En Garde (Nancy Drew (All New) Girl Detective Book 17) (8 page)

Bela’s eyes flicked nervously in the direction of the fencing area. “Yes, yes, yes . . . I’d better stop them. I’ll tell Ted—we’ll get out plastic swords instead. There’s an exercise we do sometimes with the plastic swords. . . .”
He headed out of the cubicle but turned back for a moment. “Please, Miss Drew, I beg of you:
Do not let anyone know this has happened
. We had two new students here this afternoon, and I cannot afford for them to be scared away!”

I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. I’d been so mad just a minute ago, but I could tell how much the idea of sabotage upset Bela.

Bela was gone for only a minute. When he came back into the cubicle, he looked shaken. He had five foils, which he’d retrieved from the other students. Without a word, he held them up for me to look at. All of them had bare tips.

Bela sank wearily into his desk chair. “Thank goodness I sent those people from the television away,” he moaned. “They showed up tonight with no warning! The man said he was going to film a follow-up to yesterday’s story—tell my side of the story. Hah!” He threw up his hands.

Then Bela’s eyes widened. He grabbed the hair on either side of his head and pulled it furiously. “Paul Mourbiers must be behind this! I am certain of it. He sent a spy here to plant evidence—to make me look bad again. Then he got the news reporters to come so they would find out about it. Such evil!”

“Now, wait, Mr. Kovacs,” I said. “I was the one who convinced that reporter to do a follow-up story.
I thought it would help you to tell your side of the story. Paul Mourbiers had nothing to do with it—at least not this time.”

Bela didn’t look convinced. “But he must have tampered with our swords. Who else could have done it?”

My stomach stirred uneasily. “You said you had two new students today?”

Bela’s eyes met mine, guessing at once what I suspected. “Mourbiers’s spies!”

Even though I’d had the same idea, Bela Kovacs seemed way too quick to blame his rival.

“Let me go get their names from the sign-in sheet,” he said, jumping up from his desk. “I think I can give you a description of them too. Unfortunately, we don’t ask for addresses or phone numbers. But I bet if you go to Salle Olympique tomorrow, you’ll find the same two traitors fencing there.”

Just as he turned to leave the cubicle, an anguished cry broke out on the salle floor. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like DeLyn.

Bela Kovacs raced to the open fencing area. I was right behind him. As we came out from behind the partition, I could see a fencer in white, writhing on the floor.

It wasn’t DeLyn—although she was kneeling right next to the body, mouth still open from her scream. I
was relieved to see George standing beside her, unscathed. But who could the hurt fencer be? I couldn’t see the face behind the wire-mesh mask.

The figure on the floor flailed about frantically, moaning and whimpering in pain. DeLyn leaned forward, tugging at the person’s mask. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Speak to me, Damon!”

D
eLyn fumbled frantically with
the Velcro straps securing her twin brother’s fencing mask. Bela Kovacs gently pushed her aside, undid Damon’s mask in one swift motion, and lifted it free. Damon’s eyes were screwed shut and his face was contorted with pain.

Bela handed me the mask. An overpowering smell hit me. A sweet perfumy odor—but underneath, the piercing chemical scent of ammonia. I recognized it from the strong cleaners Hannah sometimes used. But what was ammonia doing on Damon’s fencing mask?

“Quick, get him to a sink so he can run water over his face!” I said. I knew that if the ammonia came into contact with his skin, it could irritate or even
burn him. Flushing it immediately with cold water was the only solution.

Bela already had a firm grip on Damon’s elbow and was pulling him to his feet. Hunched over and stumbling, Damon let himself be guided to the restroom. George had already run back there to start filling the sink, so by the time Damon got there, the basin was full of fresh, cold water. He bent over and plunged his face in.

“Aarghh!” Damon raised his head and cried out, as if the cold water hurt his skin. But he plunged it in again.

A circle of anxious fencers had gathered, crowding around the bathroom door. “Show’s over, folks,” Bela called out, clapping his hands. “Get back to your drills!” But he kept a hand on Damon’s back, patting him and reassuring him.

“It’s nothing, really, Bela,” Damon said, lifting his dripping face from the sink. “I guess I just got a little too much cleaning fluid on my mask. Could you give it here?”

I looked down and realized I was still holding Damon’s mask. He snatched it away from me.

DeLyn frowned. “Cleaning fluid?”

Damon hiked up one shoulder defensively. “The wire mesh was getting crudded up. I needed to scour it clean. By accident, I must have used too much. No
big deal!” He tucked the mask behind his back.

I’d had a split second to look at the mask, and in that moment I’d seen that the name, written in black marker on the mask’s white canvas straps, was DeLyn’s, not Damon’s. Odd.

If Damon claimed he had put cleaning fluid on his own mask, how come DeLyn’s mask was the one that smelled like ammonia?

Somebody wasn’t telling the straight story. And I had to find out who.

I walked back to the front of the studio, to where the fencers piled their belongings during class. My eyes swept the pale, polished wood floor in search of clues.

“Can I borrow a mask from the cupboard, Bela?” I heard Damon ask behind me. “Until this one airs out?”

“You’re not going back on the floor, Damon,” Bela replied gruffly. “You take the rest of the evening off.”

“But Bela—,” Damon began to protest.

“No argument,” Bela said curtly. “You’re finished with class for tonight. DeLyn, you go too. Take your brother home.”

That’s when I spied a tiny scrap of something shiny and wet-looking on the floor. I knelt down to swipe at it with my finger. It was a soft, transparent
scrap of plastic gel, called an ampoule. It’s a casing for medicine, like the outside of a capsule. Where had I seen one before?

Then I remembered—in a first-aid kit. Every coach has on hand a few ampoules of ammonium carbonate, commonly called smelling salts. If someone is knocked unconscious, you break open the ampoule under the person’s nose to release the stimulant scent. It brings them back to consciousness in a hurry. Getting hold of an ammonium carbonate ampoule would be easy. I could see at once how it had been done—the ampoule fastened loosely inside the mask, so that it would break open the minute the fencer pulled his mask into place. And once that smell was released . . .

“Come on, Damon,” I heard DeLyn say as she unzipped her tunic. “Let’s call it a day. You know how slow the buses run on Wednesday nights, anyway.”

“No bus,” Bela commanded. “Miss Drew, you drive them home.”

I flashed Bela Kovacs a puzzled look, but I didn’t argue. Whether or not he intended to, Bela was giving me the perfect opportunity to interrogate the Brittany twins and to sneak a closer look at that mask.

I tried to make my voice sound as casual as possible. “No problem. I’ve got my car outside. And you’re on my way.”

Damon frowned as he started to strip off his gear. “How do you know we’re on your way? You don’t even know where we live.”

I had to backpedal, fast. Sure, I didn’t know where they lived. But they didn’t know where I lived either. Theoretically, anywhere could be on my way. “Don’t you live on campus?” I asked, for starters.

Damon shook his head. “Too expensive. We still live at home with our mom. We’re way over on the west side.”

“That’s fine,” I said. It really was the opposite direction from my house. But the Brittany twins didn’t need to know that.

“Oh, and Damon?” Bela called out from the fencing floor. “I won’t charge you for tonight’s class. Consider it a freebie.”

Damon looked relieved. “Thanks, Bela.”

I was surprised by that bit of conversation. From what I had gathered, money was fairly tight for the twins. And at their level, they must be taking several classes a week. It hadn’t occurred to me that Bela charged them for every lesson they took. Once we were driving away from the salle, I asked, as casually as possible, “I thought you guys were the stars of Salle Budapest. Does Bela still charge you for lessons?”

DeLyn jumped in quickly. “Oh, no, not full price. We get a discount for taking so many lessons a week.
And then he gives us part-time jobs—answering phones while we’re at the salle, that sort of thing, and it helps us pay our lesson bill.”

“Bela’s been great, just great,” Damon echoed his sister. “He does everything he can to make it affordable for us. Of course, we still have to buy all our equipment.”

“And we have to go to a lot of tournaments, some of them pretty far away,” DeLyn explained. “But if we don’t compete, we can’t keep up our national rankings. And those rankings helped us get our college scholarships. Right, Damon?”

Damon grunted a brief reply. It seemed to be a touchy subject with him right now.

“Mom’s had to work a lot of extra nursing shifts at the hospital to keep up with all the costs,” DeLyn admitted. “But she always says it’s worth it. And she never complains about paying Bela. After all, he needs to make a living too. Bela’s lessons are worth every penny we pay.”

“He’s been like a second father to us,” Damon said earnestly. “Our father died when we were seven years old. It’s been up to Mom to support us ever since.”

“My mom died when I was three,” I told them. I felt a tug of sympathy, knowing that Damon and DeLyn were half orphans like me. But even so, I knew that my situation was different. I had had the
warmhearted Hannah Gruen to fill in for my mother. All the twins had was gruff, demanding Bela Kovacs.

The Brittany home was a small, neat, white frame bungalow on a crowded block of small bungalows, some of them more run-down than others. “Was Mom working late tonight, Damon?” DeLyn asked as we pulled up to the curb.

“I forget. I can’t keep track of her crazy work schedule,” her brother replied.

The twins didn’t invite me to come in, but I switched off the engine and went up the walk with them anyway. I figured they’d have to let me inside once we got to the door. “Mom, we’re home!” DeLyn called out as she unlocked the door.

“My, my, aren’t you home early?” a voice called out from a back room.

Damon flashed DeLyn a fierce warning glare. I guessed he didn’t want her to tell his mother about the incident at the salle. “A friend gave us a ride,” DeLyn called back. “We didn’t have to wait for the bus, that’s all.”

Once inside, I felt like I was in a museum, not a home. Every square inch of wall was occupied with framed award certificates and photos of the twins in fencing costume. Every spare shelf and tabletop was loaded with trophies. “Wow!” I exclaimed. “Between
the two of you, you must have won every prize at every tournament you ever attended.”

Damon winced and turned aside. “I’m gonna take a shower,” he said abruptly. “My skin is still stinging.” He crossed the living room in two strides and disappeared.

“I’ll be right back,” DeLyn murmured, looking anxious. She hurried after her brother, leaving me in the living room alone. Unfortunately, she carried her equipment bag with her. How was I going to get a look at that ammonia-tainted mask?

At least there was plenty to look at while I waited. Some of the photographs showed DeLyn and Damon as kids, clutching trophies and grinning. Bela Kovacs appeared in a lot of those early pictures, beaming as he posed with his prize students. The older they got, the less often Bela was in the photos. And, I began to realize, as they got older more pictures featured DeLyn, not Damon. I began to read the brass plaques on the trophies and medals. In recent years DeLyn’s trophies outnumbered her brother’s.

“We sure have a lot of hardware here to look at,” I heard Mrs. Brittany’s voice behind me. I turned around and smiled. A short, plump woman, Mrs. Brittany was still dressed in her nurse’s uniform—not the crisp starched white of a registered nurse, but the
blue and white stripes of a less trained (and not as well paid) practical nurse. She came shuffling into the living room, walking as though her feet hurt. I know how much time nurses spend on their feet; I felt bad for her, watching her slowly make her way over to an armchair.

“The twins are really champions, aren’t they?” I replied.

“Oh, yes, I’m mighty proud of them,” Mrs. Brittany said with a huge grin. “Are you one of their fencing friends?”

“Sort of,” I said. “I met them at Salle Budapest. But I’m not a fencer myself; I was just there with one of my friends. My name is Nancy Drew.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Drew.” Mrs. Brittany waved, but she didn’t get up from her chair to shake hands. Sitting down was too much of a relief, I guessed.

DeLyn popped back into the room, giving me frantic looks and holding a finger to her lips. Obviously she didn’t want me to tell her mother about Damon’s accident. Glancing over at Mrs.Brittany, weary from her extra shifts, I decided to follow DeLyn’s advice, at least for the moment. “I was just admiring your trophies, DeLyn,” I said. “Do you and Damon keep a running score of who has the most?”

DeLyn flinched. Clearly I had hit a sore spot. Well,
good—sometimes hitting a sore spot can make people tell you things you need to know. “I think Damon faces tougher competition than I do,” DeLyn said loyally.

“No, don’t you be modest, Lyn,” Mrs. Brittany chided her. “You’ve worked so hard to get that high ranking of yours. Damon’s got to hustle to keep up. Would you believe, Miss Drew, that Damon was the one who started fencing first? I don’t know how he got the notion to take up fencing—he was just a little boy, nine or so. DeLyn was still taking ballet classes, weren’t you, honey? The community center offered lots of free classes for little kids back then. Two years later, Bela saw Damon at a junior meet and asked him to study at the salle. Being a single mom, I thought it would be easier if I could send both children to the same activity, so we persuaded DeLyn to go to fencing class too. And oh, my, how fast she took off! Bela says she has a natural gift.”