The only thing worse than
losing a toy car is losing your older sister—well, actually, that’s not quite
true. If you never had an older sister
to begin with, then losing the car is worse—unless you never had a toy car to
begin with either, but those are far more common than older sisters. Anyway, whatever thoughts Frank might have
had about the car jump were replaced with the more dramatic news—Stephanie Dale
had disappeared.
“What happened?” Frank
asked.
Nancy shrugged. “They don’t seem to know very much about
it. Ashley said that her sister left the
house around seven o’clock last night, without telling anyone where she was
going. She was driving her car—that
Mercury Grand Marquis you’ve seen in the church parking lot before. Anyway, she never came back, and there’s been
no sign of the car.”
“Oh,” said Frank. “Interesting.
Do they think she could have been in an accident?”
Nancy shook her
head. “I asked. The police haven’t gotten any reports of any
crash victims who remotely fit her description—and that’s all over the state of
Oklahoma.”
“Did she have a cellphone
with her?” Frank asked.
“She did,” said Nancy,
“but it’s not the kind you can track, and she hasn’t made any calls with it.”
The Dales had been some
of the Andersons’ original friends in Norman when they’d moved there from
Chicago two years before. Both families
went to Northgate Baptist Church, the stone building at the intersection of
Tecumseh and Porter (not to be confused with Calvary Free Will Baptist, the
steel building next door). Any visitor
was ensured to run into a Dale at some point—the family was huge. Ashley (12) was the one closest to Frank and
Nancy’s age—she only had one older sibling, but there were five younger
ones—Carl, Melissa, Caitlyn, Ron, and Lorraine.
They lived (with their parents, of course) in a fairly good-sized home
kind of in the center of Norman, in a neighborhood north of Main Street and
still east of the Interstate. They were
well aware of the Andersons’ penchant for solving mysteries, but never before
had they required their friends’ services.
After all, you only need a detective when you have a problem. Unfortunately, the Dales now had a problem.
“That’s too bad,” Frank
chewed his lip. “Stephanie’s a nice
girl. It’d be a shame if anything happened
to her.”
“Ever since she got her
license, they’ve been inviting us over more and more,” Nancy recollected. “Goodness knows how many times we’ve ridden
in that car.”
“My nickel’s still stuck
in it,” observed Louis. “I dropped it
one day, and it got stuck in a crack between the seat and the door. I haven’t had a chance to get it back yet.”
“That lost nickel’s not
going to solve our problem,” Frank said.
“Does her family have any idea where she might have gone?”
Nancy shook her
head. “She wasn’t spending the night
with anyone—they know that much.”
“Any ransom demands?”
“I doubt it,” said
Nancy. “Even if there was one, and they
told them to keep it quiet, Ashley didn’t sound like she’d heard about one when
she called.”
“She might cover it up,”
said Frank, “but if there’d been one, she probably wouldn’t even bother to tell
us her sister was missing—not without mentioning it. The next step is to search her room. Did she say it was alright if we came over?”
“Of course,” said
Nancy. “That’s why she called.”
“Alright, then,” said
Frank. “Louis, help me put our ramps and
stuff away. Then, we’re going to find
out exactly what happened to Stephanie Dale.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“You can always tell
which house is theirs,” Nancy said, as they approached. “Just take a look at the chimney.”
The Dales’ house was on
the corner of Sherry Avenue and Crestmont Street. It had tan brick on the front of the first
story, white sidings on the sides and on the short second story in the center
of the house. Blue shutters overlooked a
freshly-mowed lawn that featured a well-kept garden with a large cactus growing
in it. A long bay window was on the
right of the first story, and a two-car garage stood on the second, but all you
really needed to look for if you wanted to find the house was the cross on the
chimney. Someone had put it up some
years ago—two planks nailed together, the long one about as tall as a window
and the short one about as wide as a street sign. Originally, the cross had been white, but
time and the elements had truly made this into the subject of a famous George
Bennard song.[1]
“I like it,” said Frank,
surveying the front of the yard. “Mr.
Dale’s truck is still here,” he said, pointing to the Nissan Titan in the
driveway. “I guess the van and the SUV
are in the garage.”
“There ought to be a
Mercury in the driveway too,” Louis noted, sadly. “Look.
You can see the oil stains from it on the cement.”
“Those might be from the
van,” Nancy pointed out. “That thing’s
got to be at least thirty years old. Who
wants to ring the doorbell?”
“I will!” Susan
volunteered, but her offer was unnecessary.
The door swung open just as the Andersons reached it—Ashley had been
waiting for them.
“Oh, I’m so glad you
came!” she said, her normally placid face now tense with worry. She was about Nancy’s height, with hair the
same color as her sister’s, but straight instead of curly. That little smile that practically always
hung around her mouth was nowhere to be seen.
“Of course we did,” Frank
said. “Stephanie’s our friend, and we
want to get her back as much as you.
Mind if we take a look around?”
“Please, go ahead.” Ashley motioned for them to come in, then led
the way upstairs. “The police just
left,” she said. “So far, they don’t
have any clues.”
“It certainly is
strange,” said Frank. “At least, one
thing’s in your favor. Your sister
doesn’t have any enemies.”
Ashley nodded her
agreement. “She hadn’t done anything lately
that would have created one. Something
must have happened, though, or she would have come back.”
Because the first floor
of the house was larger than the second, the master bedroom was
downstairs. However, the other bedrooms
were all on the upper story. There were
only two—one belonged to Stephanie and Ashley, and the other belonged to Carl
and Ron. The rest of the girls slept in
the hallway, which had a bunk bed and a crib tucked against the wall, out of
the way of where people had to walk. Melissa
and Caitlyn were busy playing a game of indoor hopscotch as the visitors walked
past. Nancy couldn’t help but smile at
the set up.
“Once they get older,
it’ll be harder to stuff them in here,” she said.
“What? Oh, the hallway? They’re usually pretty good about it. It’s just that, every so often, they’ll play
a board game in the middle of it and set up so that we have to jump over them
if we want to get up or down the stairs.
I can remember one time when Carl tried to jump them, went too far, and
plunged headfirst down the whole stairwell.
He—after that—well, let’s just say they didn’t set up right there
again.”
“I see,” said Frank. By now, they’d entered the bedroom. It was a decent-sized room, long across, with
a double window across from the door.
The window faced the front of the house, and the room in between was divided
on two sides. From the door, Stephanie
had the right side of the room, and Ashley had the left. This was easily deduced from the large,
glittery letters which ran across the walls at the top—Stephanie was spelled
out in blue, and Ashley was spelled out in red.
“No mistaking whose side
is whose,” Nancy remarked.
“Mom did that for us once
we started sharing the room,” Ashley said.
“Those names have been there for years.”
“Since you share a room
with her,” said Frank, “you’re probably the one who could tell us the most
about what happened. Did you notice
anything unusual about Stephanie at any time before she went missing?”
Ashley thought about
this. “Yesterday, she did seem a little
preoccupied about something. I’m not
sure what, though.”
“Any ideas?” Nancy asked.
Ashley shook her
head. “She didn’t have any problems that
I knew about. Her car was running great,
her grades are fine, she hadn’t had any doctor’s appointments lately—”
“Did she have a medical
condition, or something?” Frank asked.
“Oh, no, nothing like
that. I just meant that she wouldn’t
have been worried about health problems due to a doctor’s visit.”
“Oh, I see,” said
Frank. He glanced around the room. “Anything missing that’s supposed to be
here? Besides your sister, I mean.”
Ashley looked over the
right side of the room. “Her keys aren’t
here, of course—nor is her jacket—but I hadn’t noticed anything else missing.”
“I guess that means we’ve
got our work cut out for us,” said Frank.
He glanced at the side of the room, then at his siblings.
“We’ll divide it up,” he
said. “Louis, you search the left
corner. Susan, you search the
right. I’ll take the right side of the
desk, and Nancy can take the left.
Sounds clear?”
Everyone nodded, and the
detectives got to work. Stephanie’s side
featured a lofted bed in the center, under which was her desk. To the right of the bed (nearest the door)
was a short bookcase—to the left, a dresser.
There weren’t that many books on the shelf, and Susan had no trouble
going through them.
“Ooh, a bookmark!” she
said, pulling out a piece of cardboard with quotes from George Washington on
it.
“Let me see that,” Frank
said, examining it. “Nothing written on
it—anything notable about its location in the book?” He glanced quickly at the book, but it was
just an M.T. Anderson story, and the bookmark was at one of the chapters, where
whoever had been reading it had stopped.
“Probably not a clue,”
said Frank, “but we’ll leave it in place just in case.” He closed the book and put it back on the
shelf, his hands making a soft squeak
as they came away from the slick, library book jacket.
Louis was busy going
through the dresser. “Hmm, that’s
strange,” he said, pulling something out of the second drawer. “This jacket looks a little too small for
Stephanie. Plus, would she really have
one with a fire engine on—”
“Oh, I’ll take that,”
said Ashley, snatching it away. “Carl
and my sister have this little game going on.
One of them will hide some article of clothing that belongs to the other
one, and they’ll see how long it takes the other person to notice. It goes back and forth between them. Every now and then, I get caught up in the
mix, and it’s usually right when I need that scarf, or that hat, or—”
“Let me see it for a
second,” Frank asked. Quickly, he
searched the pockets, then inspected the rest of it for rips. “No, it’s clean.”
Ashley regarded him with
a curious expression as she took it back.
“You really take this detective stuff seriously.”
“That’s why you called
us, right?” Frank observed. “You never
know where something important might be hidden.
That notepad, for instance.” He
picked a small pad of paper off the desk.
“Could you hand me a pencil, Nancy?”
His sister took a break
from going through the drawers to pass him one.
“Writing a note?”
“Reading one,” Frank
said, carefully running the point over the sheet of paper. It was an old trick, but a useful one. The graphite would stick to the whole paper,
except for the indentations where a pencil had written—
Ashley glanced at him,
then shook her head. “Sorry, Frank. Stephanie only writes notes in marker. Dull-tipped marker.”
“Oh, drats,” said Frank,
noticing the Crayola marker next to the desk.
“It’s like she was trying not to leave a message.”
Nancy was struggling with
a drawer towards the bottom of the desk, twice as large as the others. “It’s locked.”
“Oh, I can open that,” said
Ashley, hurrying across to her side of the room. She yanked a key out of her desk, then handed
it to Nancy. “It’s a cheap lock—these
keys work on both.”
Opening the drawer, Nancy
found it to be full of file folders. She
flipped quickly through them, seeing that many of the front ones contained
schoolwork (grammar, history, etc.). The
back ones, though—
“Ashley?” Nancy
asked. “Do you know who all these names
belong to?”
“Names?” Ashley peeked over her friends shoulder. “Oh, those.
They’re my sister’s pen pals.”
“Pen pals?” said
Frank. “Then she writes letters a lot?”
“Heavens, yes,” said
Ashley.
“International?” Louis
asked.
“A couple are,” said
Ashley. “The rest are just friend from
the U.S. who don’t live close by.”
Nancy started flipping
through these. “Judy Garner—”
“Used to go to Northgate,
moved a year before you came here. Now,
she lives in Montana—Billings, I think.”
“Ariane Montieux—”
“That’s one of the
international ones. Lives in
France. I think Stephanie met her on a
missions’ trip.”
“Brittany McPherson—”
“Friend of hers from
horseriding camp. Lives in Blackwell.”
“Emily Simms—”
“Another friend from the
horseriding camp. She lives in
Wapanucka.”
“And Elena Popescu—”
“Now, she’s an
interesting one,” said Ashley. “My
parents met her family on a different missions trip, this one to Romania. It was about eight years ago, and she was
just about to be born, but the doctors could tell she had a lot of health
problems. They were going to kill her
before she ever got a chance to live, because they said she’d never be able to
have a normal life. My parents found out
about it, and so we helped her family escape.”
“Oh, my goodness!” said
Nancy. “That sounds exciting!”
“Do you remember anything
about it?” Frank asked.
“A little bit,” replied
Ashley. “I was only five, but I do
remember a bit about a train—I think they were hiding them in a coffin, or—oh,
it’s all a blur.”
“She got out fine, then?”
Nancy asked.
“Not only that,” said
Ashley, “but now she can do everything a normal kid can, except walk. She’s thrilled to be alive, and outraged that
anyone would’ve wanted it any different.”
“What a wonderful story,”
said Frank.
“Do you suppose your
sister’s disappearance might have anything to do with that?” Louis asked. “Revenge from somebody, or something?”
Ashley started to reply,
but Frank shook his head. “That was
eight years ago, Louis. It’s entirely
possible, but not very likely. I’d say
we only investigate that if we’re getting stuck. This early in the case, there are still
plenty of possibilities open.”
“Maybe there’s a clue in
the letters,” Nancy suggested. “If
you’re writing a pen pal, you’d probably mention anything important that was
going on in your life. I know these are
letters to her, not from her, but someone might have said something that would
give us a clue.”
“That’s a good thought,
Nancy,” Frank agreed. “Is it alright if
we search through these, Ashley?”
The Dale girl looked
embarrassed. “Well, technically they’re
not mine, but my sister is missing—I think in this case, it’d be alright.”
“Fine,” said Frank. “Nancy, you help me look through them. Louis and Susan, you keep searching.”
Susan groaned. “Why can’t I read them?”
“Because you’ll tell
everybody you meet what they said,” Nancy remarked. “You’re not any good at keeping secrets,
Susan.”
Susan stomped her foot
indignantly. “I am too! I never told you that we’re getting Books
51-56 of the Bobbsey Twins series for Christmas—”
Frank laughed. “Susan, you just did!”
“Wait, really?” Nancy looked
surprised. Her sister looked
embarrassed. In spite of her situation,
Ashley couldn’t help laughing.
“Don’t feel too bad,
Susan. Things never stay secret for very
long in this house. There’s always
someone listening in.”
“I don’t know,” Frank
remarked. “I’ve known Stephanie for
quite a while, and if there’s a person that would be good at keeping secrets,
it’s her. She—oh, well. Let’s take a look through these letters.”
Have you ever searched
through letters to somebody? It was
really quite fascinating. All the
writers were different from each other, yet the letters from each individual
one were quite similar to each other.
Brittany always wrote five paragraphs—Elena, just a short scrawl that
wasn’t even indented. Emily and Ariane
used yellow notebook paper, Brittany used white, and Elena used just unlined
paper (Judy rarely used the same kind twice).
Emily and Elena used pencil—the rest, pen. The handwriting varied quite
dramatically—Ariane’s was super easy to read, while Brittany’s was a close-packed,
hastily written scrawl that took significantly more time. And those weren’t all the details the
detectives noticed.
“What are you doing with
that letter?” Nancy asked her brother accusingly, as he picked up one off Judy’s
stack.
“Interesting,” he said,
pulling it away from his face. “Paper
smells a bit sweet, like it was under a perfume bottle or something. Matter of fact—” he took a few more
whiffs—“they all smell like that.”
Louis laughed. “It’s the clue that’ll solve the case.”
“More than likely, it
means nothing,” said Frank. “Just an
interesting observation.”
Even had all the letters
been typed on the same quality paper, written at exactly the same length, and
formatted exactly the same way, it still would’ve been possible to tell they were
by different authors. Ariane always
responded point by point to everything her friend had mentioned in the previous
letter, as was evident by certain phrases—“that sounds fun…you also
mentioned…in your last letter, you said you had been planning to; thank you for
telling me about it…” Emily’s letters,
on the other hand, never appeared to be responses—they were all about the
various things Emily was doing. Elena
mentioned her family frequently—Judy, almost never…
“Does Judy get along with
her family okay?” Frank asked. Ashley
looked surprised.
“Oh, they get along
great,” she said. “She always seems
really happy when she’s with them. I
know Stephanie’s been over to her house several times.”
“I see,” said Frank. Her answer didn’t surprise him. Just because Judy got along with her family
didn’t mean she had to mention them.
“Oh, cool!” Nancy
remarked. “Emily’s in Civil Air Patrol.”
“You ought to join,” said
Frank. “I’m sure you’ve landed more than
she has.”
“Aren’t you a riot?” Nancy didn’t like to be reminded of the time
she’d had to bring down a pilotless Cessna by herself.[2]
“Judy plays softball,”
Frank remarked. “Third base, but they
just moved her to catcher—now, that’s going to sting a little bit. All those foul balls bouncing off her…”
“She was always into
sports,” said Ashley.
“So, you know Judy pretty
well, and Elena a little bit,” said Nancy.
“What about the others?”
Ashley shook her
head. “Never met them. All I know is what Stephanie’s told me about
them. If one passed me on the street, I
couldn’t tell you who it was.”
“I see,” said Frank. Finishing with Elena’s letters, he picked up
Brittany’s stack. Nancy glanced over.
“Aw, I was going to read
those next!” she said. “I’m just about
done with my second stack.”
“Let’s split them,” said
Frank. “You take the top ones; I’ll take
the bottom ones.” He cut the stack, then
handed them to her.
Brittany’s seemed more
helpful than some (say, Emily’s) had been.
While she didn’t reference everything Stephanie had written, she did mention
a lot of things. Like the others, her
writing had definite tendencies.
“She seems to have been
under a lot of stress,” Nancy said, at one point. “She keeps hinting that there was some
problem going on at home.”
“Really?” said
Frank. “These all seem pretty
upbeat!” He glanced at his sister. “When were those written?”
She glanced through the
stack. “A few months ago.”
“Hmm,” said Frank. “The ones written more recently don’t seem
that way at all. I wonder…” he thought a moment, then glanced out the window.
“What?” Ashley asked.
Frank shook his
head. “It doesn’t have anything to do
with this case. Nancy, what are the
dates on yours?”
“Hmm?” Nancy looked at her letters. “January 4, January 18, February 2—”
“Mine are a lot closer
together,” said Frank. “It looks like
for the last few months, she’s written one about every six days—sometimes five
or seven, like she writes back immediately after she gets one.”
“Stephanie was usually
pretty prompt with her responses,” Ashley remarked.
“The most recent one of
these was three weeks ago, though,” said Frank, “and—let me see
something.” He glanced at the most
recent letter in all the other stacks.
“Yes, these are all more recent.
Judy, Ariane, Elena, and Emily have all written in the past week. Brittany hasn’t in two weeks. Now, I wonder why that is?”
“You think something
happened to her?” Nancy said.
Frank shook his
head. “Not necessarily, but maybe
Stephanie had those letters with her when she disappeared. And if so, there might’ve been a clue in them.”
“Then it would involve
Brittany,” said Nancy. “If only we had
those letters.”
“Well, they might be
somewhere else in the room,” Frank pointed out.
“If not, though, we can always contact Brittany ourselves and find out
what she wrote—as well as what Stephanie wrote her. If those did have anything to do with the
disappearance, then Brittany might know something—”
Ding-dong!
“Oh, that’s the
doorbell!” Ashley exclaimed. Rushing to
the window, she glanced out.
“Mailman—thought so. Be right
back.”
“We’ll come along too,”
Frank said. “Don’t have anything better
to do.”
The five kids rushed down
the stairs—joined by Carl, Melissa, and Ron, who never missed an opportunity to
rush anywhere. Thus, there was quite a
crowd waiting for the mailman when Ashley opened the door. He looked relieved, though—relieved that he’d
finally be able to put down the large, unusual-looking box clenched between his
arms. “Package for Jim Dale?”
“That’s my father,” said
Ashley. “I’ll take that.”
“Let me help,” said
Frank. He and Nancy both helped her
place the large, heavy box on the ground.
It was a cylindrical package in a way, only there were three small, long
cylinders sticking out on the top of it.
The side of the box read “Imaginations Unlocked.”
“What is it, anyway?”
Nancy asked. “Some sort of
weight-lifting system?”
“I guess you could use it
for that,” Ashley remarked. “It’s a
telescope.”
The mailman
whistled. “Gotta be as heavy as that one
they got orbiting the earth—the Wibble, or whatever it’s called.[3] Well, here’s the rest of your mail. Good thing your friends don’t send you heavy
letters. Be seeing you!”
“Have a nice day,” Ashley
waved after him. Holding the letters,
she began to casually flip through them, organizing the ones for her father and
mother. Then, her hand stopped, and she
stared at one of the envelopes.
“Hey, guys!” she
said. “Check out the return address on
this one!”
The Andersons crowded in
for a look, all glancing over Ashley’s shoulders (except Susan, who wasn’t
quite tall enough). “Where’s it from?”
she asked. “I want to see.”
“Blackwell, Oklahoma,”
Frank answered for her. “Brittany
McPherson. Wonder what she has to say.”
Grabbing the letter, he
quickly tore it open. Louis made a face.
“Frank, you do realize
you’re committing a federal offense—”
“Guilty as charged,”
Frank admitted. “Go ahead and arrest me
if you want—well, I’ll be!”
“What?” Ashley asked.
“What’s the letter say?”
Nancy said.
Frank held it away from
him. “Read it for yourselves!”
Curiously, the other four
glanced at the lines.
Dear Stephanie,
I don’t have much time to
write, but I fear I may be in danger. Remember
what I told you in my last letter? Well,
I think I found out what happened, but now [erasure
mark]
If anything happens to me, go
to “Johnny’s Sports Cards and Collectibles” at 117 Park Avenue, Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma 73102. Tell the owner you’re a
friend of mine. Hopefully, you’ll
That
was the weird ending to the letter. There
was still plenty of room on the paper, and there was no sign that anything had
been erased at the end, yet the handwriting was the same as that on the
envelope. Combined with the letter’s
subject, the ending was quite unsettling, indeed.
“If
something happens to Brittany,” Nancy said.
“What in the world is that about?”
“Got
any ideas, Ashley?” Frank asked.
The
Dale girl shook her head. “I hadn’t
heard anything about this!”
“Well,
then,” said Frank. “I guess we know our
next move. I don’t know if anything’s
happened to Brittany or not, but something’s sure happened to Stephanie, and
whatever’s at that store is most likely a clue.
We’re off to Oklahoma City!”
