The North Star

by Shepherd

  Evie looked out the back window, admiring the sparkling blue pool and expanse of lawn and gardens. “Your house is so pretty.”

  Sophia smiled. “Thanks!”

  “What’s it like?” Evie cleared her throat. “I mean, living in a fancy house and having servants and stuff?” She pointed out to the patio, where a worker in a baseball cap knelt at the edge of the pool, lifting the cover of the skimmer basket and reaching inside. Poles and assorted equipment leaned up against the wrought-iron fence that bordered the pool.

  Sophia glanced out the window. “Weird.”

  “Yeah, it must be. Having so many rooms you could get lost, and having all these people around.”

  Sophia touched her arm. “No. Not that. It’s just weird that we’re having our pool cleaned today. Must be a scheduling mix-up. Our regular day is Thursday, but today’s only Tuesday.” She pulled out her phone. “Let me call Maurice and see what’s up.”

  Vishal stopped her. “I don’t think it’s a mix-up. I think it’s an imposter!”

  CHAPTER

  22

  Vishal pointed out the window. “That uniform says A1 Pool Service, but you use Mermaid Pool Service. Unless Maurice switched companies, I don’t think that’s really a pool cleaner!”

  The four teens ran outside, Sophia already dialing Maurice’s number. They stopped a few yards from the imposter, approaching cautiously. He didn’t seem to notice them. Instead, he was frantically pawing through the skimmer basket at the edge of the pool. “What’s he doing?” Zach whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Sophia whispered back. “Maurice says the cops are on their way.” The teens crept closer. The imposter’s shoulders were hunched and shaking.

  Vishal narrowed his eyes, struggling to get a better view. “Is the pool guy . . . crying?” Heedless of any danger, Vishal hurried across the patio.

  “Vish, stop! What are you doing?” Evie hissed, grabbing his shoulder. He shrugged her off and strode forward until he was standing over the hunched figure.

  The intruder looked up, and the teens gasped in shock to discover it wasn’t a man at all. “OMG, it’s Jasmine Jetani!” Evie cried. The YouTube star’s baseball cap had fallen askew, and her long rainbow-colored hair tumbled out over her shoulders. Tears streaked her face, her heavy eye makeup melting down her cheeks.

  “It’s not here!” Jasmine wailed. She bent over the skimmer basket again, her hands scraping the edges of the basket. “It’s not here!” She looked up pleadingly. “I swear I put it right here, and now it’s gone!”

  “What are you talking about?” Sophia asked.

  “The North Star!” Jasmine cried. “I hid it here during the party, but now it’s gone!”

  Evie’s jaw dropped. “You stole the North Star?” Her face clouded. “But you have tons of money! If you wanted it so bad, why didn’t you just buy it?”

  Evie’s question seemed to snap Jasmine back into herself. She swiped at the tears with the back of her hand and made a face when she saw the streaks of smeared makeup on her skin. “It wasn’t about the necklace. If I wanted to dress like some wrinkled old has-been I could have bought that tacky thing a hundred times over. I did it for my followers!”

  Zach stared at her. “Huh?”

  Jasmine sighed impatiently and enunciated like she was speaking to a very small child. “My followers. Hello? Don’t any of you subscribe to my channel?”

  “I do,” Evie chirped. “You’re always doing the coolest internet pranks! Like last week when you did the furry flash mob that blocked off the freeway? Classic.” Suddenly, her gaze sharpened. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you stole the North Star as a . . . prank?” Sophia looked stricken.

  “I have the nineteenth-most-popular channel in the world. Do you know how hard it is to maintain that status? Hundreds of channels crop up every day, and each one has something newer and better. If I want any hope of getting into the top ten, I have to keep thinking of bigger and bigger stunts. What choice do I have? So I came up with a stunt to steal the North Star. If I posted that video, do you have any idea how many views I would get?”

  Sophia’s face was livid with rage. “So you stole a priceless heirloom from my family, ruined our charity fund-raiser, and torpedoed the zoo’s plans for a gibbon habitat just so you could get more famous?”

  Jasmine blinked. “What’s a gibbon?”

  Sophia flew at her, hands curled into white-knuckled fists. Vishal and Zach grabbed her just in time. “Easy, easy,” Zach said. “Let the cops handle it.” He turned to Jasmine. “Where’s the necklace now?”

  Jasmine’s shoulders sagged. “That’s just it. I don’t know! We had a perfect plan. I purposely spilled champagne on my dress, giving me an excuse to slip away from the party for a few minutes. Unlocking the safe with a magnet was a piece of cake. I dropped the necklace into my bag and climbed out the window onto the vase that D-Mack had put in place for me. I hid the necklace right here in the skimmer basket and slipped back into the party. I came to get it today, but now it’s gone! I was going to return it, I swear!” Sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder as they approached the house.

  “Liar!” Sophia shouted, struggling against Zach and Vishal. Black-and-white police cars pulled into the driveway, and uniformed officers streamed out of the cars. Maurice hurried from the door to greet them.

  “I’m not lying!” Jasmine cried. “We had everything all good to go. The plan was to sneak the necklace back into the house, post the videos, and wait for the offers to start rolling in. D-Mack said there were a bunch of safe and security companies already lining up to sponsor my channel, maybe even get me my own reality show. He must have double-crossed me and taken the North Star for himself.” Jasmine burst into tears again. “That loser! I should never have listened to him. I was set up!”

  The police swarmed across the yard, closing in. “You’re pathetic,” Sophia spat. “Risking prison just to get more followers. You deserve everything you get.” Officers surrounded Jasmine. Sophia turned her back in disgust.

  As police started to drag Jasmine away, she brushed past Evie and grabbed her arm. She stared intently into Evie’s eyes. “987193. Find D-Mack,” she said. “He’s the key to everything.”

  The police yanked the YouTube star away from Evie and cuffed her hands behind her. As they ducked her head into the back of the police cruiser, she shouted over her shoulder, “Find D-Mack and you’ll find the North Star!”

  The police cruiser drove away, and the other officers loaded up their cars, several of them staying behind to talk to Maurice. Sophia bent over the skimmer, pulling out the basket and digging her arm deep into the hole. “There’s definitely nothing here,” she sighed.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be, not if D-Mack has it,” Vishal said.

  “If D-Mack even exists!” Sophia scoffed.

  “He must exist,” Zach said. “Who else would Evan have been blackmailing over the phone? It definitely wasn’t Jasmine Jetani. She didn’t want to keep the theft a secret, so why would he bother blackmailing her?”

  “Good point,” Vishal said. “Evan must have seen D-Mack take the necklace out of the pool skimmer when he was in the garden the night of the party.”

  “So everything just brings us back to Evan. Again.” Sophia threw up her hands. “And with Evan missing, there goes our only clue.”

  Evie stared into the grass, eyes unfocused, her mind turning over what Jasmine had said to her before the cops took her away. Suddenly, her eyes sharpened as she caught sight of something. “Not our only clue, guys. I think Jasmine left us one of her own.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  Evie pointed to the selfie stick mixed in with the pile of pool equipment in the grass. “Look. It’s Jasmine’s cell phone. She left it attached to the selfie stick.”

  Sophia dove on it and pressed the home button before tossing it back down in the grass again. “Dead end. It’s locked.”

  Evie picked it up. “When Jasmine was being taken away,
she whispered a series of numbers to me. I think it might be the code to unlock her phone.” Evie typed in the numbers: 9-8-7-1-9-3. The phone unlocked. “Bingo!” The others crowded around.

  “Check her contacts,” Zach suggested. Evie did a search, but there was no D-Mack listed.

  “Maybe text messages?” Vishal said. He took the phone from Evie and skimmed through her various texting apps. “Ugh. There are, like, at least a thousand open text threads here. It will take days to read them all.”

  “What about photos? Video? Maybe there’s a clue there.” Zach took the phone and scrolled through her photos. “Oh, wow. This is even worse. I’ve never seen so many photos and videos on one phone!” Image after image showed Jasmine posing by herself or with a constantly rotating series of other people. No one person appeared in more than a few pictures with her. “Some clue this is. Any one of these guys could be D-Mack. How are we supposed to figure it out?”

  “There must be something somewhere,” Evie said, taking the phone from Zach. “Otherwise, why would she bother leaving it behind for us?”

  Sophia glanced over Evie’s shoulder. “Maybe this is exactly why she left it behind. To keep us busy searching for this nonexistent mastermind, D-Mack, instead of helping the cops put her away and get the necklace back!”

  “Oh, come on,” Evie said. “Why would she make that up?”

  Sophia rolled her eyes. “It’s obvious. That way when the necklace went missing, she would have someone to blame. Think about it. If she did get caught, she could say she was planning to return the North Star but got double-crossed by her partner in crime, who took it for himself and conveniently disappeared. We go off searching for the mystery man, and she keeps the necklace for herself.”

  Evie shook her head. “No way. She was really freaking out. I mean, Jasmine may have a cool channel and all, but she’s not exactly the world’s greatest actress. I don’t think she was faking that. D-Mack’s got to be real.”

  “Well, there’s only one other person we know who can prove that D-Mack exists, and that’s Evan Masterson. But now he’s taken off to parts unknown, too,” Zach said.

  Sophia’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute. What if Evan is D-Mack?”

  “Huh?” Evie asked. “How would that work? We heard Evan talking to someone else on the phone, remember? He said, ‘I know you took it.’”

  Sophia rubbed her hands together. “Yeah, but what if there wasn’t anyone else on the other end of the line? What if it was the whole conversation was just a performance?”

  “Yeah, but for who?” Vishal asked. “There was nobody else in the room.”

  “For us,” Sophia said with satisfaction. “Evan was following us, remember? He may have been spying on us in other ways, too, so he probably knew when we got to the country club. All he had to do was sit in his office, wait for us to show up in the hallway, and then stage a fake conversation for us to overhear.”

  Zach nodded his head slowly. “It does kind of make sense.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Evie said. “It seems like an awful lot of planning and effort just to trick a few kids. It’s not like the cops are really listening to us or anything. Why would he bother?”

  “The only way to know for sure is to find him,” Vishal said. “And if anyone could guess where he went, I bet it’s your great-aunt.”

  “Good idea,” Sophia said. “The police have probably searched his condo by now, and I bet they’d tell her if they found anything interesting. Maybe they found a clue that shows where Evan went.” She started walking around the side of the house toward the garage. “Come on. Let’s see if Edgar can take us over to Marguerite’s house.” The others followed her, but when they reached the garage, the black SUV was gone. Sophia sighed in frustration. “Now what?”

  Vishal and the twins looked at each other. “Uh, have you ever heard of the bus?” Vishal asked.

  “The bus?” Sophia shuddered. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, get over yourself, Sophia!” Vishal grinned and beckoned her down the driveway toward the street. “You’ll be fine!”

  ***

  A short time later, Vishal and the twins slouched in seats near the front of the bus, while Sophia stood next to them with perfect posture, holding the overhead bar and looking nervously around at the other passengers. Zach leaned over. “What are you doing?”

  Sophia’s eyes darted back and forth. “I’m looking for barfers.”

  Zach sat back. “What?”

  Sophia explained. “Once when my mom was a kid, her nanny took her on a bus somewhere. The bus was crowded, but there was an empty seat. Since no one was sitting there, my mom took it. As soon as she sat down, someone told her that the seat was empty because the person it in before had barfed all over the place.”

  Zach gaped. “Your mom sat in barf without noticing?”

  “Not exactly,” Sophia answered. “Somebody had cleaned it up.” She shivered. “But still . . . barf.” She pointed to the empty seat. “Does that look barfy to you?”

  Zach ran a critical eye over the seat. “I think you’re probably safe,” he said. Sophia reluctantly sat down.

  Evie was leaning against the window, scrolling idly through Jasmine’s phone. Suddenly, she sat up straight in her seat. “You guys. Check it.”

  The others crowded around. “What is it?” Vishal asked.

  Evie held up a page of thumbnails on Jasmine’s Instagram feed. “I think I just found D-Mack.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  “Whoa!” Vishal pointed to one of the thumbnails. “She describes this bald dude as her ‘new BFF, D-Mack.’” He tapped on the photo and expanded it, squinting to get a better look. “You can’t see much, but he’s got a goatee and some pretty intense eyebrows.” He scanned the rest of the photo. “And a snake tattoo on his arm.”

  “Ugh!” Sophia rolled her eyes. “Seriously? A snake tattoo? That’s so cliché.”

  “I don’t care if it’s cliché,” Evie said. “We found him! That’s awesome!”

  “Well, we didn’t exactly find him,” Zach said. “I mean, we kind of know what he looks like now, but that still doesn’t help us figure out where he is.”

  “Well, at least we know he’s a real guy,” Evie said. “Maybe we can send the photo to Detective Bermudez, and he can run it through a police database and see if they find a match.”

  “Can the cops really do that?” Vishal asked.

  Evie shrugged. “They do it on TV.”

  Sophia looked out the bus window. “Oh, we’re in Marguerite’s neighborhood. She lives just down that street.” Sophia pointed to a tree-lined lane with sprawling old houses set back from the sidewalk.

  Zach stood up and pulled the bell string. “Let’s get off here.” The bus stopped, and the four friends stepped out into cool grays of the early evening light. The streetlights were just beginning to wink on.

  “Do you want to call your great-aunt and let her know we’re coming?” Zach asked.

  Sophia waved her hand dismissively. “Nah. She’s always happy to see me.” After a few moments, Sophia led them up a steep driveway to a gray stone house with ivy growing on the walls. “Here we are.” There was a long black luxury sedan parked under the old-fashioned carport, and a detached multi-car garage tucked in the back corner of the lot.

  “That’s a lot of cars for just one old lady,” Vishal said.

  “My great-uncle Harold was kind of a car guy,” Sophia said. “He had this really cool old convertible MG that he used to take me out in on the weekends. It was so fun!” Sophia rang the bell, and the kids could hear the echo of melodic door chimes inside. After a moment, a petite young woman in a blue-and-white uniform walked down the front hall, patting her apron and smoothing her hair, which was pulled back in a tight ponytail. She looked through the window and smiled when she saw Sophia.

  “Sophia, so nice to see you! Your great-aunt will be so pleased.”

  Sophia smiled. “It’s nice to see you, too, Liana.”
She introduced her friends, and Liana led them down the hall to a sitting room with a dark-beamed ceiling and heavy, carved furniture. Every surface was covered with lace doilies and expensive-looking china vases. Gold-framed Impressionist paintings crowded the cream-colored walls. Although it was a warm day, the windows were shut tightly and the Batchelder-tile fireplace held a roaring wood fire. The air in the room felt close and cramped.

  Vishal took two steps into the room, and his bulging camo-patterned backpack barely missed a crystal decanter. Evie grabbed his arm just in time, and she and the boys quickly removed their heavy backpacks and placed them carefully near the dark floral curtains that edged the tall windows on the far wall.

  Marguerite LaFarge reclined on a brocade divan in the center of the room, an ivory afghan blanket tucked around her legs. She held a cool compress to her head, and a glass of brandy sat on the table next to her. When she saw Sophia, her mouth stretched into a thin smile. “Sophia, darling. How lovely of you to come and see me.” She turned to the housekeeper. “Liana, we’re almost out of brandy. Go fetch some from the market, will you? And buy some cake for the children.”

  Liana nodded and looked at the floor. “Yes, ma’am.” She exited, closing the door softly behind her.

  Marguerite turned back to her guests. “What a dreadful day it’s been. I don’t even know how I can face my mah-jongg club again.”

  Sophia perched on the edge of a wingback chair, and the others followed suit. “Don’t worry about that, Marguerite. It’s not your fault you were taken in by that creep.”

  “He really is the most awful rogue, isn’t he? Stealing my Harold’s watch like that! And blackmail, too? Why, I fell into a near swoon at the country club. They wanted to call the paramedics! Can you imagine the embarrassment? I refused, of course. Instead I called my manservant, Derek, and insisted that he take me straight home!”