“Phew!” Nancy's whole body went limp with relief.
“Let's get out of here!” she mouthed to Ned.
“Sorry to bother you, Dennis,” George said, out in
the living room. “It's just that, well, all these fraterni-
ties start to look the same after a while. Can you guys
tell me which one is Omega?”
Nancy didn't stick around to listen to the rest. She
and Ned climbed outside, shut the window behind
them, and waited in the shadows of the frat house until
George rejoined them.
The Omega Chi Epsilon frat house was just a few
doors down Fraternity Row. When Nancy, George, and
Ned got there, they saw C.J. just ahead of them.
“Your ankle's better?” Ned asked.
C.J. nodded, twirling his cane in the air. “My ankle
doesn't hurt at all, and I don't need this anymore.”
When they got inside, Grant was waiting for them in
the common room—a large room with a fireplace and
wood paneling.
“Ready?” he said, holding up a slip of paper. “The
clue's right here.”
Nancy and Ned flopped down on the couch next to
Grant, while C.J. and George settled into a couple of
battered chairs. Nancy shut her eyes and listened as
Grant read the clue aloud.
“ I am old and fat and wrinkled, yet people sing of
my beauty,' ” he began.
“ I live on solid ground, but my head is in the clouds
. . .' ”
As he spoke, Nancy tried to form a picture in her
mind.
“ I cannot speak,' ” Grant continued, “ yet I tell the
stories of many, many people.
“ I have rings, but you will find no fingers on me.' ”
Nancy opened her eyes as Grant put the clue down
on the coffee table in front of the couch. “That's it,” he
said. “Any ideas?”
Leaning forward, Nancy picked up the clue to study
it. “Who can tell stories without speaking?” she
wondered aloud.
“Maybe it's a what. Maybe a book?” Ned suggested.
“A notebook could have rings but no fingers,”
George said. “And I guess a book could be old and fat
and wrinkled. . . .”
Grant frowned. “What about having its head in the
clouds? That sounds more like a building.”
His backpack was on the floor next to him. Grant
pulled out his map of the Emerson campus. But as
Nancy looked at it, she felt as if cotton was clogging her
brain.
For forty-five minutes they tried to reason out the
clue, but couldn't get it.
“Maybe we'll be able to think more clearly after we
get some sleep,” Nancy said, but she hated to end the
day feeling so unsettled.
Brringgg!
Nancy's eyes popped open. She fumbled in the
darkness to turn off the alarm, then groaned when she
saw the glowing numbers on the clock: 4:30.
“Time to get up, already?” she mumbled, and lay
quietly in the darkness.
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” Nancy finally said,
turning on the light on her bedside table.
George cracked one eye, then groaned and turned
over, pulling the blankets over her head.
“Come on,” Nancy said, laughing. “We only have an
hour to get dressed, meet the guys for breakfast, and
get to Clues Challenge headquarters before the horn
blows at five-thirty.”
She got out of bed and pulled on jeans and a
turtleneck. “Now, where's my toothbrush and soap?”
Nancy grabbed her bag of toiletries from the
windowsill, then paused with her hand in midair.
“Whoa,” she murmured, staring at the gnarled
branches of a maple tree that rose out of the snow
outside the window. “A tree! That's the answer!”
“Come again?” George rubbed her eyes and swung
her feet to the floor.
“A tree can be beautiful even when it's old and fat
and wrinkled,” Nancy said. “It can live on solid ground
and still have its head in the clouds. It has rings . . .”
“But no fingers!” George jumped out of bed, sud-
denly wide-awake. “You're right! But what was the
other part? Something about not speaking but telling
stories . . .”
“That's the only part I'm not sure of,” Nancy ad-
mitted. “Maybe the guys will know. They're a lot more
familiar with the campus than we are.”
It took them less than fifteen minutes to get dressed
and drive to Ned's fraternity. They found Ned, C.J.,
and Grant in the kitchen making toast, scrambled eggs,
and coffee.
“Hi, there,” Ned said as the girls walked in. He
stopped buttering toast long enough to give Nancy a
big hug.
“Hi, yourself.” Nancy leaned back and smiled up at
his handsome face and dark eyes. “Do you guys know
of any special trees on campus? Say, one that's big and
old and wrinkled, and can tell many people's stories?”
“Of course!” Grant said, slapping his palm against
his forehead. “The legendary oak!”
“What's that?” George asked.
“It's this huge oak way back in the woods on the
other side of campus. It's been around since before
Europeans settled here,” Ned said. “It's a tradition to
carve your initials on it.”
“Which is how the tree tells the story of many peo-
ple even though it can't speak,” said George.
C.J. nodded, grinning from ear to ear. “When Mr.
Lorenzo blows the horn this time,” he said, “no one's
going to stop us!”
A pale light was just snaking across the horizon when
Mr. Lorenzo sounded his air horn at five-thirty sharp.
The Omegas were ready. Within five minutes they
had put on their skis and left the Sports Complex be-
hind.
“Did you see Joy's face when we shot out of there?”
Grant said, grinning. “She couldn't believe we solved
the clue before she did.”
C.J. slid forward on his skis, heading toward the
woods on the far side of the lake. He angled a quick
glance back at Randy, who was skiing behind him. “It's
more than five miles to the oak,” he said. “You're sure
you're up for the trip?”
Randy nodded. “Absolutely. As long as we can talk
while we ski,” he said. “I was hoping you could tell me
about the Clues Challenge sponsor.”
“Mr. Lorenzo?” C.J. skied forward easily. Nancy was
glad to see his ankle didn't seem to trouble him.
“There's not much to tell. He just opened SportsMania
a few months ago.”
“What about before that?” Randy asked.
“Beats me,” C.J. said.
As she skied behind Randy, Nancy wondered at his
questions. “I thought your article was about C.J., not
Mr. Lorenzo,” she said.
“Background information is an important part of any
article. I like to get my facts straight,” he told her.
But as they skied deeper into the woods, Randy's
questions continued to focus on Mr. Lorenz
o. Did he
have a special interest in college sports? Did C.J. know
how long Mr. Lorenzo had lived in Emerson, or where
he moved from?
After a while Nancy tuned him out and concentrated
on skiing. The path they forged was through dense
forest. Every time Nancy breathed in, she smelled the
sweet fragrance of cedar and pine.
“I think we're getting close,” Ned said.
Nancy began a searching sweep over the area with
her eyes. There were plenty of oaks, but none that
looked as big as the one Ned had described.
“You think we took a wrong turn somewhere?”
George wondered, when they'd been skiing for more
than forty-five minutes. “I don't see—”
“There!” Nancy stopped in her tracks and pointed
with her ski pole.
About twenty yards in front of her the branches of a
huge oak towered over the other treetops. As they
skied toward it, Nancy saw a massive tree trunk more
than four feet across. Its bark was chipped and scarred
from carvings that covered nearly every square inch of
it.
“That's the legendary oak, all right,” Grant con-
firmed.
Nancy saw a second set of ski tracks leading up to
the legendary oak. They snaked through the woods
from somewhere to the left of the path the Omegas
had taken.
“Whoever made those took a different route through
the woods,” George commented.
“Jimmy probably,” Grant said. “He hid the clues for
Mr. Lorenzo.”
C.J. tilted his face upward and then said, “There's
the snowflake.”
Nancy looked up, following his gaze. In the topmost
branches of the tree, sunlight glinted off a plastic
snowflake.
“This one's mine,” she said. After stepping out of her
skis, she hoisted herself on to the lowest branch. She
reached for the next branch, then had to grab it wildly
as her boot slipped on the icy bark.
“Whoa!” she cried.
“Careful, Nan,” George called.
Nancy steadied herself, flashing a grin down at her
teammates. “Don't worry,” she assured them.
Slowly and surely, she climbed up to the next
branch, and the next. She noticed that snow had al-
ready been cleared from some of the branches—no
doubt by Jimmy when he had hidden the clue. Footing
on those branches was less slippery than where the
snow was still thick, so Nancy followed the trail
upward. She didn't pause until she saw the treetops of
the evergreens that were thick around the oak.
“Wow!” she murmured.
Straight down, Ned and the others looked tiny.
Nancy felt so giddy she had to clutch the branch even
tighter to keep her balance.
“Almost there.” She angled a look up at the plastic
snowflake, which glowed in the sunlight just two
branches over her head.
Taking a deep breath, she placed her boot on the
next branch and pulled herself up. She steadied her-
self, then reached for a higher branch.
With a chilling, cracking sound, the branch beneath
her gave way. Nancy gasped as her boot slipped off.
“Noooo!” she cried.
In the next instant she felt herself falling into thin
air.
13. Into Thin Air
Nancy plummeted downward. Her heart stopped in
her chest as she caught a dizzying glimpse of snow-
covered trees far below.
Throwing her arms out, she grabbed a branch and
her body jerked to a stop.
“Ooooh!” Nancy's arms felt as if they had been
yanked from their sockets.
“Nancy!” Shouts of alarm rose up from below.
Grunting, Nancy swung her legs around to grab the
tree trunk with them. Her hands started to slip on the
icy branch, and she wasn't sure how she did it, but at
last she was sitting firmly on a solid branch.
“I'm . . . all right!” she called down, her chest
heaving.
“What happened?” Ned's worried voice rose up to
her.
Nancy looked up, eyeing the broken branch. It had
split just inches from the trunk. Now the branch hung
at right angles to its original position, exposing the pale,
splintered wood beneath the heavy bark.
After taking a few deep breaths, Nancy climbed up
for a closer look. She frowned when she saw the
smooth slice in the wood. The cut ran about two thirds
of the way through.
Someone had sawn through the branch.
Nancy shivered, thinking of what might have hap-
pened if she hadn't stopped her fall. Then, pushing the
thought firmly from her head, she climbed the rest of
the way to the plastic snowflake and opened it.
Four paper clues lay folded inside. So we're the first
team to get the clue, thought Nancy. But someone
came here first and cut through that branch.
Nancy climbed quickly back to the ground.
“I was so scared for you,” Ned said, giving her a hug.
“That could have been a nasty accident.”
“It wasn't an accident,” Nancy told him. “Someone
sawed through that branch.”
“What!” Ned, C.J., Grant, George, and Randy all
cried at the same time.
“Oh, man.” C.J. shook his head in disgust. “Someone
has tried to stop us from getting every single clue.”
“But who?” George wondered aloud. “Joy?”
Nancy had been running over the list of suspects in
her own mind. “I'm pretty sure Joy is the one who took
my hat,” she said. “Maybe this is what she did in the
woods last night.”
“What about Dennis?” Grant asked. “He went
AWOL when his teammates were brainstorming the
second clue yesterday. He could have come here then
and sawed through the branch.”
“But how could Dennis have known where this
snowflake was hidden?” Ned asked. “As of this
morning, his team didn't even have the clue from the
administration building.”
Nancy grabbed her ski pole and poked the snow
with it while she thought. “Someone tried to threaten
Mr. Lorenzo into handing over the answers to the
clues. Maybe it was Dennis,” she suggested.
“Maybe,” said George. “But if Dennis got all the
answers, why is his team so far behind in the Clues
Challenge?”
It was a question for which Nancy didn't have an
answer.
Nancy shot a surreptitious glance at Randy as she
pulled her yellow team hat farther down on her head.
Was he the blackmailer and saboteur?
She shook herself. It was a pretty far-fetched theory.
So far, the only thing implicating Randy was Mr.
Lorenzo's intense dislike of him.
“Heads up, everyone. Look who's here,” said C.J.,
breaking into her thoughts.
Nancy looked up to see Joy ski toward them through
the woods. Hanna and the three other girls from Delta
Tau stretched in a line behind h
er, skiing forward at a
spirited pace.
“Looks like we're ahead this time,” C.J. said to Joy as
she came to a stop next to him. He nodded toward the
slip of paper in Nancy's hand.
“Not for long.” Joy gave a shrug, glancing at the clue.
She popped off her skis and dropped her backpack.
“I'll be back in a flash.”
“Be careful near the top,” Nancy warned. “There's a
broken branch.”
“Someone sawed through most of it, so it would
snap when it was stepped on,” George added.
Joy's face was hidden from view as she pulled herself
up onto the lowest branch. When she finally glanced
down at Nancy, Joy's eyes flashed with irritation. “I
suppose you're going to try to pin that on me, too?” she
said.
She reached calmly for the next branch and kept
climbing. Her teammates gathered at the foot of the
tree calling encouragement.
“She sure doesn't act like she's guilty,” George
whispered in Nancy's ear.
“No, but maybe that's exactly what she's doing . . .
acting,” said Nancy.
She eyed Joy's teammates. All their faces were
turned upward. No one was paying attention to Joy's
backpack, which lay on a mound of snow next to her
skis.
Catching George's eye, Nancy held her finger to her
lips. She moved quietly to the backpack. Crouching
next to it, she pulled the zipper open slowly.
Hmm, she thought, scanning the contents. Joy had
packed an extra pair of gloves, sunglasses, protective lip
balm. . . . Nancy saw nothing unusual—until her gaze
landed on a small bottle with a prescription label.
She glanced quickly over her shoulder. Seeing that
Joy was hidden by the branches of the huge old oak,
Nancy reached inside the pack and pulled out the
bottle.
The prescription label was partly torn. Nancy
couldn't read the name of the person it was for. But the
name of the medicine was still intact.
“Comptamine,” Nancy breathed. The same drug
that was used to spike their dessert at the pre-
Challenge dinner!
Gripping the bottle tightly, she made her way to her
teammates, who waited next to their skis.
“Find something?” Grant guessed, looking at the
bottle.
Nancy showed them the prescription bottle, then
turned as Joy's teammates cheered. “Joy's on her way
down with the clue,” she said, peering up into the
towering branches of the oak.