Dare to read: Нэнси Дрю и Братья Харди

(https://vk.com/daretoreadndrus)

ПРИЯТНОГО ЧТЕНИЯ!

Carolyn Keene

Nancy Drew Girl Detective: Volume Thirty-Two

Perfect Escape

This time, I may be in way over my head. What started out as a simple undercover mission at a beauty pageant in New York City has turned into complete chaos! The pageant's sponsor, Pretty Face Cosmetics, knows that I've uncovered a big secret about their product, and now I'm in serious trouble. They want to keep me quiet — no matter what it takes.

Now I'm being held hostage by two supercreepy bad guys, without a phone, and worse, without my friends! I know that Bess and George are doing everything they can to find me, but time is running out. I have to figure out a way to get back to that pageant so I can reveal Pretty Face's secret... before it's too late for the next Miss Pretty Face, and millions of other girls!

DEAD BATTERY

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

I awoke in darkness. Gulping in a breath of air, I tried not to panic. Where was I? Why was I lying on the floor in a strange, dark room? I tried to pull my hands in front of me — Why were my hands tied? My pulse raced as adrenalin shot through my system, and I struggled to sit up. Then it all came back to me.

The pageant.

Pretty Face cosmetics.

Kyle McMahon and Adam Bedrossian.

Weeks before, I had entered a regional beauty pageant to investigate a case I was working. To my shock, I had won the pageant — but not before figuring out that the sponsor, Pretty Face cosmetics, had something to hide. A few days ago, Bess, George and I had flown to New York City for the national pageant. While there, I had met a local Pretty Face employee, Anna Chavez — a scientist. It was Anna who led me to find out Pretty Face was marketing a product that contained an untested substance that might lead to paralysis.

Before Anna and I had time to talk about anything, she had mysteriously gone missing. When I went looking for Anna at Pretty Face’s headquarters, I had walked into a trap. It was obviously because I knew too much, and Kyle McMahon and Adam Bedrossian, a Pretty Face bigwig and head of security, respectively, wanted to keep me quiet.

They had taken Anna, and then me, captive and loaded us into a helicopter. That was the last thing I remembered: rising up over the gorgeous skyline of Manhattan, wondering what on Earth these two men were going to do with us. They must have used something to knock us out — chloroform, maybe? — so we wouldn’t see where we were headed.

And now here I was.

“Hello?” I called, and my voice came out husky from disuse. No one answered. There wasn’t even a sound. Except…

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Suddenly I realized… that quiet, electronic beeping. It had been going on for a while now, and was probably what woke me up in the first place. But where was it coming from?

Was Anna here with me? Or had Kyle and Adam separated us?

She hadn’t answered when I called out, but maybe she was still unconscious.

Either way I wasn’t going to be able to find her by lying on the floor. I sat up, struggling with my bonds. My hands and feet were both bound with what felt like duct tape. I wiggled and squirmed and finally managed to loosen the tape around my ankles, but it wasn’t coming off completely. I needed something sharp to snag it on. I very carefully got my balance and pulled myself to my feet. I hopped around clumsily, making my way forward. Eventually I hit something that felt like a wall.

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see that a tiny shaft of light was coming in through a corner of a blacked-out window. If I really concentrated, I could make out the vague shapes of furniture. There was a wire storage shelf along the wall, like something you’d find in someone’s garage, just a few feet away from me. The ends of the wires were sharp-looking. I hopped over, then pressed the bond on my wrists against the exposed edges, over and over again.

First I poked a small hole in the tape, and finally, with a lot of effort, cut through the tape completely. With a sigh of relief, I pulled my hand loose — away from the sticky duct tape. With a painful rip, I yanked my hand completely free of the tape. Then I carefully bent down, found the end of the tape around my feet, and ripped off those bonds as well.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

It was too quiet to be an alarm. But what could it be? What kind of electronic device might have been left in this room?

“Anna?” I called, but there was still no reply. And even with the tiny shaft of light from the window, it was still too dark to make out anything except the one wall of the mystery prison. I moved toward the beep slowly, quietly as I could, feeling my way along the wall. It was cold and rough, possibly a concrete block, like a school building or a basement. I walked a few feet and, as I moved forward, the beeping got louder….

“Oof!” Just as I felt I was getting close, my foot hit something soft and warm. It startled me so much, I jumped about a foot in the air and almost went flying over it. My recent pageant win notwithstanding, nobody would ever accuse me of being graceful. I knelt down and felt around for whatever I’d hit.

It moved immediately beneath my fingertips. It was a knee! I squinted hard at the shape and relief washed over me at the sight.

“Anna!” I cried. “Anna, are you all right? Wake up!”

I took Anna by the shoulders and shook her, but she didn’t respond. Bending close to her mouth, I could feel and hear that she was breathing at a normal pace. She still seemed to be unconscious, though. Moving her knee must have been an unconscious reflex.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The noise was louder still, as though it were coming from Anna herself. Could Anna have smuggled something in? Something electronic that might help us make contact with the outside world? Listening carefully, I tried to follow the sound. It was coming from her pants pocket… No… Her knee? ...No… I leaned down farther.

It was coming from her foot.

“What is going on?” I muttered, gamely leaning over and pulling off Anna’s left sneaker. I shook the shoe: nothing. The beep was definitely coming from her foot. Am I dealing with the bionic woman here? I reached over, felt that Anna was still wearing a sock, and pulled that off. Just then, something square-shape and shiny dropped to the floor.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

I picked up the source of the beeping, brushing one of its tiny buttons by accident.

A large, square screen illuminated.

HI ANNA! SATURDAY, 2:37P.M. EST. YOU HAVE 2 MISSED CALLS. DETECTING WI-FI CONNECTION. MORE INFO?

It was a phone!

Actually, it was more than a phone. It was a full-service PDA — Internet access and all. I wasn’t too familiar with the newfangled things, but my friend George had gotten one recently and given Bess and I a lecture on how powerful it was and how it meant she could “connect to anyone, anything, any Web site, any source of information at any time!”

I felt my heart quicken. The Internet, plus a phone! We were saved! Thank goodness for Anna’s quick thinking — and her thick, baggy socks!

I pressed the button that promised more info. A window popped up:

NONE OF YOUR TRUSTED WI-FI NETWORKS ARE AVAILABLE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONNECT TO THE OPEN NETWORK HYUNGKOO43?

Hyungkoo43. Save me, Hyungkoo43, you’re my only hope! “Yes, yes, yes!” I whispered, pressing the button for OK. Immediately an Internet window popped up, leading me to a popular search engine. I was connected! And I had a phone!

I started dialing George’s number before the search engine page was fully loaded. As her phone rang, I looked around and peered at what I could see of the room, realizing that I had one problem.

Sure, I had access to any friend whose phone number I had memorized and any piece of information that was available on the Web. What I didn’t have was any idea as to my whereabouts. I could beg George to come save us, but I couldn’t give her the faintest clue as to where to find us.

I took a quick look around the room, or, at least, what I could see of it. It looked like some kind of storage room. There were a few utility shelves, like the one I’d cut the tape on, but there wasn’t much furniture; just some boxes and random office equipment. Based on the position of the blacked-out window — it was way at the top of the wall — I guessed we were probably in a basement somewhere.

Ring. Ring. Ring. My heart quickened. Come on, George, I thought. Pick up! Anna’s number wouldn’t be programmed into George’s phone, so she’d think a total stranger was calling her, possibly a wrong number. Would she let the phone go to voice mail? Did she even know I was missing yet? I had no idea how long I’d been out for.

“Hello?”

A rush of relief flooded through me at the sound of George’s familiar but slightly hesitant voice.

“George!” I cried. “It’s me!”

“Nancy?” George sounded confused. “Where are you? And whose phone are you calling from?”

“Anna’s,” I said quickly. “Listen, George, you have to help me. Where are you?”

“Bess and I are back at the hotel,” George said, panic evident in her voice. “Nancy, you’re scaring me — Tell me where you are!”

“It’s all gone wrong,” I admitted. “I found Anna, she was being held by Kyle and Adam at the Pretty Face offices downtown. But the two of them were there too. It was a setup!”

“Oh my god,” George said breathlessly. “Are they there now? Nancy, are you safe?”

“No, I don’t see them. I don’t know if I’m safe, maybe —” I was about to continue, but the phone let out an ear-curdling bloop.

“What’s that?” I asked, sure that George would speak the language of any electronic device.

“Nancy? Are you there?”

I started to panic. “George?!” Was I losing her?

“Nancy, your phone is beeping. It sounds like Anna’s phone is dying. Just quick- ly tell me: Where are you?”

I felt my heart sink. “I don’t know,” I replied, trying to stay calm. “They gave us something to knock us out and took us in a helicopter. We’re in a basement storage room of some kind.”

Bloop. Anna’s phone let out another depressing sound.

George was quiet for a minute. I could tell she was beginning to feel as afraid for me as I felt for myself. “Nancy,” she replied. “Think. Do you remember anything about where you were headed in the helicopter?”

My heart was pounding. I tried to take a deep breath to slow it. “I don’t know New York City very well,” I replied, “but I think we were heading north — up the East River.”

George was silent. That only left the entire state of New York, plus Connecticut. I could tell she was despairing of ever finding us. And honestly, so was I.

Bloop.

“Listen carefully,” George said. “Do you hear anything from outside? City noises? Animals? Anything?”

I fell silent. For a second I couldn’t hear anything but my own pounding heart. But then I could hear cars passing, the slamming of a car door. A siren, somewhere far in the distance. It was the sound of the city…. Something I had almost grown immune to in the short time I’d been in New York.

“I hear city noise,” I replied. “I think we’re right on the street. And…” I paused. I heard something else, but I couldn’t believe it. It made no sense with the cars passing and the noise of traffic…

“What is it?” George asked. “Hurry, Nance, if your phone’s dying, we don’t have much time.”

Bawk. Bawk, bawk, bawk. “Chickens,” I said, disbelief still lingering in my voice. “I know it’s crazy, George, but I hear them clear as day. Live chickens.”

Bloop.

Silence for a moment. I could tell George was as thrown for a loop as I was. “Is there anything else?”

Suddenly I remembered. “One thing. Hold on.” I held the phone away from my ear to double-check the screen. “Okay,” I said, putting the phone back into position. “I’m picking up a Wi-Fi signal on Anna’s PDA. The name of the network is Hyungkoo43.” I spelled it.

“Hyungkoo43,” George repeated, and I could hear her writing it down. “Anything else? Any papers in the room, identifying objects?”

Papers. I hastily got to my feet and felt my way back to the wire shelving. There was a box of files there. I quickly opened the top and grabbed as many folders as I could. Throwing them down on the floor, I pawed through the pages, but it was too dark to read what they said. Quickly, I pulled the phone away from my ear and shone the light from the screen onto the papers.

Bloop.

“Nancy! Nancy!” I could hear George yelling even with the phone down by my knees. I brought it back against my ear.

“Yes?”

“Nancy, I’m —” Bloop.

George’s voice was unclear behind the blooping noise. I screamed into the phone, not caring who heard me now; just hoping George would. “George! There are invoices for lab equipment! I think we’re in a research facility! George!”

“I hear you, Nancy. We’re com —” Bloop!

“Aaauuugh!” I screamed as a hand suddenly reached out from behind me, grabbed the phone out of my hand, and pressed the End button. Trembling violently I turned around. Anna faced me, her skin pale, her hair wild around her face. She was fully conscious.

“What have you done?” she demanded.

ALARMED

Anna stared at the phone in her hand, pressing buttons and frowning deeply. “What did you do, Nancy? Who did you call?”

“Anna?” I reached out to touch my new friend’s shoulder, trying to speak in soothing tones. “Are you okay? Do you remember what happened?”

Anna shifted and pushed my hand away. Her expression was dead serious, her eyes wide. “Nancy. Listen to me. Who. Did. You. Call.”

I didn’t understand. Calling George had been our only hope. Why did Anna seem so angry? “I called my friend George. I hoped maybe she could help find us. She’s a whiz with computers, and —”

But Anna was already moaning. “Oh no.” She shook her head and closed her eyes, turning the phone off. “No, no, no…”

“What is it?” I asked. What on Earth could be wrong? I thought maybe Anna was wary of strangers, or maybe she thought George would tell the wrong person what had happened. But of course I knew George would be careful and could be trusted with anything. Maybe once I convinced Anna of that, she would calm down.

Anna shook her head one last time and opened her eyes. She looked at me with a frank, unapologetic expression. “That phone was given to me by Pretty Face cosmetics,” she said flatly. “They can track all of my calls, all of my activity. Now that you’ve made a phone call, they’ll know that we’re awake, that we have a phone, and that we’ve called someone for help.”

My face paled. “That means… someone is probably on their way to us right now.”

Anna nodded. “And not just us. Whoever you called, Nancy, could be in grave danger.”

I felt my heart stop for a few seconds. George and Bess. Was it possible that by calling on them for help, I’d put a very dangerous person on their trail? They were at the hotel where all the pageant participants were staying, surrounded by contestants and Pretty Face bigwigs. It would be so easy for Pretty Face to send someone up to their room…

I grabbed the phone back. “I have to call George,” I said, hitting Redial before Anna could stop me. The time on the phone now read 2:50 p.m. — five hours until the pageant started. “I have to warn her….”

But the phone just gave one dispiriting bloop before going dark altogether.

Adrenaline surged through my veins. I shook the phone, then rammed it hard against the floor. “Come on!” I cried. “Just one more minute of juice… Just thirty seconds… I have to warn George!”

After a few seconds of banging the phone against the ground, Anna reached out and put her hand on my arm. “Nancy,” she said. “It’s too late. The battery is dead.”

I looked at her, not wanting to believe it. Knowing I was trapped in some basement while my best friends in the world might be in danger was too much for me. I looked around the room again, searching for an exit, any exit.

“The window!”

I stood up, pointing to the blacked-out rectangle on the side of the room. “If we could break it with something heavy…”

Anna looked doubtful. “Nancy, we have to be careful. If we break the window, who knows what might happen? We could trigger an alarm…”

I whirled around. “Who cares?” I asked. “By the time they got here, we’d be long gone. And you just said they’re probably on their way anyway.”

Anna frowned. And I could identify another emotion playing on her face: fear. “They’re already angry,” she murmured nervously. “Anything else we do…”

“Exactly,” I said, fumbling over to the wire shelves and lifting the first solid, heavy object I found. It felt like a printer or a fax machine. “They’re already angry. So we can’t make it any worse. And, best-case scenario, we get out of here.”

Anna still looked doubtful.

“We have to at least try,” I pleaded.

Anna frowned. But she stood up, wordlessly coming to my side and walking with me to the window. She grabbed one side of the printer/fax.

“Should we just throw it up there?” she asked, looking warily at the window.

I lifted my side of the machine up a couple of inches, trying to get a good grip on it. “We’ve got to kind of bash it into the window,” I replied. “But we have to do it hard. Ready?”

Anna still looked nervous, but she nodded. “Ready.”

“One… two… three!”

The crash shattered the silence: splintering glass, metal on metal, and then the dejected crash of the printer falling to the ground. And finally the whoo, whoo, whoo of an alarm system. Anna had been right; we’d triggered something.

“It worked!” I cried as soon as I spotted sunlight. “We’re fr —”

But we weren’t. The glass was shattered and sunlight poured into the room, but it also illuminated another security feature: bars. Bars covered the outside of the window, making it impossible for anyone to break in — or out.

“Oh no,” Anna moaned, shaking her head. “Oh, I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. Most city buildings wouldn’t leave a ground-floor window unprotected.”

I blinked, trying desperately to look on the bright side. “Maybe that means we’re still in New York?”

Anna just kept shaking her head. I sighed, looking out the window. We didn’t seem to be on a busy street, as I’d hoped. It looked as though we were facing some sort of driveway, close enough to hear the street, but not to see it.

Whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo. The alarm was maddening. I closed my eyes and put my fingers to my temples, trying to calm myself. It was all I could do not to picture some scary guy grabbing Bess and George off the street, or Adam Bedrossian gunning through midday traffic to get to us and punish us for what we’d done.

“Anna,” I said, “please, before they come, tell me what happened at Pretty Face.”

Anna looked back at me like I was crazy. “Now?” she asked.

“We don’t have many options,” I said, gesturing around the newly illuminated but still securely locked room. “And I could use a distraction right now, to keep from thinking about my friends’ safety. Okay?”

Anna still looked skeptical, but she seemed to understand what I was saying. “Okay.” We looked around and eventually settled down on the floor away from the broken window glass.

“Start at the beginning, and tell me your side of the story,” I said.

Anna looked thoughtful through the obvious apprehension. “I started working at Pretty Face three years ago,” she began. “I was a big fan of their products, and I was happy to land the job. For the first couple years, everything was lovely. But about six months into my first year, I heard that they were experimenting with a toxin from the unibro frog.”

I nodded. “And you’d heard of this frog?”

Anna nodded. “It hails from my country, Venezuela. And I knew that the indigenous people in my country used ingredients from the frog in different folk remedies.”

“Folk remedies for what?” I asked.

Anna shrugged. “Sore muscles, arthritis, those sorts of things,” she replied. “Simple pain. The frog excretes a neurotoxin from its skin that causes paralysis to those who try to eat it. The neurotoxin can make minor pain more bearable.”

I nodded. “But you said earlier that you were concerned about Pretty Face using the toxin. Why?”

Anna frowned. “In my country, people are very careful not to use the toxin too often. And they never apply it to the face.”

“Why?” I asked.

Anna shook her head. “I’ve heard stories that it can be deadly if you use it too often and over a long period of time. That’s why people in my country use it sparingly, carefully.”

I nodded slowly. Pretty Face was using the toxin in their new facial moisturizer and revitalizer, Perfect Face, something that girls and women would apply daily. I had actually worn it for the local pageant I’d won. It caused a strange tingly sensation that I didn’t like. In fact, I was first alerted to the fact that Pretty Face was up to something shady when I realized that my new friend Kelly, Kyle McMahon’s daughter, had been given an older formula of Perfect Face, one that didn’t tingle. I now realized that Kyle had been protecting his daughter from the toxin he knew might be dangerous.

“Did you tell the people at Pretty Face that you were concerned?” I asked.

Whoo, whoo.

The alarm continued to clang in the background. Its shrill shriek never sounded any less annoying or terrifying, no matter how long it went on for.

Anna nodded. “Of course I did. I’m a researcher, Nancy. I didn’t tell them they should flat-out stop using the toxin. I told them I wanted to do a study — a scientific study to make sure that the toxin had no harmful long-term effects. But such a study would take many years to do correctly — ten, at least. Nobody at Pretty Face wanted to wait that long to get Perfect Face on the market. See, other cosmetics companies were also looking at the toxin, and Pretty Face wanted to be the first to sell products containing it. They’d invested lots of money into developing Perfect Face, and they didn’t want to let their big payoff go to another company.”

I nodded. “And when they told you that, you still didn’t feel comfortable keeping quiet about the toxin.”

Anna shrugged. “No. I asked them to, at the very least, let me go to Venezuela and interview the indigenous people. If I couldn’t do a scientific study, I could get some firsthand accounts of what the toxin does. But they didn’t even let me do that. I think they were afraid of getting unfavorable accounts, Nancy. If they heard even one negative story about the frog toxin, then they couldn’t play dumb anymore. Without a study or the interviews, Pretty Face can claim they weren’t warned, they had no idea the toxin might be harmful.”

“But you did warn them,” I pointed out.

Anna nodded, holding her temples with her fingertips as though they would shield her from the continuous screeching of the alarm. “I found an article from a South American scientific journal. It said that the toxin was likely to have harmful long-term affects, but further study was needed.”

I nodded vigorously. “I found that article in your desk when I was looking for clues about your disappearance!”

Anna smiled ruefully. “I showed it to my boss, but he didn’t take it seriously. He said the journal I’d gotten the article from wasn’t well-respected. He took it from me — right out of my hands — and we never discussed it again. I had another copy, but he didn’t know that. And it didn’t matter. I was so happy to have a good job, I backed down. For a year or so, I was quiet about the toxin. But then I came to the pageant, and I saw all these young girls using Pretty Face. It stirred my conscience. After the protesters disrupted the rehearsal the other night —”

“You brought up the subject with your boss again?” I supplied.

Anna nodded. “I told Kyle McMahon that it was time to come clean. I told him that people would be paying attention now, and if Pretty Face confessed before anyone pointed any fingers at them, it would make the company look like they were at least taking responsiblity. But he told me it wasn’t possible. Not only would they do no further research into the toxin, they were actually using the pageant to kick off a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign — to teenagers.”

“I can’t believe that,” I murmured. I knew something shady was going on at Pretty Face, but marketing a product that might cause paralysis to teenagers was even lower than I’d thought the company was capable of doing.

I was suddenly aware of the fact that the alarm had stopped. Anna and I looked at each other for a moment, both of us probably realizing at the same moment that this could either help us or be a very bad omen that the bad guys were on their way or — worse — already here. I decided I couldn’t focus on that right now — neither of us could. “Go on,” I urged Anna.

“I was furious, Nancy,” Anna went on, her eyes sweeping the dark corners of the room before settling back on me. “How could I work for a company that has so little concern for its customers? Was a steady paycheck worth not being able to sleep at night? I thought long and hard on it, and I decided that I had to do something. I had to tell the world what Pretty Face was up to. But I needed help.”

I frowned. Help? This was new. I knew Anna had gotten into trouble for telling Pretty Face her concerns about the frog toxin, but I didn’t know she’d had help.

Anna looked at me carefully. “You were a contestant in the pageant. You must know Piper Depken.”

My eyes widened. “Piper?!” I cried. I knew Piper all right — I’d even come close to considering her a friend until she got too close to the crown and turned into a vindictive, paranoid, ultracompetitive nut. What on Earth was she doing helping Anna? Granted, she hated Pretty Face cosmetics, but only because they’d given me the regional crown and not her. I couldn’t imagine that she’d ruin her chances of taking my place as runner-up by hurting Pretty Face’s image in any way.

But Anna was already shaking her head. “No, no. Not Piper. Piper’s sister. Robin Depken.”

Robin. Of course. I knew Robin too. In the process of investigating the case that led me to all this — the dethroning of the last reigning Miss Pretty Face — I’d come across Robin, the bitter first runner-up in last year’s competition who’d been stripped of her position after a judge admitted to fixing her scores. Robin hated Pretty Face more than anyone, and had even told me at one point that she wouldn’t let their products touch her face. She only let Piper compete in this year’s pageant because she knew Piper could use the scholarship prize.

“Yes, I’ve met Robin,” I said simply. “But how did you meet her?”

Anna looked uncomfortable. “I got to know her at last year’s national pageant,” she admitted. “She is majoring in biochemistry like I did. She seemed very down-to-earth compared to the other girls. We struck up a friendship. I took her to my favorite boutiques around the city, and after the pageant, we stayed in touch by e-mail.”

I nodded. “You told her about the frog toxin?”

Anna sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. But I was worried, Nancy. I was frustrated that my boss wouldn’t listen to me, and more than anything I needed to have someone tell me I wasn’t crazy. Especially someone who knew the science of what might happen as a result of the toxin.”

“So you told Robin,” I said.

“I did. At first I was vague. I told her that I was having trouble at work, that my boss wouldn’t listen to me about an issue I felt was very important. Then, finally, I forwarded her an e-mail I’d gotten from my boss, telling me to forget the frog-toxin issue, that Pretty Face was choosing not to follow up on it.”

My mouth dropped open. “And?”

Anna looked sheepish. “And I didn’t hear from her again,” she admitted. “When I saw her again at this year’s pageant — escorting her sister — I invited her to lunch. She confessed to me then that she had used my e-mail to try to blackmail Pretty Face into dethroning the reigning Miss Pretty Face and giving her the crown.”

I gasped. “What!” I cried. “She dethroned Portia? What on Earth —?” When I’d worked on Portia Leoni’s case, I had eventually learned that Portia blackmailed one of her competitors into dropping out of the pageant, and I’d concluded that the competitor had used her influence to frame Portia for shoplifting — and get her dethroned. Had I been wrong?

Anna shook her head. “She underestimated Pretty Face if she thought they would give up so easily,” she replied. “Pretty Face would not be blackmailed. Instead of installing Robin as the new Miss Pretty Face, they did dethrone Portia — but more because she was a nuisance than anything else — and then they stripped Robin of her position, too, just to show her that they wouldn’t be bullied by her threats. The e-mail I’d forwarded looked shady, but it didn’t contain enough information for her to interest the press or anyone else. Her plan backfired.”

I shook my head, trying to absorb all of this new information. “Okay. So Robin was responsible for getting Portia dethroned — and for getting herself kicked out, as well.” I paused, suddenly flashing back on the moment I’d accused Portia’s other competitor — Fallon — of getting Portia dethroned. Fallon had cried and cried, insisting that she was innocent, but I had proof — or so I thought. It looked like I’d been wrong all this time. Fallon had been a bit of a prickly personality herself, but I still felt terrible.

“Robin was embarrassed,” Anna went on. “After she tried to blackmail Pretty Face with my e-mail, she was too ashamed to contact me again. But during our lunch, we renewed our friendship. She seemed to take an honest interest in my struggles with the frog toxin. She seemed so sincere, I flat-out asked her: If I had evidence to show the world that Pretty Face was endangering their customers, would she help me? And she said yes.”

“Robin agreed to help you,” I said, still not quite believing it. “So what happened?”

“I went straight from our lunch to my office,” Anna replied. “I immediately uploaded every e-mail or memo that I had written on the subject onto two flash drives: one for Robin and one for myself. Not just my own writings, but the responses I’d gotten from the higher-ups. Together, the correspondence painted a pretty dire picture for Pretty Face cosmetics. They proved that Pretty Face had been made aware of the potential dangers of using the frog toxin and that they had chosen not to do anything.”

I nodded. “And?” I prodded.

“The next morning, I met Robin for breakfast and gave her a flash drive. I planned to alert the press that day, and Robin’s files would be my backup, in case anything happened to my drive or to my work computer.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, still trying to understand what had happened. “So then you went to the press…?”

“No.” Anna shook her head vigorously. “Nancy, I never got that far. Within half an hour of giving Robin her flash drive, I was attacked. I was walking from the subway station to my office when a man jumped out of a town car, grabbed me, and pulled me inside. He pushed a rag over my mouth, and the next thing I remember is waking up in the Pretty Face corporate office. Tied up and groggy. And then you found me there.”

I shook my head, stunned, trying to make sense of it all. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You gave the flash drive to Robin — and within half an hour you were kidnapped? What reason would Robin have to betray you?”

Anna shrugged. “I’m not even sure she did, Nancy. I wasn’t careful enough about hiding my actions or my feelings about the toxin. It’s possible that Pretty Face was following me, and decided to stop me themselves.”

“Did you tell anyone else that you were going to the press?” I asked. “Anyone other than Robin?”

Anna shook her head. “I trusted Robin,” she replied. “But perhaps it was a mistake.”

I was quiet. Robin was bitter about the pageant when I spoke to her back in River Heights, but I couldn’t imagine why she would agree to help Anna, and then betray her. Unless it had to do with money…. Robin and Piper’s family struggled with money, and Robin had been very honest with me about her need for the prize money that came with the Miss Pretty Face crown. Could Robin have betrayed Anna in the hopes of selling her secrets back to Pretty Face?

Suddenly the sound of a car’s rumbling engine approached from around the side of the building and the vehicle parking in what I assumed was the rear, where the broken window faced. My heart thumped in my chest as Anna faced me with a wide-eyed look.

We had company.

But who would it be? I knew I’d given George a bizarre assortment of puzzle pieces to put together — basement, chickens, Hyungkoo43, city. I knew, deep down, that it would be nearly impossible for her to figure out where were and get to us in the tiny amount of time that had elapsed. I also knew that because I had called her on Anna’s phone, she might be facing some Pretty Face goons of her own. Still, I couldn’t help but hope against hope to hear George’s voice on the other side of the door. Either George had found us just in time… or this adventure was about to take a very dangerous turn.

The car door slammed. Anna and I looked at each other. We could have easily gotten up and moved to look out the broken window, but I think we were both too terrified to move. Anna bit her lip. I reached over and took her hand. The sound of footsteps walked across a paved surface and then disappeared. A few seconds later we heard them approaching the heavy, locked door near the wire shelves.

Keys. The jingle of someone picking the right one, placing it into the lock. The lock mechanism shifted, metal against metal, something that would normally barely register but that sounded deafening in the silence.

The heavy door swung open.

“Well, well, well.” Adam Bedrossian stood in the doorway, framed by fluorescent lights in the hallway behind him. He smiled an evil smile. “Managed to sneak your PDA in here, eh, Anna? How very Veronica Mars of you.”

I turned to Anna and gulped.

What was Adam about to do to us?

What had become of Bess and George?

And… who was Veronica Mars?

CAUGHT ON CAMERA

Adam moved into the storage room, still with the same cold smile on his face. “Did you really think you could get away from us?” he asked, looking from Anna to me. “Get your friends here and, what, break out of the basement? Run to the cops, have us arrested, happily ever after?”

I looked at Anna and swallowed. Adam’s eyes looked as hard and black as coal.

“Pretty Face cosmetics has many allies in the NYPD,” he went on coolly. “One phone call, and I could be there to pick you girls up. Until this pageant is over and the new Perfect Face campaign is kicked off, you girls had better get used to my company.”

“What happened to Bess and George?” I demanded. I felt so frozen, it surprised me to hear my own voice. But I had to know.

“Bess and George,” Adam responded, lingering over my friends’ names. “Bess and George. Ah yes. I think it’s better that you don’t know.”

A sharp blade of fear pierced my stomach. “What did you do to them?” I demanded, my voice rising in pitch. “Where are they?”

But Adam just waved his hand as though he wouldn’t entertain my questions any longer. “You and your friends are very lucky that Kyle McMahon is in charge,” he said simply.

“Why?” asked Anna.

“Because Kyle has a daughter your age,” Adam replied as though it were obvi- ous. “He has some sympathy for you. If it were up to me…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. My insides already felt like ice.

Adam stepped forward and held out his hand. “The phone, please.”

Anna glanced at me and then pulled it out of her pocket, where she’d stashed it. “The battery is dead,” she explained in a pleading voice. “Look, we pose no danger to you. We can’t contact anyone. If you leave us here, we promise to behave —”

“QUIET!” Adam bellowed, taking the phone and, in one quick motion, dropping it to the cement floor and crushing it under his foot. Even though the battery was dead, I cringed to see the phone destroyed — our last, and only, connection to the outside world was gone.

Adam went on in a low voice. “You didn’t only make the phone call. You also broke a window and activated an alarm. Don’t try to paint yourselves as a pair of harmless kittens. You are both instigators; troublemakers. If you were capable of behaving, you wouldn’t be here in the first place!” He glared at Anna. “You don’t know when to let something go. Pretty Face hasn’t done anything wrong. We have no evidence that the ingredients in Perfect Face have ever done any harm to anyone. So you need to just let it go!”

Then he turned to me. “And you. You’re relentless, an instigator of the worst kind. You never know when to leave well enough alone. First, poking around into Portia Leoni’s dethroning. You practically uprooted our whole pageant! And then you had to go poking around the Pretty Face offices in New York! Kyle was right to choose you to win the regional pageant, so that we could bring you to New York and keep an eye on you. I only wish we had done something sooner about your snooping!”

I gulped. So that was why I’d won the regional pageant. Oh well. I’d had a feeling it wasn’t because of my sparkling rendition of “On My Own” from Les Misérables or my knack for grace and etiquette.

“What will happen to us now?” Anna asked, and I felt a wave of regret. If only I hadn’t snooped around and found Anna’s PDA! If I hadn’t called George, we would at least be safe in our basement captivity. Not to mention Bess and George would be safe.

Adam shrugged. “That depends on how you behave,” he said lightly, but he didn’t meet our eyes. I had a terrible feeling that Adam didn’t know what would ultimately happen to us. And to be the captive of an unsure person, particularly a person like Adam who was worried about what we might do when released back into the world, was bad news.

Adam reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of zip ties, the sort of thing you might use to tie off a garbage bag. The narrow strips of plastic were surprisingly strong, and I had seen them used to bind prisoners’ hands. “There is a car waiting outside,” he said. “You will let me tie your hands, and you will cooperate with me, because you do not want to know what will happen to you if you don’t.”

I glanced at Anna and nodded almost imperceptibly. At this point we had to cooperate. We had no other option.

Adam came forward to secure my hands behind my back with the zip ties, then did the same to Anna. “Now we go,” he said.

Taking us each roughly by the arm, he led us out of the storage room, down the fluorescent-lit hall, and up a set of stairs to an outside door.

The sunshine was dazzlingly bright, and I squinted my eyes, which had been surrounded by darkness for too long. I craned my neck, greedily trying to take in all the information I could, but all I observed before I was shoved toward the car was that we were near a large, industrial building, and the daylight suggested that it was mid-to late afternoon.

The car was a nondescript black town car, and as we approached, the driver exited the vehicle and opened the back door. He glanced at us quickly, not meeting our eyes. I wondered just what he knew.

I hesitated as Adam pushed us toward the car. All of the experts say to never get into a car with a captor. Once you’re in the car, they can take you anywhere, do anything to you. But what choice did Anna and I have? We were not only protecting our safety by playing along, but the safety of Bess and George…

Suddenly the quiet afternoon was shattered by a loud, distorted voice. “Smile!” it screamed, so loudly amplified that I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. “You’re on camera!”

CAB CHASE

“What the —” Adam dropped my arm and Anna’s as he craned his neck to find the source of the voice. “Who’s there?!”

I was craning my neck too. With one quick look behind me, I found them: Bess and George! Bess was shouting into a voice distorter, probably the same one Piper had used a few days earlier to stage a protest falsely accusing Pretty Face of cruelty to animals. And George was, indeed, filming the whole scene with a tiny digital camcorder.

Waves of relief crashed over me. I don’t think I had ever been so happy to see my friends.

I didn’t have much time to bask in the news, though. Right after I spotted them, Adam whipped around and lurched after Bess and George. “You there!” he cried. “Put the camera down or you’ll regret it!”

George was already backing away, still filming Adam’s approach with the camcorder. “Nancy! Run!” Bess screamed into the voice distorter, right before she and George made a break for it themselves. I glanced at Anna. “We should split up,” I instructed quickly, already moving to run off to my left. “We’ll be harder to catch!”

Anna nodded, and we were off.

With no time to figure out where Bess and George had headed, I just picked a random direction and started running as fast as I could. It was hard to keep my balance with my hands still bound behind my back, but I did the best I could. We seemed to be in a small industrial park bordering the water. Since I couldn’t see land on the other side, I assumed we were actually looking at the ocean, and not the Hudson or East Rivers.

I ran until I could barely breathe — around buildings, across driveways, down alleys. In front of an older-looking factory I found an old-fashioned boot scraper, a piece of metal that workers in the old days would use to literally scrape the dirt off their boots. Leaning down, I managed to hook a piece of my plastic bindings over its edge, then pulled up with all of my might. The force of the breaking plastic knocked me over, but my hands were finally free.

Getting back to my feet, I took a left, and realized that the whole industrial area bordered on a small neighborhood of shops and apartments. I ran across the street and kept running — up, down, around buildings — any place I could find. Finally I paused in the middle of a crowded boulevard, looking around for any sign of Bess, George, Anna, or — gulp — Adam. Amazingly, I didn’t see any of them. As I turned toward the direction I was headed, trying to figure out what to do next, a sign on a storefront just to my left caught my attention: HYUNGKOO’S LIVE POULTRY. In spite of my panic, I smiled. That explained the chicken noises — and the source of the Wi-Fi connection I’d picked up.

But then I made a scary realization: If I could hear the chickens from the basement we’d been held in, that meant I must be very close to where I started. I must have run in a huge circle. And that meant that Adam must be close by…

“Hey!”

A car screeched to a halt next to me. Instinctively I cowered, but then the rational part of my brain recognized the voice as George’s. Flooded with relief, I looked up just in time to see George’s arm reaching out to grab me and pull me into the cab.

“Oof!” I cried as my knees hit the backseat.

“Come on, Nance,” Bess said impatiently, reaching over to help me in and nodding to the driver to keep going. “We don’t have a ton of time. We just passed Adam, and he was headed back to his car!”

George slammed the door behind me, and the cab started moving. Sprawled across my two friends in the backseat, I struggled to get up and get my bearings. “How… where…?”

“We’re in Queens,” Bess supplied, instinctively understanding my confusion. “Waaay out near JFK Airport; practically on Long Island.”

“We got here just in time,” George added, leaning over to squeeze my arm. “Sheesh, Nance, we were so worried! Just a few seconds later, we would have missed you, and you’d be on your way who-knows-where with that creepy guy. Good thing you were still in the city! If we’d had to go any farther, we wouldn’t have found you in time.”

I looked around, trying to make sense of all this. “How did you find me?”

George shrugged. “I plugged Hyung Koo and New York into a search engine.” She explained. “Hyung Koo’s Live Poultry at 43 Belleview Boulevard was the first thing to pop up. I remembered what you’d said about the chickens, and I knew it was the right place.”

“So we grabbed a cab,” Bess continued. “We went to Hyung Koo’s, and then we just kind of searched the area. We spotted that industrial park on the water, and there was something called PFD Research Laboratories. We decided to check it out, and that’s when we spotted you and Anna being led to the car.”

I laughed, amazed at my friends’ resourcefulness. “And the voice distorter?”

George and Bess looked at each other sheepishly, and George laughed. “We borrowed it from Piper,” she admitted. “We didn’t have a real plan for saving you, but we figured it might be a good distraction tactic.”

I shook my head. “For not having a plan, you did pretty well.”

Bess grinned. “Anytime, Nancy.”

Suddenly I remembered what Adam had said. “Did anybody… threaten you?” I asked. “Chase after you, frighten you?”

George looked surprised. “No. Why would they?”

I sighed. “Anna told me when she regained consciousness that the phone I used to call you was bugged. Pretty Face immediately knew that we were conscious, that we had a phone, and that I had called you.”

Bess shrugged. “I guess we got out of the hotel before they could find us,” she said. “We climbed into this cab, and by then we must have been pretty much untraceable.”

I sighed again, with relief this time. We were driving out of the residential section, getting to the wide street that separated the waterfront industrial park from the rest of the neighborhood. Suddenly it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Anna since I left the industrial park — and that the last time I’d seen her, her hands had been bound. Had she been caught? Was she alone? Frightened?

I knew I couldn’t leave her here, all alone — or worse, with Adam.

“Guys,” I said, “we have to find Anna.”

Bess frowned. “We’ve been trying,” she said. “No trace of her. I’m afraid…”

But just then, as if she’d read my mind, I spotted her. She was running out of the industrial park, and it looked as though she’d found a way to free her hands.

She looked terrified! She ran, panting, into the street, but had to stop as a car raced by her. And then I saw who was behind her. Adam. He was hot on her heels, only about twenty feet behind her, if that. Anna looked desperately into the street as more cars sped by.

“There she is!” I cried. “And Adam’s right behind her. We have to get her!”

“Stop the cab!” Bess cried, leaning over to address the driver. “Right here. If we can just get her attention…”

But George was way ahead of her. “ANNA!” she screamed, opening the door and waving furiously. “ANNA! OVER HERE!”

Anna turned and spotted George, her face flooding with relief. But just as she saw us, so did Adam. And his expression was murderous. Anna started running toward our cab, but Adam was gaining on her….

By the time Anna reached the cab, Adam was just a couple of feet away. George leaned out of the cab and grabbed Anna’s arms, pulling her into the car and sending her sprawling across the backseat, the same way she’d done with me.

Adam reached after her, and his arm was inside the taxi, blocking us from closing the door. His eyes were dark and cold, and he looked furious, ready to do almost anything to keep us from leaving him behind.

“You were so close,” he chided in a low, serpentine voice. “You could have left without her. But now you’ll all suffer….”

All three of us were clawing at his arm, trying to push it — and him — out and away from the door, so we could close it and get away. Our cab driver saw what was going on, too, and had turned to watch the action.

“Only four people in a cab!” he yelled, leaning back to push Adam’s hand out. “You get your own cab!”

Between the four of us pushing Adam, and Anna kicking at him with her feet, we had almost managed to push him out of the car. My heart was pounding in my ears, my whole body filled with adrenalin. If Adam got in, if we didn’t get away from him, then this cab driver wasn’t going to be able to save us from whatever fate Adam had in mind.

“Start driving!” Bess begged as she pushed mightily and got Adam’s arm out of the backseat.

“Not with the door open!” the cabbie insisted.

Adam managed to grab onto the door frame, his fingers clawing desperately at the side of the door. “You won’t get away…,” he threatened. But just then, Anna righted herself on the backseat and lunged toward Adam’s hand with her head. In one quick motion she opened her mouth and bit down hard on Adam’s clinging fingers.

“Owwwwwwww!” He howled.

But we didn’t hear any more. Bess took advantage of his momentary weakness and shoved him hard, sending him sprawling onto the pavement. I reached after her, grabbed the door, and slammed it shut, locking it securely.

“Okay,” Anna addressed the driver, sounding surprisingly put together as she wiped her mouth and sat upright in the seat. “We’re going to the Horatio Hotel in Manhattan, please.”

The driver pounded the gas, and we were off.

TRAIN TRACKS

“He’s watching us,” Bess complained, keeping an eye on Adam Bedrossian as he grew smaller and smaller in the rearview window. “He’s writing something down….”

“The medallion number,” Anna said with a sigh, putting her head in her hands and moaning. “Ugh. This isn’t over, guys.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “What does it mean if he has our medallion number?”

Anna pointed to a video screen that was nested onto the back of the cab’s front seat, facing us. “See that?” she asked.

We glanced at the video. It was playing a touristy little intro to New York City — Visit the Empire State Building! See a Broadway show!

“Yeah,” George said slowly.

Anna rubbed her eyes, looking tired. “They were installed in almost all New York City cabs a while back. The cabs have those kinds of video screens. The screen makes it possible to pay by credit card, and” — she sighed — “it also has GPS.”

It hit George first. “So anyone could tell where we are right now?”

Anna shook her head. “That’s one good thing. Only the police and cab companies have access to the GPS information. But if Pretty Face has friends among the police…”

“Which is totally possible…,” I supplied, remembering what Adam had told us in the research facility.

“Then we could be in trouble,” Anna finished.

We were quiet for a minute or two. The cab was flying down a main boulevard, fast enough to send us lurching forward every time he reluctantly hit the brakes. I didn’t know what to do. Stay in the cab, and there was a small but decent chance Adam would find us. Or get out of the cab in a completely unfamiliar neighborhood, not knowing if there was a subway nearby, and with the potential for Adam to still find us by poking around wherever the cabbie let us out.

We stopped at a red light at a four-way intersection. “Uh-oh,” Bess murmured, looking to the left. “Well, there’s that question answered.”

It was a black town car. Apparently Adam’s town car — I trusted that Bess knew cars well enough to recognize it even after one brief sighting.

“Guys…,” said Bess nervously.

Anna leaned toward the driver just as the light turned green. “Punch the gas!” she cried. “Please! Sir, there’s an extra fifty dollars in it for you if you can keep us away from that black car.”

The cabbie looked nonplussed. “What do you girls think this is?” he asked, easing his foot off the brake for the first time in the entire ride and slowly, safely, pulling across the intersection. “The movies?”

Just then the black car screeched into action. Running the red light, it darted into traffic, causing a cacophony of honks and beeps as cars screeched out of its way. It was aimed right at us.

“Sir, please!” Anna pleaded. “This is an emergency!”

The cabbie relented and then hit the gas, hard, and we barreled down the boulevard. Adam’s car stayed behind us, unable to keep up but never more than a few feet behind. The cabbie was watching him the whole time in the rearview mirrors.

“What are you girls involved in?” he asked, braking quickly to avoid a bike messenger and then barreling into the lane next to him. “I don’t want any trouble. I want you out of my cab!”

“Please, sir,” Anna pleaded again, turning around to look back and forth between the cabbie and Adam’s driver. “Please! Just get us out of this safely.”

The chase went on for too many blocks to count, our cabbie complaining bitterly the whole time and threatening to leave us on the next curb but never doing it. Horns honked, brakes screeched, and more than once we missed a full collision by inches. Bess, George, Anna, and I sat in a silent trance, too frightened to open our mouths to disturb the temporary bubble of safety we’d wandered into.

Finally, at a traffic light, we pulled away just as it turned from yellow to red. Adam’s driver punched the gas behind us, but suddenly there was a huge boom as a truck advanced and cut them off! We heard the screech of the town car’s brakes, and while the truck still blocked Adam’s view, Anna convinced our cabbie to turn down a side street and make a confusing series of turns that would (hopefully) leave Adam dumbfounded.

“Oh my gosh,” Bess said breathlessly, sitting up in her seat. “Oh my gosh. Do you think we could have lost him?”

Anna’s expression was still steely. “Only for a few minutes,” she insisted, telling the cabbie to pull over at the next intersection. “We have to get out here. Once Adam places his call to whoever and finds the cab with the GPS, he’ll be right on us again.”

I looked around. “Get out? Here?” I asked. We were in what looked like a quiet neighborhood with old, brick apartment buildings and the occasional Laundromat. Where would we even hide? “Do you know where we are?”

Anna didn’t answer me, pressing a wad of bills into the cabbie’s hand as the meter clicked and printed out a receipt. I could tell she was paying way more than the metered fare. “Let’s go,” she said, and we opened the door and slipped out. “Follow me.”

Bess and George and I got out, following Anna down the street, into a driveway, around a building, down an alley. I tried to stay quiet for as long as possible, but as we cut across the third backyard, I had to say it. “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked Anna. But Anna didn’t respond. She was already focused on something, looking up- ward, her eyes focused on a point halfway up in the sky. I turned to follow her gaze and saw it: an elevated train. The subway.

“Come on,” she said briskly, cutting down another driveway and to the street, turning toward the train station. “We don’t have much time before he finds us.”

The four of us ran up the seemingly endless flights of steps to reach the station’s turnstiles, then up two more flights to the platform. We were at a stop on the 7 train, in a neighborhood that Anna told us was called Jackson Heights. “A friend of mine used to live here,” she explained, her eyes glued to the spot on the horizon where the train would appear. “I recognized a restaurant we used to eat at back on the main boulevard. I’ve spent a lot of time on this platform.”

In the middle of a lazy summer afternoon — for everyone else, at least — there were only a few other people waiting for a train. The air was strangely silent, with only the occasional noise of a car or the bark of a nearby dog. I looked at Bess and George; they looked as shell-shocked as I felt.

“Where are we going?” Bess asked finally. “Back to the hotel?”

I glanced at Anna, who shrugged, and nodded. “I guess so,” I replied. “I don’t feel safe in this neighborhood; Adam knows we’re here. If we go back to Manhattan, we can put our evidence together and go right to the police. Maybe I can even call my dad before we go… In case Pretty Face does have connections to the NYPD.”

“And our evidence consists of…,” Anna prompted.

“This.” George held up the tiny video camera, clicking a button so that it showed Adam leading Anna and I, hands still bound behind our backs, out of the research building and toward the car. “Obviously he’s holding you guys against your will. That’s enough to get him arrested.”

Bess nodded. “And as for everything else…” She paused. “What is everything else, Nance? What did you guys find out?”

I gulped, looking around at our fellow platform hangers. I didn’t know why I felt so unsafe in this area; any minute now, I expected to see Adam come running up the stairs to the platform. “It’s pretty much what I was afraid of,” I replied. “Perfect Face contains a frog toxin that may cause paralysis after continued use. Kyle and Adam know about it, and even though Anna recommended a ten-year study to really learn of the long-term effects, they still want to rush the product to market before any competitors beat them to it.”

George nodded solemnly, looking at Anna. “And you were the one who found out about the toxin in the first place?”

Anna nodded. “Yes. The frog is from Venezuela, and I remembered the indigenous people using it, but never for extended times. I found an article that suggested the ten-year study and brought it to Kyle’s attention. When they ignored me for a year, I decided to go to the press.” She frowned. “Big mistake. They found out somehow. And here we are.”

“Wow,” whispered Bess, touching her face. “Oh my gosh. That’s why Perfect Face feels so tingly!” She gulped. She looked devastated. I knew Bess had really loved the Perfect Face revitalizer, and had taken to wearing it every day since we got to New York.

“I’m sure you’re fine, Bess,” I put in. “You’ve only been using it for a few weeks. Anna is talking about the damage caused from using it for years.”

“Still.” Bess scrunched up her nose, then started making crazy expressions by moving her eyebrows, her cheekbones, her jaw. I realized she was trying to make sure she still had use of all her facial muscles. “I’ll never trust a cosmetics company again!”

Anna sighed and returned her gaze to the horizon. She was looking impatient now; fidgeting with her hands, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Anna shook her head. “I just don’t know where this train is,” she replied tersely. I met her eyes and realized that she was terrified. “It’s just, we’ve been here for almost ten minutes,” she went on, looking up and down the tracks. “If Adam does have access to the cab’s GPS, he knows where he let us out, and he probably knows this is the nearest subway station….”

I gulped, looking back over to the staircase. “You think he could be coming?”

Anna shrugged. “It’s likely.”

We were standing in the middle of the station, about ten feet from where the overhang ended and a chest-high wall separated the platform from the busy street below. I walked over to the wall, took a deep breath, and looked down at the street. A lone old woman exited a bodega with a small shopping cart, and a shaggy dog stood in a small yard behind a wire fence, barking at her. I craned my head to the left and then to the right, but they were the only signs of life on the street.

I breathed a sigh of relief. But wait: I couldn’t see the station entrance below us. He could be running up the stairs to the turnstiles right now. Or just steps away from the platform…

My heart was beginning to speed up, thumping rapidly. I was beginning to realize the danger of our situation. If the train came and we could get on it without Adam seeing us, we were golden. We could safely ride back to Manhattan and breathe a sigh of relief. But if the train didn’t come soon, we didn’t have many options. We could run down the stairs, not knowing whether we might meet Adam on the way down or at the bottom, but then where could we go?

We were standing on a platform fifty feet above the city. Trapped.

I walked back to my friends. George looked at me with concern, and I could see that she was picking up on how tense Anna and I were. “Should we leave?” she asked nervously.

Anna shook her head. “Staying here is our best option,” she replied. “If the train comes before he does, we’ll be safe. If we leave, we don’t know what we’re running into, and he could still find us.”

Bess frowned. “How often do the trains usually come?” she asked.

Anna sighed. “Every ten minutes or so,” she replied. “But service can be a little slow on weekends.”

I followed her gaze toward the horizon, staring; willing a train to appear. Then I ran back to the wall. No one below now; even the dog had gone inside. But was Adam down there, directly below me? Was he starting up the steps right —

“Oh my gosh,” Bess cried, and I saw that she had run over to the wall on the opposite side of the platform shelter. “Oh my gosh. Look!”

The three of us ran over to Bess and followed her pointing finger with our eyes. There he was, down a side street below: Adam Bedrossian, in his dark suit, running toward the train station.

“Oh no,” I cried breathlessly. “What do we do now?”

Anna shook her head. I could tell she didn’t know. Two staircases led down from our platform, and if we tried to run back to the street, we’d be running right into Adam. I followed Anna’s gaze to the outbound platform opposite ours. It had a separate stairway, but it was separated from us by two sets of tracks and several scary-looking electric