• • •
“This case is turning out to be tricky,” said Nancy as she and her friends walked out to the parking lot. “I haven’t been able to narrow down our list of suspects at all.”
“You’ve never blown a case yet, Nancy,” George reminded her. “I’m sure you’ll turn up something. You always do.”
“Well, I wish I knew where to turn next,” Nancy said, half to herself. The three girls had almost reached the row where Nancy’s Mustang was parked. “It all seems so—”
Nancy stopped in her tracks. “Look!” she gasped, pointing across the parking lot. “There’s Dan Avery!”
He was just unlocking a car door.
“We’ve got to catch him!” Nancy cried. She and George took off across the lot at the same time.
“This time, he’s not going to get away!”
Chapter
Eleven
AT THE SOUND of Nancy’s voice, Dan Avery dropped his keys and bolted. This time, though, Nancy had started running before he had—and it was two against one. While Nancy was making a beeline for Avery, George dashed around the other side of the parking lot to head him off. It took only a couple of minutes before they had him trapped.
For a minute it looked as if Avery was going to fight. But while aiming a totally ineffectual punch at Nancy, he slipped and fell flat on his back, and lay there panting from the exertion.
“Help me hold him, George,” Nancy gasped, struggling to pin Avery’s feet down.
Bess had just caught up to them. “I’ll get his arm,” she called, panting.
In a few seconds the three girls had Avery totally immobilized.
“And now,” Nancy said, “now you’re going to tell us what’s going on.”
“No way,” said Dan Avery sullenly. “I’m not wasting my time explaining myself to a bunch of hysterical teenage girls. Let me up or I’ll report you to the police.”
“The police know about you already,” said Nancy grimly. “The officer guarding Brock is on the lookout for you right now.” It wasn’t exactly true, but Avery wasn’t in much of a position to question her. “So you might as well talk to us.”
Glaring at her, Avery said defiantly, “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m just doing my job. And you’ll be sorry if you get in the way.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Bess incredulously. “Murdering people is your job?”
“Murdering people?” Dan Avery stared back at the girls just as incredulously. “What are you talking about?”
“Your attempted murder of Brock Sawyer,” Nancy answered flatly. “And of me.”
Suddenly all the color drained from Dan Avery’s face. “Attempted—you suspect me?” he sputtered. “You think I . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head wordlessly.
“I’m a reporter,” he said at last. “I’m just trying to get a story. I-I’m not a murderer!”
He sounded sincere, but Nancy wasn’t convinced. “Maybe you’d better tell us about it, Mr. Avery.
“Sure, sure.” Now Dan Avery seemed pathetically eager to comply. “But could you let me up? It’s hard to talk when the three of you are pressing me into the asphalt.”
Nancy, Bess, and George cautiously took their hands off him and stood up, brushing the dust from their clothes. Rubbing a shaky hand over his sweaty face, their captive got slowly to his feet.
“I’m a reporter with the Midnight Examiner,” Avery began. “Well, the Examiner is probably the only newspaper in the country that wasn’t invited to the Chocolate Festival.”
“Wait a minute,” said Nancy. “Didn’t Brock say something about the Examiner—about the stories you’ve been running on him?”
The stocky reporter nodded. “That’s right. We’ve been giving him a hard time, I guess—but, hey, he’s famous. It’s the price you pay when you become a star. Anyway, everyone knows the Examiner’s not some big, serious paper like the Chicago Tribune. It’s just a fun read!”
“I guess Brock didn’t feel that way about it, though,” said George dryly.
“Uh-huh. That’s why he warned us to stay away. But my editor thought it would be a great scoop if we could sneak in anyway. A great scoop.” His mouth widened into a big smile. “Get it? Like a scoop of chocolate ice cream? It was going to be the headline.” He looked from face to face, but none of the three girls was smiling. “Uh, anyway, I knew I’d never get a legit invitation, so I—well, I kind of got one from someone who owed me a favor.”
“What do you mean?” Nancy asked warily.
Avery scratched his balding head before answering. “I sort of—persuaded another reporter to give me his invitation. He works for another paper, see, and one time I slipped him a couple of celebrity photos from the Examiner’s files when he was in a tight spot. So he owed me.
“So anyway, I sneaked in, using this other guy’s invitation. And I’ve been waiting for a big—er—scoop ever since. His getting dipped in the chocolate was good,” he recalled, “but what I was really looking for was a big juicy story about Brock being poisoned. Boy, would our readers go for that!”
Nancy was completely disgusted. It sounded as if he actually enjoyed ruining people’s reputations. “So what are you doing here at the hospital?” Nancy asked icily. “Wasn’t the story back at the inn juicy enough?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t have any pictures. I wasn’t there when Brock got zapped—took the poison, I mean. I was—well, to tell you the truth, I was feeling sick to my stomach. Too much chocolate, I guess,” said Avery sheepishly. “Since I didn’t have any photos from the actual poisoning, I decided that a few shots of Brock in his hospital bed would be the next best thing.
“I’ve been camping out here for the past day,” Avery went on, “waiting for a chance to sneak in. That’s what you caught me trying to do a little while ago.”
He gave a little shrug. “So there we are. A man’s got to earn a living, you know.”
“One more question,” Nancy told him. “Did you touch any of Brock’s food before he got sick? Or his utensils?”
“Uh, actually I did more than touch the guy’s food. I helped myself to a little of it. Not really his food,” the reporter added hastily. “Just some of that weird artificial sweetener he took around with him. I put some into my coffee at lunch-time when he was busy signing an autograph. I know it sounds dumb, but I wanted to cut a few calories.
“Well, if that’s it I guess I’ll be going.” Dan Avery started off in the direction of his car, but Nancy grabbed his arm.
“Wait a minute,” she said suddenly. “You say you took the sweetener at lunchtime, Mr. Avery?”
He nodded.
“And you were feeling sick at dinnertime?”
“More than sick!” Avery said emphatically. “I mean, I was—ah—really indisposed all afternoon.”
“Then it might be the sweetener!” said Nancy excitedly. “If it made you sick, it could have poisoned Brock. This could be the break I’ve been looking for!”
George was looking at her curiously. “So someone put the poison in the sweetener?”
“That’s got to be it!” Nancy exclaimed. “Let’s get going, guys. Bess and George, could you head back to the inn and see if you can track down that jar of sweetener? Maybe Mr. Avery could give you a ride back—”
“Be delighted to,” said the reporter with a big grin. “It’s the least I can do.”
Behind him Bess was giving Nancy a disgusted look that said “thanks for nothing.”
“Where are you going, Nan?” George asked.
“To the police lab,” she replied. “The lab technicians and I are going to have a little chat. About poison.”
• • •
“I think I can get you in to see Dr. Demado,” said a young man at the reception desk. He led Nancy down the hall to an office.
Dr. Demado turned out to be a calm, gray-haired woman in a business suit. “Of course I’ve heard of the Oakwood case,” she said when Nancy explained why she’d come. “Calomel p
oisoning, right? As far as I know, we haven’t traced the source yet.”
“But I’ve just found something out.” Nancy went on to tell Dr. Demado what she’d learned from Dan Avery.
The chemist whistled. “No wonder he felt so sick! A dose of calomel could really lay a person flat.”
“But how could one poison have caused two such different reactions?” Nancy inquired.
“Calomel definitely could,” Dr. Demado said with a firm nod. “Do you remember what Brock was using the sweetener for?”
“Iced tea,” Nancy told her. “Iced tea with lemon. And coffee. I saw him use the sweetener in that, too.”
“Calomel breaks down into a poison when it comes into contact with acid,” Dr. Demado explained. “Acid like the lemon in Brock Sawyer’s tea.”
“And in the chocolates he tasted,” Nancy suddenly remembered, growing more excited. “They were lemon truffles. And he ate two of them before he collapsed.”
“So he got a double dose of acid,” Dr. Demado mused, shaking her head.
“Wait a minute,” said Nancy. “Let me catch up to you.” Rapidly she summarized what she’d heard so far.
“Someone dumped calomel into Brock’s artificial sweetener. Brock and Mr. Avery both used the sweetener, but neither of them noticed that it had been poisoned because calomel is tasteless. It made Mr. Avery fall sick because that’s what calomel does. But it poisoned Brock because he took it with the acid in his tea and in those lemon truffles. Is that right?”
“Right.”
There was still one piece missing from the puzzle, Nancy realized. “But where would someone get calomel?” she asked.
“Now, that’s something I can’t answer,” said the chemist. “It was taken off the market as an internal medicine years ago—precisely because it was so unstable. Possibly your poisoner found it in an old medicine cabinet somewhere?”
Nancy nodded, remembering the walk she, Bess, and George had taken through the inn’s east wing. Some of the rooms there had looked as if they’d been left untouched for years—including a couple of bathrooms. It wasn’t uncommon for people to hold on to old medicines they should have thrown out. So the poisoner might have been able to dig up calomel pretty easily—
Abruptly Nancy thought of something else. “Wait,” she said aloud. “Would the poisoner have known Brock was going to be eating something with acid in it? Those truffles were kept secret until Samantha unveiled them. Besides, is there anyone at the inn who knows that calomel turns into a poison when it reacts with acid? That seems a little hard to believe. . . .”
Nancy slumped down in her chair as her excitement drained away. “Whoever put calomel into Brock’s sweetener may not have meant to kill him at all,” she said in despair.
Dr. Demado eyed her curiously. “Why is that bad?” she asked.
“Oh, in terms of the poisoner’s guilt, it’s not bad at all,” Nancy said quickly. “But if it’s true, it means I’ve got to start looking for a different motive.
“I’ve been on the wrong track all along!”
Chapter
Twelve
AS NANCY DROVE BACK to the inn, she hardly noticed the scenery. Her mind was circling around the newest development in the case.
From the poisoner’s point of view, putting calomel in Brock’s artificial sweetener made a lot of sense. No one else would take it. He or she could be guaranteed that at some point Brock would use it.
But Nancy was sure that even the poisoner didn’t know that calomel would turn into a poison when it reacted with the lemon juice in the tea and the truffles. After all, Nancy knew a fair amount about poisons—more than the average person, at least. And she had never even heard of calomel, much less that it could turn poisonous in the presence of acid!
No, whoever had used the calomel had probably intended to make Brock feel sick—and to ruin the truffle-tasting event. If that was true, that person’s goal might be to sabotage the festival—not to kill Brock.
So I’m back to square one, Nancy thought, banging the steering wheel in frustration. She had to figure out who would want the Chocolate Festival to fail. Quickly she ran down her list of suspects again.
Perhaps Samantha had found the stress of running the festival to be too much. She might have decided to end it any way she could.
Mrs. Tagley had a motive for wanting the festival to end, too. She seemed to feel that she and Samantha were in direct competition for control of her inn. Ruining the festival would be a good way to make Samantha look as if she couldn’t handle things without her mother.
Then there was Tim. He had every reason to resent the demands the festival was making on Samantha’s time.
“On top of that,” Nancy said aloud, “there may be suspects I haven’t started suspecting yet—a whole inn full of them.”
• • •
“No sign of Brock’s sweetener,” George announced when Nancy let herself into the girls’ suite a short while later. She had spread her lean frame out on the couch and had a book propped up on her stomach. “We hunted through the kitchen until the chef was ready to wring our necks. But it’s gone.”
“Jake even pitched in and helped for a while,” Bess called from her room, where she was lying on her bed with a magazine. “You know, he’s really a sweet guy. I wonder if I’m making a mistake concentrating on Brock so much.”
“It probably doesn’t make much difference, considering that your relationship with Brock is completely in your head,” said George.
“We’ve got to find that jar of sweetener,” said Nancy. “It could be the key to everything.” She recounted what Dr. Demado had told her.
“So we’re not dealing with poison, we’re dealing with sabotage,” said George, her brown eyes wide.
“That’s right,” answered Nancy. “We’ve got to determine who hates the Chocolate Festival enough to ruin it.” She let out a sigh. “We don’t know whether the culprit used the calomel because it was the first thing he or she came across, or whether he or she chose it on purpose.
“We don’t even know for sure that the calomel was in the sweetener,” she added. “That’s why we’ve got to find that jar.”
Nancy started pacing around the little room.
“While everyone’s busy with the festival, I’m going to check all the Tagleys’ rooms for it.”
“What if someone walks in on you? What are you going to say?” Bess asked nervously, getting off her bed and joining Nancy and George in the living room.
“That’s not going to happen,” Nancy told her with a grin. “Because you and George are going to be my lookouts. I know you’ll be great at fending people off while I’m poking around under the Tagleys’ beds.”
“We’d better come up with some kind of excuse, don’t you think?” Bess whispered a few minutes later as the three girls headed toward the stairs that led up a flight to the Tagleys’ suite of rooms. The fourth-floor hall was hushed and shadowy. Nancy felt as if they were in the middle of a ghost story.
“Maybe I can say I dropped an earring—” Bess suggested.
“And it just rolled up four flights into the Tagleys’ wing?” George finished for her. “I doubt they’ll go for that. If anyone comes up here, let’s just try to distract them.”
Nancy held her breath as she twisted the knob of the first door they came to. It swung open easily.
“Thank heaven for friendly family inns like this one,” said George with a chuckle.
“What a pretty bedroom!” Bess commented.
It was furnished entirely in antique cherry furniture, and on the floor was a faded but still handsome Oriental rug. From the framed pictures of Samantha and Jake that lined the walls, Nancy guessed this was Mr. and Mrs. Tagley’s room.
“Look, this must have been taken when Jake was about four years old,” said Bess, pointing to a picture of a sunny-faced little boy in a cowboy suit. “What a cutie!”
“Hey, get outside,” scolded Nancy with a laugh. “You guys are supposed t
o be standing guard, remember?”
“Oops, sorry!” Bess scooted out of the room to stand with George.
Nancy quickly searched the room. No sweetener in the closet or any of the bureau drawers. None under the bed or any of the furniture, nor in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom adjoining the bedroom. After a few minutes she decided she was wasting her time.
“No luck,” she said, closing the door carefully behind her. “Let’s try another room.”
To her relief, the next door they tried was also unlocked. This room was obviously Jake’s.
“What a mess!” George marveled, staring at the piles of books and magazines on the floor. The desk was cluttered with papers, and the unmade bed was piled high with laundry. “Anyone who wanted to break in here would give up and leave, thinking someone had already beat him to it.”
Nancy gave George a friendly jab on the shoulder.
Nancy sifted through piles of wadded-up shirts, peered cautiously around precariously balanced stacks of books, and dug mountains of debris out from under the bed before shoving them back again. The whole search would have been a lot easier if she had dared to clean up the room, but, of course, that was impossible.
She had just decided to give up when Bess leaned into the room. “Nancy, hurry!” she begged. “You’ve been in there for ten minutes!”
“Okay. I’m done—at least, I think I am. There may still be a pile of laundry I didn’t paw through, but I don’t think so.”
“Couldn’t you just skip Samantha’s room?” urged Bess. “I’m sure she didn’t take the jar. I just know someone’s going to discover us any minute. And besides, it’s lunchtime!”
“I can’t quit now.” Leading the way, Nancy rounded a corner onto a sunny corridor lined with windows. Seeing another door there, Nancy tried it.
Unlike Jake’s, Samantha’s room was in pristine order, with a dainty canopy bed and white-painted furniture.
“This won’t take long, anyway,” Nancy muttered to herself as she began pulling out bureau drawers.
“Come on, Nancy!” Bess urged. She was dancing up and down with impatience. “You’re taking forever!”