Midnight at the Barclay Hotel

by Fleur Bradley

  “We’re coming.” JJ turned to look at Emma. But of course, she was gone.

  JJ, PENNY, AND JJ’s mom walked into the dining room, and it was a sight to see.

  Each of the suspects was sitting at a different table, with Mr. Barclay at his own table too. It looked like the loneliest dinner party in history.

  “Well, this is depressing,” JJ’s mom said as she sat at Mr. Barclay’s table.

  Penny glanced around the room, looking for her grandpa.

  “Where’s Detective Walker?” JJ’s mom asked, as if she was reading Penny’s mind. “He wouldn’t skip this meal—he’s been talking about the veal since we got here.”

  “No veal, I’m sorry to say,” Mr. Barclay said. “With all this snow trapping us here, the chef had to resort to breakfast foods.”

  As if on cue, Chef Pierre swung open the doors pushing a dinner cart that was holding a serving plate piled with waffles, alongside trimmings like strawberries, whipped cream, and chocolate. JJ and Penny sat up. This was a kid’s dream meal.

  “I still don’t see my grandpa,” Penny muttered before digging into her food.

  Mr. Barclay seemed to be looking for the detective as well. He checked his pocket watch. “I spoke with Detective Walker just an hour ago.”

  Penny felt a sense of dread, but said, “I think I’ll go look for him. JJ, guard my waffles until I come back.” JJ nodded with a mouth full of food.

  She left the sad dining room, and she headed for the basement of the hotel, thinking that she’d find her grandpa relaxing in the pool or hot tub. But both were deserted, the bubbles of the hot tub just on standby under the water’s surface.

  This was odd. Where could her grandpa have gone?

  The library was empty (no Emma, either—Penny could’ve used a friend), and so was the carousel room. Penny still got the shivers when she thought of how that thing went totally bananas.

  But her grandpa was nowhere to be found. Not even in the Cupcake Shoppe or the bowling alley.

  Penny’s search ended in the den, the one that overlooked the white landscape. It was dark, but the moonlight reflecting off the snow was brightening the room. Snow was still coming down, almost as if to tell Penny that she was never leaving the Barclay Hotel. Not that she minded. But she sure would feel better if she could find her grandpa.

  She walked closer to the big window and peered outside. Penny had looked all over the inside of the hotel, but what if Grandpa was outside? She scanned the snowy landscape outside and saw the faintest set of footprints. Normal, adult-size ones but also really big ones with toes pointing outward, like they belonged to a big man.

  Or rather: to a man in cowboy boots.

  What if Buck Jones was the killer, and he’d lured her grandpa outside? He could freeze to death out there.

  Penny looked down at her flimsy tennis shoes, ones that were better suited to Florida sun than Colorado snow. There wasn’t even time to grab a coat or gloves or a hat. If her grandpa was outside, she had to get to him, and soon. Penny knew she had to be brave.

  She opened the door. The top of a snowdrift sprinkled onto the wood floor. She got slammed in the face by the cold and the relentless falling snow. She stepped outside, feeling the flakes quickly coat her skirt as she trudged her way into the knee-high snow.

  Penny followed the footsteps, but then they started to disappear. Snow whirled around her like a vortex. And for a split second she saw the hazy outline of a tall, lanky man. The man was dressed in overalls, looking like an old-timey photograph. He was pointing toward the maze.

  It was the ghost of Mr. Roberts, the old caretaker of the Barclay estate. Penny had read about him too in The History of the Barclay Hotel.

  Penny took her eyes off him for just a second to blink, and when she opened them again, the ghost man was gone.

  This could be dangerous. She’d read about the Barclay maze. How back in its day, the maze got guests confused, leaving them lost and wandering for hours. In her summer sneakers and without a coat, this could be a death trap.

  But if her grandpa was already in there, the maze was definitely a death trap!

  Penny took a deep breath and reminded herself again that this was the time to be brave.

  She entered the maze, trying to make sense of the jumble of footprints. She put her hand on the outer wall of the hedge maze—she knew that was one way to make sure you could find your way out. She had read it in a book somewhere, back at the library in Florida.

  Florida, where it was something like seventy degrees outside. Penny shivered. Her fingers were quickly going numb as she touched the hedge maze.

  Penny walked along the perimeter, until she turned a corner. And there was her grandpa!

  The detective was slumped on the ground. His head had a red wound, like someone had smacked him with a hard object. Her grandpa’s eyelashes had tiny icicles on them—he’d been out there awhile.

  “Grandpa,” Penny said. She used her icy hands to tap his cheeks. “Wake up!”

  The detective didn’t respond.

  Penny felt herself panic. “Grandpa!”

  IT TOOK A few smacks to the cheeks, but Detective Walker finally opened his eyes.

  He groaned. “There are no ghosts.” Detective Walker was in a daze and thought he’d seen Mr. Roberts, but when he tried to wake up, he had just fallen back into the darkness that was caused by the blow to his head. Now he tried to sit up. “Poppycock,” he said.

  Penny didn’t think that now was the time to argue. She knew what she’d seen, and she knew that the Barclay Hotel’s ghost groundskeeper, Mr. Roberts, had probably saved her grandpa’s life. “Someone whacked you in the head, Grandpa.” Penny stood. “I’ll go get help.”

  “No.” The detective’s voice was faint. He was slowly coming back to consciousness, so he stood, rubbing his head. “The killer thinks he got me. Let’s see how he reacts when I come to dinner.”

  Penny and her grandpa brushed off the snow. “Do you know who hit you over the head?” Penny asked.

  Her grandpa said, “I don’t know who was out here, but I was following footprints in the snow. Large ones.”

  Penny nodded. “Like cowboy boots.”

  “That’s what I was thinking when I started following them. Nice detective work, kid. That was very brave,” he added.

  “I want to be a detective, like you,” Penny said. “I can do it.”

  “I know you can.” Her grandpa smiled. “I’m proud of you, Penny. But now I’m going to clean up and get some veal.”

  “And catch a criminal,” Penny said. It was a bit cheesy, but true. “Oh, and I should probably warn you, there’s no veal.”

  “What’s for dinner, then?” The detective looked grumpy again.

  “Waffles. Come on, let’s go,” Penny said. Her feet were frozen.

  “That’s if we can find our way out of this maze,” the detective said, rubbing his head and wincing.

  Penny smiled and said, “It’s easy: follow me.”

  * * *

  PENNY AND HER grandpa rejoined the dinner party (which still didn’t feel much like a party). Mr. Barclay had made all the guests sit at the same table, even though everyone looked pretty unhappy about it.

  Dinner was a quiet affair. The waffles were magnificent, Penny thought.

  After everyone finished eating, the detective cleared his throat. “I found out some new evidence today. I spoke to one of my colleagues using the landline. She confirmed that our murder victim is actually Gerrit Hofstra, a famous con man from the Netherlands.”

  “Penny and I had already figured that out!” JJ exclaimed.

  Penny smiled. She was feeling pretty smart.

  “Where’s the Netherlands?” Fiona Fleming asked, ignoring JJ. “My geography is a little stale.”

  Detective Walker said, “Near Germany, north of Belgium and
France. In any case, he’d been stealing fortunes from unsuspecting rich people all over the world, before he came to Colorado.”

  Mr. Barclay said softly, in a sad voice, “He was trying to con me out of the Barclay estate.” It had to be hard to realize that the person you trusted most was out to con (and kill!) you.

  The detective nodded. “It seems Mr. Hofstra would befriend a wealthy landowner, someone with a similar height and build to his, so he could disguise himself and change the will. Then . . .”

  They all knew what this con man had planned to do next. Murder, is what.

  “Well, then maybe it’s good that he’s dead,” the cowboy said. “He sounds like a horrible man.”

  Everyone looked at the cowboy.

  “But I didn’t kill him!” Buck Jones pushed his plate aside.

  “That’s what all guilty people say,” Fiona Fleming shot back.

  And Ms. Chelsea just gave everyone a librarian stare, which she usually saved for loud people in the library.

  Things were heating up. The question was, of course: who wanted Gerrit Hofstra dead?

  THERE WAS ONLY one place to go to continue the investigation: the secret room. JJ and Penny left the dinner party, and hurried there together.

  “We have to find Emma,” Penny said as they made their way through the wardrobe entrance.

  JJ agreed. “Every good idea we’ve had has come from working together.”

  And it was as if Emma thought the same thing, because she was already in the secret room, pacing past the suspects’ pages on the wall. She was a ghost, but so what?

  “It’s down to the librarian, the cowboy, and the actress,” JJ said.

  Emma smiled. “Well, hello to you too.”

  “Hi.” JJ paused.

  Penny did too. She wanted to say something about the whole Emma-being-a-ghost business, but she didn’t know what.

  As if she had read their minds, Emma said, “We can talk ghost stuff later. Right now, we have a murder case to crack.”

  Penny smiled and felt at ease. It was time to get down to business.

  “We’re close, Emma. I can feel it,” JJ said.

  Penny began looking at the evidence. “We have stuff to add.”

  She told Emma about her grandpa and how someone whacked him over the head, leaving him to freeze to death outside. “And there were footprints outside, large ones. Like the kind that might be made by cowboy boots.” She scribbled the evidence below the cowboy’s suspect page. “I still don’t know why he would want Mr. Clark, that is, Gerrit Hofstra, dead.”

  Emma said, “But he wanted Mr. Barclay—my dad—gone, right? It’s so confusing.”

  JJ stepped back.

  He felt just like he did when he was reading: confused and overwhelmed. They needed less. Just the facts, without the suspects and motives that were all about Mr. Barclay and not about Gerrit Hofstra.

  JJ moved to the wall and took everything down: the suspects’ pages, the sticky notes, everything. Then he tore a page from the notebook and wrote: Gerrit Hofstra. “We have to look at everything fresh. Forget about Mr. Barclay—it’s this con man who wound up dead.”

  Penny felt a jolt of energy from this new perspective. “What about the clues?”

  Emma was excited too, so excited that she managed to send a bunch of sticky notes flying with her ghost wind. She laughed. “Well, I guess we can pick up the clues.”

  “That’s a great idea,” JJ said. “What clues still connect to our fake butler, Mr. Clark?”

  Con man was one clue.

  Script another—even though that one originally belonged to Fiona Fleming. Mr. Clark liked the theater.

  That threatening letter—another clue—was in his room.

  “There’s only one suspect who makes these clues connect,” JJ said.

  Emma nodded and said, “Fiona Fleming. She wanted to do this murder mystery play.”

  Penny frowned. “But why would she want Gerrit Hofstra dead?”

  JJ muttered, “The answer has to be here somewhere.”

  Penny remembered the ghost hunting they had done in the library, and how those scripts fell down right in front of them. Including one particular script, with that list of cast members. As if the ghost who knocked down those plays wanted to show them. Emma’s mother, perhaps. Penny smiled and went for the door. “I know where it is!”

  JJ and Emma followed her, after glancing at the suspect wall one last time. “Where?”

  “In the library.”

  EMMA DID HER disappearing act as they left the secret room, but appeared again in the library by the time Penny and JJ arrived.

  Penny immediately started scouring the bookshelves on the second level. “It’s a long shot, but—here it is! Scripts.”

  JJ and Emma joined her, wondering what Penny had in mind.

  “Mr. Clark, or Gerrit Hofstra, liked disguises,” JJ said, catching on to her thinking now. “You think he was an actor in a play?”

  Emma looked at the scripts section. “These are pretty old, but not this one.”

  “That’s the one I was looking for.” Penny grabbed the play. “Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, by Fiona Fleming.”

  Penny turned the front page to look at the actor lineup. There he was: Gerrit Hofstra.

  Hofstra was listed as playing Mr. Barclay.

  JJ said, “But he wasn’t listed as Mr. Clark, his fake identity. He was listed as Gerrit Hofstra. That means—”

  “Fiona Fleming knew who he was,” Emma said, finishing his thought. “She knew that Mr. Clark was actually Gerrit Hofstra, the con man. But if she exposed him like this in the play, why kill him after all?”

  “I don’t know.” Penny closed the script. “We should go ask her.”

  “Good idea,” Emma said. “But if she is actually the killer, won’t she be dangerous? How will you stay safe?”

  JJ pondered that as they left the library. “I might have an idea . . .”

  * * *

  THE THEATER WAS dark when JJ and Penny got there.

  “You think she’ll show?” Penny asked JJ in a whisper. The acoustics in the theater were excellent, so everything you said sounded like a foghorn unless you kept your voice way down.

  They stood near the stage. Waiting for a killer. Emma was off to roam the hotel, to see if she could find the actress, while Penny and JJ set what they hoped would act as a trap.

  “I don’t know,” JJ whispered back. “We could be waiting for nothing.”

  They had gone up to the theater lighting control booth to set up JJ’s ghost hunting camera. Thankfully he’d been able to repair it. Only the lens had a crack down the center. Even though it was designed to catch ghosts, it would do just as well catching a living person. Along with a voice recorder that JJ had in his pocket.

  Maybe they could catch Fiona Fleming, trip her up, and have her confess to the murder as JJ and Penny questioned her. That was the plan, anyway.

  Penny sat on the stage, dangling her feet.

  “You think she could be hiding backstage?” JJ asked Penny. He walked up to the stage and climbed on. JJ was about to go behind the curtains when there was a loud clanging sound.

  Suddenly, there was a spotlight on Penny and JJ. They covered their eyes against the bright light. Up in the control booth there was the faint outline of a woman.

  Penny called, “Fiona?”

  She didn’t respond at first, but then asked, “Why are you kids here?”

  “To talk to you.” JJ blinked. When he looked up, Fiona was gone.

  He hoped she hadn’t found his camera.

  Penny looked for Emma, but she was a ghost. Literally.

  A minute later, Fiona came out from backstage. “Shouldn’t the two of you be with your mom and grandpa? It’s after eleven already. Don’t you have a bedtime?” Her words and d
emeanor were sharper than usual, and not so bubbly. It was all an act, that nice actress they’d seen this weekend. Now, here onstage, Fiona Fleming looked like a snake ready to bite.

  “We’re here for the truth,” Penny said, undeterred by Fiona’s attitude.

  “Oh, now someone cares about the truth!” Fiona threw her hands to the sky in an overdramatic fashion.

  “Yes, we want the truth about you,” Penny countered. She stood up.

  Fiona lowered her arms. She blinked.

  “We know who you are,” JJ said.

  She looked puzzled.

  “You wrote that threatening letter to Mr. Clark,” JJ continued. “You are ‘His Daughter.’ From the letter.”

  Fiona’s face softened. She looked sad. “I am,” she said. “I was a daughter. But not anymore.”

  The theater was dead silent.

  Fiona cleared her throat. “My father is dead. The butler was the one who killed him.”

  “MR. CLARK, MR. HOFSTRA—whoever he pretended to be,” Fiona went on, waving her hands while stepping closer to JJ and Penny. “He killed my father.”

  You could hear a pin drop.

  “Get away from her!” Emma called from somewhere in the audience seats.

  Penny tried to find her, but the lights were so bright. They were cornered by Fiona, onstage.

  Fiona said, “I see you brought your little ghost friend Emma. Is she here to help you?”

  Ignoring Fiona, Penny said, “We found this in the library.” She held up the script. “It has Mr. Clark’s real name in it, Mr. Hofstra. You knew he was a con man.”

  Fiona smiled. “Leave it to the little kids to figure it out.”

  “We’re not little kids,” JJ mumbled. But he felt cornered, just like Penny. Both kids stepped back, out of the spotlight.

  Fiona continued, “Yes, I knew Mr. Hofstra. He was my father’s butler, in Chicago. He weaseled his way into Dad’s life, just like he did with Mr. Barclay. Only my father wasn’t so lucky. He died of a heart attack—or so it looked, anyway.”