Not a Girl Detective

by Susan Kandel

  “Asbury Park.”

  “Teaneck,” he said, thumping his barrel chest. “And a beauty queen.”

  “I could tell.”

  “Naughty girl. I mean you.”

  “Strictly small-time.”

  “Still got the hair.”

  I sighed. “A genetic curse.”

  “The Ghost in the Machine. Great title.”

  Jeez, those girls were motormouths. “Thanks. It refers to the ghostwriters hired by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and also to Edward Stratemeyer himself, who died two weeks after the first Nancy Drew book was published.”

  “I know something you don’t know,” he said. “Edward Stratemeyer’s daughter Harriet, the one who kept Nancy Drew alive all these years, she had a heart attack, poor dear, while watching The Wizard of Oz for the first time on TV.”

  “I know something you don’t know,” I replied. “Harriet decided to revise all the original Nancy Drew books in 1959, the year Barbie was born.”

  “When was Ken born? That’s what I want to know.”

  I laughed.

  “What do you collect, Cece?”

  “Does dust count?”

  “No. Little tea sets? Salt and pepper shakers? Navajo baskets?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Funny. You look like the type.” He took my arm and steered me back toward the front of the house. Mitchell followed, but Jake was already out the door.

  “My Edo fans,” Edgar declared proudly, gesturing to a small group of folding paper fans with delicate wood-block prints arrayed on the dining room table. “The one in the middle, with the black and gilt lacquer—that one was carried by a courtesan famous for her exquisite feet.”

  Corns were another one of my genetic curses.

  “In seventeenth-century England, fans were an essential part of one’s ensemble. They hid bad teeth. But you have lovely teeth.”

  “Thank you.” Growing up, we had no money, but on the subject of braces, my mother had prevailed: how could I possibly be Miss New Jersey with an overbite? Not that I’d made it even close.

  “Let me tell you a story,” he said, pulling out a damask-covered chair.

  I sat down.

  “There was once a rich American collector who believed a certain rare book in his possession was unique. One day a disaster befell him. A disaster!”

  I made myself comfortable. Edgar Edwards paced the floor, twirling a fan in his left hand. It was un-adorned except for the carved ivory handle, which matched the crisp black-and-white graphics of his shirt.

  “The poor fellow,” he went on. “He discovered there was another copy of this supposedly one-of-a-kind book, in Paris. So he zipped over on the Concorde. They were screening a Dudley Moore movie, but he didn’t even enjoy it, he was so anxious. After the plane landed he went straight to the other collector’s house, near the Bois de Boulogne. Très ritzy.”

  It suddenly dawned on me that I’d come across this story someplace, but he’d thrown in Dudley Moore and the Concorde.

  “They sipped cognac. They smoked cigars. It took a while to get down to business. When the time was right, the American made the Frenchman a good offer, but the Frenchman didn’t want to sell. They went back and forth for a while until finally the American offered the Frenchman a king’s ransom. The other gentleman agreed. The American wrote a check, handed it to his rival, took the book, examined it carefully, and then hurled it into the fire.” He paused. “Can you tell me why?”

  I couldn’t resist. “He wanted to own the only copy of the book.”

  Edgar snapped the fan he’d been holding shut. “Very good.”

  Bad Cece. I should’ve confessed prior knowledge, but for some reason I wanted this man’s approval.

  “Shall we take a look at my antique kitchen knives?”

  “You collect those, too?”

  “My mother was a castrating rhymes-with-witch. It was a no-brainer.”

  “I think we might have something in common.”

  “We have a lot in common,” he said, studying me intently. “Ever heard of a glitter trap?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You set it up over a person’s desk. You run a string from the back of one of the drawers, up the wall, into an acoustic tile ceiling. You’ve got to have an acoustic tile ceiling.”

  I nodded.

  “When the person goes to open the drawer, boom!”

  Boom! I nodded again.

  “It triggers a mousetrap. Snap!”

  Snap!

  “Up snaps a thin card covering a funnel, releasing a handful of glitter which falls through a hole in the ceiling tile onto the person’s head.”

  “You have a very lyrical sense of humor.”

  “First, the muffled noise, then the slow, glittery descent of a cloud of brightly colored dust. You get me, Cece, unlike certain persons in my employ. I set a glitter trap for Mitchell yesterday. He was positively ker-flummoxed, poor thing.”

  “I can hear every word you’re saying,” Mitchell yelled from the other room.

  “I used to place strands of hair across my Charlie’s Angels diary so I’d know if my brothers were trying to read it,” I volunteered.

  “Were they?”

  “They couldn’t have cared less.”

  “Let’s nix the knives. I want to show you my Nancy Drews.”

  At last.

  The stairs were covered with a rose-patterned kilim.

  “Is it from Turkey?” I asked, following him up. Gambino and his first wife had gone to Turkey on their honeymoon. He’d kept the rug.

  “Turkey by way of Pottery Barn,” Mitchell interjected snarkily from the bottom of the staircase.

  “Be a dear and marinate the chicken,” Edgar yelled without turning his head.

  We entered a small bedroom decorated all in blue—blue carpeting, blue floral wallpaper, blue checkered bedspread, and three narrow blue bookcases holding Edgar Edwards’s world-famous collection of Nancy Drews.

  “Blue was my mother’s favorite color,” he said. “She used to stay in this room when she visited.”

  “Did she get you started on Nancy Drew?”

  “Don’t get me started on what that woman got me started on.”

  He ran his finger across the top row of books, pristine in their blue linen covers and sparkling white dust jackets. The first thirty-eight Nancy Drew titles were released by Grosset & Dunlap between 1930 and 1961. Of these, the first twenty-five are considered the real deal, and all but three of those were written by an intrepid former Toledo Blade reporter named Mildred Wirt Benson. (Mildred bolted temporarily when the syndicate wanted to cut her pay from $125 to $75 per book during the height of the Great Depression, but came back at her usual fee for The Clue of the Broken Locket.)

  “My Blue Nancys,” he said. “Never been touched—well, more or less. Like our heroine, come to think of it!”

  “May I?”

  He handed me some thin white gloves. “Please.”

  I put on the gloves and pulled out a copy of The Sign of the Twisted Candles, which had my favorite cover. Grace Horton/Nancy Drew was wearing a white cloche hat pulled down low over her eyes, a white satin dress with a skinny red patent leather belt and matching clutch purse, plus strappy white stilettos. Russell Tandy, the illustrator, made his career in fashion and it showed. He loved Grace/Nancy in red and white.

  “You’d look good in that,” said Edgar.

  “Actually, I think I’d look better in this,” I said, pulling out The Message in the Hollow Oak, which featured Grace/Nancy in a honey-colored bias-cut skirt and navy-blue cropped jacket, very foxy-girl-on-the-go.

  “Oh, yes. You’re absolutely right.”

  There was also a complete set of “Yellow Nancys,” which comprised the revised texts to books 1 through 38, plus 39 through 56. These had no dust jackets and yellow, wraparound covers.

  “These are the versions I read as a kid,” I sa
id wistfully. “Of course, my mother threw them all out.”

  Edgar shook his head.

  Oh, how I’d loved those stories. Nancy was everything I wasn’t. Brave. Forthright. Not Italian. Best of all, she didn’t have a mother. Her life was a Freudian fantasy come true. Just a girl, her father, and a housekeeper. You had to love Hannah Gruen. The woman could take phone messages like nobody’s business, make a dozen different puddings from scratch, and pack Nancy’s bags on a moment’s notice. Day dresses, evening gowns, tennis skirts, scuba gear—whatever might be required for a teenager pursuing the truth in such far-flung spots as Hong Kong, Scotland, and darkest Peru. What mother would do that? What about frigging homework?

  Back then, of course, I’d had no idea that the Yellow Nancys were considered highly suspect—not by Freudians, but by conspiracy theorists in the Society of Chums. They frothed at the mouth at the mere mention of them. The official, Stratemeyer-sanctioned story was that Mildred’s Blue Nancy texts needed to be revised because they were dated—full of forgotten colloquialisms and racist innuendoes. Villains were inevitably dark and swarthy (Jewish) or drunk and mentally deficient (African-American). True enough. But the conspiracy theorists insisted that this was not the only reason for the revisions.

  There was also the fact that Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who’d taken over the syndicate after her father’s death, wanted to cut the cost of production by decreasing the number of pages in each book. And that she wanted to transform Nancy into a more passive, traditionally feminine heroine, not unlike Barbie. But the real reason for the revisions, the conspiracy theorists claimed, was so that Harriet, by virtue of these changes, could once and for all lay claim to the mantle of authorship—to the hallowed name of “Carolyn Keene.”

  The battle between Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Mildred Wirt Benson over the phantom body of Carolyn Keene was the leitmotif of my chapters two through six.

  “Don’t you adore memorabilia?” asked Edgar, waving a Madame Alexander Nancy Drew doll in my face. “Limited release! And look!” He handed me a Nancy Drew jigsaw puzzle and a promotional poster from a 1939 Nancy Drew movie starring Bonita Granville. “You gotta love eBay, Cece!”

  I was deathly afraid of eBay. God knows what trouble I could get myself into.

  “One of Harpo Marx’s harps was on there the other day. Did you know someone once gave Harpo a harp with barbed-wire strings? What a present! Look into it, if you don’t believe me! Wish I’d thought of it!”

  Another blue shelf held Edgar’s foreign editions of Nancy Drew.

  “In Sweden, Nancy Drew is known as Kitty,” I noted, “and in Finland she’s Paula.”

  “In France,” he said, pulling out Alice et la statue qui parle, “she’s Alice Roy. ‘Nancy,’ as you know, would never fly in France. It’s the name of an unsavory port town. Our heroine doesn’t walk on the wild side.”

  “She missed out.” Maybe I could log on to eBay just once. Intellectual curiosity.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, how can you be an inspiration if you spend your whole life never making a mistake?”

  “I am so glad you said that.”

  I smiled. “I guess you could say I’ve lived that.”

  “In which case I think I’ve got something you’ll appreciate.”

  He opened the door to the closet and pulled out a small oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame.

  “Mitchell Honey found this little treasure for me. And I have to say, he’s been beside himself ever since it came into this house. Beside himself! It’s the jewel in the crown. Look! It’s signed Russell H. Tandy!”

  “Now you’ve gotten me curious,” I said. “I thought all the original cover art burned up in a fire at the Tandy home.”

  “Oh, this was not a cover, dear,” he said with a laugh.

  Edgar held the painting up about an inch from my nose. Looking back at me was none other than blond, blue-eyed Grace Horton.

  But she wasn’t wearing red.

  And she wasn’t wearing white.

  Grace Horton—aka the goddess that is Nancy Drew—wasn’t wearing anything.

  Except a killer smile.

  4

  What the hell did you do to him?” The voice on the other end of the cordless phone blared in my ear.

  “Who is this?” I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes, forgetting I had fallen asleep with my contacts in. Mistake. “What time is it?”

  “It’s nine-thirty in the morning! Wake up! Edgar is missing! Gone! Vanished!”

  “Mitchell, honey, is that you?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Ms. Caruso. What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing,” I said, heading toward the bathroom for my robe. I couldn’t possibly have a conversation with this guy naked. “What are you, his jailer?” Buster nuzzled my ankle. “I love you,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “Not you. Listen, he’s probably out walking the dog.”

  “We don’t own a dog. We loathe dogs.” He started sneezing.

  “Then he went to Starbucks for coffee.” I needed coffee.

  “Edgar drinks green tea.”

  “Starbucks has green tea.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe he’s sick of green tea. Maybe he wants to live dangerously for a change.”

  “For a change?”

  I wasn’t touching that one.

  “Did Edgar give you anything yesterday?” Mitchell asked abruptly.

  Interesting question.

  As a matter of fact, Edgar had given me something the day before, which had been kind of strange. It wasn’t that he seemed the grudging sort—hardly—just someone who’d value expedience as highly as generosity. But I suppose he and I had bonded over the freakish sight of naked Nancy Drew, because as I was leaving his house, he’d put something in my hand.

  It was a brand-new, shiny gold key.

  “For you and your girlfriends,” he’d explained. “I want you to stay at my house in Palm Springs, for the convention. I want this to be a weekend you’ll never forget.”

  The probability of that was increasing hourly.

  “Ms. Caruso, are you there?” Mitchell Honey’s dulcet tones interrupted my train of thought. “Are you listening? I asked you if Edgar gave you anything yesterday?”

  I hesitated for just a minute. “No, nothing.”

  “Well, you were the last one to see him.”

  “I left before lunch. How is that possible?”

  “I left before you did—after marinating the chicken, which nobody touched, I might add.”

  “Fresh garlic is a must.”

  “Garlic is a deterrent to intimacy. Do you have issues in that area, Ms. Caruso?”

  Nice. “What do you want with me, Mitchell?”

  “When I came back home, sometime around midnight, everybody was out. So I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, I was still alone.”

  “Looks like I’m not the only one with intimacy issues.”

  “I have just about had it with you,” he yelled. “I am calling the police and I am telling them you were the last one to see Edgar before he disappeared.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine!”

  “You do realize they won’t do anything for twenty-four hours.” Just enough coffee for a full pot. But nothing to eat except jam. “He’s not even considered missing until then.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My boyfriend is a cop.” Who claims to be in love with me. But talk is cheap.

  “Edgar is a very powerful person. He knows the mayor. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to call the mayor.”

  “Don’t you think you might be overreacting a little?” I asked, spooning some jam into my mouth with my free hand. “What does Jake say?”

  “I don’t know where Jake is either.”

  “Well, there you go. They’re probably together.”

  “You obviously don’t get it. Jake often spends the night awa
y.”

  The coffee would be ready soon. I wanted to drink in peace. I had to feed the pets. I had to go to the market. “Listen, I don’t think I can help you with this, so goodbye.” I dropped the sticky spoon into the sink. “He’s going to turn up any minute. Jake, too. You shouldn’t worry.”

  “Bitch,” he muttered as he hung up.

  It was way too early for this.

  The phone rang again.

  “You’d catch more bees with honey than vinegar, you know.”

  “Cece?”

  “Oh, Clarissa, hi. How are you?” It was a little early for Nancy Drew–related matters. All My Children wasn’t on for hours.

  “I’m in a bit of a panic, actually.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s my daughter, Nancy.”

  “The one who lives in L.A.? The singer?”

  “Nancy is an artist who sings. And I only have one.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well,” she blurted out, “she’s missing. My daughter is missing.”

  What the hell was going on this morning?

  “What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

  “She hasn’t answered any of my calls in days.”

  I sighed in relief. “Daughters are like that. You’d be in trouble if she did answer all your calls.”

  “We’re very close.”

  “My daughter and I are close, too,” I said, bristling, “but she doesn’t jump when I call. She’s got a life.”

  “Nancy has a life, too, believe me, but she would never do this. She’s supposed to be helping out in Palm Springs this weekend, for one thing, and we needed to work out the details. She knows how important this convention is for me. And I’m supposed to fly out from Phoenix tomorrow. It’s just not like her to ignore me when she knows how much I need her.”

  “Take a breath. It’s going to be fine.”

  “Cece. I wouldn’t ask this if it wasn’t important.”

  Warning bells began to sound in my ears.

  “Nancy doesn’t live too far from where you are, out there in Hollywood.”

  So easily confused with Sodom.

  “If you could just go by her apartment and ring the doorbell, that would be wonderful. And if she answers, that’s that. Case closed. My mind would be at rest.” She paused. “So you’ll do that for me?” It was unclear whether she was asking or telling.