Alexis

by Erica Rodgers

  Alexis was nervous. Would Lisa laugh at them? Did she think it was silly that two girls wanted to investigate what was going on at her parents’ place? She was in college, after all. She was probably really smart.

  “Yep!” Bailey answered before Alexis could get the right words together in her mind. “Something very fishy is going on up there. I mean, animals just don’t unlock their cages by themselves, do they?”

  “No,” Lisa said, pulling away from the store parking lot onto the main road. “I guess they don’t.”

  “And your parents have run this reserve for years without problems, right?” Alexis asked. “So if they haven’t changed the way they do things, then there is no logical reason for things to be falling apart.”

  Alexis couldn’t quite bring herself to look at Lisa. She was sure the girl was about to laugh at them.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Lisa.

  “Really?” cried Alexis.

  “Of course. I’ve been telling my mom for a while that something’s not quite right. I hope you two can help. I would love to, but I’ve been away at school. And even if I were here, I wouldn’t know where to start an investigation!”

  “Well you’re in luck!” said Bailey. “That’s what we do!”

  “My mom and dad told me about your success with solving mysteries,” Lisa said as she turned the car around a corner. “I went on the internet last night and read about how you solved the problems at that dinosaur park. I hear you’ve helped with other adventures too.”

  “Yes, a bunch of them!” Bailey exclaimed. “We helped find a missing millionaire. Lexi helped rescue some sea lions. Our Camp Club Girls group of sleuths also solved a problem with sabotage in Wisconsin, a plot to harm the president in Maryland, a mystery with horses, and bad stuff going on at the London Bridge in Arizona. We even found lost jewels in Amarillo, at the Cadillac Ranch!”

  “Hey, I’ve been there,” Lisa said.

  “All six of us Camp Club Girls always work together to figure out the mysteries,” Bailey said.

  Lisa drove up the driveway to the reserve, but she passed the small cabin where the girls had met Jake and Karen the day before. Instead, she kept driving around a few barns until she stopped at one of the smaller ones in the back.

  “What’s this building?” asked Alexis.

  “This is the building where we start your documentary!” said Lisa. She jumped out of the Jeep and trotted off through the snow. “C’mon! Follow me!”

  Bailey grabbed the video equipment off the seat next to her and followed Alexis out of the car. The snow was knee deep, and Bailey had a hard time keeping up with the two taller and older girls.

  “You want me to carry something else?” called Alexis.

  “No thanks!” said Bailey. “I’m almost there!”

  Lisa was waiting for them at the door to the barn. When they got close, she put her finger to her lips to signal them to be quiet. She opened the door and ushered Alexis and Bailey inside.

  The room was dark, and the only noises were a small series of squeaks coming from the farthest corner of the barn. Lisa flipped a light switch, and a few lightbulbs flickered to life above their heads. The barn was warmer than Alexis had expected it to be.

  There must be heaters in here, she thought.

  Lisa peeled off her coat, and Alexis and Bailey did the same. After hanging them on pegs near the door, Alexis and Bailey walked quietly over to the corner where Lisa was. It was the same corner the squeaks were coming from.

  “What are those things?” asked Bailey. “Baby mice?”

  Tiny brown bodies huddled together in the bottom of the cage. The only body parts Alexis could really see in the pile of fluff were a bunch of round, pink ears. Maybe Bailey was right. They sure did look like mice.

  “No, they’re not mice.” Lisa laughed. “They’re baby bats.”

  “What?” whispered Alexis.

  “That’s so cool!” Bailey said.

  “Yeah,” said Lisa. “We’ve been taking care of these for a while now. Eventually, when it gets warmer and they get bigger, we’ll be able to let them go. But right now they don’t have any parents, so they don’t have a way to get food.”

  Lisa opened the cage and took out one of the little creatures.

  “Wait!” said Alexis. “Let me get out the camera!” She took the bag from Bailey’s shoulder and pulled out the camera. It was fully charged and had a new disk in it already. “Ready, Bailey?”

  “Ready!” Bailey said. They had decided that Alexis would run the camera and that Bailey would do most of the on-camera work. Alexis loved movies and usually did her own commentaries when filming. But she knew how much Bailey longed to be a star. She knew that giving the younger girl the turn in front of the camera would be a gift that would make Bailey happy. And since Bailey was younger, Alexis figured it would make her feel more confident and sure of herself around the other Camp Club Girls.

  “This is a baby California Myotis bat,” said Lisa. She brought the small animal closer to the camera and stretched out one of its wings. With the wings expanded, the bat was much bigger than Alexis had expected it to be.

  “At first we fed them on milk,” said Lisa. “We twisted the corners of small rags, dipped them in warm milk, and let the baby bats suck the milk out of the rags. Now they’re big enough to eat bugs.”

  She placed the bat back in its cage and pulled a jar from a nearby shelf. Using a spoon, she scooped what looked like maggots out of the jar and sprinkled them into the bottom of the cage, which looked like it was covered with a fine mesh.

  “The mesh allows their little claws to grab hold,” said Lisa.

  “So they can crawl to get the food, right?” Bailey asked.

  “Yup! Look!”

  Sure enough, the baby bats had detached themselves from their pile and were crawling toward the wiggling food. Alexis had never seen anything so gross and so cool at the same time. She taped the feeding. Then she put the camera on a tripod so it would tape while she and Bailey helped Lisa clean out the owl cages.

  Baby great horned owls sat above them on branches, watching curiously. They were big, even for babies. Each one was about eighteen inches tall, and their fluffy baby feathers made them look even bigger.

  “I don’t know why on TV owls are always shown as spooky or around scary places,” Alexis said. “They don’t seem creepy at all.”

  “Probably because they’re nocturnal animals. They mainly hang out at night and sleep during the day. Night animals seem spooky to most people. Can you see where they got their name?” Lisa asked as she shoveled dirty straw into a bucket.

  “The feathers on their heads, above their eyes,” said Bailey. “They look like horns!”

  The day flew by, and before they knew it, the girls were walking to the office for some lunch.

  “Uh-oh,” said Lisa as they approached the small building.

  “What is it?” asked Alexis. Lisa pointed to a shiny black Mercedes-Benz.

  “That always means trouble,” she said. “Or at least it means that Dad’s going to be in a bad mood.”

  Alexis tromped up the steps with the others and entered the office.

  “I’ll be right back. You wait here,” Lisa said as she disappeared into the other room.

  Like the day before, a fire was burning in the fireplace. But Bubbles was nowhere to be seen. Instead, someone strange was at the counter talking with Jake. It was an older man in an expensive coat. His gray hair was slicked back away from his round face, and he hadn’t taken off his sunglasses, even though he was no longer outside.

  “Come on, Jake,” the man was saying. “This is the last time I’m coming out here.”

  “Good,” Jake said with a smile. “Then this is the last time I’ll have to tell you no.”

  The other man slapped his hand down on the desk.

  “Jake, you can’t be serious!”

  “You know exactly how serious I am, Bruce. I don’t want your money.”
>
  “You’ll wish you’d taken my money when they shut you down,” said Bruce. He had spoken in a quiet voice. Alexis was glad she had good ears.

  Jake’s smile vanished, and he leaned across the desk toward Bruce. “Is that a threat?” he growled.

  “No, Jake, no! Of course not!” Bruce laughed, but Alexis thought it sounded fake—like he was trying too hard to make the right sound come out. “I just mean that you’re in trouble. It seems like you’ve been having a few . . . problems here at the reserve.”

  “How would you know about that?” asked Jake.

  “Oh please, Jake! This is Tahoe! Tourists or no tourists, it’s a small town. People talk.” Bruce took his car keys out of his pocket.

  “You know where to find me if you change your mind, Jake,” he said. He placed a card on the desk, and then he was gone. As Alexis moved closer, she saw that the card said Bruce Benton, Land Developer.

  Jake picked up the card. “We can just throw that in the trash,” he said as he tossed it into the wastepaper basket.

  Karen and Lisa came through the door, each carrying a stack of mail.

  “I saw that Benton guy’s car and heard you talking to him. What was that all about?” Karen asked Jake as the ladies handed their piles of mail to him.

  “Oh, same old stuff,” he answered. He took some of the mail from her and started opening it. “Bill, bill, bill,” he said. Then he stopped. “Another threat letter,” he said. He tossed it onto the desk.

  Alexis and Bailey had wandered over to look out the window, but now they hurried back to the desk.

  “Really?” Alexis said. “You got a threat letter?”

  On the desk was a sheet of white paper with different sizes of lettering on it. Someone had cut words out of a magazine and pasted them together.

  You think you’re helping, but you’re interfering with nature. Leave the forest alone! It will heal itself! If you don’t, more than letters will come your way!

  No one had signed it.

  “What in the world?” Alexis said. “This is awful!”

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” said Lisa. “We actually get them a lot. A lot of people are unhappy with places like this reserve.”

  Bailey and Alexis looked at Jake. They were puzzled. How could anyone be angry with a place that helped animals?

  “It’s the same old thing, Alexis,” said Jake. “You can’t please everyone. Some people think we do too much.” He pointed to the letter Alexis held in her hand. “Others think we don’t do enough. Nothing ever comes of the letter, though. We don’t worry about them. We keep them all, just in case something worse happens, but that’s it.”

  Alexis was still alarmed. She had received a threatening note once before, and she remembered how scared she had been. It had made her feel like someone could jump out at her at any moment. She opened her mouth to mention it.

  “Ahhh!” Karen suddenly cried out.

  “Oh no, Jake! Look!” She was holding another open letter.

  “Is it another threat?” asked Bailey.

  Jake took the letter and looked it over.

  “No,” he said. “It’s worse. It’s a letter from the government. They say they’ve had complaints about our facility, and that if they continue, then we’ll lose our license to operate.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Alexis. Lisa walked up and put her arm around her dad’s waist.

  “What it means, Alexis, is that we’ll have to close down the reserve.”

  Moneybags Bruce

  I think there’s a lot more going on in this mystery than I ever imagined.

  Alexis typed the last line onto the screen for the Camp Club Girls to read. She was using her mom’s laptop and had just typed a long email to all the girls to let them know what was going on.

  Bailey read over Alexis’s shoulder.

  “It’s scary to think that not only is someone letting animals out of their cages but that the government has even heard about it,” Bailey said thoughtfully.

  “Well, as you read in my email, I told the Camp Club Girls that if we can’t solve this mystery, the reserve might not exist anymore. And that would be terrible!” Alexis exclaimed. “Then what would happen to those precious baby bats?”

  “And animals that can’t take care of themselves, like Bubbles,” Bailey added.

  “Good thing Mom and Dad picked this time to bring us here,” Alex said.

  “Or as Beth would say, ‘There’s no such thing as coincidence. God has you there now for a reason!’ ” Bailey laughed as she thought of their friend from Amarillo, Texas. Elizabeth was a walking Bible—and not because she was showing off, but because she believed that God directed people through His words in the Bible. Elizabeth believed God could do anything and often reminded the girls of that truth.

  “I’m just concerned,” Alexis said.

  “About the mystery?” Bailey asked.

  “Yes, but I’m also kind of worried that we won’t be able to solve the mystery and do the documentary too,” she said slowly. “I really, really wanted to win this documentary contest, but what good will that be if the reserve we film gets shut down?”

  Alexis bent over to lace up her heavy snowboarding boots.

  Bailey had a mouthful of ski mittens as she used her hands to lace up her boots, but she nodded to show that she was listening.

  “Karen and Jake are really doing us a favor by letting us film our video here,” continued Alexis. “It would be sad if we couldn’t pay them back by solving this case. I mean, it’s what we do.”

  “So we’ll just have to keep doing what we’re doing,” said Bailey, taking her gloves out of her mouth and tossing them onto the bed. “I mean, we’ll solve the case while we work on the documentary.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” said Alexis, “but that’s a lot to do in a few days.”

  “No, Lexi!” said Bailey. “I mean really work on them at the same time. We were going to shoot a documentary about the reserve, right? Like, about what they do for the animals and stuff? But now something better has come up! They do amazing things for the wildlife here, and someone is paying them back by sabotaging them! So, we can still make our film about the reserve…”

  A lightbulb flashed to life in Alexis’s head.

  “But we can make it about the mystery! Then filming our documentary really is solving the case! Bailey, you’re a genius!”

  Alexis hugged Bailey so hard that the two of them practically fell off the bed. The worry lifted like it had never been there.

  Why didn’t I think of that in the first place? Alexis wondered. We can document the trouble at the reserve!

  If they solved the case, their documentary would be different from any other—like a real-life CSI show! And even if they didn’t solve the case completely, they would draw attention to what was happening. They could send a copy to the government and maybe get more help for Karen and Jake. And I bet the Tahoe Tourism Bureau would help too, Alexis thought.

  The girls spent the morning on the ski slopes. Alexis had promised her dad that she and Bailey would take at least one day to enjoy the snow with the family. It was a vacation, after all.

  Alexis loved snowboarding. She had learned to ski in fifth grade but had always felt awkward. In the back of her mind, she was always afraid her legs would tangle up at any moment and send her flying down the mountain on her face.

  The next year, her dad had signed her up for snowboarding lessons. It was so much easier! Or at least she thought so. There was no chance that her feet could tangle, because they were anchored securely side by side.

  There had been one time that a face-plant had brought the snowboard up from behind to whack her in the back of the head…not fun. But overall it was always a great time.

  Bailey hadn’t skied much, so the girls spent the first hour on the bunny hill. Alexis taught her how to wedge the tips of her skis together (in the shape of a triangle), and they cruised along slowly until Bailey got the hang of it. It
didn’t take long. Soon she was tearing down the mountain so fast that Alexis could hardly catch up.

  “You should have your camera along!” Bailey called to Alexis. “Then you could do a documentary on a midwestern girl learning to ski! I could be a star!”

  On their fifth run down the mountain, Alexis took her time. She always got more confident after a few hours on the slopes, so she wanted to try some smaller jumps. By the time she got to the bottom, Bailey had been waiting for almost ten minutes.

  “Come on, Lexi! You take forever!”

  “Sorry! I wanted to try some tricks!”

  “Well, I’m starving,” said Bailey. “Let’s get lunch!”

  The girls left their boards outside the lodge and went in to find the cafeteria. They ordered a pizza to share and then giant cups of hot chocolate. Alexis had to admit that it felt good to take her gloves off and wrap her fingers around something warm.

  “The sun’s out,” said Alexis. “Want to sit outside?”

  “Sure,” said Bailey. They wiggled their way through tons of tourists. Alexis thought she heard at least four different languages being spoken in the crowd. People came to Tahoe from all over the world it seemed. Alexis was trying to understand a woman speaking French when Bailey elbowed her in the ribs.

  “Hey, look!” Bailey said. “Isn’t that the boy I hit in the head with our camera at breakfast yesterday?”

  Alexis looked in the direction Bailey was pointing. Sure enough, the same boy was sitting on a bench looking up at the mountain. Alexis wondered why he wasn’t wearing any snow gear. Who came to the ski lodge and didn’t ski? As the girls got closer, Alexis noticed something else. The boy was holding a walking stick. But it wasn’t like the walking sticks people used when they hiked in the mountains. It was thinner and white.

  “Bailey,” Alexis whispered. “I think he’s blind!”