Sweet Revenge (9 page)

“Yeah, but my dad was the real mastermind. I just held nails for him.”

“I bet you did more than that,” Bess piped up, moving up beside them. “Anyway, it's beautiful.”

Jake nervously brushed his sandy hair back, as if embarrassed. But his hazel eyes were filled with pride. After finding the girls chairs at the end of one row, he continued seating the other guests.

Glancing around, Nancy saw that the room was already almost full, and a couple of photographers had stationed themselves near the stage. It seemed odd that Dan Avery wasn't among them, she thought, considering how he'd practically stomped all over everyone trying to get shots of some of the other events. Come to think of it, Nancy hadn't seen him all day. Where could he be?

Before she could wonder any further, Mrs. Tagley strode briskly onto the stage, and everyone started clapping. Then, with a quick bow, Mrs. Tagley announced, “Tonight I'll be preparing a dessert I call Chocolate Volcano. It's a spectacular finale to any meal, and it's a fun dessert to demonstrate because it's so dramatic. I'm going to need an audience volunteer. Who'd like to help me?”

A forest of hands popped into the air.

“How would
you
like to help?” she asked, pointing straight at Nancy.

“Me?” Nancy asked in surprise. She hadn't even had her hand up. “But I—”

“Go ahead. It'll be fun,” whispered Bess eagerly.

“How can you resist?” George chimed in, grinning.

“Well, okay—why not?” Nancy stood up and began making her way toward the stage.

Bess was right. Working on the Chocolate Volcano
was
fun. Together Nancy and Mrs. Tagley shaped a mound of chocolate mousse into the shape of a mountain. Then Mrs. Tagley showed Nancy how to roll out a sheet of chocolate “leather”—made of chocolate mixed with corn syrup—and how to fit the leather neatly over the “mountain,” leaving a hole at the top.

“Why do I suddenly feel all thumbs?” asked Nancy with a laugh. She happened to glance out at the audience as she spoke and saw that Jake had taken her chair and was whispering something in Bess's ear. Bess smiled at him, and then Jake slipped quietly out of the conference room.

“And now comes the most realistic touch,” Mrs. Tagley was saying cheerfully. She seemed more relaxed than Nancy had ever seen her. Obviously, cooking and chocolate brought out the best in her. “I'm talking about the molten lava.”

“Lava?” Nancy repeated in mock alarm. “Sounds dangerous!”

“Not at all. First we pour a half-cup of rum into the hole at the top of the mountain.” Mrs. Tagley handed over the rum, and Nancy poured it in carefully.

“Next, we light the flame. The rum will begin to burn, and that's what makes the ‘lava.' There won't be any alcohol left after it burns off, so you younger people will be able to sample this. Now to light the flame!” From a drawer under the table, Mrs. Tagley pulled out a miniature acetylene torch.

“Now, that
really
looks dangerous!” someone in the crowd called out.

There was a little nervous laughter before Mrs. Tagley said reassuringly, “It's not. Honestly, it's one of the most important cooking tools I own.”

Mrs. Tagley pressed a button on the torch, and a thin spurt of blue flame leapt out. Carefully she aimed the flame at the rum that was now streaming down the sides of the cake. In an instant the rum was ablaze.

“There's your volcano!” she announced triumphantly—and the audience burst into spontaneous applause.

Just then Nancy was distracted by a thin cloud of white powder drifting down from the ceiling and settling in the air around her.

“Hey!” said Nancy, waving to try to clear the air. “Where did
that
—”

A muffled explosion cut off the rest of her sentence.

Before anyone had time to move, Nancy was surrounded by a sheet of flame!

F
OR THE REST
of her life Nancy would be grateful that she'd so often rehearsed what to do in a fire emergency. Without conscious thought she dropped to the ground and rolled rapidly over and over until the flames licking at her clothes were out. Then, panting, she jumped to her feet. She had acted so swiftly that she hadn't been burned at all. One sleeve of her blouse was slightly charred, but that was the extent of the burns.

Checking Mrs. Tagley, Nancy saw that the woman, though white and shaking, was also unharmed. The fire had spread by then to the stage curtains behind them and the audience had
panicked and was screaming and running for the exit.

“Where's, a fire extinguisher?” Nancy called loudly to Mrs. Tagley, above the din.

Mrs. Tagley's mouth opened, but she didn't make a sound. She was swaying and gripping the edge of the table as though she were about to pass out.

Nancy peered out at the audience, frantically checking the room for a fire extinguisher. There had to be one— Yes! There it was, hanging on the wall next to a circuit breaker. She ran to it, yanked it from the wall, and raced back to the fire.

As she reached the stage, the curtain ripped from its metal frame and tumbled to the floor, a mass of flames that spread across the entire width of the platform.

Nancy yanked back the pin on the fire extinguisher and aimed it at the flames. Foam shot out, dousing the fire. In seconds the flames were out, and the curtain was a black, smoldering tangle on the floor.

Drawing a deep breath, Nancy checked on Mrs. Tagley again. She was still leaning against the table for support and was quite obviously in shock.

There were only a few people left in the conference room now, and one hysterical voice kept calling out over and over.

“Nancy! Nancy! Are you all right?”

It was Bess.

“I'm fine,” Nancy called back shakily. “But I
don't feel like making another Chocolate Volcano for a long, long time.”

• • •

“Now, explain to me just why you turned off the sprinkler system,” the fire chief was saying patiently to Samantha.

“I knew that the dessert was going to be flambéed,” Samantha said shakily. “I was afraid that the flames would set off the sprinkler, so—so I switched off the system. I'll never do it again,” she added in a small voice.

The fire chief's expression softened. “Okay. I'm holding you to that.”

Nancy was standing a little to the side with Bess and George, frowning. Something seemed wrong to her. She wasn't an expert, of course, but she was pretty sure flambéing a dessert wouldn't set off a sprinkler system. Was Samantha lying? Had she turned off the sprinkler in preparation for what was to come?

With a start, Nancy realized the fire chief was now talking to her. “You're a lucky girl. If you hadn't been so quick on your feet, that flour could have burned the whole room down in a matter of minutes.”

“That powder was just flour?” said George incredulously. “I thought it was some kind of explosive.”

“It was, in a way. Flour's just like any fine powder. It can be an explosive if the individual particles have lots of air around them,” the chief explained. “All it takes is a spark and—well, you saw what happened.”

Nancy shuddered. “I certainly did.”

Turning back to Samantha, the fire chief said, “I know this was a cooking demonstration, but can you tell me one more thing? How did that flour happen to fall?”

“I don't know, Chief,” Samantha said, shaking her head. “Maybe my mother does, but I—I don't think she should be disturbed tonight.”

Samantha had missed the visiting hours to see Tim, so she had arrived back just after the fire department—or, at least, that was her claim. She had taken one look at her mother and called their family doctor, who had prescribed a sedative and sent Mrs. Tagley to bed.

“Well, I was just asking,” said the chief, shrugging. “Probably there's a simple explanation.”

But that wasn't what Nancy thought.

The Chocolate Volcano didn't contain any flour. Nancy had seen the recipe. And even if the dessert
had
needed flour, the flour would have been in a canister on the table—not drifting down from the ceiling.

One thing was for sure—once everything settled down and the conference room was empty again, Nancy was going to find out how flour got up to the ceiling.

It was another two hours before Nancy could go back to the room to investigate. She'd found a ladder in a nearby room and dragged it up onto the stage. She set it up and climbed up to get a close look at the ceiling.

Nancy's lips tightened. A small hole had been
drilled in the ceiling tile directly above the spot where the demonstration table had stood.

So her suspicions had been right! She saw that the tile could be lifted from its frame. She pushed it up carefully and peered into the gloomy crawlspace above the ceiling.

There, lying on its side on a beam, was a five-pound bag of flour.

Nancy tested the frame that the tiles were set into. It seemed to be strong enough to support a person's weight, but the beam definitely would be.

Someone had probably perched on the beam and poured flour through the hole. Someone who knew it would burst into flames in Nancy's face!

• • •

“It was Mrs. Tagley, Nancy,” Bess said decisively, squeezing toothpaste onto her toothbrush. The three girls had crowded into the single bathroom and were going over the case as they washed up before bed. “It had to be. That fainting act of hers was just that—an act. She was out to stop you because you were getting too close to the truth about her poisoning Brock!”

“I don't know about that,” said George. She finished splashing water on her face and reached past Bess for a towel. “If she was faking it, she's a pretty good actress. But we
do
know it couldn't have been Tim. He's still in police custody.”

“You're right,” Nancy said from her perch on the edge of the bathtub. “Whoever poured the flour down obviously wanted to stop my investigation.
Mrs. Tagley's definitely my strongest suspect right now. I remember thinking it was odd that she picked me out of the crowd like that. Maybe she had the whole thing planned. Of course, she couldn't have poured the flour while she was standing right next to me. But she could have rigged the bag so that some of the flour would spill during the demonstration.

“I'm still wondering about Dan Avery, too,” Nancy went on. “He wasn't around during the demonstration. He could have hidden above the ceiling and waited. I went down to the front desk and asked about him after checking out the conference room. The clerk said she hadn't seen him since yesterday. Have either of you?”

Bess and George shook their heads. “He's so gross I almost
hope
he's the culprit,” said Bess.

“Actually, though,” Nancy went on, “there's another person who wasn't at the demonstration tonight—Samantha. And if there's anyone who could have slipped into the conference room with a bag of flour, it's her. No one would question what she was doing.”

Bess pulled her blond hair off her face with a terry headband and bent over the sink to wash her face. “Yes, but why would she want to attack you, Nancy?” she said, frowning. “Samantha wouldn't have done anything to hurt Brock, so she wouldn't have any reason to stop your investigation. Besides, she
asked
you to investigate this case—remember?”

Nancy nodded. “She doesn't seem to have any
kind of motive, either. All I'm saying is that she had the
opportunity
to rig the conference room. She turned off the sprinkler system, too.”

“Wait—there's one other person who had the same opportunity as Sam
and
who wasn't at the demonstration tonight,” said George slowly. She'd retreated to the doorway to give the others more room. “Not at it most of the time, anyway—Jake.”

“
Jake!”
Bess gasped sharply. “George, you've got to be kidding! Jake wouldn't hurt a fly! Besides, he had a perfectly good reason for leaving the demonstration. He told me he had to finish varnishing a section of floor in the east wing.”

“Hmm,” said Nancy, considering. “Jake would have had plenty of chances to rig the conference room. But I can't think of any reason he'd want to poison Brock. So why would he want me out of the way? We certainly can't rule him out, but—”

“Yes, you can,” Bess cut in, still obviously distressed. “Rule him out right now.”

“Actually, I think that what I should do now—what we
all
should do—is get some sleep,” said Nancy.

“Good idea,” George agreed. “But I hope I don't dream about chocolate waffles—or whatever chocolatey breakfast they have in store for us tomorrow morning.”

• • •

“He's doing much better! He's doing much better!” Bess's shriek reached Nancy through a
fog of sleep. The next thing Nancy knew, someone was bouncing at the foot of her bed.