Madhattan Mystery (10 page)

Of all things,
Alice in Wonderland
popped into Lexi's head. That part where Alice is faced with a hallway of doors. If only she knew they would be stumbling into a painted rose garden or a wacky tea party on the other side, maybe her hands wouldn't have been trembling quite so much.

The third door was also locked.

“Oh, well,” Kevin said, turning to go, “can't say we didn't try.”

“Not so fast.” Kim Ling started searching through her backpack again. “Make yourself useful, short stuff, and keep a sharp lookout—lemme know if anyone's coming around that corner. And you, Lex Luthor, stand here to block me from view, just in case. And try to unclench a little.”

“What're you gonna do?”

“Don't do it!” Kevin cried, as if she were about to shoot someone.

“Geez. Chill.” Kim Ling calmly unsnapped her wallet and removed her plastic library card. “This always works in the movies.”

“Oh, great,” Kevin said. “
Flying
always works in the movies too, ya know!”

Lexi moved in closer to camouflage Kim Ling, fanning herself with the small notebook until Kim Ling swiped it away and dropped it into her backpack, mumbling something about drawing too much attention. “Sorry,” Lexi whispered. She watched closely as Kim Ling carefully
slipped the library card between the door and the doorframe. Once. Twice. Three times. This seemed as goofy as trying to pick a lock with a hairpin, but after the fourth try there was a definite
click
.

Kim Ling tried the doorknob and this one turned. With a smug grin, she leaned into the door and opened it just a crack.

“Someone's coming!” Kevin hissed.

“Hustle!” Lexi said, hearing the heavy footsteps.

In the span of a heartbeat, all three slithered through the doorway into the thick blackness. The door closed behind them quietly but surely. Lexi felt something sweaty clinging to her arm. Hopefully her brother.

“Just for the record,” he said in the faintest whisper, “if we wind up dead, I'm totally telling Dad.”

10
“I
NY”

The air felt ten degrees cooler on the other side of the door. Lexi, Kevin, and Kim Ling took a deep collective breath, staring into the dark unknown. There was the strangest smell—you could practically taste it. Stale. Metallic. Like sipping spoiled milk through a steel straw.

They stood motionless at first, listening to the electrical hum and waiting for their eyes to adjust. Lexi tried to loosen Kevin's life-or-death grip on her arm, and when she did, she immediately grabbed his clammy hand. Little by little, they all inched forward until the cavernous room slowly bled into view.

“Whoa,” Kevin muttered, looking straight up.

The room was a mile tall at least. Grated staircases zigzagged from ceiling to floor, and long steel catwalks outlined the walls at every level. There were rows and rows of pipes, and thick black wires were snaking everywhere.
It was like being inside a gigantic computer. The mother of all motherboards.

“Don't touch anything,” Lexi warned, thinking they might get electrocuted.

“This doesn't look like an abandoned train station to me,” Kevin said in a shaky whisper. “Happy now? Have we had enough?”

“Suck it up, tadpole,” Kim Ling said, “we're not turning back now.”

“Famous last words.”

They were taking bigger, bolder steps when Lexi noticed a wedge of light in the far corner, spilling onto what looked like a burlap sack or something. Probably not the jewels—it could never be that easy—plus, they were supposed to have been buried under some tracks. Still, it was worth checking out.

“Come on,” Lexi whispered, riding a wave of bravery.

“Do you see something?” Kim Ling asked.

Lexi's quickening pace was her answer. She kept a steady gaze on her target and cautiously led the others along the endless wall, counting her steps—one for every heartbeat so she could easily find her way back to the door.
Thirty-eight, thirty-nine footsteps exactly
. They came to an accordion stop.

Now the electrical hum was competing with a strange rumbling that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth as they sized up the brownish lump. It was woolly. Dirty. Looked more like a rumpled blanket up close than
a sack. And there was definitely something under it. After a few uncertain seconds, Kim Ling gave the edge of the blanket a little kick and quickly backed off. Nothing happened.

Not a dead body
, Lexi prayed, her bravery shriveling instantly like aluminum foil in a microwave.
Anything but that
.

Kim Ling kicked it a little harder and this time it moved. Everyone flinched.

“Oh, God, please don't let it be rats, either,” Lexi said.

In a very bizarre move, Kim Ling wriggled a foot under the dusty blanket and, with one mighty kick, it flew into the air.

“No!” Kevin cried as a girl jolted upright.

“Okay, I'm leaving right now,” the girl said through a drape of greasy blond hair that hung from her purple bandanna like wet spaghetti. “Just be cool, be cool.” She scrambled to her knees, swiftly gathering the things around her—Chinese food cartons, half a box of doughnuts. When she happened to glance up at the three gawking faces, she stopped cold. “What the—whadda you rug rats want?” she snarled, collapsing onto her heels. “Take a wrong turn on the Yellow Brick Road?”

“Mixed metaphor,” Kim Ling said.

“I thought you were the cops!”

Her voice was gravelly with a New York twang. From the Bronx, Lexi guessed, or Brooklyn maybe. The girl shook her head and crammed half a doughnut into her mouth,
raining crumbs down her grungy
I
NY
T-shirt. It was like the ones sold all over the city except the heart was broken with a zigzag crack. When the splotch of light caught the girl's face, Lexi guessed she couldn't have been much older than fifteen maybe. Sixteen tops.

“I hate it when visitors show up unannounced,” the girl said with her mouth full, retrieving her ratty blanket.

Now Lexi was clinging to
Kevin's
arm like a tree frog. Kim Ling grabbed her free hand, and the threesome stood gawking down at the rumpled teenager in total disbelief. At her makeshift bed made out of flattened cardboard boxes; at the rolled-up jeans she used for a pillow; at the filth upon filth.

“So, how'd you guys end up in the boiler room?” the girl asked through a crooked yawn. “You lost or somethin'?”

Lexi scanned the place again. “Boiler room?”

“We wandered in by mistake,” Kim Ling answered. “So, what's your excuse?”

The girl gave her armpit a ferocious scratch. “I live here, if you must know. Ain't much sunlight but I love the high ceilings and it's definitely affordable.” She adjusted her purple bandanna, brushed crumbs off her jeans-pillow, and collapsed back down. “Well, show's over, kiddies. You'll have to see yourselves out.” And yanking the disgusting blanket over herself, that was the end of that.

Lexi, Kim Ling, and Kevin did an awkward about-face, coughing a little from the dust. They started toward the
door, but after a few steps, Lexi had a thought and rushed back to the girl.

“Knock-knock,” she said softly. “Sorry, but you don't by any chance know where the abandoned section of the train terminal is, do you? Track Sixty-one? We were actually—”

“GET OUUUT!”
a voice roared out of nowhere.

Lexi bolted for the exit, her heart beating wildly. Kim Ling and Kevin were in full throttle ahead of her with Kevin screeching like a boiling teakettle.

“I wouldn't be hangin' at Grand Central no more if I was you!” the girl called out. “The cops'll cart your butts off to juvie!”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Lexi yelled back. “Sorry we interru—Bye!”

A burst of wicked laughter erupted from the rafters and Lexi flew into a full gallop. Ghostly images were emerging from everywhere. A leg dangling from a platform—then an arm—two heads poking through a steel stairway. It was as if she was escaping from some eerie catacomb where all the dead bodies were rising from their graves. Like the Haunted Mansion at Kingsley Park, only real.

She couldn't get to the triangle of light fast enough, where Kim Ling was holding the door open, frantically waving her on. Laughter ricocheted off the walls as Lexi finally flew out the door and closed it behind her with a slam.

“Thanks-sorry-bye?” Kim Ling spouted. “Are you for real?”

“There's, like, a whole bunch of mole people in there—hiding in the shadows!” Lexi clung to the doorknob, catching her breath. “Where's Kevin? Is he all right?”

“I'm okay.” He was behind Kim Ling with his hands on his thighs, panting and wheezing.

Lexi rushed over and smothered him in a desperate hug, surprised he wasn't bawling. “That was so not cool,” she said to Kim Ling. She could feel Kevin's heart about to explode from his chest. “
So
not cool.”

Kim Ling's eyeballs shifted from left to right. “Or was it, like, the coolest thing ever?”

Lexi pretended she didn't hear that. She took Kevin by the hand and led him to the elevators with Kim Ling right beside them. She couldn't help wondering if any further damage had been done to Kevin's internal panic button. And as far as the treasure hunt, well, that was a hare-brained idea and they were definitely calling it quits.

The elevator
ding
came like a wrong answer in a spelling bee. Lexi was first on and jabbed
MAIN FLOOR
with a shaky sense of relief. Game over.

No sooner had the elevator doors snapped shut when Kim Ling turned to Lexi with dancing eyes. “We have to go back!”

“
What?
In your dreams.”

“Think about it. That homeless chick could be a freakin' gold mine of information. She must know the uncharted
tunnels and passageways of this place like the back of her hand. And she gave us a legitimate warning about the cops so there must be a heart in there somewhere under all that grunge. This is too good. We can't let her get away—we have to drill her.
You
have to drill her.”

“Back off, Nancy Drew,” Lexi warned.

“If anyone's gonna win her trust, it's you. You've got that pie-eyed, naive, small-town thing going on.”

The elevator doors opened and they exited into the buzzing main concourse. “So wait,” Lexi said, “let me get this straight. You want to just use that girl—correction—you want
me
to use that poor girl just so we can find the jewels and you can have your stupid story?”

“Mm-hmm—and the problem with that is?”

“Tell me again how you're able to sleep at night.”

“Listen to me. We've got a very small window of opportunity here. We have to go back right now, before she disappears forever!”

“I'm afraid
we
might disappear forever!”

“Don't be such a sissy.”

Lexi's eyes snapped shut like two deflective shields, shutting out Kim Ling's words. She blinked them open again, reached out and grabbed Kim Ling's hand with both of hers, and gave it a civilized shake. “I believe this is where we part company,” she said with the warmth of a prison guard dismissing an inmate. “Thanks for your time; thanks for almost getting us killed—and have a nice day.”

Kim Ling ripped her hand away. “Aww, don't bail on me now, dude.”

“I am not bailing. Freak-face!”

So much for civilized. Lexi grabbed Kevin and stormed off through the concourse. She was beginning to see a pattern—hadn't she done this before in the park? This would be the last time.

“I could really use a Snapple now,” Kevin said. “Mango Madness.”

Lexi was moving faster than her brain could think. Sweating. Fuming. The annoying sound of Kim-Ling's slapping flip-flops following her and Kevin through the crowd, around the corner, and up the ramp toward the Forty-Second Street exit.