The Baby-Sitter Burglaries Read online

“David, calm down,” Juanita said quietly.

  “Why should I be calm?” he asked. “Your so-called friend is trying to put me in jail!”

  Juanita whispered something to David and pulled him out front, with Carlos following them. David threw Nancy an angry look over his shoulder. “You’d better not pin those burglaries on me,” he said.

  “Was that a threat?” George asked softly.

  “I don’t know,” Nancy said. “But I’d love to search David’s truck.”

  “Can it wait?” Bess asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “Want to come over to my house?” Nancy asked. “Hannah’s baking a ham for Sunday dinner.”

  “Fabulous!” George said.

  • • •

  A short while later, they were seated around the table. Nancy’s father, Carson Drew, carved the ham, and the platter of slices made the rounds, followed by baked sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

  Hannah, the Drews’ housekeeper, spooned some gravy over her ham, and asked, “How are things going with your case, Nancy?”

  Mr. Drew speared a slice of ham with his fork. “What did you find out at the block watch meeting?” he asked.

  Nancy told her father and Hannah what had happened at the meeting. “We also found out,” she said, “that the burglars got into the houses through windows on the second floor, which weren’t wired into the security system.”

  Bess waved her fork, and said, “I asked Mrs. Mowrer why her upstairs windows weren’t wired. She said it costs a lot to wire just the downstairs and the basement. And if you did wire the upstairs windows, they couldn’t be opened at night.”

  “Even though the windows weren’t wired,” George added, “there are motion detectors on the stairways, which are supposed to set off the alarm. The weird thing is, the thieves did go downstairs and take things, but the alarms didn’t go off.”

  “Don’t forget,” Bess said, “when the police arrived, the systems weren’t even on. So Secure Monitoring said the owners forgot to activate them in the first place. But all the homeowners insisted they didn’t forget. Which means that the intruder must have known how to shut down the system. Or, if he somehow learned the security code—”

  “Maybe from feeding a neighbor’s cat?” George put in.

  “Oh, right!” Bess said. “Mrs. Larsen gave Mr. Gardner her code so he could feed her cat.”

  “That’s it!” Nancy said. She pushed her plate away and leaned forward. “The burglar could break in upstairs through the unwired window, and if he knew the security code, he could punch in the code on the upstairs control panel. That would shut off the motion detectors, and then he could move freely through the house.”

  “Are you saying Mr. Gardner is a suspect?” Mr. Drew asked. Hannah stood up and began to clear the table.

  Nancy nodded. “So is a woman named Alice Mendenhall. She’s Juanita’s neighbor, and we just saw her loading a bunch of TVs and VCRs into her trunk—that makes her a suspect, too.” Nancy handed Hannah her plate.

  “But why did the thief ignore expensive items, yet always ransack the kids’ rooms? And why take toys from the backyard?” George asked. She picked up her plate and Bess’s and took them into the kitchen. Bess stood up and finished clearing the table.

  Mr. Drew arched an eyebrow. “Toys? That is strange,” he remarked. “You told me the police consider David Andrews a suspect. Couldn’t he shut down the systems without the codes, since he installed them?”

  “Probably,” Nancy agreed, “I wish I knew more about security systems.”

  Mr. Drew looked thoughtful. Hannah came back with a pot of coffee and pie plates. Bess was right behind her with a homemade apple pie, Mr. Drew’s favorite dessert.

  After the coffee was poured and pieces of pie passed around, Mr. Drew said, “You know, a friend of mine, Joel Gordon, lives in River Estates. He has a Secure Monitoring system. Maybe I could arrange for you to have a good look at it.”

  “That would be a big help,” Nancy said.

  After dinner, Nancy’s father called Mr. Gordon, who suggested they come over right away, since he was catching a plane that evening to go on a business trip.

  “Let’s go,” Nancy said. The three girls dashed out of the house.

  It wasn’t long before Mr. Gordon was standing with Nancy, George, and Bess at his security control panel. “I’m programming a temporary code into the keypad,” he told them. “This way I don’t have to tell you my real code.” That’s what Mrs. Larsen should have done with Mr. Gardner, Nancy thought.

  Mr. Gordon showed Nancy how to test the system to see whether it was working. “A three-tone signal will beep if the windows are opened or if the motion detectors sense movements,” he told her. “But this is only a test. If it were for real, the alarm would go off, and the alarm code would appear on Secure Monitoring’s computers. Then Secure would call the police.”

  Nancy looked at the control panel. “What would happen if someone cut the wires or tried to disable the system at the control panel? Would the alarm let Secure know?”

  Mr. Gordon nodded and looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, but time’s running short. Take a closer look while I go next door. My neighbor said he’d watch my house while I was gone, and I have to give him the key.” Mr. Gordon left the house.

  Nancy put the alarm on test mode. Together with Bess and George, she walked through the house, located the motion detectors, then listened to the tones as they moved around the rooms.

  They also discovered that even when George crawled along the floor, the tones would sound. Nancy went back to the upstairs control panel and turned on the system, but not the motion detectors, so they could move around freely. Then they went down to the basement.

  Nancy’s eyes followed the wires around and above the windows and throughout the basement. Mr. Gordon’s system looked just like the Larsens’. Then she stopped short. A rolled-up paper was taped to one of the wires near a window. She stood on tiptoe but couldn’t reach it.

  George dragged over a box and stood on it. “I can reach it, Nancy,” she said. But just as George’s hand touched the paper, she leaned over too far and her foot slipped off the box.

  George grabbed the bar on the window for balance. A deafening scream filled the basement as sirens blared inside and outside the house. George had set off the alarm.

  8

  Date with a Doberman

  Bess clapped her hands over her ears. “George, what did you do?” she yelled.

  George shook her head helplessly and jumped off the box. The sirens continued to blare.

  Nancy raced up the basement staircase, with George and Bess after her. At the control panel, Nancy frantically tried to remember the temporary code.

  “It was six, eight, five, uh . . . two!” George yelled.

  “No it wasn’t!” Bess shouted, as the sirens continued to blare. “It was six, five, eight . . .”

  Nancy fumbled in her pocket with shaking hands. She found the slip of paper where she’d written down the code. “Six, five, two, eight . . . I’ve got it!” she cried, and punched in the numbers.

  The alarm stopped and a delightful silence fell over the house. “Ohhh . . .” Bess moaned, “my ears are still ringing.”

  Mr. Gordon rushed through the open door. “What’s going on here?” he cried.

  Nancy stared at the control panel. Then she heard another siren wailing. Tires screeched on pavement. Car doors slammed.

  The front door burst open, and Officer Brody and another policeman ran in, guns drawn.

  Bess gasped and put up her hands.

  Officer Brody stopped short. “We were just down the block when we heard the alarm. We were hoping we’d catch the crooks in the act,” he said. “What are you doing here, Nancy?”

  “Mr. Gordon was kind enough—” Nancy began.

  George winced. “I’m sorry,” she said to Mr. Gordon. “I accidentally set off your alarm.”

  Mr. Gordon sighed in relief. “I can vouch for these ladies,”
he told Officer Brody. “I was showing them my security system. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a plane to catch.”

  • • •

  The next morning Nancy brought her notes up to date. As she wrote about the events of the previous evening, she realized that she’d completely forgotten the rolled-up paper on Mr. Gordon’s security wires. She hadn’t seen papers like that on the wires at the other houses. She went to the phone and called Secure Monitoring Company. A salesman answered.

  “Hello,” Nancy said cheerfully. “I wondered if you could give me some information on your systems.”

  “How big is your house?” the salesman asked.

  “I’m not in the market for a system,” Nancy said. “I want to know about a paper I saw rolled up and taped to the wires of my friend’s alarm system. Can you tell me if the paper was put there by Secure, and what could be on it?”

  The man’s voice at the other end of the line was guarded. “I can’t give out information like that,” he said.

  “Well, maybe you could answer another question,” Nancy said. “Do you know why one of your installers—his name is David Andrews—was fired?”

  “I’m sorry, but I cannot give out information like that,” he repeated, and hung up.

  Nancy made a face, then replaced the receiver. That was a wasted phone call. Why wouldn’t the man discuss the rolled-up paper with her? If only she’d remembered to check it the night before, but there’d been too much confusion and not enough time.

  The phone rang and broke her train of thought. It was Bess, who told her about an arts and crafts exhibit at Sycamore Park.

  “It sounds like fun,” Nancy said.

  “Great,” Bess said. “George and I have a lot to tell you, and we need to stop at Juanita’s, too. Can you pick us up at my house?”

  Ten minutes later Nancy picked up Bess and George. They scrambled into the car.

  “Oh, Nancy, do we have news!” George said when Nancy drove off. “Bess and I checked out Reese Gardner’s criminal record at the library this morning.”

  “Is it true that he has one?” Nancy asked.

  “Does he!” she said. “According to the newspaper articles I read, Mr. Gardner was convicted five years ago of embezzling from the investment firm where he worked.”

  Bess nodded rapidly. “Then I found out that he got out of prison early for good behavior.”

  Nancy bit her lip, thinking hard. “It seems doubtful that an embezzler would start burgling houses.” She pulled the car over to the curb and parked. “We’re here,” she said, and they piled out.

  Bess grabbed Nancy’s arm. “Oh, look!” she cried. “A hot dog vendor! I’m starved.” She dashed over to the hot dog cart. When Nancy and George reached her side, a young man was smearing mustard on a hot dog for Bess.

  “Aren’t you Max Karn?” Nancy asked, looking closely at the vendor’s face. “Diego’s assistant?”

  Max grinned and nodded, pointing at his white hat. “I work a lot of odd jobs,” he said. “So you could say I wear a lot of different hats.”

  “Diego doesn’t need you every day?” Nancy asked.

  “Most of our magic shows are at birthday parties, and they tend to take place on weekends,” Max replied. He waved at his cart. “How about a footlong with the works?”

  “Try one, they’re wonderful,” Bess said with her mouth full. “I need a soda.”

  Nancy and George bought hot dogs and sodas and said goodbye to Max. They walked around the exhibit for a while. George and Bess finished their hot dogs and sodas, but Nancy wasn’t that hungry. She drank her soda but didn’t finish her hot dog. “I’ll eat it later,” she said. When they got back to the Mustang, Nancy handed George the hot dog to hold for her.

  Nancy drove to Juanita’s house and parked. As she climbed out of the car, she heard Buster growling in the yard next door. Nancy went up to the fence and peered over. Buster was growling and chewing on a plastic toy.

  “What’s that he’s chewing on?” George asked.

  “It looks like a toy fire truck. The kids must have thrown it over the fence,” Nancy said, sighing. “Maybe we’d better take it away from him.”

  “What?” Bess gasped, staring at Nancy. “Have you lost your mind? Buster’ll eat us for lunch! He could—”

  “Now, Bess,” Nancy said. “We have to get that toy away from him, or Mrs. Mendenhall will make more trouble for Juanita. George, give Bess my hot dog, and I’ll zip over there and get the toy. Okay?”

  “I don’t know . . .” Bess said, her voice trailing off uncertainly.

  “I’ll back you up,” George said, handing Bess the hot dog.

  Buster raised his head. The hair along his neck rose. He dropped the truck and growled, keeping his eyes on them.

  “Here, Buster,” Bess cooed. “Look at the nice hot dog.” Buster looked up and sniffed.

  “That’s right—keep his attention,” Nancy whispered. She looked at the fence. It was about four feet tall. A few large rocks and bushes near the foot of the fence might provide an easy way over it.

  Bess nervously waved the hot dog at Buster while Nancy looked for a place to climb over the fence. Buster stopped growling and trotted over to Bess, sniffing.

  Nancy climbed onto a rock, then vaulted over the fence. She scooped up the fire truck and threw it over the fence into Juanita’s yard. “Yuck,” she said, and wiped her fingers on her jeans.

  “Hurry, Nancy,” Bess whispered, dangling the hot dog above Buster’s head and trying to break a piece from it. Buster leaped at her hand. She squealed and dropped a piece of the hot dog, which he gobbled. “This was a terrible idea—I could lose a finger. Hurry!”

  Nancy knew she had to get out of the yard fast, but she’d seen something small and red in the doorway of the doghouse and headed for it. Another plastic truck. Holding it in her hand, she got down on her knees and peered into the doghouse. A pile of toys was stashed in a corner.

  Oh no, she thought. She hated the idea of crawling into the doghouse.

  Nancy took a deep breath, then crawled to the back of the doghouse. She scooped up the toys and backed out.

  Bess screamed. “Nancy—I ran out of hot dog!”

  “He sees you, Nancy! Run!” George yelled.

  Nancy ran partway to the fence, threw the toys over into Juanita’s yard, and headed toward a garden shed, which was closer. Buster’s growl was right behind her. She picked up speed.

  Her foot hit the handle of a shovel, and she tripped and fell through the doorway of the shed. Bess was still screaming. Nancy felt Buster’s paws slam against her back, pinning her down.

  She turned over and saw Buster’s teeth in her face, saliva dripping from his jaws.

  He growled and lunged for her throat.

  9

  Robbed!

  “Nancy!” George yelled. She backed up a bit, then ran forward and jumped over the fence. She was holding a metal trash can lid. She raced to the shed, ready to do battle with Buster.

  But Buster had stopped growling and was licking Nancy’s face. Buster whined softly, and wagged his tail. Nancy sucked in her breath, wondering if she could breathe with Buster’s weight on her.

  Nancy let out her breath, then turned her head, trying to escape his slobbering jaws. Buster kept licking her face as if she were a puppy. Out of the corner of her eye, Nancy saw Bess collapse, shaking, against the fence. George stood outside the shed, staring, her trash can shield still in her hand. “Nancy?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  Mrs. Mendenhall stormed out the back door in her pajamas. “Just what do you girls think you’re doing?” she yelled. “Who said you could play with my dog? Buster’s a watchdog—not a playmate! Release him immediately!”

  “Uh . . . I’d love to, but . . .” Nancy slipped one hand out from under Buster to wipe her wet face. “He doesn’t seem to want to move,” she said.

  Mrs. Mendenhall marched over to Buster and yanked on his collar. “Off, Buster!” she demanded.

  B
uster jumped off Nancy and ran to Mrs. Mendenhall. Nancy staggered to her feet, and her elbow hit something hanging on the wall near the door.

  A pair of heavy-duty wire cutters was hanging from a hook. “Look,” Nancy said.

  George nodded. “They look strong enough to cut through the Kileys’ chain-link fence,” she said.

  George and Nancy walked through the gate, which Mrs. Mendenhall held open for them, still scolding them for playing with Buster.

  Bess put her hand on Nancy’s shoulder. “I thought Buster was going to eat you!”

  Nancy rubbed her face with her hands, then sniffed. “Ugh. I smell like Buster,” she said. “But we found out”—she lowered her voice—“that Mrs. Mendenhall owns a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters. She could have cut the Kileys’ fence.”

  Nancy, George, and Bess walked over to Juanita’s house. “What was Mrs. Mendenhall yelling about?” Juanita asked when she let them in. George told her about Buster and showed her the toys.

  Juanita picked up a slimy car. “Yuck . . . Well, I’m happy to say that none of these is mine.”

  “Maybe they belong to the kids who live on the other side of Mrs. Mendenhall,” George said.

  Juanita shook her head. “No kids live there.”

  “That’s strange,” Nancy said. “I’ve got to wash my hands and face. Is it okay if I use the kitchen sink?”

  Juanita handed her a bar of soap and a towel. “Be my guest.”

  While Nancy washed up, Juanita and Bess talked quietly. Then Juanita said, “Nancy, George, I hate to ask . . . but would you help me with one more baby-sitting job?”

  “You’ll love it,” Bess said.

  Nancy and George looked at each other. “We should have known,” George said. “Okay, where is it?”

  “At the skating rink. Four o’clock this afternoon,” Juanita said. “I promised to take the play group roller-skating.”

  “And I told Juanita that she had to ask you herself. I didn’t want to spring it on you,” Bess said.

  Nancy smiled at Juanita. “We’ll be there.” She’d noticed an open psychology book on the table. “We’d better go and let you study,” she said.