Frognapped (7 page)

I
decided that we should walk back into Water Wonderland through the front gate, as Nosy Nora would not expect that. It was very quiet at the gate, with just a few bored-looking people lining up to get tickets.

Wanda hung back. “They'll see us,” she whispered.

“Who will?”

“Whoever's in the ticket office.”

“There's no one there,” I told her. “Come on.”

“But people will wonder why we're walking in without buying a ticket.”

“So what? They won't say anything. They'll think we belong here. We'll just hold our heads up and march right past them.” Which is what we did. And then I had a great idea. A good detective does not waste an opportunity to search a suspect's premises, and this was too good to miss. I pulled Wanda into the ticket office.

“Araminta, what are you
doing
?” she wailed.

“About time, too,” said the man at the front of the line. He had a baby strapped to his chest and a small kid hanging on to his leg, wiping her lollipop on his trousers. He did not look happy. “We want to buy some tickets. We've
been waiting for hours.”

“What?” I said.

“Two adults and two children
please
,” snapped the man with the baby stuck to him. He pointed to a disheveled-looking woman holding on to a buggy containing a chocolate-covered twin of the lollipop owner.

“We don't do children's tickets,” I told him, “as children are just as much of a nuisance as adults. More in fact. That will be five tickets in all.”

“Five?”

“Two adults, two kids, and one baby. Two and two and one make five. Where's the ticket roll, Wanda?”

Wanda was not being much help. She was just standing there doing her goldfish impression.

“You can't charge for a
baby
,” the man said.

“Yes we can. Do you want to come in or not?”

“No,” he snapped.

The next customers were two old ladies who were much more reasonable. Wanda stopped being a goldfish, found the ticket roll, and we sold them their tickets. Then one of them said, “Mabel and I just love your fish and squid hats. Do all the staff wear such wonderful hats?”

“Only the ones in charge,” I told her. Wanda gasped and dropped the ticket roll.

“I do hope you have some for sale,” the other old lady said. “Vera and I are great fish fans. We have been looking for hats like these for years.”

“You can buy these if you want to,” I told her. “They are limited edition sale samples.”

“Really?” The old ladies looked thrilled. “How much?”

I told them the price and I heard Wanda gasp again.

“Stop it, Wanda,” I said, “and give me your hat.”

The two old ladies put on our crazy hats,
which really suited them. They went off looking extremely pleased.

“But we're not in disguise now,” said Wanda.

I sighed. “Wanda Wizzard,” I said, “just think about it. When Nosy Nora saw us with Sir Horace, what were we wearing?”

“The usual stuff,” said Wanda, looking puzzled.

“The usual stuff and the
hats
. So what will she have noticed most—the usual stuff or the hats?”

“The hats?” asked Wanda.

“So what will she have told Old Morris to look out for?”

“The hats?”

“And what will she be looking out for?”

“The hats,” muttered Wanda.

“But
who
will be wearing the hats?”

“The old ladies. Oh,” said Wanda. “I
see
.”

I was working very hard at training Wanda Wizzard to be an efficient sidekick, but as you can see it could be tough going sometimes.

We sold ten more tickets and put the money in the cash box. Then we had the place to ourselves. It was time to search the suspect's premises for the stolen property.

It was obvious, once you knew, that the ticket office was part of the old gatehouse. The little window that you sold the tickets through was where the gatekeeper must have sat and checked everyone out. I think the part where they poured boiling oil on anyone they didn't like was at the top where all the ivy was growing. Any other time I would have liked to
climb up the little spiral steps and had a look to see if there were any pots of oil left, but we had frogs to find.

The ticket office was really small and it took about two seconds to figure out that the frog bucket was not there. But there was a little room behind the ticket office with some coats hanging in it that looked more promising—just the kind of place you would hide a bucket of frognapped frogs in fact. There was Nosy Nora's school coat, which is just like Wanda's, there was Old Morris's grubby overcoat, and then there was—a shark!

Someone had hung up a shark in the cloakroom!

Wanda, who is nosy—which I suppose can be a good thing if you are helping out a busy detective who does not have time to think of
everything—poked at the shark. “It's a shark suit,” she said. “Look!” She heaved it off the hook and the shark suit fell right on top of her.

“Der-
dum
…der-
dum
, I'm coming to get you!” said the Wanda-Shark. “Snap snap
snap
!”

“Sharks don't go snap,” I told her. “Only crocodiles go snap. Take it off, Wanda.”

Wanda wriggled out from underneath the
suit. She looked very excited and her hair was sticking up like it does in the morning. “I like being a detective,” she said. “This is fun.”

“An
assistant
detective,” I corrected her.

“I think, Araminta,” said Wanda rather pompously, “that I am a
real
detective now.”

“I don't think so,” I told her firmly. “You still have a lot of training to do.”

“
You've
never done any training, so I don't see why
I
have to.”

“Some people don't need to. Some people are just natural-born detectives, they can't help it.”

“Well, since I have worked out a whole bunch of stuff about the shark, I think that makes me a real detective.”

“What stuff?” I asked warily.

“For a start, that was not a real shark in the
sea, it was Old Morris in the shark suit.”

“I was just about to say that.”

“Oh, but you didn't say it,
did
you?” Wanda was getting irritating now. “And you didn't say
why
Old Morris swam around in a shark suit scaring everyone, did you?”

“I don't have to tell you
all
my theories,” I said.

“So why did he then?”

I sighed. “That is one of the questions I want to ask Old Morris when we arrest him for frognapping.”

“You don't have to ask him,” said Miss Smugpants, “because I am going to tell you. He went swimming in a shark suit to scare everyone off the beach and into Water Wonderland. He scared us, and all those little kids, just so that he could sell lots of tickets
for people to come and watch Dad's frogs. He is not nice.”

“He didn't scare
me
,” I said. “You should get your facts right if you are trying to be a real detective.”

“I
am
a real detective,” said Wanda. “And I think that from now on I should be in charge.”

“What?”
I was shocked. It was mutiny.

Wanda folded her arms and looked like the parking lot attendant who gave Aunt Tabby a ticket last week: kind of smug and I've-got-you-ha-ha at the same time. “Look at the facts, Araminta,” she said. “Have we rescued Dad's frogs?
No
. Have we rescued Sir Horace?
No
—”

This was too much. “That's
not true
,” I told her. “We
did
find the frogs.”

“But we didn't rescue them, did we?”

“No, but we will. And we
did
rescue Sir
Horace. He is quite safe in the ditch.”

But Wanda was not going to give up—I could tell by the fiendish gleam in her eye, which reminded me of Aunt Tabby when she knows you have done something wrong and she goes on forever until she finds out what it is.

“We may have rescued his suit of armor,” she said, “but Sir Horace is not inside it.”

“You don't know that, you're just—what was
that
?”

“What?”

“Someone tapped me on the shoulder.”

“It is no use trying to change the subject,” said Wanda, and then she jumped. “Someone just tapped me on the shoulder too,” she whispered.

It was very spooky. A ghostly breeze ruffled
past and suddenly it felt as though someone else was there in the little cloakroom, listening to us.

“Let's get out of here,” whispered Wanda. “This place is
haunted
.”

But after Wanda's takeover bid for the Spookie Detective Agency I was not going to let on I was spooked too.

“No, it's not,” I told her.

“Yes, it
is
,”
came a ghostly voice.
“Miss Spookie, Miss Wizzard, I require your assistance, if you would be so kind.”

“S
ee, I
told
you Sir Horace was not inside his armor,” was all Miss Know-it-all Smugpants had to say. If she had been a real detective she would have questioned Sir Horace about his motive for getting out of his armor in the first place. And about why he was haunting the gatehouse and not rescuing frogs like he was supposed to. I mean, what is the point of being a damsel in distress
if your knight goes off and just does his own thing?

So it was left to Chief Detective Spookie to question the suspect—I mean Sir Horace.

Sir Horace said he had come for his long-lost treasure, which was in the dungeon underneath the ticket office.
“I always dreamed of the day I could retrieve what is rightfully mine,”
he said.
“And when you asked me to go on your frog quest I knew it was my chance at last. Because, Miss Spookie, I need your assistance. The trapdoor is here, if you would care to accompany me.”

I really like dungeons and I especially like long-lost treasure, so I lifted up the trapdoor and we peered down into the dark hole. Wanda shivered. It was really cold down there. I switched on my flashlight (all
detectives must carry a flashlight) and we saw some steps leading down to an earth floor and some slimy green walls. It looked great.

“Come on, Wanda,” I said.

Wanda followed me down the steps and soon we were standing in a perfect little dungeon. The dungeon was empty apart from a very old shovel propped up against the wall.

Sir Horace's voice echoed around the little
dungeon and I got goose bumps. He sounded even more spooky down there.

“I see you have found my shovel,”
he said.
“It is exactly where I left it. Now, perhaps you could dig a hole just where Miss Wizzard is standing?”

“Me? Dig?”

“That's what he said,” said Wanda. “Dig.”

Sometimes a chief detective has to get things done and this was one of them. So I stabbed at the earth with the shovel and got going.

“Not there,” said Miss Picky, “
here.
” And she jumped out of the way. “Where I was standing.”

“How can I concentrate if you keep hopping about like a demented rabbit?” I asked her. “Digging for treasure is a skilled job, you know.”

It was a tough job, but about ten minutes later the shovel hit something hard with a big
thud
. As I scraped the earth away, Sir Horace—who had kept so quiet that I began to wonder if he had floated off somewhere—suddenly shouted,
“I see it! My treasure chest!”

Aha! Another success for the Spookie Detective Agency.

Wanda and I dragged the chest out of the hole. It was really heavy and was just how you would expect it to be—dark, thick wood with a domed top. It was covered in metal studs and had two big iron bands wrapped
around it. In the middle was a great big brass keyhole.

Sir Horace was really thrilled. Even though you could not see him, you could tell that his voice had a smile in it. A big smile.
“My treasure, my treasure,”
he kept saying, over and over again.

“Open it, open it!” I said. After all, it's not every day you get to see treasure that has been buried for five hundred years.

“Oh,”
said Sir Horace, and I could tell he was not smiling anymore.

“What's the matter?” I asked him, but he didn't reply.

“He doesn't have the key,” said Wanda. “That's what was rattling inside his armor.”

“How do you know?” I asked her.

“Deduction,” said Miss Smugpants.

“What?”

“It's what detectives do. They put two and two together and make four.” Wanda looked at me in a Nurse Watkins kind of way when she said that, although I don't know why.

“Well, if you know so much about where the key is, you can go and get it,” I told her. “
What's that
?”

Thump, thump, thump.
There were footsteps up in the ticket office. Big, clompy footsteps.

“It's Old Morris,” whispered Wanda.

“Shh…” I hissed. “It might not be Old Morris, it might be—”

“Nora, Nora…is that you?” Old Morris yelled grumpily. “I
told
you not to leave the door open. Anyone could have walked in.
Nora?
”

“We're trapped,” whispered Wanda. She
looked really scared.

We listened to Old Morris's big boots clomping across the floor. The footsteps were right above us now and I knew that any minute he would find the open trapdoor.

And then he found it. Very suddenly. Extremely suddenly, in fact. One minute he was stomping around shouting and the next minute he was flat on his back on the dungeon floor staring up at Wanda and me. He looked a bit surprised.

“Well, hello, Old Morris,” I said in a friendly way, as I did not want him to feel that he had intruded on anything—even though he had. There are some times when you just have to be polite and I figured this was one of them.

But Wanda is not polite like I am. “Let's get
out of here!” she yelled, and she was up the ladder in two seconds flat. I followed her—fast.

“My treasure,”
Sir Horace groaned.
“I have waited five hundred years to get my treasure back from the FitzMaurices. Five hundred years only to see it snatched from my grasp yet again.
Aaarrghhhooooh
.”

“Now stop it, Sir Horace,” I told him in my best Aunt Tabby voice. “Just stop it. It will be all right. I have a plan.” Now it was Wanda's turn to groan, but I ignored it.

I slammed the trapdoor shut.

“Hey!” came a muffled yell from the dungeon.

“Help me shove the safe over the trapdoor so he can't get out,” I said.

“You can't do that,” said Wanda.

“Yes I can,” I said. “We don't want him getting away with the treasure, do we?”

Wanda shook her head.

“Hey! Let me
out
!”

The safe was really heavy but we managed it. There was no way that Old Morris was going to get out of there in a hurry.

“Now look,” I said. “The Fish Frolics Show is meant to start in a few minutes and if it doesn't everyone, including Nosy Nora, will start looking for Old Morris. It won't take them long to figure out where he is, not with all that yelling. Then they will find the treasure—which will belong to him since he owns this place—”

“No he doesn't,”
said Sir Horace.
“I do.”

“Well,
we
know that and
you
know that, Sir Horace, but no one else does. As I was saying, I have a plan that will mean we get the treasure
and
the frogs. Okay?”

“What plan?” asked Wanda suspiciously.

“
We
are going to do the Fish Frolics Show.”

“What?”

“And Sir Horace is going to be Old Morris.”

Wanda did her stranded goldfish imitation. “But…
how
?”

“He's going to wear the shark suit,” I said.

Wanda opened her mouth but she didn't say anything. She didn't have to. I knew it was my most brilliant plan ever.