Alexis and the Lake Tahoe Tumult - Erica Rodgers [17]
Alexis sat down next to her father, and he poked gently at her cheek.
“I thought you two were shooting a documentary out there, not BB guns!” he said.
“BB guns?” said Alexis.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Howell. “I’d recognize a BB bruise anywhere! My brother and I used to play with those things all the time. It’s a miracle we never shot an eye out.”
Alexis’s eyes opened wide, and she kicked Bailey under the table. So she had been shot by a BB gun? That meant someone else had been out at the bear cave at the same time as their group. What if a BB had awakened the bear? What if that’s what the person was trying to do?
It reminded Alexis of Cruella DeVille, the villain in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Her first name started with the word cruel, and in the movie she would have done anything to get the puppies for a fur coat. If turning cute puppies into a coat wasn’t cruel, Alexis didn’t know what was.
She thought about how it felt to see the bear charge out of the cave. It had been really scary. One of them could have gotten hurt, or even worse. At that moment, Alexis knew she and Bailey and the Camp Club Girls had to solve this case as soon as possible. The person doing these things was becoming dangerous. Like Cruella’s character, they didn’t care who they hurt. As long as they got what they wanted, they might do anything … but what did they want?
After dinner Alexis and Bailey took their camera to their hotel room and borrowed Mrs. Howell’s computer again. Alexis plugged her camera into the USB port on the computer so the girls could look at what they’d filmed near the bear cave. The camera had been rolling the entire time. Maybe it saw something—or someone—that they hadn’t.
They started by watching the spot on the sick coyotes.
“You do such a great job in front of the camera, Bailey!” said Alexis.
“Thank you, dah-ling,” said Bailey. She tossed her hair and did her best movie-star impression.
“We have to remember to add the stuff about the chocolate,” said Alexis. “I don’t think we filmed—”
“Shhh!” said Bailey. “Here’s the bear cave!”
They sat and watched as the camera rolled over the snowy landscape. Surrounding pine trees were drooping from the weight of the snow. Shafts of sunlight peeked through the branches and made the white sparkle. Soon the cave came into view—a small opening beneath the rock.
“Is it just me, or does that cave look too small for a bear to get in and out of?” asked Bailey.
“Well, a bear sure did come out of it,” said Alexis. “We’re about to see it happen.”
The camera rocked a little.
“That must have been when you got hit by the BB,” said Bailey.
Alexis nodded. She was watching the screen as closely as possible. Soon the bear came charging out of the cave, throwing snow everywhere. But Alexis wasn’t watching the bear. She was looking everywhere else for any sign of a fifth person in that forest.
Soon the film got hard to watch. The picture jumped all over the place as Alexis tried to run in her snowshoes. Most of the shots showed either her clumsy feet or a piece of the sky.
“Well, that’s it,” said Bailey. “That’s where you dropped the camera when you fell off the snowmobile, right?”
“Yup,” said Alexis. “Now all we can see is snow and a couple trees.” Alexis reached for the EJECT button, but Bailey grabbed her hand.
“Wait! I see something,” she said. “Rewind it!”
Alexis skipped back a few frames and leaned in closer. Sure enough, something was moving in the background. Near a group of trees in the distance, a shadowy figure climbed onto something and sped away in the opposite direction.
“Was that another snowmobile?” asked Bailey.
“I believe it was,” said Alexis. “What else could it have been? Bailey! We have this person on tape! Whoever was out there waking up the bears—”
“And shooting people with BB guns,” said Bailey.
“Right. That, too. They’re on our video, Bailey! This is great! All we have to do is blow up this frame, and