Sabotage At Willow Woods by Carolyn Keene Read Free Book Online

followed Eloise down a maze of hallways to her locker. “That was awesome, Katrina!”
    I could feel myself blushing. “Thanks.”
    “How come I’ve never seen you before?” Eloise asked me as we walked down the hall.
    “Oh, I just transferred here,” I said as casually as I could. “My dad works for a big bank. We move around a lot,” I added.
    Eloise stopped and looked at me. “Really? Where did you transfer from?”
    “Cleveland,” I replied easily. Every made-up character I play in the course of my detective work hails from Cleveland. It makes things easier.
    Eloise nodded, seeming satisfied. She finally paused in front of a top locker, long ago painted blue but now showing patches of red and pink, too—previous paint jobs—and spun the dials. Two bumper stickers were stuck to the locker: RESPECT THE EARTH and GO VEGAN!
    “Are you vegan?” I asked, more to keep the conversation going than anything else.
    Eloise nodded, pulling open her locker and revealing an unholy mess of crumpled papers, textbooks,notebooks, and folders. I couldn’t judge, because I wasn’t particularly organized either. But it was clear that Eloise wasn’t going to find what she was looking for anytime soon.
    “Lifelong,” she said, shoving a couple of books aside and frowning. “It just doesn’t feel natural to me to eat animal products. I mean, what other animal drinks another animal’s milk past the age of weaning? It’s kind of gross when you think about it, right?”
    It did seem kind of weird, when she put it that way. “Yeah, kind of.”
    Eloise refocused her attention on her locker, and I watched carefully, looking at each paper and book, everything she had posted on the inside locker door. A photo of her with a smiling blond girl, a picture of Ryan Gosling with a lipstick kiss—nothing unusual there.
    “I’ve been thinking of going vegan, but it’s hard when my parents aren’t,” I said, hoping to keep her talking. “Maybe you could give me some pointers?”
    “Ooh, that’s great,” Barney said from behind me.I turned and saw his now-familiar enthusiastic smile. “Going vegan is a major commitment to the environmental cause!”
    Eloise nodded, still fishing in her locker. “The important thing is making sure you still get all the nutrients you need, like protein and iron. You end up eating a lot of beans and nuts. You might need to figure out how to cook, a little. But it’s totally doable.”
    Suddenly her digging shifted a few books back, and a sheaf of papers toppled down from the top and onto the floor. Eloise shoved the books back in and scrambled to grab the papers, but I got to them first.
    I turned them over and had to work hard to suppress my gasp. Boylestown Teachers Association ! Eloise had at least twenty pieces of stationery in her locker! Had she stolen them? And more importantly, did that mean she could have written the note to Carrie?
    Eloise grabbed the papers back. “I’ve got so much stuff in here, honestly, I don’t know where half of it came from. But I found the literature I wanted to give you.”
    She shoved a stapled packet of photocopied sheets into my hands. So you want to go green! read the top sheet. Here’s what you should know.
    “Thanks,” I said, scanning the first few paragraphs. “This looks really helpful.”
    Suddenly a sharp, tinny beep sounded from inside my backpack. My phone! Eloise looked at me appraisingly as I dropped my backpack onto the floor and dug it out.
    “You know, we’re not supposed to have our phones on inside the school,” she said, pointing to a poster across the hallway: TURN IT OFF ! it insisted, with a photo of a huge cell phone that had to be about twenty years old. “But clearly you’re a rebel, Katrina.” She smiled. “I like that.”
    I didn’t have much time to process Eloise’s words, though, because as soon as I pulled out my phone, I saw a text from George: CRISIS!!! COME TO CARRIE’S HQ PRONTO .
    My heart started