15 Escape

Just as I was about to start shouting for help, I stopped myself. Not only would I get in huge trouble if my mom caught me riding the dumbwaiter, but we didn't have a key to unlock this door anyway. My heart pounded. There was no way to get back up to the other floors by using the dumbwaiter, since there was nothing outside of it but a locked door where the keypad should have been. It could

be days before anyone found me. I could suffocate or die of thirst!

"Calm down and use your brain," I said out loud. The dumbwaiter was so stuffy I smelled my own breath. There wasn't much time before I ran out of air.

Look for clues on the floor, all four walls, and the ceiling.

I felt the inside of the dumbwaiter quickly, one wall at a time from top to bottom, like a mime doing, "trapped in a box." My heart hammered and I was ready to cry. I dragged my fingers back and forth across the ceiling and up and down the walls, searching desperately for a way out. The walls were smooth and I was definitely stuck.

After aiming my penlight beam all around, I finally spotted a little red button in the upper right-hand corner of the ceiling. It wasn't marked. I didn't have a choice. I pushed it.

Slowly, the dumbwaiter started to climb.

I held my breath as I felt myself moving upward, and then the little elevator made a grinding noise and stopped. Inching the narrow door open to just a crack, I looked into the formal dining room. My mom was around the corner, humming to herself. I couldn't get out of the dumbwaiter here! Quietly I pulled the cupboard door closed and pushed the emergency button again. If she heard the sound of the dumbwaiter, hopefully she would think I was just playing with it, not riding it.

Up I went, climbing out of the stuffy box and into the library. Then I hurried down the hall to my room, shaking so hard I could barely walk. After lying down on my bed until my heart stopped pounding, I sat up and looked at the footsteps on the clue, then decided to follow the footstep pattern.

"One, two, three," I said, staring at the paper and stumbling around, "four—wait a minute. Where's five six and seven?" I stopped in my tracks as I heard my mom coming up the stairs. The clue was a dead giveaway that I was looking for the jewels, so I put it in my pocket and held my breath until she passed my room, continuing down the hall.

I wanted to make my dad proud of my investigation, and make my mom realize that taking risks was worthwhile. Smack's crew was not going to find the jewels before I did. I wanted to rub my hands together in satisfaction and say, "Case closed," like my grandfather. I needed to find Xandra's jewelry box before my parents figured out what I was doing and forced me to stop, since they would have thought it was way too dangerous.

As it turned out, they would have been right.