The Stolen Bones Read online

  Let me introduce myself. I’m Nancy Drew.

  My friends call me Nancy. My enemies call me a lot of other things, like “that girl who cooked my goose.” They actually sometimes speak like that, but what can you expect from criminals? See, I’m a detective. Well, not really. I mean, I don’t have a license or anything. I don’t carry a badge or a gun, in part because I wouldn’t touch a gun even if I could, and also because I’m just not old enough. But I am old enough to know when something isn’t right, when somebody’s getting an unfair deal, when someone’s done something they shouldn’t do. And I know how to stop them, catch them, and get them into the hands of the law, where they belong. I take those things seriously, and I’m almost never wrong.

  My best friends, Bess and George, might not totally agree with me. They tell me I’m wrong a lot, and that they have to cover for me all of the time just to make me look good. Bess would tell you I dress badly. I call it casual. George would tell you I’m not focused. By that she’d mean that once again I forgot to fill my car with gas or bring enough money to buy lunch. But they both know I’m always focused when it comes to crime. Always.

  Nancy Drew

  The Stolen Bones

  I’m hunting for something other than clues for a change: dinosaur bones! Bess, George, and I travel out to the desert to join a paleontology dig. The other volunteers are a pretty quirky bunch, but we’re all having a great time … until an important find goes missing. It turns out fossils can be worth millions. I’m making no bones about it—the thief is going down.

  Catch my next case:

  Pageant Perfect Crime

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Cover designed by Debra Sfetsios

  Cover illustration by Sammy Yuen Jr.

  Ages 8-12

  www.Kids.SimonandSchuster.com

  Rattled!

  Bess and George followed me back to the tent. I crouched and unzipped the flap. Under the noise of the zipper I heard a strange sound. I paused a moment, trying to identify it. A dry rattle, like seeds in a gourd. Where was it coming from?

  I shrugged and finished unzipping the tent. As the flap fell open, the sound got louder.

  Zhhh-zhh-zhhh!

  It was coming from inside the tent!

  I looked in. I saw a raised head, coiled body, and shaking tail.

  I was staring at a rattlesnake.

  NANCY DREW

  girl detective®

  #1 Without a Trace

  #2 A Race Against Time

  #3 False Notes

  #4 High Risk

  #5 Lights, Camera …

  #6 Action!

  #7 The Stolen Relic

  #8 The Scarlet Macaw Scandal

  #9 Secret of the Spa

  #10 Uncivil Acts

  #11 Riverboat Ruse

  #12 Stop the Clock

  #13 Trade Wind Danger

  #14 Bad Times, Big Crimes

  #15 Framed

  #16 Dangerous Plays

  #17 En Garde

  #18 Pit of Vipers

  #19 The Orchid Thief

  #20 Getting Burned

  #21 Close Encounters

  #22 Dressed to Steal

  #23 Troubled Waters

  #24 Murder on the Set

  #25 Trails of Treachery

  #26 Fishing for Clues

  #27 Intruder

  #28 Mardi Gras Masquerade

  #29 The Stolen Bones

  Available from Aladdin Books

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2008 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  NANCY DREW, NANCY DREW: GIRL DETECTIVE, ALADDIN PAPERBACKS, and related logo are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  First Aladdin Paperbacks edition April 2008

  Library of Congress Control Number 2007934380

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-3614-5

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-3614-9

  ISBN-13:978-1-4424-6548-0 (eBook)

  1 Trespass

  2 Noise in the Night

  3 Footprints in the Dark

  4 Damaged

  5 More Mysteries

  6 Rattled

  7 Twin Troublemakers

  8 No Claws for Alarm

  9 Laws and Outlaws

  10 Behind Closed Doors

  11 Things That Go Bump in the Night

  12 Between a Rock…

  13 … And a Hard Place

  14 Secrets Revealed

  15 The Fossil Escapes!

  1

  Trespass

  What have you gotten us into now, Nancy?”

  I glanced over at Bess in the front passenger seat. Her eyes were sparkling, so I knew she was only teasing me. Bess and her cousin George are my best friends, and I do get them into trouble sometimes—mostly when we’re on the trail of a mystery. We weren’t trying to find a criminal now, though. We were trying to find a road.

  George was hunched over her GPS unit in the backseat. “Hey, we’re not lost. I can tell you exactly where we are. It’s the road that’s lost. And if we had the GPS coordinates of the turnoff, I could tell you where it was too.”

  “I did ask,” I reminded her. “They didn’t know the coordinates.”

  George snorted. She loves gadgets of every kind, and couldn’t imagine anyone not taking advantage of a useful item like a Global Positioning System. She’d been tracking our progress since we’d left River Heights two days before.

  Bess pointed to our left. “There’s a road. Or is it a trail? It’s something, anyway.”

  I slowed my car and idled near the turn. The land around us was dry scrubland, with plenty of rocks and weeds, but few road signs. The rutted dirt trail on our left might have been wide enough for a car, but calling it a road seemed generous. Still, our directions said “go six miles, to the third dirt road on the left.” We’d driven ten miles looking for a major dirt road, without luck, as the sun had headed for the horizon. So we’d decided that whoever had written the directions had a definition of road that was different from ours. We had decided to backtrack and start over.

  “I guess we can try it.” I turned the car and eased it onto the dirt path. Scraggly brush grew up the center, with deep ruts on either side. I kept my wheels on high ground so the bottom of my car wouldn’t scrape.

  “And if we don’t find the place soon,” Bess said cheerfully, “we can turn back to that last town and get a hotel room.”

  I smiled. Bess doesn’t like to be away from her shower and hair dryer. I wondered if her perfectly manicured nails, painted a soft pink to match her rosy cheeks, would survive this trip.

  “We’re hardly roughing it,” I said. “We’re car camping, so you won’t even have to carry a pack. We’ll have our cooler right there, and even a camp cook to fix our meals.”

  George muttered, “Yeah, talk about roughing it. I’ll be away from my computer for almost a week!”

  Bess and I laughed. George must have had a dozen gadgets with her, but without her full computer setup, she acted like she was living in the Dark Ages.

  “Look,” I said, “this is going to be fun. How often do you get to see dinosaurs in their natural habitat?”

  Bess grinned. “So long as they’ve been dead for a few
million years, I’m happy.”

  George leaned forward. “I’m excited too, Nancy. We’re just teasing you. I think volunteering for a paleontology dig is a great idea!”

  “Thanks. I just hope we can find it.” The track crossed what looked like a shallow old streambed. I eased the car forward, but it only lurched, throwing us against our seat belts.

  “Uh-oh,” George said. “That didn’t feel good.”

  “No.” I turned off the engine. “We’d better get out and take a look.”

  We opened our doors. “Ugh!” Bess said. “The ground is all muddy here.”

  I stepped gingerly onto the soft ground and crouched to peer under my car. “Whoops.” This was a streambed all right. The last time it had rained, water must have run across our “road.” The ground was wet and our front wheels had sunk into the mud. “I didn’t realize the ground was so soft here. I guess I should have checked before trying to drive across.”

  “So how are we going to get out of here?” George asked.

  The wind whipped my shoulder-length hair into my face, so I swept it into a ponytail. “I guess we should try pushing. Bess, why don’t you get behind the wheel, and George and I will shove. We’d better try to go backward.”

  Bess slid into the driver’s seat while George and I crouched in front of the car. Our feet sank into the mud. Bess put the car in reverse and gently pressed the gas while George and I leaned against the front. The car rocked slightly. But despite our grunts and groans, the only thing that moved was the mud—as the tires spun, the mud splattered all over us.

  Finally George and I stood up, gasping. Bess put the car in park and got out. “We can try digging around the tires and then packing in dry sand and rocks,” she said.

  I glanced at the sun sinking toward the western mountains and sighed. We didn’t have much light left. “We’d better get started.”

  “Hey!” A loud voice startled us. “What are you girls doing?”

  We turned to see a woman hurrying toward us across the field. She was in her forties, thin and wiry, with dark hair and a weather-beaten tanned face. She wore faded jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  My initial relief that someone had found us faded as I noticed her scowl.

  “This is private property,” she yelled. “You’re trespassing!”

  • • •

  I forced myself to smile as the woman came panting up to us. “We didn’t mean to trespass,” I said. “We’re going on a paleontology dig, and we thought this might be the road we’re supposed to take.”

  The scowl eased itself into a straight line. “Oh. You’re one of them.” She grudgingly admitted, “Yeah, this is the right track. I said them fools could go through my land. I can’t understand why people would want to waste time digging up old bones, but so long as they make their mess on that government land and not on mine, I guess I don’t care.”

  “The museum is learning more about the past,” I said. “They might even discover some new species.”

  She snorted. “Who cares about that? It’s today that matters. Ranching is real work.” She looked us up and down, her eyes lingering on Bess’s short skirt and sandals. “But it don’t look like you girls know anything about that. I told my Jimmy that’s the kind of foolishness college leads to. Better to get a real job and make some money instead of spending it on school.”

  I was still trying to think of a response when George said, “There is money in paleontology! Dinosaur bones can sell for millions of dollars.”

  The ranch woman gaped at her. “You don’t say? You mean some of them bones out there might be worth millions?” She laughed. “If I’d known that, maybe I would have kept them for myself.”

  I glanced at the setting sun. We still had two miles to go on this road and we were running out of light. I pasted on my brightest smile. “We really are sorry to cause you any trouble, but our car is stuck. Do you have a couple of boards or something that we can stick under the wheels?”

  She frowned at the car. “I guess if I want you off my property, I’ll have to rescue you. Hold on a minute. I’ll get my son.”

  She trotted away. George, Bess, and I stared at one another and simultaneously let out a long sigh of relief.

  George whispered, “You sure do attract interesting people, Nan. I can’t wait to meet her son.”

  “I just hope he hurries,” I said.

  We watched the sun drop behind the distant hills in a blaze of pink and gold. The temperature also dropped about ten degrees, so we retrieved our sweaters from the car. George frowned at her watch. “We have about half an hour of fading light left. Looks like we’ll be setting up our tent in the dark.”

  At last a dirty white pickup bounced toward us. It turned and backed up so it was about ten feet in front of my car. The woman got out, along with a young man, maybe eighteen or twenty. He, too, was thin and wiry, with tangled dark hair.

  I stepped closer and smiled. “Thank you for helping us. I’m Nancy Drew, by the way, and these are my friends Bess and George.”

  He stared at us. Like his mother, he studied Bess especially closely. I think his opinion was different, though—his eyes widened and his jaw dropped open. Bess is a natural beauty who usually looks like she just stepped out of a fashion magazine.

  Bess gave him a dimpled smile and said, “Hello. Thanks for helping us out. It’s really nice of you.”

  He only continued to stare. I started to wonder if he could even talk.

  His mother stepped forward. “I’m Erlinda and this is Jimmy. Now enough chitchat; let’s get you out of here.”

  We weren’t arguing with that! Jimmy reached into the back of the truck and pulled something out. He attached it to his truck’s trailer hitch, and then pulled the other end toward my car.

  “Oh, a come-along!” Bess said. “That will make things so much easier.”

  Jimmy paused again to stare at her, until his mother gave him a shove. He bent his head and fumbled around under my front bumper. He tightened the come-along, got back into the truck, and slowly pulled the truck forward. The car finally came out of the mud with a sucking sound. Jimmy kept going until my car was safely across the muddy area. Then he got out and unhooked the come-along as we picked our way across the mud.

  “Thanks so much,” I said. I wondered if I should offer money for the help. “Um, can I give you—?”

  Erlinda interrupted. “You said them dinosaur bones could be worth millions of dollars? Is that true?”

  “Well, I don’t know about these particular bones. Fossils can sell for a lot of money, but they have to be rare to get millions.” I worried that Erlinda might have ideas about scavenging the dig after the paleontologists left. “Of course, you need a special permit, like this team from the museum has. If you steal fossils, you can get big fines and jail time.”

  Erlinda nodded. “Oh sure, but bones on my own land, they’d be mine, right? And if there’s bones just down there, maybe there’s some here, too!”

  “You would probably own any fossils you find on your own land,” I said cautiously. “But I don’t know if you’d find anything valuable. It depends on lots of things. The age of the rock, for example.”

  She kept nodding, but I wasn’t sure whether or not she was actually listening. “Right, right. Well, just keep going down this road and you’ll find them diggers.”

  After we thanked her, Erlinda got into the truck with Jimmy and they drove away.

  “Ten minutes until dark,” George said. “Let’s get moving.”

  We did our best to scrape the mud from our shoes, and piled into my car. Everything was gray, like a faded black-and-white photo. I turned on the headlights and drove slowly along the dirt track.

  George leaned over the seat back. “Well, Nancy, you’ve done it again.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You found a mystery already,” she said, laughing. “Why are these people so odd?”

  I smiled. “Odd maybe, but h
ardly mysterious. Not everyone can be as normal as you are, George.”

  Bess burst out laughing. When she caught her breath, she said, “I guess we should expect people to be different here in New Mexico, anyway.”

  “Oh, come on,” George said. “We’re not in a foreign country. New Mexico is one of the fifty states, you know.”

  Bess twisted in her seat to poke her cousin. “I know that! But it’s still going to be different from River Heights, don’t you think? All this desert, and the Spanish culture.”

  I let them tease each other. Bess and George may be cousins, but they couldn’t be more different, in everything from looks to temperament. George is tall and thin, with short dark hair and a cynical attitude. Bess is blond, shorter, and curvy, with optimism that some people would call naïve.

  I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. I try to see the best in people, but I’ve uncovered too many criminals to think that people are nice all the time.

  At that moment, driving needed my full attention. The track twisted around, and my wheels kept slipping on big rocks. I winced as a bush scraped against the side of the car. This was one place where a big truck would have been handy. I had to remind myself of all the fuel the hybrid had saved on the long drive from River Heights.

  I was hunched over the wheel, clutching it tightly, when I noticed another glow ahead, over a hill. The sun had long since vanished, and we were miles from any city. I squinted and focused on the glowing light.

  I smiled, realizing what I was seeing. This mystery was easy to solve—campfire. “Hey, I think we found the camp!”

  Finally we’d arrived. I put the car in park and slumped back. George bounded out of the car, and Bess and I followed her.

  I’d parked among the other vehicles—trucks, SUVs, and one Land Rover. A cheerful fire sent warm light and dancing shadows over a group of people sitting in camp chairs.

  A man got up and walked toward us. Bess nudged George, whispering something. Even without hearing her words, I could guess her reaction to the tall, well-built form striding toward us. We went over to meet him.