Stage Fright (Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys Book 6) (12 page)

“Nancy!” someone screamed. I heard the sounds of a struggle
above me, but I couldn’t make out what was happening. My head was spinning. I put
a hand down to steady myself—and nearly plunged off the walkway! I was now
balancing on the narrowest section of the path. An inch farther and I’d go right
over, down onto the stage below. Far, far below.

I tried to slowly stand, but the saw, which I was still clinging to, was
caught on something. I couldn’t drop it onto the stage. I pulled, and it came
loose with a
tearing sound. There was a terrific crash from below.
The entire grid shook as though an earthquake had hit. The saw must have been stuck on
the rope holding up the plane door. I hoped everyone on the stage survived, but right
now, I had to stop Damien. I struggled to my feet.

“Look what you did!” he was yelling. “I knew it was you!
You and those guys. Let go of me! It’s all your fault! You’re the
saboteurs.”

“Watch out!” Bess yelled, as Damien managed to pull free of
her grasp. He turned to run, but I had recovered. I threw myself at him, pinning him
against the railing. George grabbed his arms.

“You’re going away,” I told him as he struggled in our
grasp. “For a long time.”

“You going to try and kill me, too?” he wailed.

“No,” said a voice. I looked up and there were the Hardys.
“You’re under arrest.”

Frank pulled out his ATAC badge.

“Help me!” yelled Damien. “If you’re the police,
arrest these girls! They’re the ones who knocked the plane doors down.
They’re out to kill Claire!”

His relief was so evident that I had to believe him. He really thought we
were the bad guys.

“George, Bess—let him go.”

We all backed away, not wanting to be too close if he
made another crazy move. Damien shook his arms out and straightened up. He popped
his collar and ran one hand through his hair, which had become a wild poof of curls.

“Please arrest these women,” he said, trying to sound calm and
professional. “They have been harassing Claire Cleveland.”

“Should we arrest this twerp?” Joe asked me.

“No.” I shook my head. “I want to hear what he has to
say.”

“When I came up here, these three … ladies …
perpetrators were clustered around the base of that pole over there,” Damien
sputtered. It was clear he was trying to talk like the police on television. “That
one proceeded to attack me, take my saw, and cut the rope. There is evidence of their
misdemeanors all over the place. Look, she’s still holding the saw!”

“He makes a good case,” Frank winked at me.

“I was holding the saw because I took it from him!” I
responded. “George noticed the rope swaying in the wind, and we realized that
someone had sawed it nearly in two. I guess he was coming back to finish the
job.”

“No way!” yelled Damien. “I found that saw at the base
of the ladder. It looked like someone dropped it in a hurry, so I was coming to check on
things. You don’t know how many strange accidents I’ve had to prevent this
last week. This show is cursed!”

“So you weren’t coming to look at a
certain shrine, were you?”

Damien blushed beet red and looked at his feet.

“Shrine?” said Joe. “Want to fill us in?”

“Someone,” I said, nodding in Damien’s direction,
“has built a little shrine to Claire up here. A picture of her, a lock of her
hair, a few stolen things.”

“I think his face is enough of a confession,” said Frank.
“So you were coming up here to finish the job? Kill Claire off during the opening
number?”

“No!” screamed Damien. He was suddenly standing up straight
again. “I love Claire! Okay, yes, I took some of her stuff. But just little things
that she wouldn’t miss. I was trying to make a little good luck charm for her. You
don’t know what it’s been like around here these last few weeks. Every day,
something goes wrong. Last week I found a razor blade in her dance shoes! Yesterday,
someone had stripped the wiring in her dressing room. If I hadn’t got an
electrician in pronto, it might have burned the whole place down.”

Whoa
, I thought. If Damien was telling the
truth, that meant Claire might be in a lot more danger than we knew!

“And you had nothing to do with any of this?” asked Frank.
“You didn’t sabotage that plane, or lock me in the basement?”

Damien’s face froze with his mouth hanging open.
He looked like he’d just choked on his own tongue.

“I didn’t mean to … I was just … I didn’t
know you were … I was jealous,” he finally mumbled. “You show up out
of nowhere, and there are all these accidents, and Claire is flirting with you, and I
just wanted you to go away. But I never touched that plane! I swear, I would never do
anything to hurt Claire.”

He jumped forward and grabbed Frank’s shirt. I moved to pull Damien
off, but Frank held up a hand.

“I love her! I’ve loved her since the fourth grade, when I saw
her in
Melly and Max’s Best Day Ever
! You’ve got
to believe me.”

Damien had his face pressed close to Frank’s, and I was pretty sure
he was crying. He was talking fast and a little bit crazy, but what he was saying rang
true.

“Working for Claire Cleveland is the only job I ever wanted,”
he sniffed. “I never thought I would do anything so important in my whole life. I
didn’t think I’d even get an interview, since I’ve never worked on
Broadway before. And when I spent half the time gushing about Claire, I really thought
I’d shot myself in the foot. But Laurel asked me how I felt about her! Arrest me
for stealing her stuff if you have to, but just let me be here tonight. I have to
protect Claire. Please?”

As I watched, Joe and Frank exchanged a look.

“What exactly did Laurel ask you?” Joe said.

“She wanted to know how all the applicants felt
about Claire,” said Damien, letting go of Frank. “She said this show was a
big deal, and Claire was the star, and we couldn’t have anyone on set who
didn’t really, really love her. I guess that’s why she sent the job posting
out over the fan club listserv.”

“Tell me more about what Laurel said.” Frank put his arm
around Damien’s shoulders. Joe pulled Bess, George, and me aside.

“Madonna was the same way,” he whispered. “No
experience. Obsessed with Claire.”

“That’s definitely weird,” I responded. “I
don’t know a lot about showbiz, but I’m pretty sure you have to put in your
time before you get to Broadway.”

Bess snorted.

“And ‘Claire Cleveland Fan Club president’ does not
count as relevant experience on your resume!” she whispered sharply.

“There’s more,” Joe whispered. “Frank found a
website full of photos and gossip about the show. We’re pretty sure Laurel has
been the one leaking information! The only thing we don’t know is why.”

But I knew exactly why she was doing it.

“Money,” I said. “That’s why.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. How does ruining her own
show make her money?”

“She’s not ruining it,” I explained. “Look at it
this
way. Say you had a show you weren’t all that certain
about. Lots of problems you couldn’t fix, an expensive and hard-to-please star,
people eager to see you fail. So instead of fixing all the problems, you decide to
feature them. It’s a way of guaranteeing press. And who wouldn’t want to see
a show where the lead actress might actually be killed onstage? It’s morbid and
weird, but that’s celebrity these days. I bet you every time she blogged about
another accident, ticket sales jumped another twenty percent!”

“Hey guys,” Frank said, interrupting us. “I think Damien
feels pretty bad about what he’s done, right?”

Damien nodded his head frantically.

“If he promises to stop stealing Claire’s things, I told him
we’d let him help us protect Claire tonight. I was going to send him down to tell
Linden that everything is okay up here. Then he should go to the rehearsal room and stay
with Claire until the moment she goes out onstage. Got it, Damien?”

“Yes, sir!” Damien said.

“That sounds like a good plan to me,” I chimed in. “Just
don’t go picking up any stray saws you see on the way, okay?”

Damien blushed and nodded.

“One thing before you go,” said Joe. “Have you seen
Laurel?”

“Ms. von Louden said she was going home to change
for the opening,” Damien said. “But that was hours ago.”

I looked at Frank. “You guys should head to her place. The
three—four—of us will look after Claire.”

“Better hurry,” said Damien. “Curtain goes up in two
hours. Well, so long as we can do something about that plane door on the
stage….”

CHAPTER
15

FRANK

THE THRILL OF THE CHASE!

I was dialing Vijay before we even got out of the theater.

“Hey hey hey,” he answered. “How are my favorite sibling
detectives? Okay, you’re also my only sibling detectives, but that
shouldn’t—”

“No time, Veej,” I cut him off. “I need every scrap of
information you have on Laurel von Louden, starting with her home address.”

“Thirty-two Beekman Place,” he answered instantly. When it
came to finding information, Vijay was faster than Google. “It’s on the
other side of town, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, next to the East
River.”

“Thanks, Vijay. She might be making a run for it.”

“I’ll alert the authorities as soon as we hang up. And
I’ll see if I can get you any other useful information on her.”

I hung up and turned to Joe. “She’s
across town. We need a cab, fast!” Quickly I pulled up a map on my phone, just in
case we got lost. Beekman Place was a tiny one-way street that only existed for a single
block. Very exclusive. Very money.

The crowd was still outside the theater, but we didn’t have time to
make nice. We pushed through them at high speed.

“I feel like a real New Yorker now!” said Joe, as we battled
our way off the sidewalk and on to Forty-Second Street.

“Taxi!” I yelled, jumping off the curb and out into the
street, the way everyone else in the city seemed to do it. It always worked in movies.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a yellow cab in sight.

“Need a ride?” someone asked beside me.

I turned to find a girl with long dreadlocks standing next to me, leaning
against one of those strange pedicabs. It looked like a small horse-drawn carriage,
except instead of a horse, the pedicab was powered by a bicycle.

“No,” I said. “We’ve got to get across town
fast!”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But the time you’ll
waste waiting for a taxi at this time of day is way more than the time it’d take
me to get you there.”

“Fine,” said Joe, leaping into her cab. “Thirty-two
Beekman Place.” He reached down and pulled me in
after him.
It was like sitting on the smallest, least comfortable couch in the world while someone
dragged it down the street attached to their bike—which was pretty much exactly
what it was. But we were moving, and that was all that mattered.

“Now, on your right we’re going to be coming up on Duffy
Square,” our dreadlocked driver began to lecture us on New York City sights.
“Most people think of all of this as Times Square, however, in truth
 …”

It was amazing to me that someone with such crazy hair could be so …
boring. Right at that moment, Vijay called me back.

“What are the chances your lady-friend is calling the airport just
to check out the weather at JFK?” he said.

“Slim to none,” I said.

“It’s a bit strange to be headed out of town on opening night,
wouldn’t you say?” Vijay asked. “But it looks like Ms. von Louden just
purchased a first-class, one-way ticket to Buenos Aires. Odd, no?”

“Yup,” I agreed. Joe was staring at me with ill-concealed
interest. “Veej, hold on, I’m going to put you on speaker. Keep us
updated.”

I put the phone on the seat between us. “She’s headed to the
airport.”

“Then we need to hurry up,” he yelled. “Step on the gas!
Or, err … pedal to the metal!”

Our driver obediently stopped talking and started
pedaling harder, her back hunching over the bike so she could push with her whole
body. The pedicab rushed down the street, flying through Times Square, ducking and
dodging between pedestrians. When we hit traffic, she didn’t even slow down: She
wove in and out of lanes like an Olympic skier in the slalom event.

“Wow,” said Joe. “You’re definitely getting a big
tip!” he yelled to the cabbie. She grinned and pedaled harder.

“You have cash on you, right?” Joe whispered in my ear.
“I’m out.”

I nodded and put my hand down over my phone, so it didn’t hurtle out
of the cab.

As we sped across Second Avenue, leaving a long line of honking cars in
our wake, Vijay’s voice crackled over my phone speaker again.

“Uh, guys, if you don’t get there soon, I’m afraid
you’re going to be performing to an empty house.”

“Could we get that in English, Veej?” I asked. We didn’t
have time for riddles.

“I ran a tap on her house phone, and it looks like Laurel just
called her chauffeur.”

We were almost there—but even though our pedicab driver was
excellent, there was no way she could keep up with a limo. Once Laurel was in that car,
we were done for.

“I have an idea!” yelled Joe. “Hey, can you go down
Fiftieth Street?” he asked our cabbie, leaning forward.

“Sure thing,” she said. “But
Beekman Place is one way. In the other direction.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” Joe smiled.

“What’s the plan?” I asked. We were flying up First
Avenue now. In a few seconds, we’d be turning onto Beekman Place. I had no idea
what Joe had planned.

“Remember that story Nancy told us about her last case?”

“The one with the lieutenant governor?” I vaguely remembered
it. Now we were on Fiftieth Street, just half a block from Laurel’s place. I hoped
we were in time.

“Remember how they stopped his car?”