Not A Girl Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

knives?”
    “You collect those, too?”
    “My mother was a castrating rhymes-with-witch. It
    was a no-brainer.”
    “I think we might have something in common.”
    “We have a lot in common,” he said, studying me in-
    tently. “Ever heard of a glitter trap?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “You set it up over a person’s desk. You run a string from the back of one of the drawers, up the wall, into an acoustic tile ceiling. You’ve got to have an acoustic tile ceiling.”
    I nodded.
    “When the person goes to open the drawer, boom!”
    Boom! I nodded again.
    “It triggers a mousetrap. Snap!”
    Snap!
    “Up snaps a thin card covering a funnel, releasing a
    handful of glitter which falls through a hole in the ceiling tile onto the person’s head.”
    “You have a very lyrical sense of humor.”
    “First, the muffled noise, then the slow, glittery descent of a cloud of brightly colored dust. You get me, Cece, unlike certain persons in my employ. I set a glit-N O T
    A
    G I R L
    D E T E C T I V E
    27
    ter trap for Mitchell yesterday. He was positively ker-flummoxed, poor thing.”
    “I can hear every word you’re saying,” Mitchell
    yelled from the other room.
    “I used to place strands of hair across my Charlie’s Angels diary so I’d know if my brothers were trying to read it,” I volunteered.
    “Were they?”
    “They couldn’t have cared less.”
    “Let’s nix the knives. I want to show you my Nancy
    Drews.”
    At last.
    The stairs were covered with a rose-patterned kilim.
    “Is it from Turkey?” I asked, following him up. Gam-
    bino and his first wife had gone to Turkey on their honeymoon. He’d kept the rug.
    “Turkey by way of Pottery Barn,” Mitchell inter-
    jected snarkily from the bottom of the staircase.
    “Be a dear and marinate the chicken,” Edgar yelled
    without turning his head.
    We entered a small bedroom decorated all in blue—
    blue carpeting, blue floral wallpaper, blue checkered bedspread, and three narrow blue bookcases holding
    Edgar Edwards’s world-famous collection of Nancy
    Drews.
    “Blue was my mother’s favorite color,” he said. “She
    used to stay in this room when she visited.”
    “Did she get you started on Nancy Drew?”
    “Don’t get me started on what that woman got me
    started on.”
    He ran his finger across the top row of books, pris-
    tine in their blue linen covers and sparkling white dust jackets. The first thirty-eight Nancy Drew titles were 28
    S U S A N
    K A N D E L
    released by Grosset & Dunlap between 1930 and 1961.
    Of these, the first twenty-five are considered the real deal, and all but three of those were written by an in-trepid former Toledo Blade reporter named Mildred Wirt Benson. (Mildred bolted temporarily when the
    syndicate wanted to cut her pay from $125 to $75 per
    book during the height of the Great Depression, but
    came back at her usual fee for The Clue of the Broken Locket .)
    “My Blue Nancys,” he said. “Never been touched—
    well, more or less. Like our heroine, come to think of it!”
    “May I?”
    He handed me some thin white gloves. “Please.”
    I put on the gloves and pulled out a copy of The Sign of the Twisted Candles, which had my favorite cover.
    Grace Horton/Nancy Drew was wearing a white cloche
    hat pulled down low over her eyes, a white satin dress with a skinny red patent leather belt and matching
    clutch purse, plus strappy white stilettos. Russell
    Tandy, the illustrator, made his career in fashion and it showed. He loved Grace/Nancy in red and white.
    “You’d look good in that,” said Edgar.
    “Actually, I think I’d look better in this,” I said,
    pulling out The Message in the Hollow Oak, which featured Grace/Nancy in a honey-colored bias-cut skirt and navy-blue cropped jacket, very foxy-girl-on-the-go.
    “Oh, yes. You’re absolutely right.”
    There was also a complete set of “Yellow Nancys,”
    which comprised the revised texts to books 1 through
    38, plus 39 through 56. These had no