”

“All I know is what’s in that letter from Paula Hancock. I’ve tried and tried to remember exactly when I entered the contest, but I can’t.”

Bess smiled mischievously. “Well, then, maybe it would be better if we didn’t go.” She pushed her half-finished diet drink away, looking with longing at George’s sundae. “The beach is awfully nice at this time of year.”

Nancy looked at George. In the back of her mind was the growing conviction that there was something not right about the contest. But the phone call and George’s inability to recall entering it were her only clues.

“I don’t suppose you’d reconsider your decision to go?” Nancy asked half hopefully. “Maybe we could find another white water rafting trip, if you’ve got your heart set on that.
There must be others that would be just as exciting.”

“Yes, but this is a
free
trip,” George reminded.

Nancy and Bess exchanged long looks. “What about it, Bess?” Nancy asked.

“Well,” Bess said reluctantly, “I’m not exactly thrilled by the idea of spending two whole days hanging on to a raft, getting drenched by icy water, and bouncing from one rock to another. But I hate to think of you out there on the river with some kook who makes weird phone calls.” She shrugged. “You can count me in, I guess.”

“That settles it, then,” Nancy said with a grin, laying her spoon beside her empty dish. She felt good remembering that the three of them had always stuck together, even in tough times. Whatever happened, they weren’t going to let George face the trip alone. Besides, it was already shaping up to be a very interesting vacation. “Lost River, here we come!” she exclaimed.

• • •

“Where in the world do you suppose we are?” Bess asked from the backseat of the rental car that Ned was driving. She leaned over and took the map out of George’s hands. “Here, let
me
have a look at that map. Maybe I can find us.”

Nancy leaned precariously over the front seat.
“The road just made another left turn back there,” she said, pointing to the small hand-printed map that Bess was holding.

“Well, what do you think, Bess?” Ned asked, braking suddenly and twisting the wheel to avoid a granite boulder that had tumbled off a cliff and lay in fragments in the road. “Are we taking the right route?”

“It looks like we are,” Bess said, grabbing frantically for the armrest as the car lurched sideways and threatened to go into a skid. “But who cares? The map doesn’t have any route numbers or anything. If this is all we have to go on, Lost River is likely to
stay
lost.” She thrust the map back at George. “You know, it’s almost as if whoever drew this map
wants
us to spend the whole morning wandering around in the mountains.”

“I hate to admit it, but Bess may have something there,” George said, staring at the map with a puzzled frown. “And another thing. I can’t figure out why nobody met us at the airport yesterday, the way the letter promised. You’d think that a company big enough to run a national contest would arrange to meet the grand-prize winner when she got off the plane.”

Nancy nodded. “I wondered about that myself. What a start for a vacation!”

Actually, Nancy thought as she settled back into the car seat, it hadn’t even begun to feel like a vacation yet. The four of them had rushed
to the airport but waited several hours for a flight from Denver that was so bumpy it would have made an eagle airsick. In Great Falls, there was nobody to meet them—only an envelope containing a hand-drawn map. Scrawled on the bottom were unsigned instructions to pick up a rental car and drive to Lost River Junction that night.

But by the time a car was available, it was late. They had spent the night at the only place they could find—a motel next door to the airport, where jets seemed to plow through the bedrooms every hour on the hour. Dragging themselves out of bed, they were on the road by five o’clock—anxious to get to Lost River Junction before the rafts left at nine.

“Well,” Ned said, rolling down the window and taking a deep breath, “now that we’re here, I’m glad. Smell those pine trees. What a wilderness this is!”

It
was
a wilderness, Nancy thought. They hadn’t seen a sign of civilization for miles. For the last half hour, the narrow two-lane asphalt road had twisted and turned upward into the mountains like a mountain-goat trail. At the moment it was zigzagging precariously across the face of a vertical rock cliff.

Above the cliff and on the other side of the creek, huge pine and spruce trees reached toward the clear blue Montana sky.

Even though it was the middle of July, the
breeze was cool and brisk and invigorating, not at all like the steamy, oven-hot summer weather they had left back home.

Nancy stretched and filled her lungs with the clean air. In spite of everything, she was glad they had come. She glanced at Ned’s calm profile and his sturdy, capable hands on the steering wheel. She was glad to be with him. With Ned along to help her laugh, the trip hadn’t seemed nearly so bad.

Bess looked out the window. “I suppose there are wild animals out there,” she said in a worried tone.

“Right,” agreed Ned. “Plenty of them.” He grinned at Bess in the rearview mirror. “Black bears and cougars and mountain lions and rattlesnakes.”

With a little moan, Bess shut her eyes tight and hunched down in the seat.

“You know, I’m really getting worried about how late we are,” George said, glancing at her watch. “It’s after eight o’clock, and we’re scheduled to leave at nine. You don’t suppose they’d start the trip without us, do you?”

“I don’t think they’d leave without their grand-prize winner,” Nancy consoled her. “They wouldn’t dare. After all, you
are
the reason for this trip.” She hesitated. If George were the reason for the trip, why had
Nancy
received the mysterious phone call?

“Anyway, I’m just as glad things got screwed
up with the rental car and that we didn’t have to drive this road last night,” Ned said. “With all these twists and turns, it’s dangerous enough in broad daylight. I don’t think we—”

“Ned!” Nancy yelled. “Stop!”

Just a few yards ahead of the front bumper, the road vanished into thin air.

Bess gasped.

Ned jammed his foot on the pedal, making the brakes squeal. “Oh, no!” George screamed. “We’re going over!”

T
HE RENTAL CAR
screeched around in a circle before skidding erratically to a halt. The four friends sat for a moment in stunned silence, once again staring at the sheer emptiness ahead. The road was completely gone, carried down the cliff and into the ravine by a massive rockslide.

“Ned!” Nancy exclaimed, her horror mixed with limp relief. “If you hadn’t stopped when you did . . .”

“We’re just lucky it was daylight,” Ned said soberly.

Shuddering, Nancy peered down into the ravine where the slide had loosened enormous
boulders and huge gray slabs of asphalt. “We would have been killed if we’d dropped down there!” She looked around. “Is everybody okay?”

Bess rubbed her head. A bump was beginning to appear where she had hit her head against the car window. “I think so,” she said in a dazed voice. “Good thing we were wearing seat belts.”

“But why isn’t there a barricade across the road?” George asked, jumping out of the car and stepping cautiously to the edge of the drop-off.

“Maybe the slide just happened,” Ned suggested.

Nancy got out and looked around. “I don’t think so,” she said. “There are signs of erosion down there, and even a few weeds in the rubble. I’d say this road has been out of commission for weeks, at least.”

Bess came to stand beside Nancy. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to something orange half-hidden behind a pile of brush a dozen yards below. “Isn’t that a barricade?”

George scrambled partway down the slope. “It
is
a barricade,” she called. “It looks as if somebody tried to hide it!”

“You mean somebody tried to
kill
us?” Bess asked.

Nancy frowned. “I don’t think we can draw that conclusion from the evidence,” she said
slowly. “All we know is that the road is out and the barricade is missing.”

“That barricade was deliberately hidden,” George corrected her breathlessly, climbing back up to the road. “There’s no way it could have
accidentally
gotten covered up under all that brush.” She shivered. “You know, Nancy, as Ned was saying a few minutes ago, if we’d driven up here last night after dark—the way we were supposed to—we wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“That’s true,” Nancy said. “But we don’t know that the barricade was removed just for
our
benefit. A road crew might have come to inspect the slide and forgotten to put it back up.”

“Well, maybe you’re right,” Bess said, looking pale and shaken. “But I don’t know. Between this and your phone call, Nancy, the whole thing looks really suspicious.”

“You’re right,” Nancy agreed. “I’d say that we have to be on our guard.”

“In fact,” Bess said hopefully, “maybe we ought to reconsider.” She turned to George. “Haven’t we already had enough excitement for one trip?”

Ned had managed to turn the car around, and the girls got back in. “Well, what now?” he asked.

Nancy looked at the others. “Do you want to go back to Great Falls and take the next plane
home? Or do we keep trying to find Lost River?”

“I want to get to the bottom of this thing,” said George. “And I’m stubborn. I don’t want to give up my prize.” She looked around. “But just because I’m crazy, doesn’t mean you all have to stay. I’ll understand if anybody decides to go back home.”

Bess heaved a sigh of resignation. “If George is staying, I guess I will, too.”

Ned reached over and ruffled Nancy’s hair. “I’m in this as long as you are, Nan,” he said.

“In that case,” Nancy said briskly, “we’d better find an alternative route. This road isn’t going anywhere but down.” She pulled a state highway map out of the glove compartment and began to compare it to the map they had been given. “I think I see how to get there,” she reported after several minutes. “Let’s go back to the last fork in the road and take a left. Then it looks like we take two more left turns—we’ll be there in thirty or forty minutes.”

“You’re the detective,” Ned replied cheerfully, and drove back down the mountain.

Thirty minutes later, they pulled up at Lost River Junction, a small cluster of weathered, tired-looking wooden sheds huddled under tall pine trees beside the road. As Nancy got out of the car, she saw that one of the sheds sported a crude sign that said White Water Rafting in crooked letters. The sign looked new, she noticed,
in contrast to the old building. Down the hill, behind the building, she glimpsed a group of people standing on the bank of a river, next to two big rubber rafts.

“Looks like we’ve made it—finally,” Ned announced, turning off the ignition.

“Fantastic!” George exclaimed. She got out of the car, her concern about the trip momentarily forgotten. “Listen to that river!”

“I hate to tell you guys this,” Bess remarked, “but I hear roaring.
Loud
roaring.”

“Right,” Ned said, opening the trunk and beginning to pull out their gear. “Sounds like a pretty big falls not far away.” Grinning, he handed Bess her duffel bag. “That’s what white water rafting is all about, you know, Bess. Water falling over the rocks. It always makes a noise.”

Bess took the bag, shaking her head.

Nancy slung her backpack over her shoulder and followed George to the river. She was wearing khaki-colored safari shorts and a red knit polo shirt, a sweatshirt tied around her neck. The sun felt warm on her shoulders.

“Hi!” George said, hailing a tall, thin-faced young woman who was standing beside one of the rafts. “I’m George Fayne. Can you tell me where to find Paula Hancock? She runs White Water Rafting.”

The young woman looked up. Nancy couldn’t tell whether she was surprised to see them. “I’m Paula,” the woman said. She was in her early twenties, Nancy judged, wiry-thin and tense, like a nervous animal. “You’re late. We expected you last night.”