Mystery by Moonlight Read online

  She wasn’t sure what to do. Part of her was eager to visit the museum, but what if she ran into Jim? She hesitated for a minute. She wasn’t going to let that guy’s nasty attitude stop her from going.

  Nancy walked through the open door into a spacious foyer lined with display cases. She continued on to a large open room. Along the walls were ancient and contemporary local native crafts—mainly Lenape. But Nancy’s attention was quickly drawn to a diorama setup on a huge round table in the center of the room.

  Posted at the front of the table was a simple sign. It read, BEFORE THE FLOOD. Nancy’s curiosity soared when she realized it was a skillfully crafted reproduction of the valley in 1924.

  Nancy quickly located the north shore. Sure enough, the diorama was so detailed, she easily located what must have been the whole Malone property. As Ravi said, it bordered a large beaver pond. The valley below was a regular patchwork of farms with fields, barns, and farmhouses. Small hamlets with church spires and tiny streets punctuated the sparsely populated landscape.

  The Malone property bordered what was labeled as Lenape land. It was a small tract, but it ran right through the current dividing line between Emily’s house and Camp Moonlight. And all of Camp Moonlight had originally belonged to the Lenape people. Malone’s little compound showed the big house, the guest house, a toolshed—but no boathouse.

  “That’s the before picture! Now, how about the after!” a tight voice commented.

  Nancy turned. “Jim!” she said, forcing back a wave of anger.

  “We keep running into each other,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. His whole being was a challenge to her—but Nancy decided not to be challenged. She was too curious about the valley and this diorama.

  “This museum’s pretty impressive,” she said.

  As she had hoped, her comment disarmed him slightly. “Now that I’m permanent staff, we have one full-time curator, then me and two assistants. We’re getting things together, slowly but surely,” he said, a note of real pride in his voice. “When my boss gets back from vacation, I’ll be able to work full-time on ‘Part Two’ of this one.”

  “ ‘Part Two’ is after the flood?” Nancy asked, immediately wanting to bite back her words as she realized Jim thought she was mocking him.

  “Yeah, what else,” Jim said, tensing up again. “If you’re interested, it’s in the next room. It’s still pretty much a work in progress.”

  Nancy was surprised at his offer, and quickly took him up on it. He led her into a room that abutted the Historical Society’s half of the building. A broad, open arched doorway separated the two institutions.

  “Now, this should look more familiar,” he said, drawing back a protective cloth from the top of a large display table.

  The whole north shore of the lake looked pretty complete to Nancy, though the east, west, and south shores were still blocked out with brown terraform material and lots of Post-it notes. Nancy quickly spotted the Fayne cottage, Emily’s house, Camp Moonlight, and then on the other side of the Faynes’, a nearly completed model of the Lawrence-Joneses’ cabin. Map locator pins dotted parts of the forest, the grounds of Camp Moonlight, the Fayne cottage, and Emily’s yard. Some of the pins went right down into the replicated lake.

  “What are these?” she asked Jim.

  “None of your business,” he snapped.

  Nancy rolled her eyes. This guy kept acting as if she were personally responsible for flooding the valley and disturbing his ancestral lands. “What’s with you?” she started to ask but just then a woman poked her head through the door to the Historical Society’s side of the building.

  “I’m back, Jim. I’m officially open now. You don’t need to watch the shop,” the woman said.

  Jim gave her a thumbs-up and walked away from Nancy.

  The whole reason Nancy had come to town was to check out the Historical Society. “Excuse me, but I actually came here to check out some of your records,” Nancy said to the woman.

  “Of course. Come in. Sorry I was still at lunch—but I hope Jim kept you entertained,” the woman said, flicking on the lights in the front room. Before tucking her purse inside her desk, she pulled out her compact and checked her hair. She was an attractive woman with a friendly smile.

  Nancy decided not to respond to her remark about Jim. “My name’s Nancy Drew, and I’m staying with friends at the cottage on the old Malone property on the north shore.”

  “Mike Malone’s old place? Yes, I know the cottage. It’s charming! I hear a young couple bought it about a year or so ago. And then the Malone house itself just got sold after being on the market for a good five years. Amazing—when things start happening, they happen fast,” she babbled on. “Oh, by the way, my name’s Karen Kopekski. I more or less run this place, together with a really great committee of volunteers.”

  Nancy smiled. She’d have to talk fast to get a word in edgewise; Karen was such a talker. “Anyway,” Nancy said, unzipping her knapsack, “I found these letters in the cottage last night. Apparently there’s a secret stairway in the house that leads to a—”

  “You don’t say!” Karen looked thrilled.

  “To a crawl space,” Nancy continued. “I went through the letters a bit last night. They were all written by Mike Malone, but I wondered if your records here could shed some light on them.”

  “Oh my, those would be of great interest to the Society,” Karen said. “Mike Malone is a real local celebrity. In fact, there have been rumors circulating for years that he’s still haunting the old main house. Of course, that’s only if you believe in ghosts. But if you do”—Karen giggled—“there are supposedly at least ten of them wandering around the north shore. Why the ghosts of farmers who lived twenty-five miles away down in the valley would bother to haunt the north shore is beyond me. Back in the mid-twenties, it was mainly Native American land. Traveling twenty-five miles in these parts was quite an excursion.”

  “Would you tell me how the local Native American groups feel about Moonlight Lake now?” Nancy asked.

  Karen shrugged. “Mostly just like everyone else. They use it for recreation: boating, fishing, water sports. There are a few who still resent the way the tribal lands were more or less ripped out from under them by the powers behind the hydroelectric projects.”

  “People like Jim?”

  “Yes, but at least he’s channeled his anger in good directions. He’s going through the courts trying to get property owners on this side of the lake to set aside a small area—a memorial really—to the native people who lived in the region for hundreds of years before the white man came.”

  Nancy wanted to learn more about Jim’s project, but she could see that Karen was eagerly eyeing the packet of letters.

  “Can we look at those now?” Karen asked, pulling a second chair up to the desk and putting on a pair of reading glasses.

  Nancy sat down, and for a good twenty minutes they pored over the letters.

  “Now, this is interesting,” Karen said, in a serious voice. “Back here in 1923, Malone’s written something about plans for a boathouse, and a chance for serious boating coming up. . . . ”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Nancy asked.

  Karen peered at Nancy over her glasses. “Well, he doesn’t spell it out, Nancy, but I think Malone had foreknowledge of the flooding of the valley. The plans were top-secret until late in 1924. The minute they were made public, a huge controversy erupted. But since this was a poor, underpopulated area, the power company and state won easily.”

  Nancy leaned back and thought a moment. “Malone was a mobster, notoriously in cahoots with corrupt politicians. He probably had inside knowledge of lots of things.”

  “But what’s even more interesting is that he mentions plans. Our town archives have plans dating from the last years of the nineteenth century. Come on, let’s look and see what we can find.”

  Nancy jumped at the chance. Karen took Nancy into the Historical Society’s library. Plans were st
ored in large wooden flat-files, sorted first by date, then title of property. They searched several years before 1923 and after 1925 but they couldn’t find the plans.

  Karen was visibly disappointed. “I so hoped to find them. You know, Jim’s 1924 diorama has no boathouse—but now we have no idea when it was built. A builder would have had to file plans.”

  “Malone might not have wanted to tip his hand that he knew about the flooding of the valley ahead of time,” Nancy reasoned. “And maybe he didn’t have to file plans. He certainly had the connections to build a boathouse without the locals objecting.”

  “Do you think the plans are still in the house?” Karen asked.

  “I don’t know. They weren’t with the letters. . . . ” Nancy thought for a moment. Had they been under that pried-up plank in the pantry? The space was narrow but long, and a tube of rolled up architectural drawings could have easily fit there.

  Karen suddenly looked up past Nancy’s shoulder. “Jim, how long have you been standing there?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Didn’t want to interrupt you guys,” he said. He had a definite smirk on his face. How much had he heard?

  “I’m heading to lunch now,” he said, his voice neutral. “So if you would keep an eye on things . . . ”

  “Of course, Jim. You just go on ahead.” Karen waved him away.

  As he left the room, Nancy noticed he was wearing the same sheathed knife in his belt and was carrying the same sort of burlap sack over his shoulder that she’d seen in the back of his truck the day before.

  • • •

  Nancy drove home, her mind reeling from the wealth of new information. Her first thought was of Jim. How long had he been eavesdropping? She tried to tell herself she was being paranoid about him; after all, except for his attitude and bad driving habits, he hadn’t done anything truly suspicious.

  Or had he? His reaction to her question about those locator tacks on the post-flood diorama had been pretty extreme. He didn’t want her to know whatever they stood for. And that smirk on his face when Karen discovered him listening at the library door—Nancy’s gut instinct told her the guy knew something about that boathouse, if not the letters.

  When Nancy got back to the cottage, Bess, George, and Ned were still out boating with Ravi. After downing a glass of milk and a couple of cookies, Nancy decided to go find Emily and tell her what she found out about the history of the boathouse and the Malone property.

  As she headed outside, she saw the hauling and excavation truck parked in the driveway. She walked around the various sheds and outbuildings, but didn’t see Emily anywhere. She was probably off with Dale and Kevin, supervising some project.

  Passing the boathouse, Nancy noticed that the door was open. She looked inside. “Emily, you there?” she called. But a quick look around revealed that the place was empty. Two cups of coffee sat on a workbench. Nancy went over and touched the cups; they were still warm. Strange, she thought.

  Nancy decided to come back later, but as she started to leave, she caught sight of a plank straddling two sawhorses. Tacked to the plank were some sort of architectural drawings. Probably renovation plans. Curious, she went to take a closer look.

  Up close, she could see that the paper was old, and the plans seemed hand-drawn—much like several of the plans she’d looked at with Karen back at the Historical Society library.

  Leaning closer, she saw the architect’s signature, and the date in the lower right-hand corner read: SEPTEMBER, 1923.

  Nancy couldn’t believe her eyes! Was this the plan for the boathouse that Mike Malone had never filed? Suspicion surged in Nancy’s mind, but she took a breath. Emily had every right to these plans. She probably found them in her own house, and was using them to guide her renovations.

  As Nancy studied the plans, something struck her as odd. Little arrows were drawn from the beach of the cottage, from the dock of the main house, and from the lawn, down into the water. Other arrows pointed to a corner of the boathouse itself, the part that seemed to have been badly damaged over the years. Nancy had noticed yesterday how the stones along one corner had been pulled out, and how that corner of the boathouse was propped up with some type of beam.

  Nancy looked more closely at all the arrows: they were drawn in ballpoint pen—a kind of pen that didn’t exist in 1923. Closer inspection revealed they were carefully traced over faded pencil marks.

  What did those arrows mean?

  The thought had barely formed in her mind when suddenly a strong, calloused hand gripped her wrist hard and shoved her to the ground. As her head struck the corner of the table, Nancy blacked out.

  11

  A Familiar Prowler

  She slowly surfaced back to consciousness and felt the touch of cool hands on her face.

  “Nancy!” A vaguely familiar voice was calling her name.

  Nancy opened her eyes and found herself looking up into Emily’s face. The woman looked pale and scared half to death. “I’m okay, Emily. Really.” Nancy started to sit up. The movement made her stomach lurch, but she fought back the wave of nausea. Holding Emily’s arm, she slowly managed to get to her feet. She wasn’t quite sure where she was—some sort of shed.

  “What in the world happened?” Emily asked, guiding Nancy over to an upturned barrel. Nancy sat down and massaged her temple. She had fallen somehow and hit her head.

  Careful to move slowly, Nancy looked around. Gradually, the room came into focus. Broken glass littered a windowsill. Coils of old rope, oars, and life jackets hung on the walls. I’m in the boathouse, she realized. Suddenly everything rushed back to her. She’d been looking at old boathouse plans when someone had grabbed her from behind. She could still feel the calloused hands on her wrist. Whoever it was knocked her down—or knocked her out.

  She stood up slowly. For a moment the walls of the boathouse seemed to spin.

  “You don’t look so good,” Emily warned.

  “I’m okay. I just remembered what happened,” Nancy said in a sober tone. “Emily, I was looking at the boathouse plans, when someone came up behind me and knocked me out.”

  “Boathouse plans?” Emily asked.

  Nancy pointed to the sawhorses and the old plank door that served as a work surface. The plans were gone. “He must have made off with them.”

  Emily’s eyes widened. “I don’t believe this,” she gasped in horror. “Why in the world would someone steal those?” She exhaled forcefully and marched over to the boathouse door. When she turned to face Nancy she looked like she was about to cry. “That means I have to have them redrawn. My budget’s so tight, but I’ve already contracted the work—”

  “Why would someone want those plans?” Nancy asked.

  “Beats me,” Emily said. “Except maybe to cause me trouble. Everyone and his uncle around here knows I spent too much for this place and is waiting for me to default on the mortgage.”

  “But that doesn’t mean people want to cause you that much grief,” Nancy said.

  “You wouldn’t think so, would you?” Emily plunked herself down on the barrel and buried her face in her hands for a moment. “But there seems to be an army of people who resent my being here. I just try to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist,” she said slowly. “First of all, there’s that guy from the Native American museum, Jim. He’s been causing grief for everyone on the north shore. He seems to think present landowners owe his ancestors something for having bought the land. He hassles everyone and is always creeping around the woods—even if he’s trespassing on other people’s land. I keep finding these weird piles of stones all over the place. The other day there was one on my lawn. Dale told me they give him the creeps and mumbled something about spirit totems. The guy’s weird, and he’s mad at everyone who lives here.”

  “I think I know what you’re talking about,” Nancy said. Had Jim been building some kind of spirit cairn when she and Ned ran into him in the woods?

  “Then there’s Steve Delmonico,” Emily said. “He’s
furious I bought this place out from under him, even though he was taking forever to decide to buy. He’d love to see me fail here, believe me. He’s ready to jump in and buy the place from the bank.”

  “I heard about that,” Nancy told her. “And have you had any trouble with George and Bess’s neighbors? The Lawrence-Joneses are upset about all the commotion on the lake this summer. They keep talking about boats paddling around at night disturbing the geese. And some kind of drilling noise.”

  Emily snapped to attention. “Drilling?” Her voice sounded strained.

  “Yeah—I haven’t heard it myself, but the past two nights . . . ” Nancy shook her head. “So much has gone on, I might not have noticed.”

  “I’m not sure what they’re talking about. Maybe something over at the camp. I guess I sleep too soundly to hear,” Emily said. Then she looked at Nancy. “You’re looking better. Hey—how come you were here, in the boathouse, anyway?”

  Nancy laughed. “I came looking for you. I spent the morning at the Lost Valley Historical Society and wanted to tell you what I found out about the boathouse and the old Malone property. I thought you might be able to fill in some of the blanks.” She reached for her backpack. “And because of these!” She produced the bundle of letters. The burglar hadn’t been interested in Nancy’s backpack or wallet—just in the plans. Nancy decided she’d think about that later. She handed the letters to Emily.

  “Look what I found in the cottage. Turns out there’s this secret crawl space that was never in the cottage plans. It has two hidden entrances.”

  Emily stared at the bundle. When she looked back up at Nancy, her face was flushed. “I-I don’t understand. What do these have to do with me?”

  Nancy frowned. Emily’s reaction wasn’t quite what she’d expected.