Alexis and the Lake Tahoe Tumult (4 page)

“The mesh allows their little claws to grab hold,” said Lisa.

“So they can crawl to get the food, right?” Bailey asked.

“Yup! Look!”

Sure enough, the baby bats had detached themselves from their pile and were crawling toward the wiggling food. Alexis had never seen anything so gross and so cool at the same time. She taped the feeding. Then she put the camera on a tripod so it would tape while she and Bailey helped Lisa clean out the owl cages.

Baby great horned owls sat above them on branches, watching curiously. They were big, even for babies. Each one was about eighteen inches tall, and their fluffy baby feathers made them look even bigger.

“I don’t know why on TV owls are always shown as spooky or around scary places,” Alexis said. “They don’t seem creepy at all.”

“Probably because they’re nocturnal animals. They mainly hang out at night and sleep during the day. Night animals seem spooky to most people. Can you see where they got their name?” Lisa asked as she shoveled dirty straw into a bucket.

“The feathers on their heads, above their eyes,” said Bailey. “They look like horns!”

The day flew by, and before they knew it, the girls were walking to the office for some lunch.

“Uh-oh,” said Lisa as they approached the small building.

“What is it?” asked Alexis. Lisa pointed to a shiny black Mercedes-Benz.

“That always means trouble,” she said. “Or at least it means that Dad’s going to be in a bad mood.”

Alexis tromped up the steps with the others and entered the office.

“I’ll be right back. You wait here,” Lisa said as she disappeared into the other room.

Like the day before, a fire was burning in the fireplace. But Bubbles was nowhere to be seen. Instead, someone strange was at the counter talking with Jake. It was an older man in an expensive coat. His gray hair was slicked back away from his round face, and he hadn’t taken off his sunglasses, even though he was no longer outside.

“Come on, Jake,” the man was saying. “This is the last time I’m coming out here.”

“Good,” Jake said with a smile. “Then this is the last time I’ll have to tell you no.”

The other man slapped his hand down on the desk.

“Jake, you can’t be serious!”

“You know exactly how serious I am, Bruce. I don’t want your money.”

“You’ll wish you’d taken my money when they shut you down,” said Bruce. He had spoken in a quiet voice. Alexis was glad she had good ears.

Jake’s smile vanished, and he leaned across the desk toward Bruce. “Is that a threat?” he growled.

“No, Jake, no! Of course not!” Bruce laughed, but Alexis thought it sounded fake—like he was trying too hard to make the right sound come out. “I just mean that you’re in trouble. It seems like you’ve been having a few …
problems
here at the reserve.”

“How would you know about that?” asked Jake.

“Oh please, Jake! This is Tahoe! Tourists or no tourists, it’s a small town. People talk.” Bruce took his car keys out of his pocket.

“You know where to find me if you change your mind, Jake,” he said. He placed a card on the desk, and then he was gone. As Alexis moved closer, she saw that the card said
Bruce Benton, Land Developer
.

Jake picked up the card. “We can just throw that in the trash,” he said as he tossed it into the wastepaper basket.

Karen and Lisa came through the door, each carrying a stack of mail.

“I saw that Benton guy’s car and heard you talking to him. What was that all about?” Karen asked Jake as the ladies handed their piles of mail to him.

“Oh, same old stuff,” he answered. He took some of the mail from her and started opening it. “Bill, bill, bill,” he said. Then he stopped. “Another threat letter,” he said. He tossed it onto the desk.

Alexis and Bailey had wandered over to look out the window, but now they hurried back to the desk.

“Really?” Alexis said. “You got a threat letter?”

On the desk was a sheet of white paper with different sizes of lettering on it. Someone had cut words out of a magazine and pasted them together.

No one had signed it.

“What in the world?” Alexis said. “This is awful!”

“It’s not as bad as you think,” said Lisa. “We actually get them a lot. A lot of people are unhappy with places like this reserve.”

Bailey and Alexis looked at Jake. They were puzzled. How could anyone be angry with a place that helped animals?

“It’s the same old thing, Alexis,” said Jake. “You can’t please everyone. Some people think we do too much.” He pointed to the letter Alexis held in her hand. “Others think we don’t do enough. Nothing ever comes of the letter, though. We don’t worry about them. We keep them all, just in case something worse happens, but that’s it.”

Alexis was still alarmed. She had received a threatening note once before, and she remembered how scared she had been. It had made her feel like someone could jump out at her at any moment. She opened her mouth to mention it.

“Ahhh!”
Karen suddenly cried out.

“Oh no, Jake! Look!” She was holding another open letter.

“Is it another threat?” asked Bailey.

Jake took the letter and looked it over.

“No,” he said. “It’s worse. It’s a letter from the government. They say they’ve had complaints about our facility, and that if they continue, then we’ll lose our license to operate.”

“What does that mean?” asked Alexis. Lisa walked up and put her arm around her dad’s waist.

“What it means, Alexis, is that we’ll have to close down the reserve.”

Alexis typed the last line onto the screen for the Camp Club Girls to read. She was using her mom’s laptop and had just typed a long e-mail to all the girls to let them know what was going on.

Bailey read over Alexis’s shoulder.

“It’s scary to think that not only is someone letting animals out of their cages but that the government has even heard about it,” Bailey said thoughtfully.

“Well, as you read in my e-mail, I told the Camp Club Girls that if we can’t solve this mystery, the reserve might not exist anymore. And that would be terrible!” Alexis exclaimed. “Then what would happen to those precious baby bats?”

“And animals that can’t take care of themselves, like Bubbles,” Bailey added.

“Good thing Mom and Dad picked this time to bring us here,” Alex said.

“Or as Beth would say, ‘There’s no such thing as coincidence. God has you there now for a reason!’” Bailey laughed as she thought of their friend from Amarillo, Texas. Elizabeth was a walking Bible—and not because she was showing off, but because she believed that God directed people through His words in the Bible. Elizabeth believed God could do anything and often reminded the girls of that truth.

“I’m just concerned,” Alexis said.

“About the mystery?” Bailey asked.

“Yes, but I’m also kind of worried that we won’t be able to solve the mystery and do the documentary, too,” she said slowly. “I really,
really
wanted to win this documentary contest, but what good will that be if the reserve we film gets shut down?”

Alexis bent over to lace up her heavy snowboarding boots.

Bailey had a mouthful of ski mittens as she used her hands to lace up her boots, but she nodded to show that she was listening.

“Karen and Jake are really doing us a favor by letting us film our video here,” continued Alexis. “It would be sad if we couldn’t pay them back by solving this case. I mean, it’s what we
do.”

“So we’ll just have to keep doing what we’re doing,” said Bailey, taking her gloves out of her mouth and tossing them onto the bed. “I mean, we’ll solve the case
while
we work on the documentary.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” said Alexis, “but that’s a lot to do in a few days.”

“No, Lexi!” said Bailey. “I mean
really
work on them at the same time. We were going to shoot a documentary about the reserve, right? Like, about what they do for the animals and stuff? But now something better has come up! They do amazing things for the wildlife here, and someone is paying them back by sabotaging them! So, we can still make our film about the reserve …”

A lightbulb flashed to life in Alexis’s head.

“But we can make it about the
mystery!
Then filming our documentary really
is
solving the case! Bailey, you’re a genius!”

Alexis hugged Bailey so hard that the two of them practically fell off the bed. The worry lifted like it had never been there.

Why didn’t I think of that in the first place?
Alexis wondered.
We can document the trouble at the reserve!

If they solved the case, their documentary would be different from any other—like a real-life
CSI
show! And even if they didn’t solve the case completely, they would draw attention to what was happening. They could send a copy to the government and maybe get more help for Karen and Jake.
And I bet the Tahoe Tourism Bureau would help, too
, Alexis thought.

The girls spent the morning on the ski slopes. Alexis had promised her dad that she and Bailey would take at least one day to enjoy the snow with the family. It was a vacation, after all.

Alexis loved snowboarding. She had learned to ski in fifth grade but had always felt awkward. In the back of her mind, she was always afraid her legs would tangle up at any moment and send her flying down the mountain on her face.

The next year, her dad had signed her up for snowboarding lessons. It was so much easier! Or at least she thought so. There was no chance that her feet could tangle, since they were anchored securely side by side.

There had been one time that a face-plant had brought the snowboard up from behind to whack her in the back of the head … not fun. But overall it was always a great time.

Bailey hadn’t skied much, so the girls spent the first hour on the bunny hill. Alexis taught her how to wedge the tips of her skis together (in the shape of a triangle), and they cruised along slowly until Bailey got the hang of it. It didn’t take long. Soon she was tearing down the mountain so fast that Alexis could hardly catch up.

“You should have your camera along!” Bailey called to Alexis. “Then you could do a documentary on a midwestern girl learning to ski! I could be a star!”

On their fifth run down the mountain, Alexis took her time. She always got more confident after a few hours on the slopes, so she wanted to try some smaller jumps. By the time she got to the bottom, Bailey had been waiting for almost ten minutes.

“Come on, Lexi! You take forever!”

“Sorry! I wanted to try some tricks!”

“Well, I’m starving,” said Bailey. “Let’s get lunch!”

The girls left their boards outside the lodge and went in to find the cafeteria. They ordered a pizza to share and then giant cups of hot chocolate. Alexis had to admit that it felt good to take her gloves off and wrap her fingers around something warm.

“The sun’s out,” said Alexis. “Want to sit outside?”

“Sure,” said Bailey. They wiggled their way through tons of tourists. Alexis thought she heard at least four different languages being spoken in the crowd. People came to Tahoe from all over the world it seemed. Alexis was trying to understand a woman speaking French when Bailey elbowed her in the ribs.

“Hey, look!” Bailey said. “Isn’t that the boy I hit in the head with our camera at breakfast yesterday?”

Alexis looked in the direction Bailey was pointing. Sure enough, the same boy was sitting on a bench looking up at the mountain. Alexis wondered why he wasn’t wearing any snow gear. Who came to the ski lodge and didn’t ski? As the girls got closer, Alexis noticed something else. The boy was holding a walking stick. But it wasn’t like the walking sticks people used when they hiked in the mountains. It was thinner and white.

“Bailey,” Alexis whispered. “I think he’s blind!”

“No way!” said Bailey. “Yesterday he walked all the way across the dining room without help. And he was carrying a tray of food!”

“I know, but that’s normal. Blind people don’t need help all the time—only when they’re in unfamiliar or crowded surroundings. Come on.”

And before Bailey knew what she was doing, Alexis was sitting down beside the boy on the bench. Bailey sat next to her, more than a little nervous. Was the boy still angry with her?

“Hi,” said Alexis. “I’m Alexis, and this is my friend Bailey.”

“Hi,” squeaked Bailey. The boy didn’t even turn to look at them when he spoke.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Going to knock me in the head with a ski pole this time?”

“Of course not,” said Alexis. She was trying to be friendly. The last thing she wanted to do was argue. “So what are you doing up here?” she asked.

“Observing,” said the boy.

“Observing?” said Bailey. “But you’re—”

“Blind? Yeah, thanks for reminding me. I almost forgot.”