En Garde (Nancy Drew (All New) Girl Detective Book 17) (13 page)

BOOK: En Garde (Nancy Drew (All New) Girl Detective Book 17)
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“But coach—” Damon began.

“I am your coach no longer. As of now, you are suspended from the school’s team. I will notify the financial aid office that your scholarship has been revoked.” He threw a withering glance at Bela Kovacs. “I suppose you can permit Damon to compete for your salle. But I must say, I expected you would have taught him more honor, Bela.” The college coach strode away.

“Oh, Damon, baby,” Mrs. Brittany exclaimed. “What a shame. How dare he do that to you?”

To my surprise, Damon just shrugged—and almost seemed to smile. “Mama, he was going to kick
me off the team soon anyway. I guess I was hoping this would happen. Now at last I can quit fencing.”

Bela began to tremble with emotion. “Quit fencing? How can you do that, after all the years you have devoted to it?”

Damon looked pleadingly at his coach and mentor. “Bela, this is DeLyn’s sport, not mine. Why haven’t any of you figured that out? Haven’t you seen how unhappy it makes me? As long as I fence, I will always be in my sister’s shadow. I need to find something of my own. Maybe it’ll be another sport, or maybe it’ll be music, or painting, or science, or politics. But it’s got to be mine.”

To my left, I heard the TV camera whir, and I jerked around, determined to stop Kelly and her crew from prying into Damon’s disgrace. But to my surprise, the scene they were filming was one I never thought would happen—Paul Mourbiers and Bela Kovacs, throwing their arms open and enfolding each other in a huge bear hug.

“After a public altercation on Tuesday, fencing masters Bela Kovacs and Paul Mourbiers have reconciled,” Kelly Chaffetz was saying into her microphone. “Let’s have a word with these two and see why they agreed to bury the hatchet—or, in this case, the saber.”

Paul Mourbiers grinned into the camera. “We may
have our deefferences,” he said, his French accent mysteriously stronger than ever, “but thees passion we have for fencing, we hold eet in common.”

“We both come out of a great Old World tradition,” Bela chimed in. “We love to win, yes, but more than that, we love and honor our sport. And who understands that better than my friend Paul Mourbiers?”

“Of Salle Olympique, in Cutler Falls,” Mourbiers sneeked in a plug for his studio.


Mon ami
, you will always be welcome at Salle Budapest, here in River Heights,” Bela added his own mini-commercial.

“After all that has happened, how can they call each other friends?” Bess whispered in my ear. “Were they faking it all along?”

I thought back on everything I’d heard Bela say about Mourbiers. I didn’t think he was that skillful an actor. He’d meant what he said, all right. But he looked like he meant what he was saying now, too.

Ned, beside me, chuckled. “Those two old guys,” he said. “They’ve known each other for so many years—they probably understand each other better than anybody else does.”

I nodded, looking at them standing arm in arm, hamming it up for the camera. “That feud of theirs is probably the deepest relationship either one of them
has,” I said. “Without it they’d be nothing.”

Just then, applause burst out from the fencing floor. I turned to look over my shoulder. DeLyn had taken off her mask and was saluting Una. The numbers on the electronic scoring device showed fifteen touches for DeLyn, against six for Una. She had won her bout—fair and square this time.

And Una? I would have thought she’d be upset. But she was barely even looking at DeLyn. She was smiling over at somebody in the nearby bleachers—Doug Calley, with his new look. Maybe at last her dad would approve of Doug and let them get back together.

“Look at DeLyn—how happy she seems,” George murmured. “Considering that ten minutes ago she thought her brother was trying to poison her.”

“That’s what makes her a true champion,” I said. “When she’s engrossed in doing the thing she loves, she shuts out everything else.”

“Kind of like someone I know when she’s solving a mystery,” Bess said.

Ned grinned. “You mean Nancy Drew, the champion of detectives?”

Bess nodded. “Touché!”

BOOK: En Garde (Nancy Drew (All New) Girl Detective Book 17)
2.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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