Hidden Meanings Read online

  Nancy tried to imagine the scene in the man’s room—two people bent down near the sliding doors of the closet, probably close together. It would have been easy for the man to slip the key off Rosita’s key clip.

  Nancy asked Rosita to show her which room the man had been in. She knew that it might not have been his real room—maybe he had asked Rosita to open any room, as a ruse to steal her passkey. But Nancy wanted to explore every possible lead.

  Rosita and Nancy left the supply closet and wandered down the hall. Reaching the end, Rosita became flustered. “Maybe it was here,” she said, stopping at room 724. Nancy knocked. No answer. “No, I think it was this one,” Rosita continued, changing her mind. She went to room 726. “But . . . they all look the same,” she said with a helpless shrug.

  Disappointed, Nancy pulled a small notebook out of her purse. “Here’s my name and room number,” she said, writing them down and tearing out the page for Rosita. “If you see that man again, please call.”

  “I will,” Rosita promised. “But please, miss, don’t tell Mr. Wasilick I have lost my key!”

  “I think you’d better report it,” Nancy said. “You’ll need a new key to get into the rooms to do your work. Mr. Wasilick can’t blame you if the key was stolen from you. But I promise I won’t tell anyone that you opened a room for a guest.”

  Rosita looked at Nancy gratefully. “Thank you!”

  Nancy went back to her room and phoned Ms. Peabody for the names of the guests at the far end of the hall. None of the names were familiar, though she jotted them all down for future reference. Then she went downstairs and grabbed lunch at the mezzanine-level café. She knew Bess was still waiting tables, and George was back at the pool.

  Next, after signing her room check, Nancy went to find Ned. She knew that Gina and Sally had workshops all afternoon. In a hallway outside the meeting rooms, Nancy finally spotted him, tipped back in a chair, reading a magazine. Seeing Nancy, he brought the chair down with a thump. “Hey, Drew, what’s up?” he called to her happily.

  Nancy mustered a smile, hoping she wouldn’t look too uptight at seeing him. She sure felt uptight. “Hey, Ned. How’s the bodyguard business?” she replied.

  “Bor-ring,” Ned complained.

  “Look, Ned, I need to search Gina’s room for clues,” Nancy said. “Is that okay with you?”

  “Sure,” Ned replied. He pulled out two keycards from his pocket. “One’s for my room, one is Gina’s—I can’t remember which is which. Take them both. Bring them back when you’re done—I’ll be here till four.”

  “Thanks,” Nancy said, taking the cards. “See you then.” With a little wave, she turned to walk away.

  “Hey, Drew!” Ned called. Nancy turned. He tapped a finger on his lips. Slipping back, she bent over for a kiss. He reached up, caught her shoulders, and held her for a few extra seconds.

  Nancy broke away. “I miss you,” she murmured.

  Ned nodded. “I miss you. Let’s not let Gina catch us, huh?”

  Nancy’s face darkened. “Why not?” she asked.

  Ned shrugged. “I thought we weren’t supposed to let on we knew each other,” he said casually.

  “Oh, right,” Nancy said. But as she left, she felt uneasy. Ned had seemed his old self again—until the remark about Gina. They both knew how Gina would have reacted if she’d seen them kissing.

  Nancy went upstairs and started her search of Gina’s room. She dusted for fingerprints on all doorknobs and drawer handles, but they were too smudged to read. She pulled a couple of snags of clothing fiber from a splintered edge of the desk. A quick check in the closet showed they were threads from Gina’s clothes.

  She sifted through the wastebaskets, looking for anything the thief might have discarded. But all she found was makeup-smeared cotton balls, an empty film container, and wrappers from the hotel chocolates left on guests’ pillows each night.

  Then, on a memo pad on the desk, Nancy spied dents in the paper, left by writing on the previous top sheet. Shading over it with pencil, she outlined the message:

  Ned—Sweetest dreams. I feel so much safer knowing you’re on the other side of my wall. If I get lonely during the night, can I call you?—G

  Nancy tore off the paper and crumpled it up. So that’s what is going on! she fumed.

  Storming out of the room, Nancy went back downstairs. She knew Ned was waiting for his keycards, but she couldn’t face him right now. Instead she found Bess in the Muskoka Lobby, setting up a snack table. Nancy asked her to return the keycards to Ned. “I have to check in with George,” she added, not wanting to go into the real reason, and headed for the pool, which was on the roof of the hotel’s three-story annex.

  Wearing a red tank suit, George was walking along the pool with a screen on a long pole, skimming leaves from the water. “Nancy, put on your suit and go for a swim,” George urged her. “You could use some relaxation. You look tense.”

  “And for good reason.” Nancy groaned as she flopped down on a poolside chair. George sat beside her, and Nancy told her about the note she’d found in Gina’s room.

  George made a face. “You don’t think Ned would fall for a gooey routine like that, do you?” she said. “Besides, you don’t know that he’s done anything to encourage her.”

  “She doesn’t need encouraging,” Nancy said, scowling. “And he obviously hasn’t told her he’s already involved. He’s just eating up the attention.”

  “Of course he is. He’s only human,” George reminded her. “Look, Nan, I know this is hard for you. But you just have to trust the guy.”

  “I know, I know,” Nancy said. “But seeing this little flirtation go on right under my nose is really frustrating.”

  “So what’s going on with the case?” George asked. Nancy knew she was trying to get Nancy’s mind off Ned, and it worked. By the time Nancy had recounted the day’s developments, she felt calmer.

  “Well, there’s not much going on here,” George said. “Not many people swim in the middle of the day.” Scanning the pool, Nancy saw two ten-year-old boys playing tag in the shallow end, and one man swimming laps.

  “Jane Sellery told me she always takes an after-dinner swim,” Nancy noted. “Watch for her this evening. She’s tall, with red hair.”

  “I will,” George commented.

  The two girls fell silent, each wrapped up in her own thoughts. “I like the way they’ve planted those trees and shrubs around the sides of the terrace,” Nancy finally said.

  “That plant’s a rhododendron—we have one like it in our backyard,” George commented. “It’s really pretty when the flowers bloom.”

  Nancy nodded, looking at the nearby bank of greenery. “And this one next to it is hemlock,” she commented, fingering a small evergreen.

  “Hemlock—like the poison?” George asked.

  “No,” Nancy said, “poison hemlock is an herb, with fine leaves. It looks almost like parsley. But speaking of poisons . . .” Nancy stood up to examine a narrow-leafed evergreen bush with white blossoms. “This is oleander. This is deadly.”

  “How do you detectives end up knowing so many grisly facts?” George declared with a shudder.

  “I sat in once on a med school class on accidental poisoning,” Nancy explained.

  Just then out of the corner of her eye she saw the man who’d been swimming. He was sitting at a nearby table, drying his hair and beard with a towel. Nancy recognized him as the man who’d met Evan Sharpless on the mezzanine the day before.

  Suddenly the man saw Nancy watching him. Scooping up his clothes, he scurried into the men’s locker room.

  “That guy sure is acting strangely,” Nancy said. “I saw him yesterday with Evan Sharpless.”

  “Maybe he’s a reporter, too,” George suggested. “Maybe he’s leading a class. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I will, if he comes back out,” Nancy said.

  “Why wait?” George asked. “Hang on, Nan, I’ll try to find him.” Before Nancy could p
rotest, George marched boldly to the door of the men’s locker room and called out for the attendant.

  Impressed with George’s resolve, Nancy sat waiting anxiously. She unconsciously snapped a twig from the oleander bush, watching the milky white sap ooze out. Then, remembering how poisonous the plant was, she tossed the twig into a litter basket.

  Finally George returned. “Either he ran out the doorway leading to the hotel, or he’s hiding somewhere inside,” she said. “The attendant barely saw him run past.”

  Nancy laughed. “Well, thanks for trying. Anyway, what’s next on your schedule?”

  “I’m supposed to bus tables at a buffet dinner tonight,” George said. “They need extra help. And I’m meeting Bess for dinner in the employee cafeteria. Why don’t you come along and see how the other half lives?”

  Agreeing, Nancy went with George back up to their room to change and relax for an hour or so. Then George led Nancy into the seventh-floor service corridor. “This is the route we workers have to take,” George announced with a grin. Nancy recognized the area as the corridor Rosita had shown her. The two girls took the big, clunky service elevator down to the subbasement.

  A hallway lined with metal lockers led from the elevator. Sidestepping a rolling hamper filled with dirty green coveralls, Nancy and George entered the cafeteria, a cement-floored room with harsh lighting. Paul Lampedusa waved to George from a table, and George waved back eagerly.

  George and Nancy filled their plates and joined Paul. Bess soon arrived. As they all ate and chatted, Nancy decided Paul was funny, smart, and charming. She gathered that he was working here part-time to help pay his college tuition.

  After dinner Paul gave the girls a tour of the hotel’s immense kitchen, also in the subbasement. Gleaming white tile stretched for yards, along huge steel cooking ranges, counters, and banks of ovens. The walk-in refrigerators were as big as rooms. “The hotel has three restaurants and four banquet rooms,” Paul explained. “On a good night, they could serve two thousand meals out of here.”

  Suddenly a man in a white coat leaned through a door. “Buffet ready—servers upstairs!” he barked.

  Excusing themselves, Paul, George, and Bess jogged over to a small service elevator. Nancy noticed trolleys loaded with platters of food already on the elevator. The waiters stepped on and headed upstairs.

  Nancy turned back again to marvel at the kitchen. A steel counter beside her was piled high with warming plates, ready to go up to the buffet. She noticed rice pilaf and a pile of shish kebabs—cubes of meat and vegetables cooked on long sticks.

  Then Nancy saw a pile of slim peeled twigs beside a platter with more chunks of meat. Frowning, she picked one up and broke it open. A milky white sap came out.

  Nancy rushed to find the nearest chef, a woman in a mushroom-shaped white hat. “Excuse me—where are those sticks from?” Nancy asked urgently.

  “I don’t know,” the chef replied. “The shish kebabs are for the high-school kids. The menu theme was Wild West, but an hour ago the conference director sent us a note to make it Middle Eastern, too. He sent these wooden skewers down, saying they’d be more authentic.”

  “But you can’t serve these shish kebabs,” Nancy announced.

  “Why not?” the chef asked, frowning.

  “Those skewers are made from the oleander bush,” Nancy said. “They’re deadly poisonous!”

  Chapter

  Six

  THE CHEF’S FACE FROZE in horror. “But we already sent up two platters of those shish kebabs,” she said with a gasp. “They’re upstairs now—being eaten!”

  There wasn’t a second to waste. Nancy raced to the service elevator and pounded the button with her fist. “Call upstairs and get someone to take those shish kebabs away!” she called back to the chef. “And then destroy the rest of those twigs—but not by burning them. Even the smoke is poisonous!”

  Just then the elevator doors opened. Nancy strode in and pushed the button for the second floor, where she knew the banquet room was located. The elevator climbed upward at what seemed like a snail’s pace. Nancy rapped on the wall in frustration.

  Finally the doors opened onto a small pantry. Nancy saw no shish kebabs on the counters. A phone on the wall was ringing—the chef must be trying to call upstairs, Nancy guessed. That meant that no one had yet been told about the deadly skewers. She sprang to the double doors leading to the banquet room and flung them open.

  A throng of students milled around the room, everybody talking at once. Small round tables had been set up around the outer walls; a long buffet table took up the center of the room. A line of hungry students was moving up to the buffet table, and Nancy saw that about ten kids had already served themselves. Some held their plates and ate standing up. Others were sitting at the small tables.

  Nancy shoved through the crowd to the buffet and spotted a tray of shish kebabs at the end of the table. She raced over.

  Seizing the hot platter in her hands, Nancy yanked it off the table. She spotted George standing nearby holding a linen cloth, and she thrust the dish into George’s hands. “Take these to the pantry and destroy them,” Nancy said quickly. Without asking why, George instantly obeyed.

  Grabbing a cloth napkin, Nancy ran to the other end of the buffet table, which had the same food laid out. She snatched the other shish kebab platter just as a student was reaching for a skewer. “Try the chicken wings instead,” Nancy advised with a smile. She scurried to the pantry with the deadly dish.

  “What’s wrong with these?” George asked as Nancy came through the double doors.

  “If we hadn’t been talking about oleander this afternoon, I might not have noticed,” Nancy said. She plunked the hot platter down on the counter. “But these skewers are oleander twigs. The poison would seep through the bark and taint the food. I just hope no one’s eaten any yet!”

  Hurrying back to the banquet room, Nancy hunted frantically for Gary Ruxton. She spied him near the buffet line, chatting with Evan Sharpless. As she rushed up, the teacher smiled at her. “Nancy Drew!” he said. “I was just telling Mr. Sharpless about our mystery—”

  “Mr. Ruxton,” Nancy interrupted, a bit annoyed that he was blowing her cover, “could you make an emergency announcement?”

  “Of course,” Mr. Ruxton said. As he and Nancy threaded their way through the crowd to a podium, she explained the situation.

  A moment later Mr. Ruxton spoke into the microphone. “Attention, students,” he began. The room fell silent. “Anyone who took a shish kebab from the buffet, please do not eat it.” A ripple of excitement ran through the crowd. “Anyone who has already eaten some should come see me immedia—”

  At that very moment, a boy across the room doubled over. Nancy saw Jane Sellery standing beside him. As the boy began to collapse, Jane screamed.

  Nancy rushed to the boy’s side, but Evan Sharpless was already there. Supporting the boy by the arm, the reporter twisted around, clearly looking for help. Nancy saw Bess standing behind him, her mouth gaping open.

  “Waitress, get a doctor!” Mr. Sharpless ordered Bess. “There’s a cardiologist staying here—he spoke to me in the lobby earlier. He’s in room 555, I remember. Call him.” Nodding, Bess ran off to a phone.

  Nancy leaned over to speak to Mr. Sharpless. “The poison was oleander,” she told him. “It has effects similar to digitalis poisoning.”

  The newscaster turned to take in Nancy with a shrewd, appraising glance. “Thanks—that’ll help,” he said. “When I was in the service in Vietnam, I saw a few cases of accidental poisoning. I know these first few minutes are critical.”

  The sick boy raised his head weakly, gasping for air. Mr. Sharpless helped him to his feet. Half carrying the boy, the reporter moved him out of the banquet room. As Nancy followed, she spotted Gina near the door, surrounded by several guys from the workshop. Sally stood awkwardly behind her, anxiously twisting her brown curls.

  Ned, leaning against the wall outside the banquet room door, looked u
p as Mr. Sharpless helped the sick boy to a sofa in a nearby lounge area.

  Soon the doctor arrived, out of breath from having hurried to the scene. He frowned as he felt the boy’s pulse.

  “Most likely a case of oleander poisoning,” Mr. Sharpless told him. “Apparently, it’s like digitalis poisoning.”

  The doctor nodded. Reaching into his medical case, he pulled out a vial of medicine and started to fill a hypodermic needle. “His heart’s beating a mile a minute,” he said. “Quinidine should help.”

  A few moments later, a crew of paramedics arrived, in response to Bess’s call. Nancy stepped away to let them through.

  Nancy decided the situation was under control and made her way back to the banquet room. Passing Ned again, Nancy paused and filled him in on what had happened to the boy. Ned asked when Nancy had finished, “Gina’s okay?”

  Nancy fought down a jealous reflex. “Of course—why wouldn’t she be?” she snapped.

  Ned looked surprised. “Well, I just assumed that whoever did this was trying to get at her. After all the other stuff—”

  “That is possible,” Nancy admitted. “But I don’t want to leap to conclusions. I’ll let you know what I find out.” And she hurried back into the banquet room.

  The room was still buzzing with excited conversation. Gary Ruxton, hovering anxiously near the door, stopped her. “How is he?” he asked.

  “He looks better,” Nancy said guardedly.

  “What an awful accident,” Mr. Ruxton moaned.

  “Or—maybe it wasn’t an accident,” Nancy said. Looking over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening, she leaned toward Mr. Ruxton. “The chef told me you ordered those shish kebabs.”

  Ruxton looked disturbed. “I did call the banquet director, and I asked to add some Middle Eastern food for tonight,” he admitted. “At lunch Evan Sharpless was telling some students about covering the Middle East. On the spur of the moment, he offered to speak about the Middle East to the whole workshop tonight—at no charge. His speaking fees are enormous, so it seemed like a real treat.”