The Ghostwriter Secret (9 page)

Steve kneeled down with the handbook opened next to him on the floor and slid the card into the crack between the door and the jamb, just above the lock, then started wiggling the card back and forth.

Nothing happened.

“Why isn't this working?” Steve muttered to himself.

“Where'd you get that card?” Dana asked through a mouthful of caviar.

“I took it off the maid's cart.”

“But, Steve—”

“I know, I know. It's stealing. But my heart is good and my intentions are noble!” He sawed away at the card.

“Steve—”

“The handbook says it will work. I just need to keep wiggling.” The card warped and bent and almost broke, but still nothing happened.

“Steve, stop!” Dana whispered fiercely.

Steve stopped.

“That's the maid's key card,” said Dana. “It opens all the doors in the hotel.”

“Hey, not everyone gets to go on a trip with their parents every summer and stay in hotels with fancy key cards,” Steve said.

“Key cards aren't really that fancy.”

“Whatever. I have a lock to pick.”

Steve was still for a few seconds, then he slowly withdrew the card. Right in front of his face, next to the handle, was a brass card slot with three little lights on it. He put the card in the slot and quickly removed it. A green light flashed and a lock clicked. Steve tried the handle. The door opened.

“We're in!” said Steve.

Dana smoothed the divot he'd made in the caviar, wiped the spoon on his shorts and put it back on the tray, and replaced the silver dome. Steve took a deep breath. The boys walked through the door, unsure what they'd find on the other side.

T
HE CURTAINS WERE DRAWN
and glowed at their edges. Otherwise the room was dark.

“My mom says that's the sign of a nice hotel room—when the curtains block out the light even in the daytime. MacArthur Bart's got nice taste,” Dana said.

“Of course he does,” said Steve. “He's the greatest writer of all time.”

Usually Dana rolled his eyes when Steve said that, which annoyed Steve and usually led to an argument. If Dana rolled his eyes this time, it was too dark to see.

Steve walked over to the drapes, yanked them
open, and let the late-morning sunlight fill the room.

Everything was neat and tidy. Steve had half expected upended furniture and dresser drawers strewn across the floor. Instead there was a typewriter on a desk and an empty suitcase on the floor. Three suits hung in the closet: one blue, one tan, one brown. There were socks in one drawer, underwear in another.

Dana dropped his beach ball and took off his hat and backpack. Steve put the camera down on the dresser.

“Look for anything that might tell us something about Bart's disappearance,” Steve said. “A letter from someone, a plane ticket to South America, a personal check for a large amount of money. Or a business card,” Steve added. “We don't even know where MacArthur Bart lives.”

Dana was peering under the bed, using Steve's flashlight. “I think there's a battery under here,” he said.

That wasn't very exciting.

“Never mind. It's just roll of mints.”

That was even less exciting.

“Actually, it's antacids.”

This search was going poorly.

They searched everywhere—every drawer, every
suit pocket, every hard-to-reach corner—for some kind of clue that would tell them anything about what had happened to MacArthur Bart. When they were done, they searched again.

Nothing.

Steve sat down on the edge of the bed. Dana offered him an antacid. He ate it. Then he sighed.

“We don't know anything more about MacArthur Bart now than we did this morning.”

Dana was looking out the window. “They have a nice pool here. Maybe we should go swimming.”

It wasn't a bad idea—the Bailey Brothers often stopped sleuthing to take a dip—and Steve was about to agree when he noticed a small white notepad on the bedside table. He'd seen it earlier, but—of course!—how had he forgotten? Steve stood up suddenly.

“Dana, give me a pencil.”

Dana reached into his backpack and hurried over with a bright yellow pencil in his hand. Steve snatched it from him and sat back down. The Bailey Brothers had used this trick to crack two different cases—
The Symbol of the Wheezing Jaguar
and
The Mystery of the Third Twin
. Now it was Steve's turn. He grabbed the pencil sideways in his fist and rubbed it back and forth against the page.

Dana was peering over Steve's shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“If MacArthur Bart wrote something on this pad of paper, his pen would have left grooves on the next sheet. This is an old detective's trick to reveal what he wrote.”

There, in the middle of a cloud of gray, emerged a string of white numbers.

“What is it?”

“Part of a phone number. Probably the last number MacArthur Bart called. This could be a big lead.”

“That's the area code for San Francisco. My grandparents used to live there,” said Dana.

“San Francisco …,” said Steve, chewing on his thumbnail.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of loud footsteps coming up the hall and stopping outside the door. Steve and Dana froze and listened hard. There was some rustling, and then the sound of a key card being inserted in the lock. Someone was coming inside!

S
TEVE AND
D
ANA RAN TO THE BATHROOM
and softly shut the door. Three seconds more and they would have been discovered. Steve heard two men enter the hotel room and begin to talk. Their voices were deep and muffled, and Steve couldn't make out a word they were saying. But he knew a baddie when he heard one, and these were definitely two baddies.

Moving slowly, deliberately, silently, Steve picked up a glass from the bathroom counter—two were sitting upside down on little paper doilies—and he nodded at Dana to do the same. Steve placed the mouth of the glass against the door and the conversation in
the other room became audible. Dana copied him.

“… hate stakeouts.”

“It's part of the job, Henry. It's part of the job.”

Henry! One guy's name was Henry.

“They have a nice pool here. Maybe we should go swimming.”

“Wrong. The boss says we're supposed to wait here for that Brixton kid.”

Steve's eyes widened. Dana's did too.

“How do we know he's going to come here?”

“The boss was sure he'd show up.”

“Great. So we wait. All I'm saying is this is not why I joined up with the Bee Syndicate.”

The Bee Syndicate! These must be the kidnappers. Steve wanted to write this stuff down, but he was afraid getting his notebook out would make too much noise. The guy named Henry kept talking.

“Hey,” said Henry. “Is that your backpack?”

Steve looked over at Dana. He was not wearing his backpack. Dana apologized with his eyes.

Suddenly the men in the other room got very quiet.

Steve pressed his ear hard against the glass in his hand, straining to hear anything. There was silence, and then, suddenly, the sound of a closet door being opened very fast. They were searching the room. Steve knew where they would look next. There was only one other place someone could hide, and he and Dana were hiding in it.

Steve and Dana eavesdropped on the two brutes.

Steve scanned the bathroom for something he could use as a weapon. All he could see were towels. Lots of towels. Towels in shapes and sizes he didn't even recognize. Varieties of towel extending far beyond the Big Three of hand towel, bath towel, and washcloth. Who could possibly use all these towels?

Steve reached into his pocket.

The door flew open.

S
TEVE PULLED OUT
the bottle of lavender bubble bath, uncapped it quickly, and aimed it at the goon's eyes. He squeezed. Time slowed.

Steve watched the purple fluid flying from the bottle toward the goon's stubbly face; the liquid's arc dropping sharply, way too early; the bubble bath hitting the goon's white shirt with a lavender splatter; the goon's mouth twisting as he laughed a laugh both angry and amused; the plastic bottle falling from Steve's hand and clattering weakly on the bathroom floor.

The man stepped forward, wiggled his fingers, and
closed them into a fist. “So you wanna fight dirty,” he said, grinning. “That's fine with me.”

The man lunged forward. Steve took a quick step back. And then, out of nowhere, Dana was stepping forward, as in toward their attacker, and Steve noticed that Dana was holding the white ceramic lid from the back of the toilet. He swung the toilet's ceramic lid hard and fast into the man's right knee. The big man doubled over and collapsed onto the floor, holding his leg in both hands. Dana dropped the lid, which crashed on the tile, breaking into three or four large pieces and a puff of white powder.

“Ace!” said Steve. Dana smiled, breathless, and ran out of the bathroom with Steve following right behind him.

They probably shouldn't have been surprised to see the second baddie standing there waiting for them. “I'm a little tougher than Henry,” he said, smiling mirthlessly.

Steve glared at him, about to spit out a smart retort that he hadn't quite yet thought of, when he suddenly recognized the man before him.

“You're the doorman!”

Steve looked him up and down carefully: He wore his greasy hair pulled back in a ponytail that glistened in the light from the window. The sleeves
of his shirt were pulled low and covered his tattoo.

“Good to see you again, Steve Brixton. Who's your friend?”

“This is my associate, Dana.”

“I'm not really his associate,” said Dana.

“Dana,” said the man. “Cute name. I guess you must be the Brixton Sister.”

And with that Dana went rushing toward the doorman.

The Shawn Bailey Flying Tackle, deployed with equal enthusiasm against rival schools' quarterbacks and the underworld's burliest creeps, looks like this:

Dana's bum-rush of the doorman looked more like a remote-control car running at high speed into a wall. Dana bounced off the man, who picked him up and held him, wriggling, in a full nelson.

Steve, determined to rescue his best friend and really wishing he had looked up “solar plexus” in his mom's anatomy book this morning, charged forward. He hadn't taken more than two steps when something hit the back of his foot and he went sprawling onto the carpet. Before he could get up, someone pinned his arms behind his back.

“Nice job, Henry,” said the doorman.

Steve craned his neck around and saw that Henry had indeed recovered and was holding both Steve's wrists in one meaty hand. Steve kicked his legs wildly and wriggled his wrists, but the struggle was fruitless.