Kat Wolfe on Thin Ice

by Lauren St. John

  6.  Fifth-Century Bronze Sculpture of a Horse and Hare

  7.  1918 Inverted Jenny Stamp

  8.  Dress Worn by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady

  9.  $50,000,000 Hollinghurst Diamond Necklace

  An earnest reporter took up the story outside Shady Oaks Nursing Home. “Fresh doubts have been raised over the innocence of accused criminal mastermind Gerry Meeks after it emerged that at least three women, all calling themselves Mrs. A. Relative, signed him out of Shady Oaks Nursing Home for weekend breaks. Were they con artists or accomplices? Detectives are investigating.”

  Three grainy black-and-white CCTV images filled the screen. One woman was petite; one long-limbed and elegant; and one had thick, curly hair. All wore hats, and none of their faces were visible.

  “Earlier, I spoke with the Shady Oaks director, Sylvia Jarman,” said the reporter. “Ms. Jarman, does Mr. Meeks have any relatives?”

  “No, he does not. He was devoted to his granddaughter, but she passed away many years ago.”

  “Yet your staff allowed a man with no family to disappear for weekends with three women bearing no resemblance to one another, each called Mrs. A. Relative?”

  Sylvia Jarman eyed him severely over the top of her glasses. “Mike, our residents are grown-ups, not children, and we treat them as such. The visitors were courteous, and Gerry greatly looked forward to these outings. When he returned, he seemed … normal. Nothing aroused our suspicions. After his arrest, we found nothing incriminating in his room.”

  The reporter was like a dog with a chew toy. “You’re telling me that you had no problem with one of your most fragile residents going partying till the wee hours at the Royal Manhattan?”

  Standing before the Shady Oaks sign, Sylvia shuffled in her gel-soled shoes. “We were under the impression that he was having root-canal surgery under a general anesthetic, due to his advanced years, and would be in the hospital overnight.”

  “Being taken care of by a relative, no doubt,” the reporter said nastily. “So every time Gerry left Shady Oaks with one of these accomplices or con artists, he might have been on his way to steal a priceless sculpture or Bob Dylan’s guitar?”

  “Absolutely not.” Sylvia Jarman was indignant. “According to our records, he was absent on only one other date that coincides with the crimes of the so-called Wish List gang: a weekend when a stamp was stolen in Key West. I’m certain that police will find Gerry has a cast-iron alibi for that time too. On all other occasions, he was here at Shady Oaks, sitting in a quiet corner reading Trouble Is My Business or some such mystery.”

  She adjusted her glasses. “Mike, the Gerry Meeks we know is boringly ordinary. This is all a dreadful misunderstanding. When he’s found innocent, as he will be, we’ll welcome him home to Shady Oaks with open arms.”

  Harper switched off the TV. If only her dad had allowed her to bring her laptop. The Wish List case intrigued her. She itched to be able to investigate it. Even if she’d had her usual smartphone rather than the Stone Age Nokia her father had insisted she bring, hacking into the Shady Oaks server would have been as easy for her as counting to ten in French. If Gerry Meeks had emailed anyone ever, chances were Harper would have found it.

  Then she remembered that there was no Wi-Fi at the cabin. They’d come to the Adirondacks to get away from their phones and back to nature.

  Harper grimaced. With no internet or data and only a pitiful signal on her non-smartphone, Detectives Wolfe and Lamb would not be solving cases any time soon.

  It was her last thought before she fell asleep. When next she opened her eyes, it was nearly 8:00 A.M. Extricating herself from the deep folds of the sofa, she stood, stretched, and did a double take. Snowflakes were whirling past the window.

  Overnight, Mirror Lake and the mountain had been transformed. Delicate snowflakes clung to the glass like butterflies. Others melted into the lake or formed frosting on outstretched branches.

  A warm feeling filled Harper’s chest. Living in the U.K., she’d forgotten how much she missed proper snow. Great, billowing piles of it. Snowball fights! Massive grinning snowmen!

  Unexpectedly, she and Kat were going to be treated to a bonus winter holiday. What fun they’d have outside. They could make snow angels or pelt each other with snowballs to their heart’s content.

  The best part? There wasn’t an adult in miles to tell them not to.

  WOLVES

  “I can’t believe you didn’t wake me,” said Kat—again—as they tucked into buttermilk pancakes made from a ready mix Harper had found in a cupboard. “New developments in our Wish List case, magical snow, and a live raccoon sitting right where my plate is. I slept through them all.”

  Harper reached for the maple syrup. “Believe me, I tried. There are five-thousand-year-old mummies in Egypt that have more life in them than you with jet lag. Anyhow, you should be thanking me, not picking on me. I risked my life to save you from a masked intruder.”

  “It was a harmless raccoon!”

  “Yeah, but it might have been a masked assassin, and then where would you be? And I did save you from hours of cleaning. By the time Rocky the Rascal was done with the place, it needed the services of a biohazard team.”

  “Rocky?”

  “That’s what I’ve named our raccoon. You’ll meet him, Kat. He’ll be back. I got the feeling it wasn’t his first time raiding the refrigerator.”

  “You think he squeezed behind that cabinet?”

  Kat went to inspect it. “There’s a missing floorboard between the wall and cabinet. Rocky must be using it as a bolt-hole. Wonder where it leads. Hope he has a warm den. It’s getting colder by the minute.”

  Beyond the wall of glass, the white-and-mauve mountain and spiky trees were fuzzily mirrored in the lake. Snow swirled madly. Kat had the sensation of being in a vigorously shaken snow globe. It was dizzying.

  She returned to her pancake. “Tell me about the story on the news. Did you learn anything more about the Wish List gang?”

  “Only that Gerry Meeks was regularly signed out of Shady Oaks by three different women, all calling themselves Mrs. A. Relative.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. Apparently, they don’t even look alike. Also, only two of the dates that Gerry was gone for the weekend match up with any of the robberies. The other was when a postage stamp was stolen in Florida.”

  “A stamp?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s called the Inverted Jenny because the mail plane on it was accidentally printed upside down. I used to collect stamps, so I know it’s worth a lot. Not as much as the diamond necklace, but a cool million, I’d say.”

  Kat was stunned. “A million dollars for one badly printed stamp? That’s nuts.”

  “I don’t make the rules.”

  “I just find it difficult to believe that Gerry Meeks is a hard-boiled diamond and stamp robber. Why would a ninety-one-year-old go on a crime spree? What’s he going to spend fifty-one million dollars on? Two Ferraris? A yacht? And his own private jet and Caribbean island?”

  “Who knows?” said Harper. “What I can tell you is senior-citizen crimes are on the rise. Me and Dad watched a program about it. Ever heard of the Hatton Garden safe-deposit robbery in London? There’s a movie based on it. Six thieves in their sixties and seventies stole two hundred million pounds’ worth of stuff. In the U.S., we had a ninety-two-year-old bank robber called Hunter Rountree. He’d hand tellers a note with ‘Robbery’ written on it and walk out with thousands.”

  Kat was unsure. “Thousands is one thing. Snatching a fifty-million-dollar necklace from an heiress in a ballroom packed with celebrities and armed guards is a whole other league. Gerry doesn’t seem the type.”

  “Agreed,” said Harper. “If he did it, he must have had help. Shame I don’t have my laptop. We could have taken a peek at the Royal Manhattan’s website. They might have posted images from the event on September twenty-seventh. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Between us, we might ha
ve spotted a few clues.

  “Without online digging, all we know about Gerry is that he’s a retired insurance salesman who’s ‘boringly ordinary.’ That’s how the Shady Oaks director described him. Says he mostly sits in a quiet corner reading books like Trouble Is My Business.”

  “What’s that?” asked Kat.

  “A detective novel by Raymond Chandler, one of America’s most famous novelists. He wrote mysteries about Philip Marlowe, a private investigator in L.A.”

  “That’s the opposite of boring,” said Kat with a grin. “Nothing dull about solving mysteries!”

  “Well, we can’t solve the Wish List mystery.” Harper was suddenly sulky. “Not here, stuck in a snowbound cabin with no Wi-Fi.”

  Kat was amused. “The trouble with you computer geniuses is you’re too reliant on technology.”

  Harper scowled. “You haven’t complained before.”

  “And I’m not complaining now,” Kat said patiently. “You’re one of the best hackers anywhere. We’d never have solved a single mystery without your help. But this is the perfect opportunity to practice some good old-fashioned detective work.”

  “How? It’s not as if we can get to a library or ask questions in the local village. With no phone data or internet, we can’t even contact Edith to ask her to do our research for us.”

  Edith Chalmers was a retired librarian in Bluebell Bay. They’d helped her while investigating their first case. These days, using the impressive resources of her Armchair Adventurers’ Club library, she was more likely to help them. She and Kai Liu, another client who’d since become a friend, were Kat and Harper’s deputies in their fight against crime.

  But even the bravest, most dedicated deputy was no use if there was no way of contacting them.

  “Before smartphones and the internet, detectives often began their investigations by going through the archives,” said Kat. “I’ll check the newspapers in the wood basket. There might be an article or two on the other Wish List robberies. We could also take a look at the bookcase on the landing. Between the thrillers and travel guides, there might be something useful on bronze statues or Bob Dylan’s guitars.”

  Harper’s blues were banished. “You’re so right! Philip Marlowe, Poirot, Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, and Sherlock Holmes—i.e., the greatest detectives ever—didn’t need laptops and five-G connections to crack crimes. Nor do we. Where should I begin? What old-fashioned method should we try first?”

  Kat laughed. “Who said anything about work? It’s the first day of our holiday, and winter’s somehow arrived in the middle of fall. Let’s get creative and make a toboggan.”

  * * *

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” worried Kat as they struggled to carry an inflatable mattress up the hill behind the cabin. They were wearing borrowed, oversized snow boots, but it was hard work pushing through knee-deep snow.

  From the bedroom window, Harper had spotted a fire break—a cleared strip-cutting through the dense forest. It would, she’d decided, make an excellent ski slope.

  Kat wasn’t so sure. “What if we can’t stop and smack into a pine or skid into the lake?”

  “We’re not attempting the Olympic ski jump,” Harper said playfully. “Basically, this is a nursery slope. There’s zero chance of us soaring into Mirror Lake or breaking a limb on a tree. Okay, maybe not zero, but the risk is teensy-weensy.”

  Kat was in no way reassured. “Let’s nip back to the cabin and check the weather report before we go farther. What if there’s a snow squall?”

  Harper lowered her side of the mattress. “I’m guessing you’ve never been skiing.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Ever tried tobogganing?”

  “Never.”

  “You’re in for a treat. Don’t stress about the weather. We’ll check the app when we get back. Just trust me.”

  On balance, trusting Harper had always worked out for the best. Kat decided there was no harm in doing it again. “All right, I will.”

  Their first run down the slope was an unqualified success. The mattress was supremely comfortable. It gave them a silky smooth, exhilaratingly fast ride before dumping them in a soft pile of snow at the bottom of the hill.

  Kat was glowing. “Harper, you’re a toboggan genius as well as a computer genius. That was the best experience ever. Let’s go again, from higher up.”

  “Not too high,” laughed Harper, pink-cheeked and euphoric. “It’s not like we have brakes. If we lose control, we really could end up in the lake.”

  They puffed up the hill, their breath making misty speech bubbles. Kat was grateful for Riley’s merino wool neckerchief. The air was as fresh and biting as toothpaste: minty with pine.

  The farther they climbed, the trickier it was to find a run clear of small obstacles and with enough snow to give them a smooth ride. By the time they found a suitable launchpad, the distant cabin looked unnervingly small.

  Kat sat on the back of their toboggan. She wrapped one arm tightly around Harper’s waist and gripped the thin branches of a frosty shrub with her left mitten. It was the only thing anchoring them to the slope.

  “I’ll count to three,” said Harper, who regretted agreeing to the advanced slope but wasn’t about to admit it. “Don’t let go of the shrub until I say so.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain Lamb,” sang Kat to hide her nerves.

  “One … two—”

  “Wait!”

  “What?!” cried Harper.

  “I saw something slink through the trees. On the right, halfway down the slope.”

  “A moose? A bobcat? What?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” said Kat. “Let’s go.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “One … two—”

  A heartrending howl rose from the valley floor, chilling them to the marrow. A chorus of ghostly howls followed.

  “Wolves!” panicked Harper. “A whole pack of them. Kat, what are we going to do? They’ll eat us alive.”

  At that precise second, the shrub they were using as a handbrake tore loose from the ground. The mattress shot forward like a gravity-powered bobsled. Taken unawares, the girls tipped backward. They had to fight to stay aboard.

  With little wind resistance, the homemade toboggan was greased lightning in action. It skimmed the surface of the snow, ramping every mound and ripple. The girls clung on for dear life, too petrified to scream.

  Just when it seemed that it might actually take flight, their runaway craft clipped an unseen rock, skewed sideways, and headed straight for a tree.

  “Bail, bail, bail!” yelled Harper. The mattress flipped and did it for them. It was like being boosted from the ejector seat of an F-14 jet.

  Kat thudded down and rolled and rolled until she collided with a prickly but snow-softened bush. She lay winded for so long that icy flakes collected in her eyelashes. Gingerly, she moved her fingers and toes. Apart from a persistent growling in her ears, she appeared to be unhurt. She got up shakily.

  “Kat, look out! Behind you!”

  Harper was crawling out of a snow-filled hollow, her face as white as the landscape.

  Beneath her woolly hat, Kat’s scalp prickled with fear. She spun around. The growling wasn’t in her head. It issued from a clump of bushes. Through the snow-flecked greenery, Kat made out glaring blue eyes and a ripple of gray fur. The creature fled, limping.

  Wincing, Kat started after it. Crimson specks marked its escape through the trees.

  Harper ran to catch up with her, grabbing Kat’s arm. “Are you out of your mind? That must be the beast we heard last night. Forget that nonsense about wolves enjoying singing. You’ll be savaged.”

  Kat tugged away. “It’s not a wolf, it’s an injured husky. I have to help it.”

  “Then let’s call the emergency services or a local veterinarian. We’ve already had one near-death experience today. I don’t want another.”

  A cacophony of howling drowned ou
t her words. Bloody pawprints led to a well-worn track, ending at a high chain-link fence, a short distance from Nightingale Lodge. Behind it were five huskies. Two were growling, two wagged their tails, and one raced around in ecstatic circles.

  A sixth husky was on the wrong side of the fence. Her right forepaw was tucked up beneath her. As she bared her fangs, she trembled with pain and cold.

  “Alaskan and Siberian huskies,” said Kat. “One hurt and all hungry. Somebody forgot to tell us that they’re ours for the holidays.”

  WRONG TURN

  “I don’t understand,” said Harper, poking at the fire until it spat sparks. “Did we miss something? Was some instruction lost in translation? How were we not aware that we were supposed to feed six huskies?”

  Kat was on the sofa with the wounded husky, expertly bandaging its paw with the help of the small first aid kit she’d brought in her luggage. “It doesn’t matter who messed up, does it?” she cooed to the dog, leaning down to kiss it on the nose. “What matters is that we get to hang out with you and your gorgeous friends.”

  Harper stared at her incredulously. “How do you do that? How do you win them over so fast?”

  Kat shrugged. “My mum’s a vet. I’ve had animal emergency training from the best. I could treat a cut paw when I was six.”

  “I don’t just mean the physical stuff,” said Harper. “It’s as if you read their minds. Half an hour ago, that husky was ready to tear you to pieces. Now she’s a pussycat.”

  Kat secured the bandage with micropore tape and hugged the husky close. “You have to let them know you’re on their side. That’s the most important thing. Animals’ hearts are pure, but their trust is easy to lose. If I’d lied to her, told her, ‘Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit,’ and then she was in agony, next time she wouldn’t believe me.”

  Harper sat on the arm of the sofa. “So, what did you tell her?”

  “I said, ‘I’m going to disinfect and tape up your paw. It’ll hurt like hell, but we’ll get through it together, and I promise you’ll feel heaps better afterward. And when it’s over, I’ll give you a scrumptious dinner and tons of cuddles.’”