En Garde (Nancy Drew (All New) Girl Detective Book 17) (10 page)

And I whipped around to see a young woman fencer writhing and clutching at her white doublet, crying out in pain.

A
s I raced toward
her, I saw that the fencer was yanking hard at the electrical cord plugged into the lower hem of her silvery lamé. It took two hands for her to disconnect the plug. The minute it was detached, she groaned and slumped in relief.

“Are you all right?” Paul Mourbiers asked her, frowning with concern.

She reached up and pulled off her mask. Even in her distress, she was careful to fluff her short strawberry blond hair back into place. I stifled a gasp. I recognized her, all right—it was Una, the fencer DeLyn had faced in Tuesday’s disastrous bout. Even now, as she stripped off her doublet, I could see the gauze taped to her forearm where DeLyn’s foil had jabbed her.

Mourbiers had the electronic scoring leash in his hand. He touched the metal prongs at the end. I was close enough to see that the copper wires were shining, exposed, below the plug. It looked as if someone had cut away the black rubber coating that insulated the wires leading to the plug!

I had seen enough of the equipment at Salle Budapest to know how it worked. The electrical impulse distributed a mild current to the metallic threads in the lamé—enough to register a touch from a metal sword and send a signal to the scoring device. The underside of the lamé, however, had a layer of insulation so the fencer would not feel any electric shock.

But with the wires exposed, Una had accidentally touched a live electrical current with her bare hands. I remembered once touching a frayed lamp cord and feeling a current buzz through my body. I’d felt like my whole body was lighting up. I wasn’t badly hurt, but my heart had thumped hard and my body had tingled for several minutes. Looking at Una, her eyes wide and her breathing rapid, I could imagine she was feeling the same unpleasant effect—maybe even worse, having held the live wires longer.

Now that Mourbiers noticed the exposed wires, his dark eyes narrowed with anger. “Sabotage!” he hissed, pronouncing the word with a nasty flourish.

I exchanged a worried look with George. Surely an electrical cord could be worn to pieces on its own. So why did Mourbiers jump to the conclusion that there was foul play involved?

“And I know who is behind it,” the French fencing master went on ominously. “Bela Kovacs.”

Una looked at him fearfully. “Paul, do you really think . . . ?”

Mourbiers pounded a fist into his other palm. “The mad Hungarian. Of course! How could I not see it coming? First he damages your gauntlet at the meet. Now this. Una, you are a threat to his precious DeLyn Brittany. She will not be on top forever; you are challenging her now, and Kovacs doesn’t like it. He
does not like it one bit
.”

I looked over at George, who was quivering with the effort it took not to speak out in defense of Bela Kovacs. I steadied her with a glance. Then I reached over and grabbed the cord out of Mourbiers’s hand. I deliberately pressed my fingers against the live wires, drawing the shock into myself. “That little zap?” I said. “That’s hardly worth worrying about. Sure, it took you by surprise. But it’s not going to do any real damage.”

George, taking her cue from me, chimed in. “You’re right, Daphne,” she said. “Why, if I were going to sabotage somebody, I’d do something really
mean—like taking the safety tips off their swords.” She darted a rude glance at Mourbiers.

Mourbiers drew himself up to his full height and looked down his elegant hawklike nose at us. “Clearly you do not comprehend. It is not physical damage I complain of. It is psychological damage. A fencer of Una’s quality is like a thoroughbred racehorse—she must not be discomposed. Her courage must not be tampered with—especially not the day before a big meet.” He stabbed the air with his forefinger. “I cannot have my top woman fencer nervous and jumpy every time she puts on a lamé! Only an experienced fencer would understand this effect. Only a fencing master would know how effective this sort of sabotage could be. Only Bela Kovacs would be capable of such a low deed!”

“Who’s this Bela Kovacs?” I asked, playing dumb.

But Paul Mourbiers was just as paranoid as Bela Kovacs. Once the idea of sabotage was in his head, there was no shaking it. “You two know perfectly well who Bela Kovacs is!” he thundered. “I know every other fencer in this room—but not you two. You show up out of the blue, and suddenly a thing like this happens. It is no coincidence, I can assure you! Kovacs has sent you—to bring about my ruin!”

If we hadn’t been personally under attack, I guess I would have seen Mourbiers’s hysterical reaction as
pretty ridiculous. But you tend not to laugh in the face of someone who’s furiously brandishing a sword at you. “Come on, Phoebe,” I muttered to George.

“Now I recognize you!” Mourbiers went on, pointing that accusing forefinger straight at George. “You were fencing for Salle Budapest on Tuesday! I remember watching you lose your bout—spectacularly, I might add. You had terrible footwork, rotten timing, a weak attack. And of course, being badly coached by Bela Kovacs, you will never improve. You are a clumsy amateur—and you are a saboteur! Get out of my salle, and get out now!”

George and I had already dropped our foils and were heading for the door.

“And if you ever dare to darken my doors again, I will call the police on you!” Mourbiers called after us.

George and I were both pretty eager to put Cutler Falls and Salle Olympique behind us, and fast. We scuttled out the door and got into my car. But things always go wrong at the worst times. When I tried to start my car . . .

“Oh, no, Nancy,” George groaned. “Don’t tell me. You forgot to charge up your car again!”

Now, I love my hybrid car. It makes me very happy to know that I am not wasting scarce petroleum resources or polluting the environment with
car emissions (plus I save plenty of money on gas). But there is one disadvantage of driving a hybrid: If you don’t plug the battery in every once in a while, it runs down. And—well, sometimes when I’m absorbed with a case, I just forget to hook it up at night. Usually the car charges up when you drive it on the highway and it switches over to the gasoline-powered mode. But driving to Cutler Falls, we hadn’t been on any highway. Apparently we hadn’t been going fast enough to kick into the gasoline power. And now my battery was flat as a pancake.

“I’d better phone Charlie to give me a boost.” I pulled out my cell phone.

“Couldn’t you call a local garage?” George asked. “I mean, it’ll take Charlie twenty minutes to get over here from River Heights. And, uh, it would be nice to get out of here sooner than that.” She cast an uneasy look back at the Salle Olympique building.

But I had already dialed Charles Adams’s number. And I have to admit, I was too embarrassed to call anybody else. Charlie wouldn’t tease me. Charlie never teases me, and he always comes as soon as I call.

George rolled her eyes. “Must be nice to have the best mechanic in River Heights have such a crush on you.”

Charlie said he would come right away, of course. In fact, he’d been out somewhere in his truck and
was already halfway to Cutler Falls. George and I leaned against my car, waiting, trying not to notice that Paul Mourbiers kept coming to the window of the salle to glare at us.

“I can’t believe Mourbiers went crazy on us like that,” George said. “There’s no proof that that damaged electrical lead was intentionally sabotaged. Who would want to hurt Una? She’s really not much of a threat to DeLyn; DeLyn has beaten her many times in competition.”

I shrugged. “Paul Mourbiers is just as crazy as Bela when it comes to their rivalry,” I said. “I don’t trust a word either one of them says anymore. They’re too paranoid. At this point, I’m beginning to doubt that either salle is sabotaging the other one.”

“Then how do you explain everything?” George asked. “There have been too many ‘accidents’ lately. I have to believe one person is behind them all. And who else but Paul Mourbiers would have a motive?”

But by then, I wasn’t really listening to George. I was peering intently at the scrubby trees and tall weeds at the edge of the parking lot.

There he was—the scuzzy guy in the old overcoat. Raggedy Man, I called him in my mind. It couldn’t be just a coincidence that he was here today, loitering at the edge of the parking lot. First the tournament on Tuesday, now here today—following
a trail of damaged equipment and injured fencers . . .

Now George saw Raggedy Man too. “Should we grill him?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, shifting my weight from foot to foot. “I’d hate to scare him off before we see what he’s doing. So long as he doesn’t know we’re watching, he may do something—something definite, to give us solid proof that he’s up to no good.”

I cast another nervous look toward Salle Olympique to see if Mourbiers was still staring out at us. The person I saw instead was Una, walking out the front door of the building. She had changed into her street clothes, stylish tailored trousers and a matching sweater set. She carried her fencing bag tightly by the short handles, like a briefcase. It looked like she was still shaken up by the electrical shocks. Shoulders hunched, head lowered, she shivered once or twice, even though it was a mild day.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I noticed a motion. The scruffy guy we’d been watching saw Una too—and he wasn’t idly loitering anymore. Snapping to attention, he began to walk toward her with determined strides.

Una’s head jerked up, and her step faltered. Already he was only about ten yards away from her. Cringing backward against the nearest car for safety, she yelled, “Leave me alone! Go away!”

The young man did not stop. In fact, he hurried toward Una even faster.

George and I were at the other end of the parking lot, but we started to run toward them. As if in slow motion, I saw Raggedy Man stretch his arms out toward Una, ready to grab her. Una wailed and threw her arms over her head, but he managed to catch her arm.

As loudly as I could, I shouted, “Let her go!”

W
hen someone’s up to
no good, they don’t hang around waiting to find out why you’re shouting at them. Without even looking in our direction, the guy dropped Una’s arms and raced away from us. He was fast as a cat. Before we got to Una’s side, he had plunged into the tall weeds and vanished.

“Are you okay?” I asked Una.

She nodded, looking dazed. “You’re . . . the saboteurs from Salle Budapest. Why are you still here?”

“You explain, George.” I had no time to waste. “And have Charlie get my car running—I’ll be back!” I dashed off in pursuit of Una’s scruffy attacker.

Only a few feet from the edge of the parking lot, I was swallowed up in an urban jungle. The acreage
behind Salle Olympique had probably been farmland at one time, but it was overgrown with tall grass, fast-sprouting trees, and big, tough weeds—not to mention loads of trash. The ground under my feet was uneven, and I had to use both hands to fight my way through.

The attacker had a head start on me, and like I said, he was fast. My best hope was that his long overcoat would get caught in the tangled underbrush. Only a few yards in, though, I saw his coat, flung into a towering thicket of nettles. Desperate to get away, he’d taken it off—and from the looks of it, he wasn’t a guy who could afford to buy a new one. He sure was anxious to escape. That told me one thing: He was feeling guilty about something.

Of course, if he got away, I’d never find out what.

Thick as the undergrowth was, I could spot where he had crashed through ahead of me. But he didn’t stay in the weedy lot for long. His trail cut across the corner to a chain-link fence, where there was a gap just big enough for him to squeeze through. He must have known exactly where that hole in the fence was—which told me he knew this neighborhood pretty well.

As I slipped through the fence and ran across the pavement, I remembered to check out my surroundings. I’d gotten lost before, and it wasn’t fun. I was
behind a bank branch. Running past the drive-up ATM, I came out onto another street.

Which way had he gone? I paused, scanning the street to the right. No sign of him. I looked to the left. No sign. But I did see a woman pulling on the leash of a barking dog, one of those yappy little terriers that wants to hunt every moving thing he sees. The dog was straining to chase something, or someone, that had just disappeared down the mouth of an alley. My instincts told me it wasn’t just a stray cat or a squirrel.

I raced across the street, laying on some extra speed to beat the oncoming traffic. I heard a squeal of tires behind me as a driver stomped on the brakes to avoid hitting me. I waved a hand wildly to thank the driver and ran on into the alley.

The guy may have been familiar with the neighborhood, but in his panic he wasn’t thinking clearly. This alley had a continuous line of brick wall on either side, the matching backs of two long blocks of stores. Service doors punctuated the walls every twenty yards or so, but they were all locked up tight. It was like an extended chute, with no escape on either side. The asphalt was cracked and creviced; garbage cans and stacks of empty boxes leaned against the walls; fast-food trash, broken bottles, and flattened aluminum cans littered the ground. And at
the far end, I could see him, long hair flying and baggy pants bunched around his torn sneakers, running madly. He was close to the place where the alley opened up onto the next street.

But before he made it, a familiar red pickup truck pulled up at that far end of the alley, screeching up onto the sidewalk to block off the guy’s escape.

It was Charlie Adams, my knight in shining armor.

Raggedy Man skittered to a stop and whirled around. He saw me coming up behind him. He knew he had no place else to run, so he scrambled up onto a small Dumpster and tried to scale the wall. Of course, the building was three stories high. No way would he get over it.