The Clue in the Secret Shack
CHAPTER I
Trapped!
"Someone’s coming!" George exclaimed. "Hurry -- Nancy, Bess, into the shack!"
Amateur sleuth Nancy Drew, an attractive strawberry blonde being impersonated on the Holodeck by Fatima Michelle Vieuchanger, sucked in her breath sharply. She squeezed through the creaky door into a dark, cramped space. Her friend George Fayne was a spunky brunette, proud of her boy’s name. Indeed, her part in this mystery was being played by a young man, Nguyen Van Tho, a Vietnamese immigrant on sabbatical from his dinnerware-juggling career.
"What is all this stuff?" Nancy asked, her pretty blue eyes struggling to adjust to the blackness.
"I feel a lot of boxes. Maybe some kind of supplies," Bess said, breathless with excitement. Bess Marvin was George’s rather overweight but pretty blonde cousin (later, Bess becomes bulemic). "Why don’t we slide this big one -- ."
"Wait!" cried Nancy. "That box could be booby-trapped!"
George bit her lip. As a child in Vietnam, Nguyen had lost both hands to a booby-trapped can of Spam, and now George and Bess and Nancy were hot on the trail of the so-called Unabomber, allegedly Theodore Kaczynski. Kaczynski was on trial in California for killing three people and wounding 23 others with mail bombs meticulously constructed in a ten-foot by twelve-foot shed that used to be nearby. That shed had been packed up and shipped off to the trial on a large flatbed truck, but the alleged terrorist-luddite’s small plot of land still swarmed with FBI agents, white power fanatics, survivalists, anti-technology freaks, and reporters.
When Nancy, George, and Bess had agreed to accompany Nancy’s father Carson Drew, a prominent attorney, on a business trip to Montana, they’d hardly expected to be investigating a mystery. But now, here, they found themselves in a closet-size shack in the wilderness outside the tiny town of Lincoln, with night falling fast.
"Kosinski is Polish for goatherd," Nancy informed her friends.
Thwunk. They heard a loud thud, followed by the sound of footsteps receding. Someone had been listening to them! They rushed to the door only to find it had been barred from the outside. They were trapped!