by Sara Grant
“I know, right?” Mackenzie groaned.
We cocked our heads and tried to see Cupid emerging from the ice. I could see a heart taking shape.
My body was twitching to move. “Sven’s got everything under control,” I whispered to Mackenzie. “I think we should check in at the ice maze and make sure no one’s lost in that one tricky dead end with the howling wolf ice sculpture.”
Mackenzie nodded. She knew I wasn’t concerned about our guests. I wanted to investigate, find more clues and prove to Grandma and Shauna that something deadly was going on here.
Sven’s audience blocked the front door. “We’ll have to go out the back.” We slowly edged around the room and slipped down the main corridor and wound our way through the hotel. The hum of voices and the rattle of Sven’s tools faded the further we moved into the hotel.
Mackenzie gasped and hugged me close. “Did you see that?” she whispered.
“What?” I jerked free and spun in a slow circle. Panic electrified my body. I didn’t see anything.
“I thought I saw something move over there.” She pointed down the corridor a few feet away. “A reflection or something.”
I inched forward and to check it out. Up ahead the shadows seemed to shift in the ice. I darted back to Mackenzie.
“W-what i-is it?” she stammered.
“I didn’t see anyone,” I said, which was true but didn’t feel like the whole story. I didn’t need Mackenzie freaking out on me. “We are jumpy after, you know, what happened. I’ve got you imagining things,” I said with a fake laugh. “We’ll feel better once we’re outside.”
We turned the corner and stopped dead in our tracks. “You saw it this time, right?” Mackenzie asked. I nodded. The shadows had returned.
“It’s probably a trick of the light.” I took a step forward.
Mackenzie stopped me. “I bet it’s TnT.”
TnT, of course. How could I have been so stupid? I wasn’t going to let them trick me again. “In here,” I told Mackenzie and slipped into the next room we passed. “It’s our turn to scare them.” I looked around for inspiration. On the far side of the room was a sculpture of a bird’s nest with a load of ice eggs. The largest egg in the middle looked as if it was cracking and a tiny beak was emerging. Sven’s sculptures always had these little fun touches. “Grab a few of those eggs,” I told Mackenzie. “Just the small ones around the edge.”
“We shouldn’t wreck Sven’s sculpture,” she said, but did it anyway.
“We’ll put them back,” I said, taking the ice eggs from her. “I’ll roll one in the hall to attract their attention, and then another. We’ll hide and when they investigate, we’ll pounce on them.”
“I don’t know…”
“All you have to do is hide,” I told her and rolled one egg into the hallway. I dived behind the bird’s nest. Mackenzie flicked on her phone and looked around for someplace to hide. There weren’t many options; just three blocks of ice – a big one with a reindeer pelt for the bed, a smaller one that was the table and the third which was a chair. “Come on. You’re going to ruin it.” I chucked another egg out of the door. It hit the icy floor with a splat.
Mackenzie dived under the reindeer pelt. The light of her phone flickered again. But instead of hiding quietly, she screamed and leaped from the bed, taking the reindeer pelt with her. It wasn’t her normal girly yelp when she saw a spider. This was the kind of scream that made my insides jiggle like jelly.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” I was at her side.
Her face was as white as a marshmallow. She pointed to the bed and then crumpled into the ice chair.
What had scared her? I needed to know, but part of me didn’t want to find out. I took a deep breath. It was probably nothing. She’d spooked herself. I took another step. Maybe it was another of TnT’s rubber finger pranks. I took a step closer. Yeah, that was probably it. I switched on my phone and directed the light to the bed.
I stifled a gasp. It looked like a body was frozen in the ice, but that couldn’t be. My phone light faded. That was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to let TnT fool me again. They could have put something in the ice bed, like they did the block of ice in the courtyard. It was probably a mannequin. I looked behind me expecting to find the snickering pair peeking around the doorway. The corridor seemed darker than it had a few minutes ago.
“Is it…” Mackenzie blubbered. “It is, isn’t it?”
I stepped right next to the bed and leaned over. I slowly swept the light from my phone from the foot of the bed to the head.
I screamed and backed away, landing on Mackenzie and then falling hard on to the floor. My phone skidded across the room.
It was definitely not a mannequin. That was a body. A dead body was trapped inside the ice.
“Is it?” Mackenzie asked again.
I nodded. My brain and body were frozen in fear. I knew it was a real body because I recognized the face. “It’s Lucinda Sterling.”
I scrambled for my phone as we staggered out of the room and towards the exit. We stumbled into the cold on wobbly legs, holding our phones in the air searching for a signal. The snow was coming down so heavily we could only see the faint glow of the lights that lead to the lodge.
“What do we dial for emergencies?” I couldn’t remember what they’d told us earlier when Alexia needed an ambulance.
“One-one-two,” Mackenzie said.
I pulled off my gloves and dialled. “Hello, police,” I said when someone answered. “Emergency.” I remembered the phrase Shauna had taught me. “Jag talar inte Svenska.” I know I messed up the pronunciation, but I hoped the operator understood that I didn’t speak Swedish.
“What is your emergency?” The man’s voice was calm and reassuring.
“Dead body. Dead body.” I couldn’t think of what else to say.
“Calm down and tell me what happened,” the man said. “Are you saying that you’ve found a dead body?”
I nodded, in my panic forgetting that they couldn’t see my head bobbing in agreement.
Mackenzie took the phone from me. Her hands were shaking. She took a deep breath. “We are at the Winter Wonder Resort.” Another huge breath. “There’s a dead body frozen in one of the ice beds.” I had to hand it to her. She wasn’t Miss Action-Adventure, but she could pull it together when she needed to. If she could suck it up and be brave-ish, I could too. I shook off the shock.
She listened and nodded. “Lucinda Sterling.” She paused and nodded some more. “No, but we will do that right now.” Another pause. “I see. Are you sure?” Another pause. “Yes, I understand.” She hung up and handed the phone to me.
“Shouldn’t we stay on the line until they arrive?” I was speaking fast and tripping over my words. “Should we block off the crime scene?”
“The police aren’t coming.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking. The roads are closed. They will arrive as soon as they can, but it could be more than twenty-four hours. They are a small police station, and the snow storm has already caused several accidents. We are supposed to alert the resort’s security and let them handle it until the police can arrive.”
“Right,” I said as fear surged through me again. I’d been in worse situations before. “We saved the day in the Maldives, and we can do it again,” I said, faking a load of confidence. Fake it until you make it, Dad used to tell me. Pretend to be brave and eventually you will feel brave.
“I don’t want to do it again,” Mackenzie whispered.
“We don’t have a choice,” I told her. “If we can survive a heist, vicious eels, a bomb, man-eating sharks and a kidnapping, we can handle one little old dead body.”
“The dead body’s not the problem,” Mackenzie said, looking over her shoulder. “It’s the killer.”
“And there’s one more thing.” Mackenzie took a deep breath. She had reported everything to Grandma and Shauna. They were our next calls after the police. We’d met
them outside the room with Lucinda’s dead body on ice. They’d seen the body. Mackenzie and I stayed outside the room until they returned. Mackenzie nudged me. “Show them.”
I showed them the vial of fish food, still wrapped in the plastic bag to preserve evidence.
“What is it?” Shauna took it from me and removed it from the plastic before I could stop her.
“Is that fish food?” Grandma asked, taking the vial from Shauna. If there were any incriminating fingerprints, they were ruined now.
I nodded. “We found it in the dumpster behind the lodge.”
“I’m not going to ask why or how you were searching a dumpster,” Grandma said.
I wasn’t going to explain. I had a feeling it would only get me in trouble. “Alexia is allergic to shellfish. There are no aquariums at the Winter Wonder Resort—”
“You think someone used this to poison Alexia,” Grandma interrupted.
“I also think that our dogsled accident wasn’t an accident,” I said. “Someone was trying to kill the Sterlings.”
Grandma’s face matched the snow. Her eyes searched mine. She was speechless and that scared me more than finding the dead body.
“What do you want us to do, Grandma?” I asked. She stared at me.
“Should we assemble the guests and let them know what happened?” Mackenzie suggested.
“No!” Shauna blurted. “Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for this.”
Seriously? Even my wacky imagination couldn’t think of any non-scary explanation for how someone ends up dead in a block of ice.
“I think Mackenzie is right.” Grandma stood straighter, back in control. “We should—”
“We don’t want to create a panic,” Shauna interrupted. “We’ll rope off this area and have the resort’s security team stand guard. For now, we tell no one.”
Grandma squinted at Shauna. “I’m not sure—”
“What good will it do to scare everyone?” Shauna asked, drowning out Grandma’s concern. “We will lose control of the situation. We want everyone to stay calm, right?”
Grandma nodded, but I could tell from her wrinkled forehead that she wasn’t completely convinced.
“I’ll put this in a safety deposit box in reception.” Shauna shoved the fish food in her messenger bag. “I’ll give it to the police as soon as they arrive.”
“Create and post a few signs to keep people away from the ice hotel for now,” Grandma told Shauna. “We’ll adjust the itinerary to keep everyone in the lodge tonight. We can use the weather as our excuse.”
Shauna rushed away. Maybe she was hiding it well, but she didn’t seem that upset.
I was trying not to completely lose it, but there was a dead body in a block of ice right behind me. A dead body. In ice. It didn’t seem like a real thing that could happen. I was going to have to use my wildest imagination to block that image from my mind.
The two resort security guards raced over. “Body? Where?”
We pointed to the room behind us. Grandma barked orders at them. “Block off this room. Cover the body.” The security guards were like something from a police comedy. They were bumbling around and messing up any evidence that might have been in the room.
“These guys don’t know what they are doing,” I whispered to Mackenzie. “They will never catch who did this.”
“That’s not their job,” Mackenzie said. “They are going to guard the crime scene. That’s all.”
“Then we are going to have to figure out what happened and why.”
She shuddered. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
To say the rest of the night was weird would be like saying Superman was simply an ordinary guy in a tight suit. We helped Grandma and Shauna keep everyone happy and completely unaware that one of their fellow guests was a human ice cube. I watched everyone closely. I was sure that I’d be able to see the guilt in the eyes of whoever did this. I mean you can’t just kill someone and then resume your life as usual, but everyone acted no more or less strange than they had before. I found it unnerving that someone had died and yet nothing had changed. Shauna eventually asked me to stop staring at the guests because it was freaking everyone out.
Mackenzie and I couldn’t wait until our hostess/ lying-our-butts-off duties were done for the night, and we could escape to our room. Mackenzie wanted to go to bed and pretend that Alexia hadn’t been poisoned and Lucinda wasn’t dead, but I had a better idea.
I fired up Mackenzie’s computer and collapsed on the couch. “What are we doing?” Mackenzie asked as she typed in her password and plopped down next to me.
“Let’s find out everything we can about Lucinda and Alexia Sterling,” I said and handed the computer to Mackenzie. I was definitely rubbing off on her because she got right to work.
Her search found several web pages. We started reading and clicking links and reading some more. Lucinda Sterling was the retired headmistress of Ingenium International College, an elite boarding school in England. Every article and reference was about how brilliant she was, how amazing the school was or how much she’d done for this charity or that student. She was squeaky clean. We couldn’t find one bad word ever uttered about her – except she was a tough headmistress who expected and received the most from her students.
Her granddaughter was the exact opposite.
“Can you check out Alexia’s social media stuff?” I asked Mackenzie. A few clicks and taps, and we were in. Alexia had posted a picture of herself almost every day, pouting her lips and staring into the camera. Gack! She’d also posted unflattering pictures of other people from celebrities to girls at Ingenium and made nasty comments about them.
“What a witch,” Mackenzie muttered.
“I’m surprised it’s taken this long for someone to try and off her.” I pointed to a particularly nasty comment slamming her teachers at Ingenium.
“Did you read the most recent posts?” Mackenzie asked. “She was kicked out of her uni, and reading between the lines, I think her parents sent her to live with her grandmother in hopes she could rehabilitate her.”
“That explains her nasty mood.”
“Or maybe she’s always like that.”
“Check out her profile,” I said when I’d seen enough glamour-gross shots of Alexia.
“She is the only child of two very wealthy people,” Mackenzie said, scrolling through Alexia’s profile. “Look at her address. Doesn’t get any posher than that.”
“I’m sure there are loads of people who would like to kill Alexia,” I said. “But not literally kill her, if you know what I mean.”
We climbed into our beds, but Mackenzie kept searching. We eventually fell asleep. I woke at 6:34 a.m. according to my watch. Mackenzie was already tapping away on her laptop.
“Look at this,” Mackenzie said as soon as she realized I was awake.
I crawled into bed next to her. I rubbed my eyes and studied her computer screen. “Is that?”
“I think so,” Mackenzie said. The photo was of a younger Alexia and Blake.
“How did you find that?” I asked. “I didn’t see any pictures of Blake on Alexia’s social media pages.” She started speaking computer-geek speak. “In normal people language,” I interrupted.
“I dug around a bit and found posts and pictures Alexia deleted a few years ago. Nothing is ever really deleted. Never forget that.”
My dad wouldn’t let me on any social media. I needed to remember to thank him. No one could stalk me like we were stalking Alexia.
“It appears that Blake and Alexia dated at Ingenium. A real It couple.” She showed me a few pictures. They were dressed for a dance and on a yacht somewhere with crystal blue water that reminded me of the Maldives.
Then I remember what Alexia said right before she collapsed. “I think Alexia spotted Blake right before she hit the floor.”
“Blake acted weird from the moment he arrived,” Mackenzie added. “You remember how he kept hiding behind his grandfather? A
lso he wanted to leave right after Alexia’s accident.”
“Blake Johnson.” I clicked on a picture of him and enlarged it so it filled the screen. “Suspect number one.”
“Dating her makes him an idiot, not a killer.”
“We knew her for all of a day, and we wanted to kill her.”
Mackenzie looked at me with disgust. “Not a great choice of words.”
“I don’t mean for real. You know what I mean. It can’t be an accident that Alexia’s ex-boyfriend arrives and the next minute she’s poisoned.”
Mackenzie checked the shared folder where Shauna kept the plans for the launch. “His room is only a few doors away.”
“Mackenzie, I’m shocked,” I said, rummaging around in my suitcase for something to wear. “You aren’t suggesting we go and ask him a few questions.”
Mackenzie wasn’t moving from her spot covered up in bed. “No, that is not what I am suggesting.”
I dressed in jeans and the Winter Wonder Resort sweatshirt Grandma had bought me. I tossed Mackenzie the pair of jeans she’d left draped over the blue leather chair in the corner of the room and the pink sweatshirt with the small designer logo on the front that was piled near her bed.
“Did you hear that?” I said. It sounded like a door opening. “Someone’s in the hall.”
“You’re making that up,” she said, but she was out of bed and dressing.
“I’m not joking.” I opened the door and poked my head out.
Blake was walking away dressed in his snowsuit.
“It’s Blake,” I whispered to Mackenzie. “Hurry up or we’ll lose him.”
“I don’t want to catch him,” Mackenzie said.
He ducked around the corner, heading towards reception. “What is he doing skulking around at this hour?” I said, grabbing my boots. I needed to know what he was up to.
“What are we doing skulking around at this hour?” she asked.
“We’re not skulking, we’re following.”
“I’m not sure it’s smart to be following.”
“We’ll stay hidden. He won’t even know we’re here. What can it hurt?”
Mackenzie stopped midway through pulling on her snowsuit. “Seriously?”