En Garde (Nancy Drew (All New) Girl Detective Book 17) (7 page)

I hesitated, wondering if DeLyn’s brother had told her about Salle Budapest’s financial troubles. I bet he hadn’t—otherwise she’d have known how badly Bela Kovacs needed to save his reputation, and save it soon.

“Will Damon be fencing in Friday’s meet?” George asked, tucking in her T-shirt.

DeLyn frowned, balancing her bag on her shoulder. “Yes. I sure hope he does better this week. He’s really been off his form lately. I have no idea why.”

I remembered how upset Damon had looked earlier today, when Bela told him about the salle’s debts. Could that be affecting his fencing? Damon certainly seemed devoted to his coach.

“Maybe it’s just a temporary slump,” I suggested.

DeLyn shook her head. “He’s been struggling for weeks now. Our coach at school has given him a
warning. If Damon can’t improve his fencing, he may get cut from the college team.”

“But he could still fence for Salle Budapest in noncollege meets,” George said, leaning over to pick up her bag.

“If he gets cut from the school team, he’ll lose his scholarship,” DeLyn explained. “And if he loses his scholarship, he can’t afford to stay in college.” She paused for a moment. “Hey, I need to do a few things before class. George, I’ll come back to pick you up.”

After DeLyn left the room, George sighed and said, “She’s been so moody lately. I know she’s worried about Damon, but she doesn’t have to take it out on me!”

I’d been convinced that DeLyn was jealous of Kovacs’s praise of George, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe DeLyn was just worried about Damon and his scholarship.

“Ouch!” George exclaimed. She yanked her left hand out of her bag and stuck a finger in her mouth. “Whoo, that hurt!”

“George, are you bleeding?” I said. “What did you touch?”

“Nothing but my foil.” George set her bag down and unzipped it all the way. “But the tip of the foil is protected by a guard—it couldn’t be sharp. . . .”

Her eyes widened as she extracted the sword from
the bag with her right hand. The long, skinny metal blade quivered as she pulled it free.

“Where did the protective tip go?” George wondered. “I know it was there this afternoon. Those things are soldered on tight—they don’t just fall off.”

I stepped closer and steadied the flexible blade between my fingers. The pointed end of the blade was etched with tiny scratches, and I could still see a few fragments of solder. The guard was gone and the naked tip shone silver and sharp.

I looked grimly into George’s face. “You’re right, George—these things don’t just fall off. Someone jimmied it off on purpose!”

G
eorge lifted her eyes
to mine, looking scared. “But who would tamper with my equipment? And why?”

I tested the exposed tip of George’s foil with my fingers. “I can’t say for sure, George. But I’d say someone could get hurt fencing with a sword in this condition. And if there is a saboteur, I’d bet that would suit him or her just fine.”

“George, aren’t you ready yet?” said DeLyn, reappearing in the doorway.

“DeLyn, you’d better see this,” George said. “Someone removed the tip from my foil.”

DeLyn reacted immediately, with a violent start. “
What?
Let me see that!” She dropped her own bag and rushed into George’s bedroom.

“It doesn’t look accidental,” I said as DeLyn inspected George’s blade.

“Not a bit,” DeLyn agreed, looking worried. “These tips never come off. In all the years I’ve fenced, I’ve never seen it happen. Was it loose before, George?”

George shook her head. “I remember touching it this afternoon, and it was on snug. This is a fairly new foil; I just bought it six weeks ago.”

Something popped into DeLyn’s mind. Dropping George’s foil, she dashed to her own bag. Unzipping it, she dug out her foil. Her shoulders sagged with disappointment. She turned and held it up so that George and I could see.

Another naked tip, sharp and shiny.

“So it’s not just mine,” George said softly.

DeLyn shook her head with a grim expression. “No one’s out to hurt
you
, George.” She drew a heavy breath. “But it looks like someone
is
out to hurt Salle Budapest.”

George looked at me. “Sabotage?”

I nodded. “I’m already on the case. I talked to Bela earlier today. Let me go get my fingerprint kit—I think it’s in the trunk of my car.”

Usually I try not to let people know when I’m on an investigation. George and Bess and Ned are one thing, but no one else who’s involved with a case
should know. Not that DeLyn Brittany was a suspect. Of course, I had no reason to clear her name yet, either.

But this was one of those times when I had to show my cards. I needed to take fingerprints off of George’s and DeLyn’s fencing bags, to see who might have handled them. And I needed to do it right away.

If you’ve ever watched anybody taking fingerprints, you know you can’t do it on the sly. You have to shake this powder all over the area you’re checking—in this case, the flat leather areas around the zippers on the fencing bags—and wait a few minutes for print patterns to appear. We ate a quick dinner of warmed-up pizza while we waited. Unfortunately, after the time had passed, I had prints all right—too many prints, from too many different people. And none of them were very clear.

DeLyn scrunched up her nose, looking at the flurry of fingermarks in the powder on her bag. “I guess I never realized how many people touch our bags in the course of an afternoon. We just pile them near the doorway and go fence.”

George sighed. “Fencers come, fencers go. You’re always moving somebody’s bag to get something out of yours. It’s chaos.”

“Don’t worry—it was a long shot,” I reassured them. “Even if we did get a clean print, we probably
wouldn’t have been able to identify our saboteur from it. Most likely whoever did this doesn’t have prints on file with the police. Later on, being able to match a fingerprint on the bag might help us prove our case—it would give us concrete evidence to show that person was messing around with the equipment. But it’s not likely that a fingerprint would actually lead us to a culprit. Now, let’s get the powder cleaned off the bags and go to the salle.”

George looked worried. “You want us to go over there and fence? What if other people have had their foils sabotaged like ours? We could get hurt.”

“I don’t want that to happen,” I said. “You’ll have to be extremely careful. But we have to find out if other foils were sabotaged. And where else will we learn that?”

George and DeLyn got into George’s car and I followed right behind in mine. As I pulled into the Salle Budapest parking lot, I leaned forward to search it. I don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered that skinny guy with the ratty jeans who was hanging around the meet yesterday. If anybody fit the image of a deranged saboteur, it was him.

I couldn’t see the guy. But a second later, I spotted something equally disturbing—a white van with a small transmitting dish on top, pulling out of the lot and driving away. “Uh-oh,” I said to George and
DeLyn after I parked my car and got out. “I’ll bet that’s the TV station.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” DeLyn asked. “Wasn’t that sports reporter planning to run a follow-up story to repair Bela’s image?”

“Yes, but I should have warned Bela someone would be coming.”

I looked at George and DeLyn. Their worried expressions confirmed what I had been thinking—that if Bela was caught off guard, he might do something off-the-wall again.

Trying to look as if nothing unusual had happened, DeLyn and George hefted their bags onto their shoulders and marched toward the entrance. I followed close behind. As we went in the front door, I paused to do a quick check of the lock, a simple steel barrel device set into the door frame. “No scratches or dents,” I murmured. “No sign that anybody’s been trying to break in.”

DeLyn tossed a hand dismissively. “That doesn’t mean anything. I’ve never seen that door locked.”

“Never?” I was surprised. I mean, I know River Heights isn’t what you’d think of as a hotbed of criminal activity, but it gets its share. More than its share, in fact, from what I’ve seen.

DeLyn nodded. “The salle is almost always open—Bela spends most of his time here. The man has no
outside life. He isn’t married; he has no family in this country. Technically he lives in a little apartment only a couple of blocks away. But he only goes there to sleep—and some nights, he sleeps here. He keeps a fold-up cot tucked away behind the partition.”

George and DeLyn set their bags down carefully, slightly aside from the random heap of gear other fencers had left. I counted only six fencers besides them here tonight—and I could see that DeLyn noticed the number as well. “Generally this clinic has fifteen people enrolled,” she murmured. “People are definitely bailing out. Poor Bela!”

I crouched down behind George and DeLyn. “Let me use you guys for cover,” I said, reaching surreptitiously for the nearest canvas bag. “People might get mad if they see me rifling through their stuff.”

“Sure thing,” George said. She and DeLyn spread themselves out as much as possible, which wasn’t hard, considering all the fencing gear they had to put on—plastic chest guards, padded tunics, gloves, and steel-mesh masks.

Damon Brittany strolled over from the fencing floor, his mask under his arm. “Where were you guys?” he asked, sounding annoyed. “Did you go somewhere for dinner? I was afraid you were going to miss the clinic.”

DeLyn threw him a get-out-of-my-face type of
look. “We just went to George’s house for a break. I can’t spend every minute of my life at the salle, Damon—not like some folks I know.” She turned her back on him while she strapped on her chest protector.

Damon crouched down on the floor next to her bag. “You don’t have to get so touchy,” he complained. “I just wondered what you did for dinner.”

“Leftover pizza at my place—you didn’t miss anything,” George told him.

I shifted quietly away from them. No point in letting Damon notice I was going through other fencers’ bags. It was bad enough that DeLyn knew I was working on the case. I just hoped she had enough sense not to tell her brother.

As soon as Damon went back to fencing, I unzipped the first bag. My heart sank as I pulled out a foil. The protective tip on this one was gone, just like George’s and DeLyn’s. The same evidence of fresh tampering was all over the blade. I silently set the foil aside, making sure it was properly labeled with its owner’s name before I separated it from its bag.

The next two bags I checked, however, had no foils in them. I sat on my heels, puzzled.

Then, looking toward the studio floor, I realized why there were no foils in the bags. The fencers had
their foils in hand—and they were dueling with them already! “Doesn’t anybody check their equipment before fencing?” I groaned. “We’ve got to stop them before someone’s hurt.” I stood up and headed toward the fencing area.

“Hold it, Nancy. Go tell Bela,” George said, lifting her mask to look at me. “Let him be the one to stop the class. If you do it, everyone will know you’re a detective.”

George was right. If I blew my cover, I wouldn’t be able to investigate quietly anymore. I collected the three foils—George’s, DeLyn’s, and the third one I’d just found—and walked the length of the studio, heading for the office cubicles at the far end. Since Bela wasn’t in sight, I figured he was back behind the partition. Like DeLyn had said, he was always somewhere at the salle.

As I got closer to the partition, I heard a low voice that I recognized as belonging to one of the assistant teachers. Bela’s voice, edged with harshness, replied sharply, “Tear up that message slip. Tear it up! If anybody from the bank calls again, say I’m not in. Understand? I don’t want to talk to any of those so-called loan officers. Hah! Sharks is what they are. Sharks with many rows of sharp teeth! What else do you need to bother me about?”

The assistant murmured something I couldn’t
make out. I stole closer, ducking down behind the nearest partition.

Bela snapped back, “George Fayne? Oh, pair her up with one of the other beginners. She’s hardly worth our time. We’ll never make a fencer out of her—not like DeLyn.”

“But Bela,” the assistant protested, “just the other day I heard you call George your star of the future.”

“And when I said that, wasn’t DeLyn standing there too?” Bela replied.

“Why . . . yes, come to think of it. . . .”

“So?” Kovacs said brusquely. “I had to do something to wake up DeLyn. I need to help her get her competitive juices flowing again. I thought a little jealousy might do the trick.”

I felt my stomach flip. So that’s what the crafty old fencing master had been up to! He was playing George and DeLyn—two friends!—off each other.

I began to back away from the cubicle. At that moment, I was so steamed up, I didn’t want to talk to Bela Kovacs. So what if a saboteur was putting all his students in danger? He deserved it, the rotten old guy!

But at that very moment Bela came charging around the partition, pulling up the suspenders of his fencing breeches. He saw me standing there with the three foils in my hand, their naked tips held out in
front. As he stared at them his face turned pale.

“Miss Drew!” he said nervously. “Where did you get those?”

“From the bags of three different fencers,” I said quietly. “Bags that were lying around in the salle this afternoon.”

“Shhh!” He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back into his private cubicle. “No one must know!”

I frowned. “You knew this already and you didn’t tell anyone?”

Bela’s shoulders sagged. “During the dinner break, I noticed the same thing was done to several of the salle’s house weapons—the ones we lend out when fencers forget theirs. I put them away at once, so no one would use them. I hoped I had already found all the problem foils.” He ran a hand over his face. “I planned to stay up all night, soldering new tips on so they’d be back in shape by tomorrow. Give me those three foils and I’ll fix them, too.”

“I’m not worried about getting them fixed,” I said. “What worries me is that some of those fencers may be fighting with unprotected foils right now!”