Curse of the Arctic Star (14 page)

“Anyway,” I continued, “we didn’t see them near the mini-golf course, but it wasn’t that crowded up there. Any of the three of them could’ve easily sneaked in there at some point and rigged that moose’s antler to fall on someone.”

“Yeah. Good thing Nancy has quick reflexes.” Bess shuddered. “She could’ve been killed!”

“Wait a minute!” Vince blurted out, sounding panicky. “What moose? We didn’t do that! And we weren’t trying to
kill
anyone!”

“Shut up!” Lacey glared daggers at him.

But Vince didn’t even seem to hear her. He shoved forward past the security guards. “No, seriously!” he told the captain. “I mean, okay, you caught us. I confess and all that—we’re working for the vice president of Jubilee.” He turned to look at Becca. “He hates your
friend Verity, by the way. Says she’s a traitor to the company. But he still likes your grandfather. That’s why we sent you that message.”

“Yeah,” Lacey spat out. “Too bad you didn’t listen.”

“Wait, back up,” I broke in. “What message? You mean that threatening e-mail Becca got before the cruise started?”

“What threatening e-mail?” Captain Peterson put in, sounding confused.

“It wasn’t supposed to be a threat,” Vince protested. “It was supposed to be a warning! We didn’t want Becca to get mixed up in all this.”

“More like you didn’t want her to work for the competition at all,” I said.

“Whatever.” Vince shrugged. “My point is, yeah, we did most of that stuff, okay? But we never tried to actually hurt anyone, so whatever this moose thing is you’re talking about, we had nothing to do with that! I swear!”

“Would you shut your big fat mouth?” Lacey snapped. “Or I’ll shut it for you!”

“All right, I think I’ve heard enough.” The captain gestured to the guards. “Take them into custody, and let’s contact the local police.”

A few minutes of chaos followed. Vince pleaded for mercy, while Lacey called him every bad name in the book. My friends and I stepped back and watched as the security guards hustled them both out of the spa. The captain followed, his cell phone pressed to his ear and Becca at his side.

“Think Vince was lying about the moose thing?” George wondered.

“Probably,” Bess said. “I bet he panicked when he realized that could be seen as, like, attempted murder or something.”

I shrugged, feeling troubled. “Maybe. On the other hand, those loose bolts might have been an oversight like we originally speculated.” I bit my lip. “Anyway, I just realized something else. There’s no way those two could’ve planted that note in my suitcase.”

“But Iris probably could have,” Bess pointed out.

“I guess. But why? She had no way of knowing I was
there to investigate, and otherwise it’s just too random.”

“Whatever,” George said. “You solved the case, right? I mean, Vince just confessed right in front of us. So yay us—now we can relax and enjoy the rest of the cruise.”

Just then Becca stuck her head back in through the spa door. “Are you three coming?” she asked. “The captain just called the Ketchikan police to let them know we’re on our way. He wants you to come along and give your statements at the station.”

“Coming,” I said, doing my best to shake off the loose ends tickling my mind. George was right—we’d solved the case.

Yay us.

Later that afternoon I took back my ship ID as the check-in woman smiled and waved me through. “Welcome back aboard, Miss Drew,” she said. “Just in the nick of time!”

I thanked her, though my words were lost in the blare of the ship’s air horn announcing our imminent
departure from Ketchikan. Bess and George had stopped to wait for me just past the check-in, though Becca and the captain had hurried on ahead.

“Well, that was fun,” George said when I joined her and Bess. “When I heard we’d be going ashore at Ketchikan, I never thought I’d be spending so much time in the local police station.”

“You and me both.” I smiled. We’d spent the past two hours at the precinct, giving our statements and answering questions from the captain and the cops. Vince and Lacey had been arrested, along with Iris—it turned out my guess was right and she was a Jubilee plant too.

Bess stretched her arms over her head, looking happy. “So now that we’re officially on vacation, what do you want to do first?” she asked. “Should we go get our nails done? Or maybe check out some of the shops?”

“Ugh.” George made a face. “With all the activities they’ve got on this ship,
that’s
what you want to do? Shopping and primping? You can do that stuff at home!”

“Before we do anything else, can we please get a snack?” I suggested. “Suddenly, I’m starving.”

My friends agreed, and we headed for the stairwell. Halfway to the next floor, we heard the sound of voices somewhere just above us.

“Is that Becca I hear?” George commented. “She didn’t get far.”

When we reached the landing, Becca and the captain were standing there with Marcelo, Becca’s boss. All three of them looked grim and anxious.

“What’s wrong?” Bess asked.

Becca spun to face us. “I thought the trouble was over!” she cried. “But something else just happened—the ship’s jewelry store just got robbed!”

“What?” George exclaimed.

“Are you sure that wasn’t Vince and Lacey too?” I put in.

“Definitely not.” Captain Peterson shook his head. “Marcelo says it happened within the past half hour or so—someone must have taken advantage of the usual pandemonium of the passengers reboarding.”

By the way he was talking to me, I guessed that Becca must have filled him in on who I was and why I was onboard, though Marcelo looked confused. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anyone until we’ve had a chance to look into it,” he said, obviously still taking us for ordinary passengers.

“Of course,” Bess told him.

“I’d better go look into this,” the captain said, rubbing a hand over his face and looking weary. He glanced at Becca and Marcelo. “As you just said, we don’t want this to get out to the passengers. So you two had better go do your thing and keep everyone happy—and distracted.”

Becca and Marcelo nodded and dashed up the stairs to the lido deck, with the captain right behind them. My friends and I followed more slowly.

“Wow,” Bess said. “What do you think of that?”

George shrugged. “It might not mean anything much,” she pointed out. “I mean, jewelry stores get robbed all the time, right? Maybe someone sneaked onboard from the town or something.”

I bit my lip as those nagging loose ends crowded back into my mind—that note in my suitcase. The moose incident. The heated argument I’d overheard in the kitchen. And even some of the pre-cruise mischief, which none of the culprits had fessed up to at the police station. Were those things just random red herrings?

“Maybe,” I said slowly. “Or . . .”

I didn’t finish. We’d just reached the deck, and I spotted Alan rushing toward us.

“There you are!” he exclaimed. “I was afraid you’d missed the departure.” He shook his head mock sternly at me. “I still don’t know why you all decided to come ashore to try to catch up with me. I told you I’d get your postcards, didn’t I?”

Bess linked an arm through his. “We know,” she told him sweetly. “But we remembered some other shopping we wanted to do. That’s why I texted you to say we were coming back to town. It’s just too bad we never found each other.”

It was a pretty lame cover story for where we’d really been, but Alan didn’t question it. As he started
chattering eagerly about trying the ship’s climbing wall or something, I traded a look with Bess and George, wishing we were free to continue our conversation.

But it didn’t really matter, because I knew we were all thinking the same thing. There was no way that Vince, Lacey, and Iris had robbed the jewelry store—not if the timing was what Marcelo said it was.

Those loose ends started flapping away in my mind again as I realized that maybe we weren’t going to be able to relax and enjoy this cruise just yet . . . .

Dear Diary,

OKAY, SO WE DIDN’T SOLVE
EVERY
mystery. But maybe on the next part of the tour—the train ride to Denali—I’ll have time to think everything through, clue by clue, and help Becca.

Then I’ll be able to pan for that gold!

READ WHAT HAPPENS IN THE NEXT MYSTERY IN THE NANCY DREW DIARIES,

Strangers on a Train

“
NANCY! DOWN HERE!
”

I hurried down the last few steps to the landing and saw Becca Wright waving as she rushed up the next set of steps toward me. The cruise ship’s atrium stairwell was deserted except for the two of us, just as she’d predicted. Almost everyone aboard the
Arctic Star
was gathered along the open-air decks watching the view as the ship chugged into the picturesque port of Skagway, Alaska.

“I don’t have much time,” I told Becca. “Alan thinks I’m in the ladies’ room. He wants to get a photo of all of us at the rail when we dock.”

“I don’t have much time either.” Becca checked her watch. As the
Arctic Star
’s assistant cruise director, she was always busy. “I’m supposed to be getting ready for disembarkation right now. But I just found out something I thought you’d want to know right away. The police caught the robber!”

I gasped, flashing back to the events of the day before yesterday. While the ship was docked in a town called Ketchikan, someone had robbed the shipboard jewelry store.

“Really, they caught someone already? That’s amazing!” I exclaimed. “Who was it?”

“A guy named Troy Anderson,” Becca replied, leaning down to pluck a stray bit of lint off the carpet. “I guess he’s well known to the local authorities as a petty thief and general troublemaker type. They caught him over in Juneau trying to fence the stuff he stole.”

I blinked, taking that in. It wasn’t exactly the answer I’d been expecting. “So he wasn’t a passenger or crew member on the
Arctic Star
?”

Becca raked a hand through her dark curls. “Nope.
Which is weird, right? I have no idea how he got onboard.” She smiled weakly. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re still here, Nancy. I hope you’re in the mood for another mystery?”

The
Arctic Star
was the flagship of the brand-new Superstar Cruises, and this was its maiden voyage. However, things had gone wrong from the start.
Before
the start, actually. That was why Becca had called me. We’d known each other for years, and she knew I liked nothing better than investigating a tough mystery. She’d called me in—along with my two best friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne—because she was worried that someone was trying to sabotage the new ship.

And she’d been right. Just a few days into the cruise, I’d nabbed the saboteurs, Vince and Lacey. They were working for a rival cruise line, trying to put Superstar out of business.

Then the jewelry store robbery happened—
after
Vince and Lacey were in custody. And I’d realized that maybe the mystery wasn’t over after all.

“Do you think this Anderson guy had an accomplice on the ship?” I asked. “If so, maybe that person was also responsible for some of the other stuff that’s been going wrong.”

Becca bit her lip, looking anxious. “I hope not. Because I was really hoping all the trouble would be over after you busted Vince and Lacey.”

I knew what she meant. I’d been trying to convince myself that the case was solved. That a few dangling loose ends didn’t matter. That those loose ends were just red herrings, easily explained by bad luck, coincidence, whatever.

What kind of loose ends? Well, for instance, there was the threatening note I’d found in my suitcase the first day onboard. Vince and Lacey claimed to know nothing about that. They also denied being involved in most of the problems that had happened before the ship set sail. And they claimed to know nothing about the fake moose antler from the mini-golf course that had missed crushing me by inches. They also seemed clueless about the angry argument I’d overheard from
the ship’s kitchen that had ended in what sounded like a threat:
Drop it, John! Or I’ll make sure you never make it to Anchorage
. And they insisted that neither of them was the person who’d pushed me off a raised walkway in Ketchikan, sending me tumbling twenty feet down into icy water.

I shivered, thinking back over the list. It didn’t take an expert detective to realize that the most serious of those incidents seemed to be directed at yours truly.

“We have to accept that the case might not be over quite yet,” I told Becca. “If the robber does have an accomplice on this ship, he or she might still try to cause more trouble. We’ll have to keep our eyes open for clues.”

“Do you think—,” Becca began.

At that moment I heard a clang from the stairwell. I spun around and saw Alan standing on the top step of the flight coming up from below. He was staring up at Becca and me with a strange expression on his face.

“Alan!” I blurted out, cutting off the rest of Becca’s comment. “I—uh—didn’t hear you coming.”

I hadn’t seen Alan Thomas coming the first time I’d met him either. Had that really happened only a few short weeks ago? I’d been having lunch with Bess and George at one of our favorite cafés near River Heights University. Suddenly Alan had appeared beside our table, drooling over Bess and begging her to go out with him.