Lost in London (9 page)

I also heard Caroline say to Ellie, “Look, we need to make sure J.J. has a good time, and we have to keep the Bakery Bozo off our backs.”

Ellie said, “Where I am, fun follows, and the boys have Pluto under control. No worries, Carrie.”

“Don’t call me Carrie,” Caroline said.

“Gotcha,” Ellie said.

I was so happy to hear that Caroline wanted me to have a memorable visit to London. She was sincere, wasn’t she?

I felt like a celebrity in my new duds, makeup, and straightened hair. I found Ellie thumbing through a fashion magazine while Sam and Gordo huddled over the iPad. When she saw me, Caroline checked me out from hair to shoes. A quick jump of her eyebrows told me she was pleasantly surprised with my look. She dropped her feet from the kitchen table to the floor and said, “She’s back. The American of the week.” To her friends she said, “We’re off to see the sights of London!” Her words sounded excited, but something about her tone said otherwise, I think.

“Oh, yeah,” Ellie said. She put on a crocheted wool cap. It was so cute. I never thought of wearing a cap like that. It covered her spiky hair but let her double earrings show. I wanted double earrings and a cap. Maybe I could get those today.

Sam finally stopped reading and caught a glimpse of me. He didn’t look long, but brushed some longish hairs in front of his face and packed the iPad in a pack with one strap that he hung diagonally across his chest.

Thankfully, I had my new purse, or I might have been jealous of that pack. I really preferred having free arms, but I liked having a stylish purse too. I flipped my fab hair over the strap. It felt good.

Gordo said “Ooh lala” about my appearance. “Sit tight. I need a minute to freshen up if I’m gonna hang with this one.” And then he locked himself in the powder room.

When he returned, his collar was snapped up and I smelled a hint of cologne. We were ready for Liam to take us to the train station.

“Where are we going first?” Gordo asked, looking at his reflection in the steel refrigerator and moving a hair to where he wanted it to be.

“I suppose we should ask J.J.,” Caroline said. “This week is all about her.”

Normally that would’ve made me do a
Yay, me!
But something in her voice sounded just a little sarcastic. No one else seemed to notice, so maybe I was being overly sensitive. So:
Yay, me!

“I’d like to go to the Tower of London,” I said, with very little confidence that was the right answer. “I’ve been dying to go there.” Then I laughed because I said “dying.” “Get it? Because King Henry killed so many of his wives there?”

Gordo and Sam cracked a bit of a smile at my joke. I didn’t think Ellie got it, but she laughed anyway, probably to be polite.

“Then off we go to the Tower,” Caroline said. “If we make it quick, we’ll have time to see the new zombie picture.”

“Oh, right!” Ellie said. “I absolutely cannot wait to see that picture. I hear it’s scary and gory. ‘The bloodier the better,’ that’s what I always say.” She got her face very close to mine, looked me in the eye, and said, “OOOOH! I am so excited. After the picture maybe we can get manis. I really need one. Look.” She held out her hand with chipped black polish.

“Ditto,” Gordo said. He held out his hand too, but he didn’t have chipped polish. “My cuticles are so bad.”

“TD,” Ellie said about his nails. No one knew what
she meant. “Total Disaster,” she explained to our questioning faces. “Duh.”

“Not me,” Sam said. His nails were bitten as low as they could go.

“That’s fine,” Caroline said. “You can work on the Pluto project while we’re mani-ing. We’ve totally got to stay on top of that. I swear if I get in trouble because of that rat, I can’t be responsible for what I’ll do to him.”

Sam didn’t seem bothered by being told he’d be working on a research paper. He said, “This assignment isn’t hard. I don’t know why he can’t do it.”

“Fab,” Caroline said. “Then everything is peachy. We’ll jet through the Tower, catch the zombie picture, and get manis.”

“Sure,” I said, but honestly, I didn’t like the idea of rushing through the Tower of London to see a movie I could see at home, or rent on DVD. But getting my nails done sounded like a treat.

As we walked to the car, Caroline added, “I would love to think of a way to get even with the Swine of Sweets for making us do his work for him.”

No one commented that Caroline had said “us” even though she wasn’t doing anything for the Pluto project. I wondered about a way we could get our videos back and also make sure Sebastian got caught for cheating.
Caroline would probably be psyched if I came up with a plan.

Liam dropped us at the train station, and I followed the gang to the right platform.

Suddenly Gordo stopped and pointed to a screen overhead. “Look at the telly,” he said.

The reporter named Skye said,
“As we reported earlier today, there was a break-in at Daphne’s, during which some sophisticated electronic equipment was stolen. After a thorough inventory, it was determined that the loss was greater than originally suspected. A selection of power tools was also taken. The combination of items leads authorities to believe the robbers may have been collecting tools necessary for other crimes.”

“What exactly are the items that were stolen?”
Cole asked.

“That information hasn’t been released, Cole. But an interesting video has been attracting a lot of attention on the Internet. Let’s go to the clip.”

They ran the video that Sebastian had uploaded of Caroline and me trying on shoes.

“You can see by the date and time stamp that this video was taken at Daphne’s. No faces are visible in this clip, but the audio suggests it’s a local and an American girl.”

Cole asked,
“Are you saying these are the robbers?”

“Authorities haven’t said that, but these girls were in the store after closing on the same night,”
Skye said.
“I know I’d like to be loose in Daphne’s after closing, Cole. Can you imagine?”

“No I can’t, but I’d love it too. For now, let’s take a look at the weather.”

“That blasted Sebastian!” Caroline said. “Look what he’s done. He’s tied us to this robbery.”

“Was it heavy?” Ellie asked Caroline.

“What?”

“All that stuff?” Ellie asked. “Where did you put it?”

“For the love of the queen! We. Didn’t. Steal. Anything!” Caroline barked.

Ellie cowered a bit from the volume, then softly asked, “Are you sure?” Then, after seeing Caroline begin to boil red, loudly she said, “Never mind! I didn’t just say that. I swear, I didn’t. I heard it, so someone said something, but it wasn’t me. Maybe it was a ghost.”

“Maybe we should go to the police,” I suggested, trying to take the heat off Ellie.

“And tell them what, exactly? That we stayed in the store after closing and ran amok in every department all night long on the same night there was a major theft, but we had nothing to do with it? That sounds like it will work,” Caroline said. “Truly bril idea, J.J.”

“Maybe we should tell your father,” Gordo said. “He’s involved with Her Majesty’s government, isn’t he?”

Caroline looked at Gordo like he was stupid, a total moron.

“You know what?” Gordo asked. “Bad idea. Forget I mentioned it,” Gordo said.

“Gladly,” she said. “Look, no one can think we did this.” She asked Sam, “Can we get this Pluto project done early? And get the flash drive back? I don’t like the idea of the Dork of Danishes having photographic proof we were in Daphne’s that night.”

“Early?” Sam asked. “Sebastian was quite specific about the schedule.” (He said “schedule” like “sheh-dyul.”) “If we stick to his deadlines, we should be fine.” He said to Caroline, “You just can’t do anything for three days to make him mad.”

We stood in front of the Tower of London, which was much more than a single tower. There were multiple Gothic castlelike buildings in the complex.

“Let’s get a photo,” Caroline said. “J.J., you stand right in front here.”

Gordo already had his arm around me with a toothy grin exposed. I hadn’t noticed before, but braces must not be popular here, because they needed my orthodontist’s digits. Except Caroline, of course, who seemed effortlessly perfect.

Ellie crouched down in front of me and stretched her arms wide as if to say,
Ta-da!

Gordo reached out to a man walking by and said, “Excuse me, mate. Would you mind snapping our photo?”

The man agreed. Gordo had an arm over Caroline’s shoulder and the other over mine.

A second later we had a great shot. It was totally going into my photo montage.

“Let me text this to the stepmummy and Mrs. J.J., and we can move on.” Caroline fiddled with the phone. “Maybe this is what it’s like for a prisoner to have a tracking anklet that follows their every move.”

Was she really comparing texting sightseeing pics to our moms to being a prisoner?

Gordo must’ve been thinking the same thing, because he asked, “A little dramatic, eh?”

Maybe Caroline liked dramatic. I could do that. “I know, right? It’s like going around with a big green ogre on your back.”

Ellie jumped in at the mention of an ogre. “Maybe one that just ate a village of trolls. I think I saw a picture like that once. He popped the little trolls into his mouth like they were chips.”

Sam studied the castles. “I’m psyched,” he said. “For
the sightseeing, not the troll eating. And that’s saying something, because I like eating.”

“I think we know that,” I said. “I guess we need to get tickets to go in.”

Caroline sighed. “We don’t have to go in, do we? We can just hang out here and mock all the tourists walking by. I mean, unless you want to.” She said it like it was a ridiculously lame idea.

What can I say? I mean, of course I want to go in. I’m in London to see the sights, DUH!

I needed to make this more interesting than an average field trip.

I got an idea.

“Mocking the tourists sounds superfun,” I said to Caroline. “But I thought maybe you’d want to see the Crown Jewels. And, Ellie, I thought you might want to see the ghosts that haunt this place. Sam, the brochure I read said they have an assortment of royal chocolates in the gift shop.”

“I’d forgotten that the Crown Jewels were here,” Caroline said, reconsidering. “We didn’t see them on our school trip.”

Ellie said, “We didn’t see any ghosts then either. They probably don’t take schoolkids to the truly ghostly parts of the Tower, eh?”

“What are we waiting for?” Sam asked.

Yay, me!
I had gotten them a little interested.

We passed through the stone archway, on top of which was an iron gate that would be dropped to protect the royal court from threats.

Inside the Tower walls my eyes feasted on the old stone buildings. I imagined ladies in layered lacy dresses, maybe a poor fellow locked in a stockade, and a stray dog scampering for a scrap of bread.

We took a long bridge that passed over a grassy path. I overheard a tour guide, who was dressed in a yeoman’s tunic, saying that the plush greenway was once a moat. I took lots of pictures.

“The deep water was like a security system,” Sam added. “It was probably filled with man-eating fish.”

“Now,
that’s
cool,” Ellie said. “Too bad they filled it in.”

Caroline’s mobile rang. She answered it and spoke for just a second in hushed tones that I couldn’t decipher. “It was Stepmummy. She got the picture, and noticed J.J. wasn’t all smiles. I assured her you were having a grand old time.” Then she asked, “So, where are the jewels?”

I looked at the map. “For the Jewel House we need to go this way.”

“Then let’s head over there.” Caroline hooked her arm
into mine and walked with me like we were Dorothy and the lion parading down the yellow brick road. (I would be the lion in that scene.) I was continuing to follow the directions, when I saw something that I thought Ellie would be interested in. It had that horror-movie feel to it. “See this tower?” I asked her. “They call it the Bloody Tower.”