St. Mallory's Forever!

29 ABBY: Nancy Drew strikes again!

Well, isn't Helen Stroud a dark horse? Just when I thought I was beginning to get my head around her, she goes and drops this little bombshell into our laps. I would feel positively Sherlockian (if that's not a word it jolly well should be!), if only I hadn't just spent the past ten minutes massaging the knotted muscles out of my feet whilst sitting on a fuzzy pink blanket. (Aunt Dotty's Christmas present. Don't ask.)

Anyway, back to the story. Turns out, while I was busy trying to jig along to Dancing Queen whilst not falling over and impaling anyone on my killer heels, Helen had been taking a leaf from Scooby Doo and started investigating our little mystery. She told me everything as we walked back from the disco. All I can say is, the plot has well and truly thickened!

So, Mrs. Stroud's got wind of our Spook-In-Residence poking about the office, eh? And it seems it's a piece of music he's after. But what? Which? Why?

In the words of Blackadder: the truth couldn't have been more obvious if it painted itself purple and danced naked on top of a harpsichord singing "subtle plans are here again".

Sam-Sam the Lizard Man's clearly got his eye on something the music department have been keeping to themselves. And I have a funny feeling old Mrs. Walters was involved too. Did she leave because of that? Or is there something more sinister is going on here?

Cue the creepy music again.

I'm going to grab Xuan and Don Pedro on the morrow and set them doing their best-ever snooping. Aside from Helen, Xuan seems to spend half her life down in the music department, and who would ever suspect such a cute little face of being an agent on a secret mission? She can always pull the "I no undahstaaaaand" card, if need be (that or whip out a Vulcan Mind Meld — that would probably work even better, and I really don't put it past her to be able to do one). As for Don Pedro, well, we've already ascertained her skill with finding interesting facts.

All this was Helen's idea, by the way. I suspect she likes this situation even less than I do — it's her mum who's involved, after all. Seriously, does this girl have hidden secrets or what? Not only the first proper geek-ess I've met in several months, with knowledge of long-dead composers whose names I can hardly say in my head, let alone type, and NOW she turns out to be Nancy Drew Mark Two as well.

Hiding behind bins to spy on the baddies! Never thought I'd see the day. I'm going to try and talk to her during lacrosse practice tomorrow (still haven't decided who we're going to pick for the team yet, though I'm leaning more towards Helen's cautious approach than Xuan's all-encompassing attempts at homicide) and between us we can conjure up the next part of our master plan to solve this riddle. Who knows, we might be able to patch in the missing bits of this puzzle together — after all, she's the one "on the inside" in musical terms.

Why not tonight after prep? The fewer people involved the better, I'm thinking. Four of us is plenty. At least, four always worked for the Scooby Doo team.

Besides, there's something else I want to talk to Helen about about. Privately.

A certain Mr. Tim Morrigan.