Club Dread by Carolyn Keene

with books, little tables with knickknacks all over them. Wordlessly, Frank and I split up. We know how to search a room.
    I worked my way along the left, Frank along the right. I flipped through the books on the shelves, but they all seemed real—no fake ones filled with money here.
    â€œWhat is this?” I asked quietly. Even though the room was empty and we had Nancy as a lookout, it was standard procedure to be as subtle as possible when on a mission. The books were filled with weird script that looked positively medieval. I held one out to Frank.
    â€œThat’s Cyrillic, the script Russian is written in. Didn’t you do any research at all?
    â€œDude—it’s summer. The only thing I’m researching is how to get the best tan once this mission is over.”
    Frank rolled his eyes and we went back to searching.
    Everything in the room was, like, really Russian.The art, the pictures, the books. He even had a set of those hollow dolls that have smaller versions of themselves inside them. I found a bunch of photos of a much younger Nikitin with a crowd of smaller kids around him. I could pick out Petrovitch in all of them too. I didn’t see any photos of his parents, or of any older people at all, except one very old woman.
    â€œFrank? You don’t think these are all his siblings, do you?”
    There were almost a dozen of them. No wonder Nikitin needed so much money to send back home. It didn’t make the robberies right, but it did make me understand him a little better.
    I flipped open the lid of a small wooden trunk, and there it all was—wallets, cell phones, jewelry, and a small pile of cash. If I’d had any doubts about Nikitin’s being in on the crime, they were gone now.
    â€œFrank, come here!”
    Frank came running over. While he looked at what was in the trunk, I pulled out my phone and started snapping photos. Frank pulled a small notebook out of the trunk and flipped it open. Most of it was in Cyrillic, but there were columns of numbers that weren’t hard to figure out—money borrowed, money sent, money owed. Frank took photos of it too.
    Suddenly a noise came from behind the closed door at the other end of the room. Frank and I both froze.Frank motioned for me to follow him and we crept quietly toward the door. Even if someone was there, I doubted they had heard us. It was probably just the air conditioning kicking on. Still, I picked up a small statue of a horse, just in case.
    Frank looked back at me and shook his head. He motioned for me to put the statue down. He was right—our ATAC training always told us that bringing a weapon into an unknown situation just made it more likely that there would be violence, which was the last thing we wanted. But I made a mental note of where it was, just in case I needed it.
    Frank pushed the door open and we moved in quickly. He went left, I went right. That way, if anyone was in the room, we’d have them flanked. But it didn’t matter. Standing in the room were Petrovitch and Matthias!
    Or rather, Matthias was standing in the room. Petrovitch was lying on the bed, tied up! His hands and feet were bound together with rope, and he wasn’t struggling. I felt momentarily annoyed that Matthias had solved the case without us. If he’d involved us at all, we could totally have figured it out days ago! Then again, we didn’t tell him what we were up to, so I guess I couldn’t blame him.
    â€œAbout time you guys got here,” Matthias said. “I thought I was going to have to do all the work myself.”
    â€œWhat are you doing here?”
    â€œI’ve been following Petrovitch all week. I caught him in the act of moving some of the stolen goods up here. I had no idea Andrew was involved. When I confronted Petrovitch, he attacked me. I just finished tying him up when you two burst in.”
    At the mention of his name, Petrovitch started struggling against the ropes. His