Skylar Robbins: The Mystery of the Hidden Jewels - Carrie Cross (most popular novels of all time TXT) 📗

and full of mischief at the same time. Long black hair streaked in silver hung way past her shoulders. She wore a dazzling diamond necklace around her neck.

“Xandra Collins,” I whispered. “It has to be.” Putting the picture in my back pocket, I opened the last box and let out a quiet whoop. A torn piece of paper with mysterious writing on it was taped to the bottom and I peeled it off. Shining my penlight on the paper, I saw some half circles, lines, and a bunch of little numbered footprints drawn with a fine-point, black felt-tipped pen. About a third of the page was missing.

The fourth clue.

The footprints on the paper were totally random, like a picture of the snow after someone had walked around in it. “Dance steps?” I decided to go downstairs where I would have plenty of light and room to move around so I could follow the footsteps. Folding the paper carefully, I tucked it into my bra so it would be hidden in case I ran into any of the construction workers when I got back downstairs.

I took one last lap around the hidden floor, shining my light into the corners, wondering if I had missed anything important and wishing I had more time to explore. “There could be clues hidden between the pages of those books, and those articles could be important,” I muttered, hurrying back over to the messy piles of boxes I’d rummaged through. The second I bent over for a closer look, I bolted back and gasped. A dead scorpion was stuck to the corner of the top box like she had been pasted there on purpose. Her pointy pincers curled up over her brittle, dry spine.

Was this a threat? Or just a random dead arachnid?

Don’t be stupid, I thought. There were more dead bugs, spiders, and even lizards than I could count when we first saw the house. This was just another one—nothing more. Or was it? No time to worry about it now. I piled the boxes back up in the same arrangement I’d found them: 9 6 4 1.

Trying to forget about the scorpion, I continued my search and found a narrow door at the dark end of the sewing area. After walking up to it and pulling it open, I aimed my penlight down a steep flight of shadowy stairs. This must be how Xandra got up here!

I hurried down the narrow staircase, and when I hit the last step I was in front of another door. It was locked from my side, so I unlocked the handle and turned it. A solid panel faced me. “That’s why her heirs never found the hidden floor,” I said, touching the rough wood and wondering what was on the other side. “There must be a button somewhere that moves the panel so you can access the secret staircase.” I left the door unlocked so if I found the button I could come back to this floor without riding the dumbwaiter. Hopefully Crew Gang wouldn’t find it before I did. After climbing back up the stairs I took a last look around, then crawled back into the little elevator.

I punched 1 and the dumbwaiter started to move. I wondered where it would stop, and where in the house I would come out. The black box creaked slowly down through the floors. Fortunately Xandra Collins’s heirs and the construction workers were too big to fit into the dumbwaiter. Otherwise they might have discovered the hidden floor and found the fourth clue. When the dumbwaiter finally hit the bottom, I was staring at the inside of yet another door. I pushed it, but it wouldn’t open.

“So that’s why I couldn’t find the dumbwaiter on the bottom floor,” I said to myself. “It is behind the locked door in the butler’s pantry.”

And then I panicked. How was I supposed to make the elevator move up to the second story so I could get out? The box was dark and there was no way to reach outside of it to push the buttons to change floors.

I slapped my hands against the door as hard as I could. Then I really banged my fists against it while I tried not to scream.

I was trapped inside the dumbwaiter.

 

15

Escape

Just as I was about to start shouting for help, I stopped myself. Not only would I get in huge trouble if my mom caught me riding the dumbwaiter, but we didn’t have a key to unlock this door anyway. My heart pounded. There was no way to get back up to the other floors by using the dumbwaiter, since there was nothing outside of it but a locked door where the keypad should have been. It could be days before anyone found me. I could suffocate or die of thirst!

“Calm down and use your brain,” I said out loud. The dumbwaiter was so stuffy I smelled my own breath. There wasn’t much time before I ran out of air.

Look for clues on the floor, all four walls, and the ceiling.

I felt the inside of the dumbwaiter quickly, one wall at a time from top to bottom, like a mime doing, “trapped in a box.” My heart hammered and I was ready to cry. I dragged my fingers back and forth across the ceiling and up and down the walls, searching desperately for a way out. The walls were smooth and I was definitely stuck.

After aiming my penlight beam all around, I finally spotted a little red button in the upper right-hand corner of the ceiling. It wasn’t marked. I didn’t have a choice. I pushed it.

Slowly, the dumbwaiter started to climb.

I held my breath as I felt myself moving upward, and then the little elevator made a grinding noise and stopped. Inching the narrow door open to just a crack, I looked into the formal dining room. My mom was around the corner, humming to herself. I couldn’t get out of the dumbwaiter here! Quietly I pulled the cupboard door closed and pushed the emergency button again. If she heard the sound of the dumbwaiter, hopefully she would think I was just playing with it, not riding it.

Up I went, climbing out of the stuffy box and into the library. Then I hurried down the hall to my room, shaking so hard I could barely walk. After lying down on my bed until my heart stopped pounding, I sat up and looked at the footsteps on the clue, then decided to follow the footstep pattern.

“One, two, three,” I said, staring at the paper and stumbling around, “four—wait a minute. Where’s five six and seven?” I stopped in my tracks as I heard my mom coming up the stairs. The clue was a dead giveaway that I was looking for the jewels, so I put it in my pocket and held my breath until she passed my room, continuing down the hall.

I wanted to make my dad proud of my investigation, and make my mom realize that taking risks was worthwhile. Smack’s crew was not going to find the jewels before I did. I wanted to rub my hands together in satisfaction and say, “Case closed,” like my grandfather. I needed to find Xandra’s jewelry box before my parents figured out what I was doing and forced me to stop, since they would have thought it was way too dangerous.

As it turned out, they would have been right.

 

16

Dusting for Fingerprints

Peeking into the hall, I watched my mom until she disappeared into the library. Then I crept up the spiral staircase into my office, shutting the door. I looked at the paper containing the clue under my magnifying glass. It didn’t look any different, just bigger. I opened my iPad cover.

After typing in the numbers inside the footprints, I looked at the result: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6. Without the other symbols, the numbers made even less sense than they did on the clue. I got up and tried to follow the footprint map inside my office but I just got dizzy walking around in circles. If these were dance steps, this was the dumbest dance anybody ever did.

I decided to make a list of the case notes and clues I had found so far.

1. Three years ago Xandra Collins mysteriously disappeared. She may have been kidnapped.

2. She left clues to find her hidden jewelry box.

3. Her heirs searched for three years and didn’t find them. (They didn’t look hard enough.)

4. The first clue was fingerprints on the turret room windowsill, leading to the cupboard. (Clue #1)

5. The cupboard had a note written on the wall in invisible ink: Things in this room are not always what they seem. (Clue #2)

6. The top of the cupboard was phony. Taped above the false ceiling was an old envelope. Inside was a piece of paper with a square design on it. (Clue #3)

7. The squares stood for boxes.

8. The boxes were stacked on the hidden floor. You have to squeeze inside the dumbwaiter or climb up a secret staircase to find it. This may be why her heirs never did. They weren’t small enough, smart enough, or brave enough.

9. A picture of Xandra Collins was inside the second-to-last box.

10. The box below that one contained a paper with numbered footprints on it. Some of the footprints are missing. There are half-circles and a rectangle among the footprints. (Clue #4)

I took the picture of Xandra Collins out of my pocket and stared at it. She stared back at me with a curious smile, like she was trying to tell me something. But what? When I turned it over to look at the back of the photo, I couldn’t believe my eyes. On the back of the picture of the mysterious woman, someone had written a big X.

X for Xandra?

X marks the spot?

X her out?

Who had written the X?

I dropped the picture like a hot potato. Suddenly I couldn’t get it out of my fingers fast enough. “Stupid!” I scolded myself, hoping that if there were prints on the picture I hadn’t smeared them or covered them with my own.

Trace evidence.

I opened my detective kit and took out my dusting powder and brush. Picking up the photo with tweezers, I examined the edges. They were light, so I chose the black fingerprint powder. When I dusted it carefully over the edges using my big soft brush, I saw nice juicy prints on both sides. And they were too big to be mine. After blowing off the excess powder I pressed down a clear piece of tape, lifted the cleanest print, and pasted it onto a Case Solution card. Using my invisible ink marker, I labeled this one, “Print on Xandra’s picture.”

The metal box I had bought for collecting clues was inside the deep drawer in the bottom of my desk. I unlocked my clue box and took out the Case Solution card containing the fingerprint from the windowsill, then compared the prints under my magnifying glass. They matched. Both of the prints were Xandra’s. The first piece of the puzzle had just snapped into place. I stared out the window across the hills at the hazy blue of the distant ocean, thinking. Then I put the two Case Solution cards, the footprint map, the box design clue, and Xandra’s picture back inside the box and locked it. “Now what?” I asked myself.

My notes ended in a big puzzle. The clues helped me find a map that had numbered footsteps on it, but a chunk of it was missing. Xandra had written an X on the back of her picture. Why? This was where the information ended. I turned off my iPad and walked down the spiral staircase to my bedroom. Lying down on my bed, I closed my eyes, my mind spinning with secret codes, unanswered questions, and the puzzling map.

 

17

The Map with the Missing Footsteps

When I got home from school Monday I walked through the front door and came face-to-face with Ignado. He stood aside like he was allowing me to enter my own home, staring at me with his brown eye while the blue-gray one veered off to one side. He tossed his screwdriver up in the air over and over, catching it one-handed, while he eyeballed