Puzzled, Nancy slipped out of her quilted satin jacket and held it up at arm’s length. Then she caught her breath.
A jagged slit ran the length of her jacket, from the collar to the waist. It looked as if someone had gone at it with a razor—a deadly sharp one.
11
Danger in Fashion
Nancy stared helplessly at her ruined jacket. She was only dimly aware that the train was pulling out of the station. Had the person who had slashed her coat boarded the train?
Suddenly alert, she tried to peer through the windows at the people left on the platform, hoping to spot a face she knew. But the train was already moving too quickly. She quickly scanned the crowd inside the train car. Again, there was no one familiar.
With a sigh, she went back to examining her jacket.
“Nancy, how awful!” said Bess.
“At least it was my jacket and not me” Nancy replied with a grim smile. “This time, anyway.”
Bess’s eyes widened. “You think it was a deliberate attack? Not just some crazy vandal?”
“I can’t believe a crazy vandal just happened to hit somebody who’s investigating a crime,” Nancy said. “That’s too much of a coincidence for me. No, I think we just got a warning.”
“So what do we do?” Bess asked uneasily.
“We go on with what we planned,” Nancy told her. “Actually this is encouraging. Obviously we’re getting close enough to the bad guys to worry them.”
Bess put her hand through the long slit in Nancy’s jacket. “They’re getting close enough to us to worry me,” she said. “How did they know we were down here?”
“Somebody must have followed us from Carlo’s.” Nancy said. She draped the damaged jacket over her left arm as she clung to a pole. “Somebody who knows what we look like. Which makes me suspect that we’ve already met the kidnapper—if it is a kidnapper—or at least one of his accomplices.”
“Miklos?” Bess suggested. “When we saw him earlier, he looked mad enough to cut up somebody’s jacket and the person inside it. And he certainly has it in for Carlo.”
“He does now, since Carlo fired him,” Nancy pointed out. “But why would he have kidnapped Cindy yesterday morning? Unless he was already working for somebody who wanted to sabotage the shoot.”
“Like Paul Norman?” Bess said. “You did say that when we saw him in the hallway yesterday afternoon, there seemed to be another person there. What if it was Miklos, meeting secretly with Norman?”
Nancy thought for a moment. “Possibly,” she replied. “But Norman isn’t the only candidate. Like you said earlier, Miklos could be working for Amalgamated Mills. There’s still something fishy about the kidnapping part, but at any rate, next time I talk to Carlos, I’ll ask for Miklos’s address and phone number so we can start investigating him seriously.”
Two stops later, the girls stepped off the train and went upstairs to the street. The El station was right below Waybridge’s, a big, top-of-the-line department store. They pushed through revolving doors into the elegant calm of the store’s ground floor.
Just inside the entrance, Bess nudged Nancy and pointed toward a poster. Seaside Juniors, it said, over a stylized drawing of girls in summer wear. The Place on Three at Four Today.
“I wonder how many people tried to find the Place on Four at Three today,” Bess joked.
Nancy smiled, then checked her watch. “Let’s find Andreas before the show starts,” she suggested.
They took the escalator to the third floor, then found their way through a maze of boutiques to The Place. A bank of lush green plants, strung with tiny white lights, separated the area from the rest of the store. Several people were already sitting at marble-topped tables set in front of a low stage with a short runway. Most of the crowd were teens, but there were quite a few women in their forties—probably moms, Nancy decided. On the stage, three rock musicians were adjusting their equipment.
A young woman in jeans and a striped boatneck tunic came over to Nancy and Bess. The name tag she wore read Jennifer. “Welcome to The Place on Three,” she said. “Let me see if I can find you some chairs.”
“That’s okay,” Nancy told her. She introduced herself and Bess, then said, “We’re here to see Andreas. Do you know where we can find him?”
The hostess looked at them doubtfully. “I don’t know—he’s pretty busy, and the show’s about to start,” she said. “What’s this about?”
“Ann Bowers was going to call him about us,” Nancy replied. “We’re interviewing people for a profile of Cindy Sunderland. She’s a teen model.”
“Sure, I know Cindy,” Jennifer said. “We’re all rooting for her to become a big star. I guess that’s why you’re doing this profile, right?”
“Right,” Bess said. “And we want to talk to other teen models who know her. Can we go back to the dressing room?”
Jennifer shook her head. “Sorry, not until I check with Andreas.”
The girls followed her across the room to the edge of the stage. Jennifer signaled for them to wait while she stepped up onstage and disappeared behind a pair of curtains at one side.
A minute later she reappeared, accompanied by a husky man with shoulder-length black hair and a bushy moustache. He wore a collarless shirt over black leather jeans.
“Ann Bowers tells me you want to talk to the models,” he said, with a slight accent. “I’m happy to do Ann a favor—I owe her plenty—but you’ll have to wait until the show’s over, okay? You can watch from backstage if you like, but don’t get in the way.”
“We won’t,” Nancy promised.
She and Bess stepped behind the curtains and into another world. In contrast to the elegant scene out front, behind the scenes was a cramped space with scuffed white walls, lit by bare lightbulbs. Half a dozen gorgeous teenage girls crowded in front of a pair of full-length mirrors, chattering excitedly.
The girl nearest Bess and Nancy was dark-skinned, with short, curly black hair. She wore fire engine red flip-flops and a string bikini. She was talking to a pigtailed blond girl in a blue patchwork minidress and work boots. Behind them, in a white maillot swimsuit with a big yellow sunflower embroidered on the front, an Asian-American girl was carrying a pair of black swim fins.
Andreas clapped his hands and said, “All right, everybody, here we go. Just remember, think sun and fun. Sun and fun.”
The band launched into an upbeat tune. Nancy and Bess flattened themselves against the wall, as the girl in the bikini slipped over to the curtains. She slung an inflated inner tube over her shoulder and loped onstage, showing her perfect white teeth in an infectious laugh.
The Asian-American girl went after her, saucily swinging her diving fins at her side. Last in the group was a girl with a brown ponytail, in a tie-dyed two-piece swimsuit and white sandals. She held a red plastic pail and shovel.
