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.