Nobody's Business (2 page)

Blaster looked apologetic. “You told me to come to you if any more tools were missing. Well, now I can't find my soldering iron, and Natalia Diaz told me she's missing her three-eighths drill bit
and
the drill.”

Andrew's lips pressed together in a thin line. “I can't believe this,” he muttered. “Every day it's something else. Tools keep disappearing, some of the wiring got cut in the dining room, and someone tore up some of the floorboards upstairs.”

Nancy didn't know much about construction, but something about these accidents seemed weird. “Where was your soldering iron the last time you saw it?” she asked Master Blaster.

“Upstairs, in one of the bedrooms,” he replied. “My boss, Eddie, called me into another room for about two minutes. When I got back, the iron was gone.”

“And you didn't see or hear anybody?” Nancy asked.

Blaster shook his head. “I don't know what it is,” he said. “I've worked on a lot of jobs before, but I've never seen one where so many things went wrong.” He fixed his dark brown eyes on Andrew. “Maybe somebody doesn't like you, man.”

Suddenly a mischievous twinkle lit up Blaster's eyes, and he added, “Or maybe it's the Lakeside ghost.”

“Ghost?” Bess echoed. She looked as if she didn't know whether to be amused or scared.

Blaster nodded. “Sure. An old place like this is definitely haunted,” he said, doing a dance step in time to the beat of the music blasting overhead.

“Don't listen to him,” Andrew told Bess, rolling his eyes. “He's just babbling.”

“Sorry,” Blaster said. “Oops! I think I hear Eddie calling me.” With that he bounded out of the room.

Turning to Andrew, Nancy inquired, “So, what about this ghost story?”

“It's not really much of a story,” Andrew said, shrugging. “The inn was built over a hundred years ago as a popular society resort. Lots of big business moguls from Chicago would come here and stay all summer.”

“I can see why,” Bess said, letting her blue eyes gaze around the room. “You can tell how elegant it must have been.”

“I hope it will be again, too,” Andrew said.
“Anyway, two of the families that came here, the Aarons and the Murrays, were bitter rivals because they owned competing oil companies. The families never even spoke to each other until one summer when Lawrence Aaron fell in love with Rosalie Murray.”

“Uh-oh,” Nancy said. “I can see where this is going.”

Andrew grinned at her. “You guessed it. They wanted to get married,” he said. “Their parents threatened to disown them, but they went ahead with the plans, anyway. The wedding was scheduled to take place in this very room.”

“What happened?” Bess asked.

“The night before the wedding, there was a big fire at the inn,” Andrew went on, “and Rosalie disappeared. The inn was nearly destroyed.”

“What about Rosalie?” Ned asked. “Did they ever find her?”

“No,” Andrew told him. “Some say she died in the fire, brokenhearted, and that her ghost still haunts the inn. But, of course, that's totally ridiculous. Everybody knows there's no such thing as—”

He broke off as the amplified music stopped in the middle of a song. A moment later a chilling, anguished wail echoed in the ballroom.

“Aaaaaaagh!”

The sound made Nancy's skin crawl and sent icy shivers running down her back.

“Aaaaaaagh!”
The wailing continued, even
louder now, and Nancy jumped as it was echoed by a frightened scream from Bess. Up on their ladders and down on the floor, the teenage workers looked around anxiously.

“Oh, no!” Bess shrieked. “The ghost is right here in this room!”

L
ET'S GET OUT
of here!” Bess shouted over the eerie shrieking. Her cry was echoed by some of the teen workers.

With a hand on Bess's arm Nancy looked quickly around the ballroom. “Calm down,” she told everyone. “I'm sure there's an explanation.”

“Maybe this place really
is
haunted,” the blond girl on the ladder suggested.

The wails stopped as abruptly as they'd started, leaving a ringing echo in the huge room.

“It's haunted all right,” Andrew said grimly. “By a practical joker with a bad sense of humor.”

Nancy had been thinking exactly the same thing. Pointing up to the balcony, she said, “The music seemed to be coming from there, and it
stopped right before the wailing started. My guess is that someone's been playing with your stereo, Andrew. Can we go up there and check it out?”

“Good idea,” Andrew said, heading for a door set in the wall beneath the balcony.

He led Nancy, Ned, and Bess through the door and up a dimly lit staircase. It smelled damp and musty, and cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. The group's footsteps echoed noisily as they climbed.

When they reached the top, Andrew led them through an open doorway and onto the balcony. A compact stereo system sat on the floor, its components stacked on top of each other and connected by wires to two large speakers.

Kneeling down in front of the stereo, Nancy placed a hand on top of the tape deck. It was still warm, even though it was turned off. Only one of the two cassette decks had a tape in it. Nancy pushed the Eject button and found a cassette hand-labeled Master Blaster's Super Mix. When she popped it back into the cassette deck and pressed the Play button, the same dance music that had been playing when they'd come in blasted from the speakers.

“Did you find anything, Nan?” Bess asked.

Nancy tapped the empty second cassette player. “It's what I didn't find that's got me wondering,” she said. “Someone could have sneaked up these stairs and put in another tape of the wailing
sounds we heard. Then the person could have taken the tape out and sneaked out again.”

“Blaster isn't going to be too happy that someone changed his program,” Andrew commented, frowning. “In fact, I'm surprised he hasn't come up here, yelling like a maniac. He hates it when anyone else touches his sound system.”

Nancy stared at Andrew. “I wonder why he didn't show up,” she mused. Unless he was the one responsible, she added to herself. Blaster had left the ballroom a few minutes before the ghostly wails replaced the music. That was long enough for him to have changed the tapes himself.

Then she shook herself. Stop playing detective, she told herself. You're on vacation, remember?

Nancy looked up as Andrew let out a groan. “Every time there's a delay like this, it costs me money,” he said, taking off his glasses and wearily rubbing his eyes. “My father's going to kill me if I go over budget.”

“Don't worry about him,” Ned said, clapping Andrew on the back.

As Ned spoke consolingly to Andrew, Nancy wandered toward the shadowy stairway. Just before the entrance to the balcony, she noticed an alcove she hadn't seen before. A metal plate was attached to the wall there, with several black dials on it and some holes with bare wires sticking out. It looked like a master light switch.

Before she could take a closer look, Nancy heard a sound on the stairs below her. She froze
and listened. Were those retreating footsteps? Maybe the intruder was still nearby.

“Where are you going?” Bess asked as Nancy ran from the balcony.

“I'll be right back,” Nancy called over her shoulder. She rushed down the stairs two at a time, trying to make out a figure in the darkness.

When Nancy got to the bottom, she realized that there was a hallway that led from the ballroom. The footsteps sounded far away, but Nancy ran blindly down the hallway toward them. Suddenly she saw a rectangle of daylight appear in the distance and a silhouetted figure pass through it before the hall went dark again. It was a door leading outside.

Picking up her pace, Nancy barreled the rest of the way down the hall, flung open the door, and felt a cold rush of winter air slap her in the face. She was standing a few yards from the rocky shore of Moon Lake.

Hearing a snapping, crackling sound to her right, Nancy turned and saw a slender girl with dark curly hair running toward a grove of trees. Though the girl was far away, Nancy could also see that she had a single streak of coppery red in the middle of her curls.

Nancy took off after the girl, but she kept losing sight of her among the dense evergreen trees. Then the girl disappeared altogether. Nancy stopped to listen, but the woods were still except for the sound of her own heavy breathing.

With a sigh of frustration, she trudged back to the inn. The sun was already setting over the lake, bathing the stone building in an orange glow.

The back door was ajar. As Nancy approached it from the rear, she pulled it open—then stopped short. “Blaster, what are you doing here?” she asked in surprise.

The wiry teenager looked just as surprised to see her. “Just, uh, getting some air,” he mumbled. Then, turning his back to Nancy, he headed down the dark hallway toward the ballroom.

It was clear Blaster was covering something up. Could he have had something to do with the eerie music, or with the girl who'd just run off?

Nancy hurried to catch up with him. “Did you see anyone just now?” she asked. “A girl with curly dark hair?”

“I didn't see anybody,” Blaster said, striding the last few steps to the door and throwing it open. “Like I said, I was just getting some air.” Hands in his pockets, he walked past the other teenagers and left the ballroom.

“What happened to you, Nancy?” Bess asked as she, Ned, and Andrew hurried over to her. “You're sweating!”

Quickly Nancy described what she'd seen, adding Blaster's strange behavior. “Does that girl sound like anyone working here?” Nancy asked Andrew.

Andrew glanced uneasily at Nancy. “Not that I know of,” he replied after a moment.

“Wait a minute,” Ned said, turning to Andrew. “That sounds exactly like Jul—”

Andrew cut off Ned with an angry glare.

“Sorry,” Ned said, backing off. “I know you don't like to talk about her.”

“Talk about who?” Nancy asked. “If you have any idea who she might be, you should tell us. She could be the one causing the problems here.”

Ignoring Nancy, Andrew said gruffly, “It's five o'clock—quitting time. Why don't you guys go home and meet me back here tomorrow morning at eight?”

Nancy studied Andrew's tensely set jaw and the troubled look in his hazel eyes. What had come over him all of a sudden?

“You know, Andrew,” Bess said, laying a hand on his arm, “I feel so embarrassed at the way I freaked out over the ghost. I hope you won't hold it against me.”

Andrew looked right over the top of Bess's head at two teenage boys pretending to duel with strips of wood, banging them together with loud clacks. “Hey!” Andrew shouted, striding away from Nancy and her friends. “Stop messing around!”

“Oh, well,” Bess whispered to Nancy. “I guess I didn't make much of an impression on Andrew.”

“Don't let it get you down, Bess,” Ned said. “You wouldn't have had a chance with him no matter what.”

“Oh, great,” Bess said, rolling her eyes. “That's comforting.”

“No, that's not what I meant.” He shot Andrew a quick look, then said, “Let's go get some dinner. I'll explain then. There's a great Mexican restaurant right up the road.”

“Thanks for driving me, by the way,” Ned said. “I can't believe my car's in the shop—again.”

“No problem,” Nancy said, slipping her arm around his waist. “The more time we spend together, the better I like it. Consider me your personal chauffeur for the next three weeks.”

After waving goodbye to Andrew, the three of them got their jackets in the lobby, then went out to Nancy's Mustang. Ned directed Nancy to a narrow road that curved around the lake. In a few minutes they saw a cluster of small buildings, among them a crafts boutique called A Show of Hands, a post office, a bank, a small grocery store, and a Mexican restaurant, Paquito's.

Nancy parked, then she and her friends entered the tiny restaurant. A half dozen wooden booths filled the room, and the stone walls were draped with colorfully striped blankets.

“So tell me,” Nancy said, sliding into a wooden booth beside Ned. “What's the story with Andrew? What's he hiding about this J person?”

“He's not hiding anything, exactly,” Ned began. “It just hurts him to talk about it. A few weeks ago his fiancée, Julie Ross, broke up with him. He's been really devastated ever since. I don't think he could even look at another girl.”

“And you think that girl I saw was Julie?” Nancy asked.

Ned nodded. “She fits the description perfectly. How many girls have brown hair with a red streak running through it? And she works right next door here, at A Show of Hands. It's just a short walk from the inn.”