Carolyn Keene - Greek Odyssey

When Bess pointed out the windmill to the shopkeeper, he handed it to her so she could have a closer look. “I make,” he said, pointing to his chest.

“You did?” Bess said. “Oh, I love it. This is the perfect birthday gift for my mother.” Her blue eyes sparkled—until she saw the price. “I guess I’ll have to come back after I change more money,” she told the elderly shopkeeper.

After thanking him for his help, the girls left the shop. “I wish he hadn’t put it back on display,” Bess said, pausing outside the shop as the shopkeeper reached down and replaced the statue in the window. “What if someone else buys it?”

“Relax, Bess,” Nancy assured her. “Why don’t you cash a traveler’s check at the hotel? If there’s time, we can make a quick trip back here before dinner—”

“The gorgeous American girls!” a familiar voice interrupted Nancy.

Nancy turned and immediately recognized Dimitri, the photographer from the beach. His dark curls glistened in the sunlight.

“That’s us!” Bess said, grinning at him.

“Would you like a photo here in Chora?” Dimitri asked, raising his camera.

“No, thanks,” Nancy replied. “We were just doing some shopping.”

“Ah, in the shop of my good friend Spiros,” Dimitri said, nodding at the stationery store. “That is my studio, just above.” He pointed to a narrow white stone staircase along the side of the building that led to a room just above the shop.

Bess brightened. “You have your own studio?”

“Of course,” Dimitri boasted, never taking his eyes off Bess. “I need a darkroom for my business. I have all the latest equipment.”

“I’d love to see the studio,” Bess told him. “Could you give us a little tour?”

“Now?” Dimitri hesitated. “I’ve been very busy today. It’s a mess.” A group of Japanese tourists caught Dimitri’s eye, and he excused himself to snap a few photographs. “I will see you later, I hope,” he told Bess.

Nancy was surprised at Dimitri’s abrupt switch. One minute the guy was melting, over Bess, the next minute he seemed to freeze. Bess had noticed his behavior, too. “I can’t decide if he was trying to get a date or give me the brush-off,” she said. Shrugging, she added, “Well, I’m not going to let it ruin my day. Come on, guys.”

The main street ended at a busy waterfront strip. The crescent-shaped harbor was ringed by hotels, cafés, and tavernas. Small fishing boats skimmed along the water. It all looked tempting. Nancy wasn’t quite sure which way to turn first.

Bess persuaded Nancy and George to go into a pastry shop. “After all,” she reminded them as they walked inside and peered into a glass case full of cakes and honey pastries, “we won’t be eating dinner for a few more hours.”

After buying honeyed pastries called baklava , the girls turned back up the main street, retracing their steps through the maze of narrow lanes toward the hotel.

“We might as well go straight to the office,” Bess said when they reached the hotel half an hour later. “I can get my traveler’s checks and passport for ID.” For security reasons, the hotel requested that all valuables, including passports, be left in the office safe.

The three girls entered the arched double doors of the main building and went to the lobby desk, which was a crescent-shaped cutaway in one of the stucco walls. Zoe was behind the tiled counter, bent over the registration book.

When Bess told her about the miniature she had found in Chora, Zoe smiled and closed the registration book. “You should probably take your passports with you when you leave the hotel grounds,” Zoe told them. “But I’ll be happy to cash your traveler’s checks. Let me get your envelope from the safe.” She disappeared through a doorway behind the front desk.

Zoe returned a few minutes later, a grim frown on her face.

“What’s the matter?” Nancy asked.

“It’s the safe,” Zoe told her. “Someone has broken into it!”

Chapter Three

“Oh, no!” Bess cried. She and George exchanged a look of alarm.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Zoe said. “We always keep that safe locked, but when I went to dial the combination, the door just swung open.”

George shot Nancy and Bess a worried look. “Our passports were in there,” she pointed out. “And our traveler’s checks.”

“Has anything been stolen?” Nancy asked.

Zoe’s brown eyes were filled with worry. “I don’t know. Many things were left behind. Maybe nothing was stolen at all,” she said hopefully. “I’ll have to check the contents of the safe against our log book.” Reaching under the counter, she pulled out a fat notebook and turned to a page with dozens of entries penciled in.

“Looks as if that will take a while,” George said. “Do you want us to help?”

“Would you mind?” Zoe asked, looking grateful. “The inventory will go faster that way.”

Nancy, Bess, and George joined Zoe behind the check-in counter, then followed her through the doorway and into the back office.

The rosy light of dusk streamed into the room through the slats of a shaded window. On the wall just inside the door was a board with hooks for extra keys to the guest rooms. A metal safe rested on the floor in the far corner, behind a desk covered with stacks of invoices and registration forms.

“First, let me remove everything,” Zoe said. She knelt down beside the square gray safe and pulled out a plastic carton containing stacks of manila envelopes. Nancy, Bess, and George gathered around Zoe as she stood and placed the carton on the desk.

“I can’t stand the suspense,” Bess said, flipping through the envelopes to find the one marked with her name.

“Me, either,” George said. She found her envelope and Nancy’s and pulled both out.

Checking in her pouch, Nancy was relieved to find her passport and traveler’s checks, just as she’d left them. She leafed through the passport, noting the visas stamped on the blue-green pages printed with a bald eagle. “Everything’s here,” she reported.

“Mine checks out, too,” George said.

When Bess said nothing, Nancy looked over at her. Bess’s mouth had fallen open, and there was a look of shock on her face. “My passport’s missing!” she said in a horrified whisper.

“Are you sure?” Nancy asked. She leaned over Bess’s shoulder as Bess looked into the envelope once again. The traveler’s checks were there, Nancy saw, but Bess’s passport was gone.

“Maybe it ended up in someone else’s envelope,” Zoe said hopefully.

George nodded toward the open ledger. “Let’s go over the inventory and see.”

As Zoe read off the names written in Greek in the inventory ledger, George and Bess checked the contents of each envelope. While they worked, Nancy paced the office, looking for a clue as to who might have tampered with the hotel safe.

Kneeling beside the safe, she looked inside and ran her fingers over the walls of the empty interior. Since there was no damage to the safe, Nancy deduced that either someone knew the combination or was an expert at combination locks. Whoever it was must have been in a hurry, she thought, since they hadn’t even closed the safe.

“Who has the combination to the safe?” Nancy asked Zoe.

“Just my father and me,” Zoe answered.

“Do you remember who opened the safe last?”

Zoe frowned. “Not really. Things were so hectic today, with that British tour group checking out and a few families checking in. I must have gone into the safe nearly a dozen times myself. But it’s not like Papa—or me—to forget and leave it unlocked.”

She returned to the inventory with grim determination. “Let’s see if anything else is missing,” she said.