The Ghost of Grey Fox Inn Read online

  “How am I going to tell my parents?” Parker was saying. “How am I going to tell Charlotte?”

  It suddenly became clear that my investigation needed to get serious—and fast. I needed to find out who was behind all this and get those rings back ASAP, or else there might not be a wedding tomorrow. “Stay here—and for now, keep this news under your hat. We don’t want the guests and bridal party to panic any more than they already have. Try to get some rest. In the meantime, there’s something I need to figure out, once and for all.”

  I left Parker with his thoughts and pulled Bess and George out of the room with me. “After you guys change, come to my room,” I said. “I hope you’re not too tired, because we have work to do.”

  “Whatever it takes to help Parker and Charlotte,” Bess replied.

  George nodded. “I just don’t understand how people are getting in and out of locked rooms!” she said as we climbed the stairs. “First the ‘ghost’ haunting people in the night, and now this! How are they doing it?”

  “That’s exactly what I want to find out,” I said. “And since our culprit was able to get into my locked room, we should be able to figure out how they did it from there.”

  Once we got upstairs and changed out of our fancy dinner clothes, we got down to business. First we checked the obvious things—any trick locks on the windows or doors that might allow someone entry without a key. Nothing. I checked for a hidden entrance in the clothes closet or the bathroom, but that was a dead end too.

  After ten minutes of searching, George decided to take a break. “Ugh!” she exclaimed, letting her head fall back against the wooden paneled wall with a thump. “Another dead end!”

  I froze in place. “George,” I said slowly. “Do that again.”

  George looked at me curiously. “Do what again?”

  “Thump your head against the wall.”

  She blinked. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Nope, totally serious.”

  George shrugged and thumped her head against the wall. It was just as I’d thought.

  “What is it, Nancy?” Bess asked.

  I walked over to another part of the wall in the bedroom and rapped on it with my fist. “Don’t you hear the difference?”

  Bess and George stared at me blankly. I walked over to where George was standing and rapped on the wall behind her, and then immediately again on another panel a couple feet away.

  Bess’s eyes widened as she recognized the subtle difference in tone. “It’s . . . hollow!”

  I grinned. “Bingo. I think we’ve found our hidden entrance. Now, all we have to do is figure out how to open it.”

  I peered closely at the wooden paneling, tracing around its edges with my fingertips, searching for some kind of release button. Sure enough, I found a circular knot in the wood on the right-hand side that wasn’t flush with the rest of the wall. I pushed against it with my thumb, and it sank into the wall with a muted click. I took a step back as the whole panel swung inward, revealing a dark passage within.

  “The plot thickens . . . ,” George muttered.

  “Do you have a flashlight?” I asked.

  George whipped her smartphone out of her pocket and tapped its screen twice. A blinding beam of light shot out of the back and illuminated the first few dusty feet of the secret passageway. A mouse caught in the beam skittered across the wooden floor and out of sight.

  “Eek!” Bess shrieked.

  “The answers are in there, I just know it,” I said. “Are you guys coming?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it!” George answered.

  Bess sighed and nodded in agreement. “Maybe that’s the only mouse in there,” she said hopefully.

  I doubted it, but that was what made Bess so great. I could always count on my friends to follow me into adventure—even if it was infested with mice!

  With George’s glowing smartphone in hand, I took the lead, with Bess following and George bringing up the rear. We walked silently, trying to avoid having the bare wooden planks squeak beneath our feet. About fifteen feet ahead of us, I saw a tiny circle of light shining on the left wall of the passage. I crept up to the little hole in the wall and set my eye against it. It gave me a full view of a very familiar room—the bridal suite! Charlotte herself was curled up in bed, reading a book by her bedside lamp. Then I noticed a panel similar to the one in my room that I presumed opened into Charlotte’s room. “This is definitely how our ghost got in and out of the rooms unnoticed!” I whispered to the girls.

  George sighed. “Too bad. ‘Ghostly haunting’ is so much more fun than ‘peeping Tom.’ ”

  We continued down the dark hallway. The passage seemed to follow a circuitous path through the inn, providing entrance into quite a few of the guest rooms, including Piper and Morgan’s room, Alicia’s room, and others who had been victims of the inn’s “ghost” the night before. At the end of the passage, a final peephole revealed a glimpse of Tucker Matthews sitting in an armchair with a drink in his hand. He was leaning back, a smartphone pressed to his ear.

  “You should have seen the look on his face,” Tucker was saying, the side of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “His fiancée pulls a knife out of this pretty little box, and his whole ‘Good evening, I’m Parker Hill’ poise goes right out the window. I swear he looked like someone just ran over his dog.” He chuckled, listening to the person on the other end. “I know, right? Parker thinks he’s an angel without wings, but it looks like not everybody in this town agrees.” Another pause. “Who sent the knife? Well, I—”

  At that very moment, a scream broke the silence. I whirled to see Bess, her hands clamped over her mouth, trembling all over, staring with horror at a little gray mouse clinging to the front of her shirt.

  “What was that?” Tucker exclaimed, dropping the phone to his side and glancing around his room. The three of us froze, afraid to move or even breathe. After what seemed like an eternity, Tucker relaxed back into his chair and resumed his conversation. “Huh? Oh, I just thought I heard a weird noise coming from the walls. This is such an old place, it was probably just a mouse or something.”

  Little did Tucker know how right he was!

  Meanwhile, the mouse had made it up to Bess’s shoulder, where it was eagerly sniffing at the beads of her necklace. “Get it off!” she whispered fiercely.

  George looked back and forth between us, making a who, me? gesture. Bess and I both nodded vigorously. George rolled her eyes and reached out to lift the tiny mouse by its tail off Bess’s shoulder and onto one of the wooden beams that lined the walls of the passage. “Happy trails,” she whispered, as the mouse scampered away. She turned back to us. “Both of you are utterly hopeless,” she muttered.

  “Sorry!” Bess whispered.

  “It’s okay,” I said, though I was sorely disappointed that Tucker had changed the subject and wasn’t saying any more about who had planted the knife at the rehearsal dinner. But even without that information, Tucker was quickly becoming my prime suspect. I said as much to Bess and George once we were out of earshot of his room.

  “He seemed a little too happy about all of Parker and Charlotte’s misfortunes over the past couple of days,” George murmured with a nod. “And not only that, it sounds like he has a theory about who’s behind it! And who better to know than if he did it all himself?”

  “I don’t know, though,” Bess whispered. “There’s something about the pranks that just doesn’t seem like Tucker’s style. Changing the flower color? A knife in a fancy, gift-wrapped box? It all feels so . . . subtle. And Tucker doesn’t strike me as the subtle type.”

  I had to agree. “You’re right, it doesn’t quite fit—but he’s our best guess right now, and you can’t ignore what we just overheard. Maybe he did those types of pranks just to throw people off his scent. Let’s check out the rest of this passage before we head back to my room.”

  What we found at the end of the hallway was a hole in the floor with a ladder leading down to the first f
loor. The three of us descended the ladder as quietly as we could and found another peephole leading to Parker’s room. “There you have it,” I said, wiping a cluster of cobwebs from my hair. “Anyone with access to this passage could have gotten into Parker’s room and stolen the wedding rings.”

  “So that narrows it down to the people in the rooms who have entrances,” Bess mused. “But that still includes everyone who we already suspected—so not a lot of help.”

  “Better than nothing,” George said. “At least we know we’re on the right track.”

  The passage on the first floor was much smaller than the one on the second, so there wasn’t a lot to see. At the end of the hall, I inspected the panel where another entrance would normally have been—they usually appeared at regular intervals. But this panel didn’t have a peephole. I knocked on it lightly and found it hollow. “Where do you think this one leads to?” I wondered aloud. I took a couple of steps forward to inspect the edge of the panel and tripped over something at my feet.

  “You okay, Nancy?” Bess asked.

  “Yeah,” I murmured, regaining my footing, and shone the smartphone light down at the floor. What I saw was a crumpled-up grocery bag, and its contents had spilled out onto the floor when I stumbled over it. I caught a glimpse of blue fabric and quickly snatched it up. “Look!” I exclaimed.

  “What is it?” George said.

  “This is the uniform the so-called ghost was wearing when he snuck into my room!” I pulled the whole bundle out of the bag and saw that it was some kind of old military costume. “It looks Civil War–era,” I mused.

  “Sounds like someone’s trying to impersonate a ghost,” George said. “But why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I turned the bag upside down to make sure nothing else was inside, and a single scrap of paper fluttered out. I picked it up and scanned the writing. “But this might help us figure it out.”

  It was a tattered newspaper clipping, yellowed with age. There were pictures of cars that looked at least seventy-five years old, as well as an ad calling for women to try out a new girdle that would make their waists look thinner. But most of the page was taken up by an article with the headline SPOOKY HAUNTINGS AT THE GREY FOX INN! It read:

  Out-of-towners are once again hollering about the haunted happenings at the local Grey Fox Inn. Guests at the inn speak of a “uniformed gentleman” who makes visits to their rooms, opening doors, moving objects, and appearing to startled citizens in the wee hours of the night. Contrary to expectations, patronage of the inn has reached an all-time high, according to the owner, with the entire establishment fully booked through the end of the year. It seems like everyone in Charleston is looking to get a peek at the Ghost of Grey Fox Inn!

  I handed the article over to Bess and George and tapped my chin in thought. From the sound of it, back then the inn had been haunted by the same kind of “ghost” as we were dealing with right now! But what did this have to do with Charlotte’s wedding? Was the culprit hoping to use this tidbit of history to make their pranks seem like genuine ghost sightings? Were they hoping that Mrs. Hill’s superstitious nature would be upset by all the bad juju and she would call off the wedding? If so, the plan had almost worked. It was only after it had been made clear that the ceremony was still on that the wedding rings had been stolen. Obviously the culprit needed to go to greater lengths in order to shut the whole thing down—so that’s what they did.

  Tucker Matthews, being in the news business, would have had access to a lot of this information. But then again, so would Alicia. In fact, considering that she’d worked at the historical society, Alicia would have had even greater access to the history of the inn; certainly newspaper clippings like this one. I couldn’t zero in on Tucker as my main suspect without ruling out Alicia, and that meant taking a trip over to the historical society itself. I had a feeling that someone there might be able to shed more light on Alicia’s feelings toward Charlotte and Parker—if she was the one behind all this, we needed to figure that out fast.

  The three of us climbed up the ladder and picked our way through the dark, back to my room. After shutting the hidden panel behind us, we all collapsed onto chairs, dusty and exhausted.

  “Ugh, look at the carpet,” Bess said. “It looks like we tracked in more of that ash—just like the ghost did when he came in here.”

  “I’ll try and clean it up a little tomorrow before the maid comes in,” I said with a yawn. “In the meantime, here’s our plan.” I quickly laid out my thoughts about Alicia, and we agreed to make a trip to the historical society first thing in the morning, before any of the wedding activities began. “We need to start crossing off names,” I finished, “and I think this is the best chance we’ve got at figuring out who did all this and getting the rings back in time.”

  Bess and George nodded. As we all said our good nights, I tried to sound more confident than I felt. Tomorrow was the big day. Charlotte and Parker surely had their vows all planned out, and I hadn’t forgotten mine. For better or for worse—it was my job to save this wedding!

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Rest Is History

  BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

  I felt like my head had only just hit the pillow when my alarm clock went off. Blearily, I groped around until my hand hit the snooze button, and the room was silent once again. I collapsed back into the covers and yawned.

  No time for snoozing, Nancy Drew, a voice in my head warned. It’s Saturday, the day of the wedding, and you have a bad guy to catch!

  Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I hopped out of bed, stretched, and quickly dressed in the early morning light. Five minutes later I slipped out of my room into the stillness of the inn. It was early enough that all the guests were still asleep in their beds—a perfect time for the girls and I to sneak out and do some last-minute investigating. Parker could only keep the missing rings secret for so long—we needed an answer before the wedding had to be canceled!

  Bess and George were already waiting for me in the lobby, looking about as tired and bleary-eyed as I felt. “Ready to go?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” Bess said. “I want to catch this person, once and for all!”

  Fifteen minutes later I pulled the convertible up to the Charleston Historical Society. It was a majestic white building, boasting wide columns and elegant domed windows. “It almost looks like the White House!” George observed.

  “Let’s hope we find what we’re looking for,” I said.

  Inside, we found a high-ceilinged lobby, crowned with a wrought-iron chandelier above us. A welcome desk in the center of the room stood unmanned, the computer still switched off for the night. As a matter of fact, the whole building was as quiet as the sleeping inn, and I immediately began to worry that we had come too early—what if there was no one here to help us?

  “Um, hello?” I called out. “Is anyone here?”

  No answer.

  I looked back at Bess and George. George shrugged and said, “Well, we’re here, and the door was unlocked. It couldn’t hurt for us to take a look around, could it?”

  I glanced at Bess. “What do you think?”

  Bess’s mouth twisted with discomfort, but after a moment, I saw her expression set with steely resolve. “I think we don’t have time to waste. If the answer’s here, let’s go and find it.”

  There were three corridors leading away from the main lobby. We decided to split up—Bess taking the left-hand passage, George taking the right, and me going down the stairs behind the welcome desk to the corridor straight ahead. “Look for anything you can find about Alicia Coleman,” I said. “An old staff file, something on the computer system—anything.” I turned to go, but on a whim, added, “And while you’re at it, see if you can find anything else about the Grey Fox Inn.” Something about that old newspaper article we’d found in the secret passage left me wondering if there was more to it than I had first imagined. We agreed to meet back in the lobby in ten minutes to share our findings.

  I ma
de my way to the staircase, trying as best I could to silence my steps on the gray stone tiles. At the bottom of the short stairwell, I found two public bathrooms, one door marked STAFF ONLY, and another one labeled RECORDS ARCHIVE. Unfortunately, the staff room was locked up tight—but the records room wasn’t. I turned the doorknob to find a room filled with row after row of tall metal shelves, each one piled with brown filing boxes. It was dimly lit from three high-up windows at the back wall, the morning light illuminating thousands of dust motes that were thrown into the air when I opened the door. If there was any place to find what I was looking for, it had to be here!

  Not risking turning on the lights, I flicked on my phone’s flashlight, slipped into the room, and squinted up at the boxes on the shelves, searching the labels for anything about old staff members. Everything was arranged into categories and then ordered alphabetically—the row I was in seemed to be dedicated to famous citizens of Charleston. The next row was all about historic places in the city, and as I passed the box labeled Ga-Gr, I paused and decided to follow up on my earlier hunch.

  Pulling the box from the shelf, I flipped through it until I found what I was looking for: a whole folder about the Grey Fox Inn. I opened it up and quickly flipped through the various newspaper clippings, letters, and other miscellaneous papers, not really sure what I was looking for.

  Suddenly the room was flooded with fluorescent light, dazzling me and surprising me so much that the contents of the folder spilled onto the floor.

  “Hey! Is somebody in here?” a man’s voice called out. Hidden as I was between two rows of shelving, I couldn’t see who it was. My heart leaped into my throat.

  “I heard you! Whoever you are, come out before I call the police!” the man said. I could hear his footsteps advancing into the room. But he was behind one of the other shelves and couldn’t see me, either.