“Will you let us know if it turns up?” she asked.
The man nodded. “I have your names and phone numbers here.” He tapped the form they had filled out to get the documents.
Xander glanced at his phone to check the time. “Mr. Brown is probably waiting for us outside,” he said. “Thanks again.”
Outside the archives building, Andrew waved to them from the window of Mr. Brown’s car. Xena and Xander filled him in on the case, and then told both Andrew and Mr. Brown what they had found out and about the disappearance of Josephine Blunt’s birth certificate.
“If we don’t have it, then nobody will ever believe us about the baby,” Xena concluded.
“Someone must have thrown that firecracker as a diversion and then taken the document.” Mr. Brown’s voice was grim. “I want you kids to be more careful. It looks like someone knew you were there. I think you’re being followed.”
Xena swallowed around a sudden hard lump in her throat. “Okay, we will.” She was struck by the chilling thought of the danger they might be in. If they interfered with the kidnapper’s plans—whatever they might be—Alice’s kidnapper might get angry and come after them. Xena tried to put it out of her mind, but she resolved to keep a close eye on her brother, who tended to dash into risks without thinking.
She forced herself to speak lightly. “Do you remember what the birth certificate said, Xander?”
“Yes, I do—names and dates and everything. Good thing the person who took the birth certificate doesn’t know about my photographic memory! Still, it’s all just a theory. We can’t prove anything now.”
“What can’t you prove? That Alice isn’t really the princess?” Andrew snorted from the front seat. “That’s easy.”
“Easy? How would you do it?” Xander asked. Andrew always rubbed it in when he knew something they didn’t, but this time Xander didn’t care if Andrew acted all superior, just as long as he could help them prove their theory.
“Didn’t you ever hear of DNA analysis?”
“Yes,” Xena said cautiously. “I’ve heard of it, but I’m not sure what it means.”
“It means that if you have a part of somebody’s body, like hair or a fingernail or even some spit or something, a scientist can compare it to a part of somebody else’s body and tell if they’re related.”
“But we don’t have a part of Princess Stella’s body,” Xander objected, “or any part of Alice’s body.”
“We have that pin!” Xena exclaimed. “The mourning pin with Stella’s grandmother’s hair! Could we use that, Andrew?”
“I think so. I’ll call the expert and see.” He pulled out his phone. “Hello, Aunt Mary?” Mary Watson was another member of the SPFD. “Can you connect me with Dr. Crichton?” After a few minutes, he was explaining the situation. “Okay. Right, got it. How long? Any way to speed that up? All right, I’ll tell them. Cheerio.” He turned to Xena and Xander. “Dr. Crichton says that she can use a small piece of the hair in the pin and compare it with something of Alice’s.”
“I hope they can do it pretty quickly.” Xander was anxious. “Alice’s birthday is in four days.”
“I can ask them to put a rush on it,” Andrew said, “but I don’t know if they can hurry it along at all.”
“How can we get something of Alice’s?” Xena asked. “I suppose her hairbrush and things are in the house, but how can we get them?”
“Gemma would give them to us,” Xander said. “But the phones there are bugged, remember? If we tell her what we’re doing, then Alice’s aunt and her bodyguard and who knows who else will hear about it.”
“Who’s Gemma?” Mr. Brown asked. They explained. “Leave it to me. I’m sure I can get in touch with her mother through the embassy.”
He pulled over to make a phone call, but before he could take the phone out of his pocket, Xena said, “Wait!” Mr. Brown paused. “How do we know Gemma’s mother isn’t involved?”
“Miss Jenny?” Xander was surprised. “It couldn’t be her! Remember how nice she was?”
“We’ve seen nice people do bad things on our other cases,” Xena reminded him. “If we’re right about the baby switch, then she’s the one who would be the queen of Borogovia. That’s a really powerful motive. She could say she won’t do it for some reason, or she could give us someone else’s hair or baby tooth or whatever.”
“What do you want me to do?” Mr. Brown asked.
“Let me think.” Xander buried his face in his hands. After a moment he looked up again. “Okay. How about this—ask her for a few things of Alice’s, like a shirt she’s worn and a hairbrush. We can tell Gemma that we’re getting a dog to track down Alice.”
“That would never work,” Xena broke in. “We can’t just turn a dog loose in the middle of London and tell it to find Alice! If we knew she was someplace specific, we could go there and use one of those dogs, but it would be hopeless without that information.”
“Exactly! Miss Jenny has got to know that too. If she has nothing to do with the kidnapping, she’ll give us the things even if she doesn’t think they would help. But if she is the kidnapper, she’ll be glad to give them to us and let us waste our time instead of doing anything really useful.”
“Okay, Xena?” Mr. Brown asked.
“You could try,” Xena said. They waited.
Mr. Brown got on his phone. “Get me the Borogovian embassy, please, Mary.” A pause. Then Mr. Brown explained that he urgently needed to speak with someone named Jenny in the Borogovian mansion. Another pause, and then he passed the phone to Xena. “It’s your friend’s mother on her cell.”
By the time they had reached central London, Miss Jenny had agreed to send Gemma to the SPFD with some of Alice’s things. “My husband can drive her there. Anything to help get Alice back.”
Gemma was waiting for them outside the pub that concealed the entrance to the SPFD. She was thrilled at the secret door that let them in. “That was the most fun way to get into a building I ever saw!” she said. “I wish there were a secret entry to the mansion! I hate knowing that I’m being watched on those silly cameras every time I go in or out.”
She handed Andrew a plastic bag with a school uniform and a hairbrush in it. Xena and Xander saw with satisfaction that some long blond hairs were embedded in the bristles.
“My mom doesn’t think this will work,” Gemma said. “She’s really upset. I found her looking at an old video of me and Alice when we were little, and she was crying. She said she’ll never forgive herself, and that she should have been keeping a closer watch on her. I tried to tell my mom that she couldn’t sleep in the same room with Alice, but I don’t think that made her feel any better.”
“We’ll keep working on it,” Xander promised. “We already have some clues. Has there been anything else at the house—a ransom note or a threatening phone call or something?”
Gemma shook her head. “Nothing. I’ll call you if anything happens.” She got up to leave.
“Wait a second,” Xena said. “There’s a bug in your hair.”
“Ew!” Gemma reached up a hand but Xena grabbed her wrist.
“Let me get it.” She pulled at something on Gemma’s scalp and the girl jumped. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to pull out that hair too.”
“It’s okay,” Gemma said, rubbing her head. “Just as long as you got that bug! Give us a ring if you find out anything, will you?”
“Of course.” Xena felt guilty about tricking Gemma, but she had no choice. “And there was something I wanted to ask you. I heard Alice’s aunt say that the servants had been given the night off, the night of the kidnapping?”
Gemma looked surprised. “They usually get Friday evenings, but Miss Banders had them switch to Saturday. I don’t think she said why.” Xena and Xander exchanged glances. It sounded like Alice’s aunt had wanted as few witnesses as possible to what she was going to do that night.
Gemma’s phone chirped, and she glanced at it. “My dad’s outside,” she said. “Please
call me right away if you find something out, okay?”
“We will,” Xander promised.
“Thanks for your help!” Xena called after her as Mr. Brown walked Gemma out to the sidewalk.
“What was that all about, with the bug in her hair?” Xander asked his sister when Gemma was out of earshot. “I didn’t see any bug!”
Xena handed Andrew the hair she had pulled from Gemma’s head. “I think we need to get Gemma tested too.” Andrew left to pack it separately from Alice’s blond ones and get them delivered to the DNA lab. “It just seemed awfully convenient that all the servants were out that night,” she said. “We can always confirm with the security tape that they actually did go out, if we need to, but it looks like they were sent away on purpose.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s try to narrow down the suspects. First, if the cook and Frieda really were out, and Gemma’s dad was out of town, who else can we eliminate?”
“Let’s look at motive,” Xander suggested.
“I keep coming back to the letters,” Xena said. “Alice found them, she talked about them in front of all the people who are now suspects, and then poof! The letters are gone. And then that night, she’s gone.”
“Let’s assume that something in them triggered Alice’s kidnapping,” Xander said. “But what?”
“The only thing we know about them is that they’re about Princess Stella’s disappearance and Sherlock’s investigation,” Xena said.
Xander drummed his fingers on the table. “Could the timing of the kidnapping have something to do with the fact that she’s going to be crowned soon?”
“I’m not sure.” Xena, as always, was a little more cautious than Xander at drawing conclusions. “Anybody who cares about Borogovia knew that Alice’s birthday was coming up, and she’d be the queen right after that. They could have taken her at any time, but they chose to wait until just two weeks before the coronation. Why that particular day?”
“We’re back to the letters. There could be something in them—something about Princess Stella—that made someone decide to kidnap Alice.”
“Then I guess someone could be trying to stop the coronation,” Xena said. “Miss Jenny and her husband have a reason for not wanting Alice to be crowned. If we’re right about the switched babies, it’s Miss Jenny, and not Alice, who should be the next queen!”
“So if the letters say something about the queen or Sherlock thinking that the baby who was returned wasn’t really the princess, Miss Jenny and her family wouldn’t have any motive for stealing the letters. Just the opposite—they’d want to tell everybody what’s in them.”
“That’s a big if,” Xena said.
“I know,” Xander conceded. “But do you have another theory?”
Xena screwed up her face in thought. “No,” she admitted. “Let’s explore it a bit more.” They sat in silence for what seemed like a long time.
“Okay,” Xena finally said slowly. “What if we have it backward? What if someone isn’t trying to stop the coronation—what if they’re trying to hurry it up?”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“Maybe someone wants the coronation to happen before Alice gets a chance to find out she’s not the real princess. That way she’d be crowned before she could change her mind about the Rathonian thing. Remember, she said she was for it but she didn’t sound too sure.”
“But what if—” Xander stopped. “Xena, can they have a secret coronation?”
“A secret coronation?”
“You know, like when that friend of Mom’s got married—they had a small wedding, just the two of them, because her husband was going into the army, and then when he came back, they had a big wedding with a cake and everything. But they were still married, even before the fancy wedding. Can they do that with a coronation?”
“I hope not.” Suddenly, Xena felt sick to her stomach. “I just remembered something.”
“What?”
“It was when we were looking up things about Borogovia—remember? There was a story about Alice’s grandfather. He was sick in a hospital in Switzerland when his own father died. World War Two was just breaking out, and he had to be crowned in a hurry. The prime minister went to Switzerland with the crown, and they had the coronation there in the hospital.”
She didn’t need to tell Xander why this was so worrisome. They had been assuming that Alice would have to be taken to Borogovia for her coronation. If she could be crowned anywhere once she turned thirteen, then they had only four days until her birthday, and no idea of how to find her.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Xander demanded.
“I didn’t think it was important. But there’s a bright side—we’re lucky there was that transportation strike!” Xena said. “All the airports and harbors in England and Scotland were closed when Alice disappeared. They didn’t even let in private boats or planes. The trains and buses weren’t even running and they searched all the cars and trucks leaving the country. So she couldn’t have been taken out of the country while it was going on. And now that everyone knows she’s missing, it’s too late for the kidnapper to sneak her out after the strike ends. Her disappearance is all over the news, and the airports and seaports and bus stations are being watched. Nobody can sneak her out now.”
“But if whoever kidnapped her has a secret coronation, it won’t matter if they can’t get her out,” Xander said, his heart sinking. “The Borogovian constitution says that once you’re crowned in the special ceremony, you’re the ruler no matter what. Even if we could prove that she’s not descended from Queen Charlotte and King Boris, she’d be the queen. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The next morning, Xander woke early and couldn’t get back to sleep. He got up and wandered into the kitchen. Another gloomy day, he noticed as he saw the low gray clouds. It was Wednesday, halfway through spring break, and he didn’t feel any closer to a solution to Alice’s disappearance.
He could tell from the cereal bowl in the sink that Xena was already up too. She never remembered to put her dirty dishes in the dishwasher. He had his own breakfast and then went into the study, where he found his sister tapping on the computer keyboard.
“Look at this,” she said.
He came around and read over her shoulder, and then straightened. “If it’s true what they say here—that babies’ fingerprints don’t last as long as grown-ups’—no wonder Sherlock couldn’t use them to identify the princess, or whoever the new baby was. It wasn’t his fault.”
“Still, at least he was using cutting-edge technology to solve his crime, just like we do!” Xena couldn’t help being cheered by this thought.
“You two are up early for a vacation day,” their mother said as she came in and turned on a light. “This case must be keeping you busy.”
“It is,” Xander said.
“Well, here’s something that should make it easier,” their mother said as she poured herself a cup of coffee. “The transit strike ended last night. So now you won’t have to be dependent on me or your dad or that nice Mr. Brown to get around for your investigations.”
“I guess,” Xena said.
Mrs. Holmes paused on her way out the door. “Oh, Xena, I’ve been meaning to ask. What do you think of that new cell phone?”
Xena and Xander exchanged glances. “It’s okay. Nothing special.” She hadn’t yet dared tell her mother that the phone had gone missing along with Alice.
“I forgot to activate the GPS feature,” her mother said. “I think I need to program something to make it work.”
“What GPS feature?” Xander asked. Suddenly, they were both alert.
“It’s a way for parents to keep track of where their children are. I thought you knew. You can track where the phone is once the feature is activated. I’m not sure how to do it, so after you get home, let me have it so that I can figure it out, okay?” She left the room.
“I sure hope she isn’t going to spy on
me,” Xena said, but Xander wasn’t listening.
“Maybe we can use the GPS to figure out where Alice is!” He ran out of the room and came back a moment later with a booklet. “I told Mom I wanted to try to activate it myself, so she gave me the instructions. They’re not online yet because the phone is kind of secret.”
“She said she had to have the phone to activate the GPS,” Xena pointed out. “We don’t have the phone, and anyway, it’s turned off. It’s no good, Xander.”
“Don’t give up so easily!” Xander was already on his own cell phone. “Hello, Andrew? Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize it was so early. Listen, though, this is important, and we need someone techie like you.” He grinned at Xena, who knew as well as he did how well flattery worked with Andrew. Xander explained the situation and said, “Okay, call me back.”
“Andrew’s going to look it up,” Xander said after he’d hung up. “He said that even though this phone is new and experimental, it sounds familiar. It might be the second generation of another phone, one where the specs are online. That one can be programmed remotely, so maybe this one can too.”
“When he calls back, put him on speaker.” Xena still didn’t think that the phone would help them find Alice, but she didn’t know what else to do.
Xander’s phone buzzed. “Hi, Andrew. I’m putting you on speaker.”
“I found it!” Andrew sounded excited, which was rare. “Give me the serial number and everything else you have.” Xena read from the booklet, and Andrew said, “If this new phone is like the first generation, it has a secondary backup battery that can’t be turned off. Hold on a sec.” They waited. “Okay, I think I activated the GPS. It’s finding the phone.”
Xena couldn’t remain in her seat. She stood behind Xander and held her breath.
Andrew read an address. Xena was about to write it down when Xander said, “Are you kidding?”
“That’s what it says.” Andrew repeated the address. “Why, what’s the matter?”
“Not sure,” Xander said. “We’ll get back to you. Thanks, Andrew.”
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