The Missing Heir

by Tracy Barrett

  The “hut” was really a door in the wall! Xander knocked on it and shouted, “Alice! Alice! Are you in there?” Xena thought she heard a faint voice.

  Mr. Brown stepped up. “Will you show us how to open this, madam, or will we have to break it down?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Aunt Penelope said, so a large policeman slammed his shoulder into the door three times. It burst open.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Standing on a chair under a skylight was Alice.

  Gemma wriggled through the crowd of policemen and ran to her friend. Alice jumped down from the chair, and the two girls hugged for a long time.

  Miss Jenny hurried in. “Are you all right?” she asked Alice, who nodded and then burst into tears. Miss Jenny led the two girls out into the corridor. The police crowded around them until Miss Jenny said, “Leave her alone! First let me get a cup of tea into her, and then you can ask all the questions you want.”

  “It’s all right,” Alice said, with more firmness than Xena and Xander had ever heard from her. “I want to tell you now.”

  Xander saw that the police inspector had quietly moved down a step or two and was standing below both Jasper and Alice’s aunt, blocking their exit.

  “What were you doing on that chair?” Gemma asked.

  “Trying to get out.” Alice turned to her aunt. “I didn’t believe you when you said you were hiding me for my own safety. I knew that could not be true. But what did you want?” she demanded. “You told me that you had to hide me because there was a threat on my life and we had to hurry the coronation before anyone found out where I was. But I knew you were lying!”

  “Is that why you sent me that text?” Xander asked.

  Alice’s eyes were still blazing, and she made an obvious effort to control herself. “Yes. I heard them coming and pressed SEND before I could finish, and he”—pointing at Jasper—“took the phone.”

  “I was looking out for your best interests,” her aunt said. “I knew that you were being exposed to all sorts of influences.” She looked pointedly at Miss Jenny, who glared back at her. “I was going to take you to Borogovia last Saturday evening, so that you could prepare for the coronation in peace, without silly people trying to convince you that Borogovia would be better off independent.”

  “But you didn’t know there would be a transit strike!” Xander said. “Then you were stuck! Even when the strike ended, you couldn’t get out of the country because by then word had gotten out that Alice was missing.”

  “So you panicked.” Xena picked up the tale. “You were in a hurry to get her away from us before she could figure out what those letters meant.”

  “Letters?” The police inspector looked baffled, but Aunt Penelope’s expression told Xena that she was on the right track, and she pressed on before the woman could regain her composure.

  “The only thing you could think of was to say she had run away, so you wrote that note supposedly from her.”

  “What note?” Alice asked. “I didn’t write a note! How could you, Aunt Penelope?”

  “And then,” Xander went on, “you were going to crown her here and try to convince her to support Rathonia taking over poor little Borogovia!”

  “How did you plan to crown her?” the prime minister asked, “given that I’m the one who always carries the crown?”

  “The break-ins at the hotel!” Xena and Xander exclaimed together.

  Xander caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. “It’s Jasper—he’s getting away!”

  The bodyguard had taken advantage of the inspector’s distraction to slip past him and was now running down the stairs. He was dangerously fast, and all the officers were crowded around the room where Alice had been hidden. They bumped into one another trying to get down the stairs, each slowing the others down. Jasper was getting away!

  Xena vaulted over the banister and landed on the second floor, where the stairs turned. She crouched right in Jasper’s path, and before he could stop, he tripped over her and went sprawling at full length. He sprang up, but not quickly enough. The policeman who had ignored Xena and Xander’s clues tackled him and held him still while one of his colleagues handcuffed him and hauled him to his feet.

  “It’s not my fault!” The bodyguard narrowed his eyes and pointed an accusing finger at Alice’s aunt. “She’s the one who thought of it!”

  “You tried to steal the crown from the prime minister, didn’t you? And you stole the birth certificate?” Xena asked. The shame on Jasper’s face gave away his guilt.

  “I don’t believe that you were acting purely out of obedience to orders,” the prime minister said. “Come on, tell us the rest.”

  “She said”—once again indicating Aunt Penelope—“that when she got paid by the Rathonian government, she would reward me.”

  “You were in the pay of Rathonia?” Gemma was on her feet. “Why, you’re a traitor!”

  “Arrest them!” the prime minister said.

  “There’s more!” Xander said. Quickly, he and Xena explained what they found in the archives, and that they suspected that in Sherlock’s time Princess Stella had been swapped with the nanny’s daughter, Josephine Blunt.

  Alice’s mouth dropped open. She snapped it shut. “That’s what those letters must have been about,” she said.

  The prime minister looked as though he couldn’t take in one more fact, but he asked faintly, “Letters? What letters?”

  Alice explained. The silence that followed was broken by her aunt.

  “She’s imagining that!” Aunt Penelope snapped. “The girl lives in a fantasy world! She did find some old papers, that’s true, but they had nothing to do with her. Mere scribblings. I took them away and burned them. They were old and moldy, and I didn’t want them to make her sick.”

  “You burned them?” The prime minister was aghast. “Documents from our nation’s history?”

  “Enough of this,” Aunt Penelope said. “I’m still the girl’s guardian, and she is the daughter of the king and queen of Borogovia. Nobody will believe that nonsense about another baby being substituted for Princess Stella, or that I was in the pay of a foreign government. Now that travel is possible, we will immediately go to Borogovia, where Alice will be crowned and she will take up her duties under my direction.”

  Xander’s phone buzzed. He answered it and listened for a moment, then asked, “Can I put you on speaker?” He pressed some buttons and said, “It’s Andrew Watson from the Society for the Preservation of Famous Detectives. He has results of a DNA test on Alice and Gemma.”

  Miss Jenny shot her daughter a puzzled look. Gemma looked clueless, but something serious in Xander’s voice made everyone fall silent. He held up his phone so that they all could hear.

  “The results are only preliminary,” Andrew said. “They’ll have to be confirmed by a lengthier process, but there doesn’t appear to be much doubt.”

  “What did they find out?” Xander asked. “Come on, Andrew!”

  “Independent laboratory results show that Subject B, not Subject A, is a member of the royal family of Borogovia.”

  “Who’s Subject A?” Xena asked.

  “Alice Banders.” There was a gasp from Alice’s aunt, and she started to say something, but the prime minister glared at her and she shut her mouth.

  “And Subject B is … ?” Xander asked.

  “Subject B is identified as Gemma Giles.”

  “Wait a second!” Miss Jenny said. “Does this mean—” She looked from Gemma to Alice and back again.

  Gemma finished it for her. “It means that you’re the heir to the throne of Borogovia, not Alice! And I’m the princess!”

  A policeman holding handcuffs approached Aunt Penelope.

  “Oh, please don’t,” Alice begged. “Can’t you just let her go?”

  “Sorry,” Mr. Brown said as the police inspector led Penelope out. “What she did was a serious crime, and she has to be punished.”

  CHAPTER SIX
TEEN

  Finally!” Xander nearly danced with impatience as his mother came in with a box from the bakery. “It’s about to start!”

  It was just over a week since Alice had been discovered in the hidden room in the Borogovian mansion. The definitive DNA test had come back, and there was no doubt that Miss Jenny and Gemma, not Alice, had the blood of the royal family of Borogovia in their veins.

  The producers of Talented Brits knew that if someone who had been in the news so much sang on their program, the number of viewers would be enormous no matter how good or bad a singer she was, so they told Alice she didn’t have to do the live audition. Now, the show was going to start in five minutes, and Xena and Xander were torn—see their friend sing on live TV or watch Miss Jenny being crowned in the Borogovian capital?

  “Scoot over,” their mother said. Their father joined them on the couch, and they were so crowded they could hardly breathe. But nobody minded.

  A troupe of jugglers took the stage on Talented Brits, so Xena clicked the remote. Pre-coronation ceremonies were being shown on the international channel. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she said. “Miss Jenny called while you were out.”

  “Really?” Their mother sounded pleased. “About to be crowned, and she makes a phone call? She’s a calm one!”

  “Very,” Xander said. “She’ll be a good queen. What did she want?”

  “She said that Alice’s aunt confessed that she always suspected she and Alice weren’t related to the royal family of Borogovia, and the letters confirmed her fears. She had to have the crown to make the coronation legal, but when Jasper failed to get it, she was going to go ahead with it anyway and hope that the Borogovian people would accept the coronation.”

  “Well, that clinches it.” Xena clicked the remote again. “Oh, look!” Alice was taking the stage. She looked small in the spotlight until she began to sing. When she reached the end of the Borogovian national anthem, the crowd was on its feet. Alice, her cheeks pink and her eyes shining, took bow after bow.

  “Quick! Let’s look at the coronation!”

  Miss Jenny, a gleaming crown on her head, was addressing a crowd in a huge, sparkling hall. She was speaking Borogovian, but Xena and Xander didn’t need to read the subtitles. They knew that she was making a passionate speech about Borogovian independence.

  Xander, his mouth full of muffin, glanced at Xena. Silently, she high-fived him. They had not only solved a case, but had also helped a friend and ensured that a tough little country would stand on its own feet.

  School had started again on Monday, and Alice hadn’t been there to sing the solo in the school concert. Xena and Xander Holmes didn’t mind, though. It had been a great spring break!

  Copyright © 2011 by Parachute Publishing, L.L.C.

  All rights reserved.

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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  Book designed by Greg Wozney/Illustrated by Richard Carbajal

  eISBN 9781466825802

  First eBook Edition : June 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barrett, Tracy.

  The missing heir / by Tracy Barrett.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(The Sherlock files ; 4)

  Summary: Xena and Xander Holmes, an American brother and sister living in London, use clues from their ancestor Sherlock Holmes’ casebook to help classmate Alice Banders, who goes missing following the announcement that she will be crowned queen of Borogovia after her thirteenth birthday.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-8047-6

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Princesses—Fiction. 4. Identity—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 6. London (England)—Fiction. 7. England—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.B275355Mis 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010041012

  First Edition—2011