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to hear the conversation better. Somebody was nervously tapping a foot on the floor.
    “If Samuel and Joanne were here, they would want her to go.”
    “We don’t know that , Harold. We don’t what they would want at all,” Helen said, sadness lacing her words.
    “I know. I know.”
    A chair was pulled across the floor as someone either stood up or sat down.
    “This may be one of the few links to her par ents she has left.” Harold said. “Besides, it could really open doors for her. I don’t need to tell you that we haven’t exactly built much of a college fund. So unless we let her use up all of her inheritance, I don’t know how we’re going to pay for everything.”
    Sam’s heart sank. Again she was reminded of how much trouble she had caused the Robinsons, how much she had taken from them while they had done nothing but give to her. It was bad enough that she had cost them their careers, but now she was causing money problems and almost getting arrested.
    She was a delinquent. Her reign of destruction had to end. It was time to give something back.
    Sam stepped into the kitchen. Helen and Harold startled at her presence. Helen looked l ike she had been crying. She was about to say something when Sam took a deep breath and went for it.
    “I want to go to Miller’s Grove Academy.”

Chapter 4
Baldorag Castle
     
     
    Baldorag Castle was a gothic nightmare of slick black stone built deep inside the crevice of an otherwise completely uninteresting mountain in the heart of the Swiss Alps. The castle was built so deep into the mountain that it only received one hour of sunlight a day. It would take the most skillful mountaineer in the world to find and reach the castle.
    Fortunately Alexander Nero had a helicopter and a map.
    Snow that had been untouched by humans for over a decade whipped through the air as the helicopter touched down on a rocky ledge near the castle.
    “Everyone remember where we parked,” Nero quipped as he climbed out of the helicopter.
    “Good one, sir,” Commander Carlson, Head of Ner o Industries Security and Nero’s personal bodyguard, said as he gently removed the box containing the lantern from the helicopter.
    “Thank you, Carlson.”
    Nero couldn’t think of anyone else with whom he would rather have traveled to the Arctic, robbed a magical vault, and fought off a fire-breathing gargoyle statue come to life. Nero was still a little annoyed that Commander Carlson got all the fun of fighting the gargoyle, but it had been necessary to maintain his disguise as the weak and frail Samantha Hathaway.
    He comforted himself with the thought that his plan was nearing completion. It had taken three years and a sizable portion of his late father’s fortune to learn the location and password of the Vault of the Blue Flame from a very corrupt and indebted member of the ISG and then obtain the correct ring on the black market from a rather unpleasant hunchback. Not to mention the two years it had taken to develop his goggles--which not only corrected for light refraction enabling him to see magically invisible objects, but were also equipped with infrared, X-ray, microscopic, and a half-dozen other forms of vision. He figured he could make a second fortune selling them out of the backs of comic books.
    On a personal vanity note there was also the matter of his hair--which, to is mother’s great concern, had turned completely white by his fourteenth birthday. Still, it was a small price to pay to complete his father’s work and regain the family honor.
    T hanks to Constable Albion’s recent failure to arrest Samantha Hathaway, he was forced to switch to Plan B. Plan B was a brilliant plan, as all of Nero’s plans were, but it was slower than Plan A.
    Ah well , he thought to himself. If taking over the world was easy, someone else would have done it by now.
    Nero shook his head in disbelief. Two mountain peaks away, people were skiing and drinking hot chocolate in cute little lodges,