Straight down, Ned and the others looked tiny. Nancy felt so giddy she had to clutch the branch even tighter to keep her balance.
“Almost there.” She angled a look up at the plastic snowflake, which glowed in the sunlight just two branches over her head.
Taking a deep breath, she placed her boot on the next branch and pulled herself up. She steadied herself, then reached for a higher branch.
With a chilling, cracking sound, the branch beneath her gave way. Nancy gasped as her boot slipped off.
“Noooo!” she cried.
In the next instant she felt herself falling into thin air.
13
Into Thin Air
Nancy plummeted downward. Her heart stopped in her chest as she caught a dizzying glimpse of snow-covered trees far below.
Throwing her arms out, she grabbed a branch and her body jerked to a stop.
“Ooooh!” Nancy’s arms felt as if they had been yanked from their sockets.
“Nancy!” Shouts of alarm rose up from below.
Grunting, Nancy swung her legs around to grab the tree trunk with them. Her hands started to slip on the icy branch, and she wasn’t sure how she did it, but at last she was sitting firmly on a solid branch.
“I’m … all right!” she called down, her chest heaving.
“What happened?” Ned’s worried voice rose up to her.
Nancy looked up, eyeing the broken branch. It had split just inches from the trunk. Now the branch hung at right angles to its original position, exposing the pale, splintered wood beneath the heavy bark.
After taking a few deep breaths, Nancy climbed up for a closer look. She frowned when she saw the smooth slice in the wood. The cut ran about two thirds of the way through.
Someone had sawn through the branch.
Nancy shivered, thinking of what might have happened if she hadn’t stopped her fall. Then, pushing the thought firmly from her head, she climbed the rest of the way to the plastic snowflake and opened it.
Four paper clues lay folded inside. So we’re the first team to get the clue, thought Nancy. But someone came here first and cut through that branch.
Nancy climbed quickly back to the ground.
“I was so scared for you,” Ned said, giving her a hug. “That could have been a nasty accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Nancy told him. “Someone sawed through that branch.”
“What!” Ned, C.J., Grant, George, and Randy all cried at the same time.
“Oh, man.” C.J. shook his head in disgust. “Someone has tried to stop us from getting every single clue.”
“But who?” George wondered aloud. “Joy?”
Nancy had been running over the list of suspects in her own mind. “I’m pretty sure Joy is the one who took my hat,” she said. “Maybe this is what she did in the woods last night.”
“What about Dennis?” Grant asked. “He went AWOL when his teammates were brainstorming the second clue yesterday. He could have come here then and sawed through the branch.”
“But how could Dennis have known where this snowflake was hidden?” Ned asked. “As of this morning, his team didn’t even have the clue from the administration building.”
Nancy grabbed her ski pole and poked the snow with it while she thought. “Someone tried to threaten Mr. Lorenzo into handing over the answers to the clues. Maybe it was Dennis,” she suggested.
“Maybe,” said George. “But if Dennis got all the answers, why is his team so far behind in the Clues Challenge?”
It was a question for which Nancy didn’t have an answer.
Nancy shot a surreptitious glance at Randy as she pulled her yellow team hat farther down on her head. Was he the blackmailer and saboteur?
She shook herself. It was a pretty far-fetched theory. So far, the only thing implicating Randy was Mr. Lorenzo’s intense dislike of him.
“Heads up, everyone. Look who’s here,” said C.J., breaking into her thoughts.
Nancy looked up to see Joy ski toward them through the woods. Hanna and the three other girls from Delta Tau stretched in a line behind her, skiing forward at a spirited pace.
“Looks like we’re ahead this time,” C.J. said to Joy as she came to a stop next to him. He nodded toward the slip of paper in Nancy’s hand.
“Not for long.” Joy gave a shrug, glancing at the clue. She popped off her skis and dropped her backpack. “I’ll be back in a flash.”
“Be careful near the top,” Nancy warned. “There’s a broken branch.”
“Someone sawed through most of it, so it would snap when it was stepped on,” George added.
