Nancy Clue Mysteries 1 - The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse (29 page)

On the back of the float was a little white doghouse, surrounded by a picket fence. Green paper poppies gave the appearance of a lush lawn. The sign on the side of the float read:

Aimless Realty: No house too large... or too small!

"Oh, isn't it wonderful, Cherry?" Mrs. Aimless hugged her daughter. Cherry agreed. Leave it to Charley to make everyone laugh. The crowd applauded loudest for Charley and Johnny's float, and was Cherry ever proud when they won first prize.

Cherry managed to enjoy the picnic in the town square, especially when her mother's Brown Betty won first prize, but she begged off the afternoon square dance. She had had a nagging feeling all day, and she dearly wanted to get home so she could call Aunt Gert and find out what had happened to Nancy!

Suppertime had come and gone with no word from Nancy. Cherry shook her head. "Silly!" she scolded herself. "Nothing's happened!" But deep in her heart, she knew something was terribly wrong!

She moped around the house and waited for Charley, Johnny and Mrs. Aimless to return from town. Her father was fast asleep, and there was little to do in the tidy house.

She flipped through a fashion magazine, but the pretty models only reminded her of Nancy and made her feel sad. She leafed through a cooking magazine but soon found her mind wandering. She felt like flinging the magazine across the room but then came to her senses. She smoothed its thick glossy cover and put it back on the coffee table, where it belonged.

"Perhaps a cool drink will steady my nerves," she thought, going to the sunny kitchen to mix a pitcher of lemonade. She heard a car pull into the drive, and was glad that someone was finally home to distract her!

"I'll put some of these cookies on a tray and we'll have a nice chat on the front porch," Cherry thought. But the car turned out to belong to someone visiting the family next door, so Cherry sat alone on the porch, nibbling on the cookies. The phone rang, but it was only Doctor Joe, calling to check up on his patient.

Doctor Joe was his usual jovial self. "By the way, Cherry, that was some fine float in the parade today! I don't know which was better-that float or your mother's Brown Betty!" he chuckled. "You Aimlesses sure are a talented bunch!"

After the phone call, she took up her post on the front porch. Something was bound to happen. She sat on the swing awhile and watched the sun go down. Golly, it felt like the first time she had sat down in days! "If only Nancy were here to enjoy this," she sighed.

"If only..." But before she could finish, the Aimless family car pulled into the driveway! "I'm so glad you're home!" Cherry cried, running to help her mother carry in the leftover food. Suddenly, she was ravenous!

After they brought in the food, Mrs. Aimless shooed Charley and Cherry away from the kitchen. "Johnny and I are going to prepare a nice picnic supper," she said. "Now you two go away for a while!"

Charley said he had to tidy the garage, and Cherry decided to get out of her sticky dress and into something fresh. She ran a tub of water, using her mother's luxurious bubble bath. She was glad her family was home. Even if they weren't Nancy, they sure were swell!

After her bath she felt refreshed and her mood improved. She spent time selecting a pretty party dress from among the old clothes still in her closet. She hadn't taken anything fancy along with her to Seattle General, knowing there would be little time there for frivolity!

She selected a lovely taffeta frock with a dressy shirred skirt and tight-fitting bodice. To complete her outfit, she borrowed her mother's pearl drop earrings. She paid extra attention on her face, penciling in glamorous eyebrows and experimenting with a bright red lipstick.

"Not exactly a movie star, but not bad either," she grinned at her reflection in the mirror. She was so engrossed in getting dressed that at first she didn't hear her mother calling to her.

"I'll be right down, Mother! " Cherry cried, giving her hair one last pat.

Her mother called up the steps to her. "Cherry, there are some girls here to see you!"

Cherry raced to the window and gasped when she looked outside. Could it be true? There was Nancy's yellow convertible, and inside the car sat Velma and Midge and Jackie, and Lauren, too! And that darn Lauren was beeping the horn. It sounded like music to Cherry's ears!

She flew down the stairs, flung open the door and fell into Nancy's arms.

"I was so worried!" she sobbed. "I was sure something terrible had happened to you!"

A tear rolled down Nancy's cheek. "Something terrible has happened! Oh, Cherry, we've got to get to River Depths as soon as possible! Hannah's taken ill, and we've got to get her out of prison! You will come help us, won't you, Cherry? Please?"

"Oh, Nancy, I'll go anywhere with you," she murmured. "But I'll need my purse!" When she turned around, Johnny and Charley were behind her. And Charley had her purse in his hand!

Cherry felt all flustered. "Golly, there's so much to do; I've got to call the hospital and tell them I'm going to be a little late getting back, and Father's still sick and Mother needs me..." She stopped when she saw Nancy's face.

Nancy was here; that was all that mattered!

Nancy, her heart kept repeating, over and over again.

Nancy... Nancy... Nancy...

"I guess they'll all survive without me," she whispered. She bolted for the car. Mrs. Aimless suddenly appeared on the porch. Her fair face was flushed.

"Where's Cherry going? Oh, she's going to miss supper. What's going on?"

Charley put his arm around his Mother's waist.

"Come and sit down, Mother. Johnny and I have something to tell you!"

"I was born in the thriving metropolis of Oshkosh, Wisconsin," writes Mabel Maney. "'I'll never forget that night,"' she recalls her mother telling her. "'We had that big lightning storm that knocked out all of Oshkosh and most of nearby Menasha. I always thought Mabel had something to do with it,"' Mabel's mother chuckled.

After her parents were lost at sea, Mabel took up residence with her Great Aunts Maude and Mavis Maney, who had as young women earned their living as bareback riders in a traveling circus before settling in the farm town of Appleton to write their memoirs, Circus Queens.

Mabel's life was idyllic until the arrest and conviction of Great Aunt Maude for the murder of her late husband, whose body surfaced from under Maude's wisteria bush during the summer of the Great Wisconsin Rains.

Mabel spent the next three years dividing her time between Appleton and the State Penitentiary for Women in LaFayette. After her Great Aunt Maude's release, the trio moved to Bear Lake, where Mabel attended Catholic Girls School, graduating with highest honors in Conversational Skills and Table Manners.

Mabel Maney's installation art and hand-made books, self-published under the World O'Girls Books imprint, have earned her fellowships from the San Francisco Foundation and San Francisco State University, where she received her MFA in 1991. Her art has been exhibited in numerous galleries throughout the United States. Artspace wrote of the hand-made World O'Girls edition of this book: "In Maney's refigured narrative, The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse, gay heroine Cherry Ames moves unhampered through a world populated by lesbian nuns and adventuresses, even engaging in a one-nighter with Nancy Drew. Entertainment aside, by appropriating and redefining the sexual orientation and cultural limits placed upon her fictional female characters, Maney provides a powerful reminder of the exclusionary nature of the ruling (in this case, straight) culture, with its power to define specific roles and acts as 'natural' while denying or marginalizing others."