Kat Wolfe on Thin Ice

by Lauren St. John

  Dr. Wolfe took hours to respond.

  Sorry, been at the spa having a facial! So relieved you’re coping in the storm. Good news. Lake Placid Car Rental will have a vehicle for me by 2pm tomorrow. I should be with you by 3:30pm.

  “A facial?” Kat was put out. “I thought she’d be sitting by the phone worrying.”

  “You told her not to worry,” Harper reminded her. “Something about being placid in Lake Placid. Do you want her to be stressing that we’ve been buried alive in a blizzard or need our fingers amputated after frostbite?”

  Kat was affronted. “I want Mum to be relaxed and happy more than anything on earth. She deserves all the pampering she can handle. It’s just that … Oh, Harper, I’m so tired, and I miss her and Tiny so much. I love investigating cases with you, and I’m desperate to help Riley, but somehow solving this mystery seems especially hard.”

  “It does, but like you always say, we know more than we think we do. Breathe. Hug a husky. Or me. It’ll turn out okay, I promise.”

  Humor restored, Kat fetched the scissors. Harper had made lightning progress online. By comparison, Kat’s old-fashioned methods had uncovered few useful nuggets. She snipped around the edges of a piece from USA Today: DYLAN GUITAR THEFT CAUSES A STINK. The gist of it was that a rare Bob Dylan guitar had vanished from a glass case during a touring exhibition in Austin, Texas. Looking at the timeline, this must have been the gang’s first successful robbery.

  Shortly before the guitar was snatched, some prankster set off a stink bomb. There’d been a stampede. No one witnessed the theft. Nobody saw the stink bomb being planted either. A cleaner claimed she glimpsed a “bionic” man sprinting away from the trash area where the smelly device was found. Police didn’t believe her.

  By now, Harper and Kat had pieced together the basics of every robbery. It was the same story every time. Some kind of distraction followed by a robbery with no witnesses.

  “Brenda from the Sleepy-Time Inn was right about the Wish List gang being ghosts,” said Kat. “In nine robberies, Riley was the only witness.”

  Harper looked up from her laptop. “Even ghosts leave traces.”

  Kat giggled. “What traces do they leave?”

  “How should I know? Steam, vapor, smoke … Do you believe in ghosts, Kat Wolfe?”

  “No,” Kat said firmly. “I do not. Do you?”

  “Not sure,” admitted Harper. “I don’t believe in ghosts on the internet. Sooner or later everyone leaves footprints online. Not me, naturally, but the average person. The Wish List gang will have left a trail. It’s just a question of finding it.”

  She reached for Kat’s watercolor pad. “There’s a thread that runs through everything. We’re just not seeing it.”

  WISH LIST CRIMES

  1.  1964 Fender Stratocaster Guitar Played by Bob Dylan

  2.  Green-Enameled Ming “Dragon” Vase

  3.  1913 Liberty Head Nickel

  4.  Lost Eighteenth-Century Masterpiece by Sofia Rossi

  5.  Rare First Edition of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

  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

  “I’ve been over and over it,” said Kat, “trying to see what links them to the Clue Club, other than a passion for mysteries. Some of the gangsters grew up in the same town, some like nature and wildlife, some have experienced trauma. Rob lost his legs and his career, and Gerry, Bianca, Emilio, and Georgia lost their loved ones to cancer. But there’s no one thing that connects all of them. We don’t even know for sure if they were all in the Clue Club.”

  “Let’s say we’re sort of correct and each of the gang stole one item on the wish list…,” said Harper.

  “Except for Gerry. We think he stole two.”

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t working alone when he lifted the diamond necklace. Wrong Writer Six told him in the letter: ‘Don’t be nervous. We’ve got your back.’ WW6 also said there’d be a ‘full house’ of operatives. The entire gang must have been at the Royal Manhattan that evening. Where’s that article you read me on our first night in the cabin?”

  Kat dug it out, and they studied it together.

  “There were too many dramas during the event for them all to be coincidence,” said Kat. “What if we assume that the four climate-change activists who took a blowtorch to the polar bear were Wish List gang members? There was the lobster incident too. A kitchen hand and an accomplice liberated the sad creatures from their tank.”

  “Good for them.” Harper smiled. “Okay, we have six potential members, plus Gerry. Seven. Anyone else? Did we ever find out the name of the shop that caught fire across the street? That was the biggest diversion of the night.”

  “Fabulous Furs.” Kat shivered at the thought of the mink and leopards that had died so that fashion victims could strut about in their coats. “There was something about them in the New York Post. But on the night of the fire, the shop was vacant. The owners had gone out of business because they’d been caught selling coats made from endangered animals. Nobody was harmed in the blaze apart from a military veteran. He had to be rescued, suffering from smoke inhalation after his wheelchair got stuck in—”

  She stopped and looked at Harper. “You don’t think Rob…?”

  “If the military vet was a Wish List gangster, our case would break wide open. That’s what I think.” Harper straightened in her chair, detective radar on red alert. “Kat, what if one reason the Wrong Writers have been so invisible is because the gang members are the kind of people society often doesn’t see?”

  “You mean, people in wheelchairs, senior citizens, immigrants, climate-change activists, the hired help…?” Were humans really that shallow and insensitive? Kat felt unwell at the thought.

  “Precisely,” said Harper. “But that doesn’t change the fact that the Wish List gangsters are criminal masterminds who may have abducted Riley. Let’s not forget about that. Where did you put that article on Bob Dylan’s guitar? Didn’t the cleaner report seeing a ‘bionic’ man fleeing the scene after the stink bomb went off?”

  “Yep. She called him the ‘Blade Runner.’”

  Harper looked thoughtful. “Rob uses prosthetics when he’s doing his personal training. Says he can run faster than he did when he was playing college football. Other times, he uses his wheelchair, so that would fit too.”

  Distant thunder rattled the windows. Matty and Rebel raced to the door, whining and growling.

  “Each time I think we’ve seen the back of Storm Mindy, she has a new evil plan to punish us,” groaned Harper. “She’s dumped a Mount Everest’s worth of snow on us, a whole Lake Superior of rain on us, and almost crushed us with a tree branch blown by one of the many gales she’s sent our way. Now we have to endure a thunderstorm?”

  “For once, Storm Mindy’s not to blame,” said Kat, peering out of the window. “There’s a snowplow clearing the road on the west of the lake.”

  They both knew what that meant. Once the lane was open, they were on borrowed time.

  “Don’t panic,” said Harper. “It takes a snowplow around seven hours to clear fifteen miles of road, and it’s four thirty P.M. now. Even if it continues working overnight, what’s the likelihood of the owner turning up before morning?”

  Kat didn’t reply. She was taking in the utter devastation that they and the huskies had unintentionally wreaked on the cabin. How were they going to fix it before dawn? Apart from anything else, they’d demolished the entire contents of the fridge. The raccoon had helped, but the owner wouldn’t believe that.

  “Let’s take the dogs out and get some air,” said Harper. “It’ll wake us up, and I need to think.”

  SILVER LAKE

  “It’s colder than Antarctica in the Adirondacks,” said Kat, carving their names in the snow as fog-like ste
am rose from the icy expanse of Mirror Lake.

  “How can it be colder than Antarctica?”

  “Thanks to global warming, with no difficulty at all. Didn’t you hear about it hitting twenty degrees Celsius on Seymour Island? The penguins were in bikinis. Also, it’s summer now in Antarctica; they have the opposite seasons of us. Hey, I’ve had an idea.”

  “Ideas would be welcome at this point,” Harper said drily.

  “First thing tomorrow morning, we put the huskies in the rig, load up our stuff, and take a shortcut across the lake to Nightingale Lodge. We’ll drop everything off, race the huskies home to their kennels, and—”

  “Cross the lake? No, thanks,” Harper interrupted. “We’d go down quicker than the Titanic.”

  “But it’s as solid as an ice rink.” Kat tossed a pebble and it bounced along the surface. “See?”

  Harper picked up a rock and hurled it as far as she could. It hit the ice with a crack and sank without a trace. “Lakes take longer than you’d believe to freeze.”

  Rebel wanted to chase the rock. He howled in frustration and rushed back and forth along the icy shore.

  “The huskies know best,” declared Harper. “The ice isn’t safe.”

  She watched the snowplow as it rumbled through the forest to hidden cabins. “Michael Lautner lives on one of the lakes in the Adirondacks,” she said thoughtfully. “That magazine story on Rob showed them sitting together on the steps of his cabin. I suppose it’s possible that the Lautner brothers and the rest of the gang are hiding out somewhere in the wilderness here.”

  “You know who else lives on a lake in the Adirondacks,” said Kat. “Riley’s nan.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s kind, she’s a fighter, and she adores Riley. If we could get to her house, we could tell her everything we’ve learned about the Wish List gang and the Clue Club.”

  “Everything we’ve guessed about them, you mean.”

  Kat ignored that part. “Some of what we’ve found out must be correct. If Riley’s nan believes us on the identity of two or three members of the Wish List gang, surely she’ll be able to persuade the cops to do the same.”

  “You could be right,” said Harper. “Let’s go inside and see if we can find the name of the company that leaked toxic metal into the lake,” suggested Harper. “If there was a court case, it’ll have been covered by the local press. We might be able to find a phone number for her or an address.”

  Back in the cabin, Harper did a search. Seconds later, they were looking at a picture of Riley’s grandmother, Cath Woodward.

  It gave Kat a jolt, seeing her. She was standing in front of a sparkling blue lake on a sunny day. Her hair was purple. Her clothes were largely purple too, swamping her small frame. Her smile reached to the crinkled corners of her eyes.

  Kat could imagine Riley’s father reading the headline and rolling his eyes. LOON-ATIC! CATH WINS FIGHT TO SAVE SILVER LAKE’S BIRDS.

  The girls skimmed through the brief but praise-filled story about Cath’s battle to take the owners of a lucrative reptile lamp business to court over toxic dumping. They’d been found guilty. Helpfully, the reporter gave Riley’s nan’s street address.

  Zooming in on Google Earth, Kat and Harper were able to see the yellow clapboard house in 3D. It was on Silver Lake in the northern Adirondacks, about forty kilometers away from their own cabin on Mirror Lake.

  Harper tried for another twenty minutes to find some sort of contact number for Cath Woodward but had to admit defeat. “I’m going to Skype-call the cops. If there’s a one-in-a-million chance that we’re right about the identity of the gang members, we need to tip them off.”

  “How are we going to convince them to believe us?” asked Kat. “As soon as they hear a kid on the line, they’ll dismiss you as another of those nuts they were complaining about.”

  “That’s why I’m dialing the local county sheriff’s office, not nine-one-one. More chance of getting through to a real person— Oh, hi. My name’s Harper Lamb. I have some information on the Riley Matthews kidnapping.”

  There was a loud click and the line buzzed.

  Harper rang again. “Before you hang up, this is not a prank, crank, or any other kind of hoax call. We’re friends of Riley Matthews, and we believe we know some things that might help you.”

  “If that’s true, you can start by puttin’ Mommy or Daddy on the line.”

  Harper hesitated. “Sir, they’re not here right now.”

  “Little girl, are you aware that wasting police time is a criminal offense?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. I’d never do that. If you could hear me out, I’d be so grateful. You might save a girl’s life. By a long process of deduction—”

  “What now?”

  “To cut a long story short, we think we know the identity of some of the members of the Wish List gang. One of them is Michael Lautner, who lives right here in the Adirondacks.”

  “Miss, you need to give me your name and address.”

  “Don’t forget that there’s a million-dollar reward for information leading to Riley Matthews’s safe return,” Harper said brightly.

  There was a long silence.

  “Young miss, thanks for calling. I’ll be sure to check it out.”

  ROOKIE ERROR

  At first light the next morning, Kat slipped a lightweight mesh harness over Nomad’s shoulders, adjusted the collar and shoulder pads, and checked the clips.

  Though the husky’s cut was almost healed and not on the weight-bearing part of her foot, Kat slipped soft red boots over all four of Nomad’s paws. She’d done the same with the other five dogs. They’d be traversing unknown terrain. She didn’t want to be the cause of any injuries.

  Harper watched in fascination from a heap of blankets in a warm corner of the storeroom. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “My mum was the official vet at a British husky-racing demonstration in a London park. I was her unofficial assistant. I watched a lot, learned a little.”

  Kat smiled as she petted the dogs and untangled a couple of lines. “Don’t go mistaking me for someone who has a clue. I’ve watched a few husky-racing videos, but I’ve never done this in real life. Never been on a sled and never mushed. There’s a high chance we won’t make it to the end of the drive.”

  “Fine by me,” said Harper. “If we fail, we fail. At least we’ll know we did everything we could to save Riley.”

  “And vacate the cabin,” Kat said with a laugh.

  It was 7:02 A.M. on Thursday, the day their parents were due to arrive. A rose dawn outlined the mountain behind Mirror Lake. Storm Mindy had finally moved on, but it had left bitter-cold air behind. Earlier, the girls had raided the prepper cupboard for thermal vests, beanies, gloves, and snow goggles. They’d braved the slippery track to stow their bags in the shed near the kennels. Now they were swaddled in large but ultra-warm clothes. They were as ready as they’d ever be.

  To compensate for the food they’d eaten, the broken crockery, and only a feeble attempt at cleaning, Harper had left her vacation pocket money in an envelope on the breakfast bar. She’d decided against adding a note of apology.

  “Let them use their imagination about who or what ate their bean chili and slept in their beds. We had to use ours about who they are. They’re lucky we’re not invoicing them for dog-walking services. There are pet-sitters who’d charge a fortune for taking care of six hyperactive huskies.”

  “If all we’d done was take care of them, I’d agree,” said Kat, who was a semiprofessional pet sitter herself. “The truth is, we dragged their highly valuable pedigree huskies out in a snowstorm on a disastrous expedition to search for our missing friend—”

  “They dragged us!”

  “Lost them in the snow, and nearly got them mauled by a bear.”

  “That was my fault,” admitted Harper. “I forgot the bear spray.”

  “We were both to blame,” Kat said generously. “We won’t make the same mistak
e twice.”

  * * *

  Ironically, it was the conversation with the police officer the previous evening that had galvanized them into taking radical and illegal (they’d be stealing the huskies—at least temporarily) action.

  “He’s not going to do a thing, is he, Harper?” Kat had fumed after Harper had hung up on Wednesday night.

  “I don’t believe he is. Or if he does, it’ll be because all he cares about is the reward. Infuriating as it is, there’s not a whole lot we can do until our parents arrive tomorrow. Once they’re here, we’ll somehow have to convince them that we might have a chance of saving Riley where detectives have failed.”

  Kat knew how that conversation would go. Nowhere. She couldn’t bear the thought of giving up. Not when they’d worked so hard and made so much progress. If there was one stone left unturned that might lead to Riley’s safe return, she and Harper had to find it.

  “We have to get to Cath Woodward—Riley’s grandmother. We have to get to Silver Lake.”

  Harper was incredulous. “Kat, Silver Lake’s about twenty-five miles away. How do we get there—call a cab?”

  “Husky sled,” Kat answered triumphantly.

  “Husky sled? But you’ve never driven a husky sled.”

  “How hard can it be? Huskies are almost as fast as racehorses. I’m not sure how often they need to rest, but if we leave at dawn, we’d get to Riley’s nan in two or three hours. With luck and a tailwind.”

  “And how do we get back?”

  “Cath might like us and offer us a lift to Nightingale Lodge?”

  “It’d pretty much have to be love at first sight for her to drop everything and drive two strange girls, six huskies, and a sled twenty-five miles through the snow,” scoffed Harper. “Plus, she’d need to own an SUV or a horse trailer … You’re not serious, are you? Have you lost the plot, Kat Wolfe? I’ll show you why it’s impossible.”

  She’d spread out the map. “See these contours here? That’s a virtual cliff. And that’s a marsh packed with whatever crabs, alligators, or northern water snakes live in those things at this time of the year. They’ll eat us from the toes up.”