How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (29 page)

Okay, I figured, taking a deep breath. It was the expired Amex or nothing.

I slid the credit card down the seam of the door, at the same time turning the handle, just as I'd seen detectives do on TV. Apparently, I wasn't quite as slick as Columbo or Dennis Franz—well, they'd have probably just shot the lock out anyway—because it took me three tries before I heard the magic click that told me I'd achieved sleuthing success.

I'd never understood much about physics, having never understood much about math, but I knew enough to know that it was the counterforce created by the tension of me holding the doorknob just so that caused the door to swing open with such force, taking my arm with it, once I'd freed the lock.

Gasping for breath after my exertions, as I finally burst into this room that had been secret from me so long, I saw…

A fax machine?

Oh, there was a lot of other office equipment in there too, most of it looking old-fashioned. But the centerpiece and what really drew my attention was that fax machine.

Why did Edgar keep office equipment up here, I wondered, when his embassy office was downstairs? And why hadn't he told me what was in this room? Why, above everything else, was that fax machine so
old?
Couldn't the U.S. government afford better? Or was it just that Iceland was considered to be such a lesser embassy posting, not being as important as either Paris or London or Bonn, that it got dumped with all the leftovers?

For, surely, this ancient fax machine I saw now was the source of all the weird noises I'd heard. I saw that now, because I heard it make the very same noise as a new message came in, adding to the one I'd heard come in just a short while earlier, the paper scrolling out to add some more to the scroll already there.

I tore the sheet off, feeling Drewishly curious to see what had disturbed my sleep, what was so important it had to be communicated this way in the middle of the night.

The “From” part of the first fax read “Robert Miller.” The body read:

 

Edgar: our suspicions have been confirmed

 

It ended there. Apparently, the earlier transmission had been cut off.

What
had been confirmed?

I scanned down quickly to the second fax to find out.

This one also started out “From: Robert Miller”—must have been a permanent letterhead, I thought. But then my blood froze, clichéd as it may sound, my blood froze as I read the contents:

The words danced in front of me, as though I were trying to make sense out of some foreign language. I couldn't believe what I was reading. How was this possible? What was going on here?

But I realized there was no time for me to question the how or why of anything. So what if I felt like Nancy, jumping the shark in #56, the final book in the original series,
The Thirteenth Pearl.
I had to assume the paper I was holding was the truth, in which case Annette, having gone willingly with Bebe, whom Annette believed to be her future mother but who was in fact a spy with the Russian mafia, was in grave danger. I had to find her before Bebe did whatever she was going to do to her for whatever reason. It might not make much sense to me, none of it, but I had to save Annette.

Bebe had told Mrs. Fairly she was taking Annette overnight to do something “spiritual.” What could she have meant by that?

Making the same kind of leap of logic I'd read about Nancy Drew making countless times, the kind that made the reader think,
Whatever made her think of that?,
until she proved to be right, I thought of the only spiritual place I knew of in Iceland: the church.

I raced down the hall, down the stairs, had the door open and was outside before I realized I was barefoot. This wouldn't do at all, I thought, going back for my boots that were near the hall tree. I wouldn't get very far if my feet got frostbite. Nancy Drew might be impulsive, but she was always prepared.

And my feet wouldn't do, either, I realized.

The church was far enough away that it was too far to walk. And, anyway, enough time had been lost already. Annette had been gone for about eight hours, I figured. The thought of taking any more time to get to her than was absolutely necessary made me want to scream.

That was when I did the bravest thing I could remember ever doing in my entire life.

I hurried to the kitchen, where there was a wooden board on the wall with keys hanging from it. It was where Lars Aquavit kept the keys to the car. Without a second thought, without thinking once about how scared I was to drive that car alone, that car I couldn't even drive when someone was with me and telling me what to do, I reached for the keys, snagging them in my hands.

Then I was back in the hall, almost out the front door a second time, when Nancy Drew screamed in my brain, “A weapon! How are you going to defend yourself, if the need arises, without a weapon?”

Gee, she'd never talked directly to me like that before. And who would have imagined her voice would be so deep? She sounded just like Adriana Trigiani. She was an alto!

She was right, of course.

But, I wanted to scream back at her, I didn't have time for this! There was a little girl who needed saving. I didn't have time to pretend I was a young sleuth, going through the house stealthily to see if Edgar had conveniently left a gun or a sabre lying around that I could use in an emergency.

And then there it was.

On the same rack, from the bottom of which I'd grabbed my boots, Mrs. Fairly's black umbrella hung from a hook. I had never bothered to get my own umbrella, a fact Mrs. Fairly endlessly teased me about every time I got wet, which was often here. And whenever she used it and I saw her coming up the walk, I thought of Mary Poppins, about to fly away. I could probably poke someone in the eye or stomach with it if need be and, in a pinch, I could always just open it up; the sheer size of it popping open would confuse anybody.

I snatched it off the wall, sending up a prayer of thanks to Mary Poppins, the Patron Saint of Nannies everywhere, as I finally made it out the door.

 

I may have been in a rush to get to where I was going, but with my limited driving skills—okay, my nonexistent driving skills—it would have been foolish to rush too much and take the risk of killing myself before accomplishing whatever good I was supposed to accomplish in the world on this night.

Plus, I still wasn't sure how to get the damn car out of the driveway.

“Come on, Charlotte,” I said, pep-talking myself, “you got the key in the lock, you got the door open. It's a start.”

My fingers trembled a bit—from the cold? From fear?—as I fit the key into the ignition.

“Cut it out!” I yelled at myself. “You're supposed to be being brave and intrepid right now. So stop being unbrave and unintrepid.”

I turned the key, trying to remember everything Lars Aquavit had tried to teach me about forward and reverse, and when to do those things, about all the different gears, about the gas, and especially about the brake.

Please,
I thought, getting serious as I backed the car down the drive,
just let me be competent long enough to do what I need to do.

Being competent lasted just long enough to get me the rest of the way down the drive, turning the car around and heading for the church at a snail's pace in one of the lower gears.

“At this rate, it would probably be quicker if you walked,” I told myself.

“Oh, shut up. Whose side are you on?” I told myself right back.

Yes, being competent lasted as I drove through the streets, passing the occasional cars of intrepid Icelanders who'd probably been out late partying. It lasted right until I got to the church.

That was when, seeing the finish line right there ahead of me, perhaps due to my overeagerness, I did the same brain-dead thing I'd done on the first day Lars Aquavit tried to teach me to drive. Pulling up, confusing the gas for the brake, I hit down hard on it, slamming into the side of the church.

Crap!

There went the front end of the car again. Having been healed once by mechanics already, it was once more crumpled up like an accordion at a bar mitzvah.

But there was no time for that now. Fuck the car.

I pushed the door open with my boot, grabbing the umbrella as I exited.

Then I raced to the door of the church, praying it was unlocked, since I'd forgotten my sewing needle and expired Amex card back at the embassy.

The door pulled right open. Maybe in other parts of the world, sanctuary had to be limited to business hours due to vandalism and violent crime. But here in Reykjavik, where the most likely criminal thing to happen was whatever was going on here, sanctuary was just as convenient as slurpies at a 7-Eleven.

I rushed into the church, trying to be as quiet as a rushing person in winter boots could possibly be, so as not to alert Bebe.

But the church was empty. I could see that, as I zigzagged in and out of the pews, checked out the altar. Empty.

Had I been wrong?

Oh, crap! This was just the kind of thing that would never happen to Nancy Drew—wasting time by going to the wrong place, chasing phantoms. All of Nancy's phantoms always turned out to be real. Well, except that they were all fiction.

Think, Charlotte, think!

The stairs!

The stairs in the entryway, the ones that led up to the bell tower!

Moving quicker than I'd ever moved in my life, I ran to the entryway and up the winding stairs, pushing aside the feelings of nausea and dizziness brought on by a full day of not eating anything.

As I came through to the top that overlooked the city, the freezing top where the wind whipped around, I saw by the light of the stars a huddled something in the corner: Annette!

Guarding her, of course, was Bebe Iversdottir.

She no longer looked beautiful to me, not even icily beautiful.

“You
bitch!
” I screamed at her, unthinking, as I pointed my umbrella at her.

“You…
governess!
” she laughed back at me, raising her gun in frustration. “You're too late.”

“What?”

I looked more closely at Annette. It was then that I noticed for the first time that her eyes were closed. She hadn't noticed my loud and clumsy entrance. Was she asleep? Was she…dead?

“What have you done to her?” I demanded.

But before she could answer, we both heard the sound of more than one pair of feet echoing up the long stairwell.

Bebe glanced over the edge. Then she turned back to me, horrified.

“The
police?
” she said, no longer laughing as she trained her gun on me. “You called the
police?
”

I was as surprised as she was. And I didn't like to be talked to like that.

“No,”
I said just as scathingly, “
I
didn't call the police.”

Of course I hadn't called the police. I'd figured: Who would ever believe me? Who ever believes anyone about things like kidnappings and the Russian mafia until afterward?

But then I realized that gun she had trained on me was no laughing matter. In her desperation, who knew what she would do? It would be convenient if she hurled herself over the side of the tower, falling to the concrete and ice down below, but I wasn't counting on it.

So I reverted to plan.

Thank
God
I'd made a plan!

I hit the release on the umbrella and as it popped open wide, I swung it two-fisted like a Louisville Slugger, connecting the silver tip clean with the deadly gray of the gun and sending it sailing out into the night.

“Okay,” I heard the Icelandic-accented voice behind me. “Which one of you crashed the embassy car?”

Y
ou could say that it was my lousy driving skills and not Nancy Drew at all that saved my life and Annette's. After all, the cops never would have found us if I hadn't crashed into the side of the church. And who knew what Bebe might have done then? True, I was ready with my umbrella. But there was no guarantee there would have been the same happy ending.

Of course, the happy ending was a while in coming. First, Annette had to be revived. Only, it turned out she didn't need to be revived at all. It turned out she was only sleeping. That child could sleep through anything!

In the meantime, Bebe had been trying to persuade the cops that I was some kind of lunatic—“Just look at how she is dressed!”—who'd kidnapped the two of them at umbrella-point.

She was just backing toward the stairwell, as though the cops might just let her go, when Annette woke up.

She looked around the bell tower, confused, wiping the sleep from her eyes.

“Miss Charlotte!” she cried with joy when she saw me. Then she looked accusingly at Bebe. “That woman is awful,” she told me. “She promised me we were going someplace special, but then she brought me to this cold place and told me to go to sleep. I definitely do not want
her
to be my mother.”

Now that she was awake, the cops immediately recognized the ambassador's daughter and they began to take matters more seriously.

If this really were a Nancy Drew book I was living, they would have let me grill Bebe myself. The police always let Nancy question subjects and after a few empathetic words from her—“We all make mistakes at times”—they were always ready to tell her the whole story and go straight. Perhaps I could be that persuasive, too?

Well, of course
that
wasn't going to happen. And when I told them Bebe was a spy with the Russian mafia, they became very skeptical.

See? I knew that would happen.

But I had the presence of mind to have them call police headquarters and have someone else sent to the embassy to retrieve the fax from Robert Miller fingering Bebe. They called another car to take Bebe away for questioning and then they took Annette and I home. It was all so confusing, and I still wasn't sure exactly what was going on, what had gone on, but at least Annette was safe and in my arms.

It wasn't until late the next day that I learned the whole story.

I hardly could believe the truth when I heard it.

 

Apparently the urgent call for Edgar, summoning him to the States, had all been another ruse of Bebe's and he came rushing home on the earliest flight.

He hugged Annette so hard, crouching down beside her, I thought he was never going to let her go. But then he stood and hugged me, too.

“Thank you, Charlotte,” he said, tears in his eyes. “If it hadn't been for you…”

He left the sentence hanging. We both knew it didn't bear thinking about.

Previously, when I'd wanted to learn the answer to a mystery, I'd played Nancy Drew, sneaking around the house. But now I realized the best way to learn what I wanted to know—and there was a lot!—was to just be straightforward about it, ask a few questions. If I was lucky, I might even get a few answers.

“Just what the hell has been going on here?” I demanded once Mrs. Fairly had removed Annette from the room, promising her extra cake. Everyone, the whole household, was about spoiling Annette for the time being.

I suppose I could have phrased my question more delicately, but I was through once and for all with being subservient. Whatever was going on here, it had almost gotten people killed.

“I suppose I owe you an explanation,” Edgar said.

“And
how,
” I said. “By my calculations, you owe me about fifty-six explanations, but I'll settle for one at a time.”

“Which would you like me to start with?” he asked with rare contrition.

“Bebe,” I said, certain that would answer a lot, “anything to do with Bebe.”

“Well,” he said simply, “she works, or I should say
worked
for the Russian mafia.”

“I know that,” I said, exasperated. “I saw the fax.”

“Yes,” he said, “and it was a good thing you did. It's also a good thing you told the police here about it. When Bebe realized she'd been identified, she immediately caved under questioning.”

“You've spoken to the police here already?” I asked.

“Yes, I called them repeatedly from my cell whenever I could while traveling. You don't think I was going to wait until I got back here to find out what was going on, do you?”

“Well,” I said, “you do have that outdated fax machine upstairs, so who knew you could be so modern as to carry a cell?”

“That's right,” he said ruefully. “You saw the room, finally learned your madwoman was really my old equipment in the communications room.”

“Communications room?” I echoed. It sounded so ominous, so…CIA. “Why would you need such a thing?”

“To keep nosy people like Mrs. Fairly and you from reading things you shouldn't. We'd been suspicious of Bebe for a long time but hadn't any proof.”

“Well,” I said, “it was a good thing I was nosy this time, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” he said, getting serious, his voice soft, “it was.”

But I didn't want to hear that softness in his voice. I certainly didn't want to respond to it.

“Back to Bebe…” I suggested.

“Yes,” he said, getting businesslike again, “Bebe. Once she saw the fax, she fingered everyone else in the organization. This is great news,” he said, looking a trifle sad, “because it means that very soon Annette will finally be able to go home.”

“Go home?” I echoed his words once again. “But this is her home,” I said, “here, with you.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “You see, Annette's not really my daughter.”

“What?”

That was when he explained to me that Annette was the next in line of a country with royalty whose current royal was under control of the Russian mafia. Now, with the plot to snatch Annette busted up—Bebe had been hiding with Annette in the tower until morning, when she was planning to fly Annette out of the country, never to be seen again—the little girl could finally go home. Edgar himself was ex-CIA and he'd been put in Iceland as the ambassador so he wouldn't be noticeable in order to protect her.

“You mean you're not really an ambassador?”

“Oh, I'm really an ambassador.” He smiled.

“How?” I asked.

“You'd be surprised,” he said, “how few people want these posts, considering the vetting process. And I was qualified, sort of. I am ex-CIA, after all.”

“That's a little hard to believe,” I said. “It's very hard.”

“Yes, well,” he said, “we live in a world where skyscrapers can fall from the sky and yet, somehow, flowers still bloom, somewhere, every single day. So what's one more improbable thing?”

Indeed.

“Does Annette know about any of this?” I asked.

“No,” he said sadly. “She's been with me since she was just two years old. She really does think I'm her father.”

It was like Annette was the Aurora from
Sleeping Beauty
, given away for her own protection at a young age.

“It'll be so hard on her when she finds out,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “but her mother is a good woman. I've met her. And she's waited so long to get her daughter back.”

It had rankled me, the idea of Bebe raising the child I loved so much. This I could deal with, however: once Annette went back home, wherever home was for her, I might never see her again. But she'd be going to a mother who loved her.

“It'll be hard on you, too,” I said, realizing it even as I said it, “letting her go like that, after all this time.”

“Yes,” was all he said.

“So,” I said, sucking it up, “back to Bebe.”

“Yes?”

“Were you really ever in love with her?”

“God, no!” he said, clearly horrified at the prospect. “That was just all to trap her. The only woman I can ever remember really loving in my life now, truly loving, is you.”

And then he kissed me.

It was the kind of amazing kiss that heals everything, erasing all the bad, leaving only good.

I couldn't believe how good it was.

Finally, I forced myself to draw away from him, looked up at him with hopeful eyes.

“Then we can be married now?” I asked.

Now it was his turn to draw back.

“Well,” he said, “there's a slight problem. You see, I'm already married.”

“What?”

I drew back farther.

“It's not what you think,” he said, reaching for me, but I pulled back even farther, out of reach, crossed my arms.

“Explain,” I said, hiding behind sternness, refusing to give in to the tears that threatened to form.

God, I was emotional these days. What was that all about?

“I've been married for a long time,” he said, running his fingers through his hair as though exasperated at the mere thought of that marriage. “But in name only,” he hastily added. “I was already married, and my marriage was already dead as far as I was concerned, when Robert Miller came to me with the mission of protecting Annette.”

“And, what?” I asked. “You were just too busy these last few years to get around to getting divorced?”

“Essentially? Yes.”

“And what of your…
wife
—is it in name only for her, too?”

“I haven't spoken to Belinda for a long time,” he said. “The last I heard, she was living with some businessman in Spain. So, to answer your question, I'd say, yes.”

It was so much to digest.

“I'll get a divorce,” he said, “as soon as possible. But in the meantime,” he added, reaching for me again, “we can be together.”

“No,” I said, remaining out of reach, “we can't.”