Uncovering Sadie's Secrets (14 page)

“My father. I have to call him. He gave me his
cell phone
! Only a few people know the
number
,” she said and proceeded to shout it out for me to hear. Miss Williston must have thought she was nuts.

A few seconds later, I crawled out of my hiding place and sat at the desk. I dialed the number Kerrie had conveniently screamed down the hallway for me, and she picked up after one ring.

“Thank God!” she said when she heard my voice. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought Williston would just give me the key again, but she was finished. Everybody had left. She was the only one there and she insisted on walking me up and. . .”

“Be quiet, Kerrie, and listen. Have you called your Dad yet?”

“Yes, I had to. Williston wouldn’t leave until she made sure I was okay. I thought she was going to wait here with me, but I told her my father would be here in ten minutes.”

“Well, you can’t tell your father about this,” I said emphatically. “He’s a lawyer. He might turn us in or something!”

“Oh, Bianca,” Kerrie said, sounding like she was going to cry. “What are we going to do?”

“You’re going to have to go home. Call my sister when you get there. Call her on her cell phone and ask her if she’s heard from me. If she hasn’t, tell her I accidentally got locked in and I need her help.” I gave Kerrie Connie’s cell phone number.

“What are you going to do?” Kerrie whimpered.

“I’m going to call Con and get her to get her muscle man to help me out again. But just in case I don’t get her, you’re my back-up. You keep trying her until you reach her, okay? I don’t want to use this phone too much.” For all I knew, the school’s phone records would chronicle my calls. No future in that.

“Okay. . .” she said. She rang off reluctantly after I explained it was better if we didn’t hang on the phone until her father got there. I was going to try to reach Connie, which I did on the first try, probably while Kerrie was still waiting for her ride.

“Yo, sis,” Connie said to me when she heard my voice. “What’s this with always calling me on my cell phone?”

“Is the home phone free?”

“Well, no.”

I sighed, and explained in barest detail my predicament. I did-n’t tell her I had maneuvered myself into the office with a purpose. I made it sound like we genuinely had gone in search of the PSAT apps and I accidentally got left behind. I don’t know if Connie bought it. All I know is she agreed to help.

“I owe you one,” Connie said. “I’ll get right out there.”

“There might be an alarm on the school grounds, Con. I don’t want you setting off any alarms.”

“Okay. I’ll bring Kurt.” She was about to hang up when she came back on the line. “Oh, I forgot—Doug called.”

My heart leapt with joy. . . then sank like a stone when she gave me the rest of the message.

“He said if you were back in time, he was going to the seven o’clock show and he could meet you there.”

It was now nearly five-thirty. If Connie and Kurt arrived at the school in twenty minutes and took only ten minutes to free me, I would have just enough time to rush home, change, and hop a ride to the theater.

It was impossible. I knew it would take longer than a half hour to get me out of this predicament, and I’d be late for sure for my Doug date—again.

A
S IT
turned out, it took three hours. Kurt was tied up and couldn’t get away until six o’clock. He and Connie didn’t arrive at the school until six-thirty, and it took another hour and a half for Kurt to size up the alarm system and feel confident that he was getting past it and any surveillance cameras without leaving a mark.

They didn’t arrive outside the office door until close to seven-thirty. I was frantic by then, despite a few desperate calls to Connie’s cell phone to make sure my escape was in progress. Kurt uttered some creative oaths while he worked on the lock, alternately cursing and praising the workmanship on the device. Finally, after a half hour of jiggling and scratching, the door came open.

“I have to pee,” I said, running past my sister and Rent-A-Hunk.

When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Connie offered to take me to the theater to meet Doug, but it was past eight. The movie would be over by the time I got there. And maybe he wouldn’t even be there. Maybe he looked around for me, didn’t see me, and decided I was a total wash-out in the potential girl friend area.

Kurt gave us a hearty good-bye at the curb before getting into his beat-up Jeep. Connie thanked him and scooted into her car, unlocking the passenger side door for me. When I got in, she turned to me.

“Where to? Want a cheeseburger?”

I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch, and that had been a quick bite.

“Okay,” I said, dejected.

Cheeseburgers and milkshakes were fast becoming the Doug Consolation Prize. I didn’t win the showcase, but I got these nice gifts instead.

C
ONNIE TOOK me to Fast Mickey’s, a tavern in Highlandtown that was a hangout for off-duty cops. Connie liked it there because it reminded her of our father. Although I hadn’t known Dad at all because I was too young when he died, Connie told me about him from time to time. The picture she painted of him made me really regret not being able to know him.

Mom, on the other hand, didn’t talk much about him except to occasionally say things like “your father was a good man.” I think one of the reasons Connie went into detective work in the first place was to follow in his footsteps.

Anyway, Connie was most likely to talk about Dad at places like Fast Mickey’s. Several guys seemed to know her and there was an air of warm camaraderie in the room, not to mention terrific fried onion rings that were one inch thick and light as air. We ordered some, along with burgers. When they arrived, she began her lecture.

“You know,” she said, looking down at her fingers on the polished wooden booth table, “if Dad were here, he would have had your hide for what you did.”

“What do mean, what I did?”

She looked up at me and took on what she thought was the gaze of a stern parent. Because she was the oldest, she sometimes thought it was her job to act as Mom’s partner in raising us.

“If someone had caught you in that office, it would have been awfully hard to explain how you got locked in.”

“Well, it was like this. . .” I began, but she cut me off by holding up her hand.

“Don’t make something up. I’d rather not know. Just think about the possible consequences, okay? How disappointed your mother would be, for one.”

Ouch. Guilt trip. I resisted the urge to fling sarcastic remarks back at Connie about how she herself was no paragon of fulfilled expectations as far as Mom was concerned. But that would have been too mean. Connie was doing her best.

And then I had one of those little revelations that sometimes light up your brain like the cartoon light bulbs over comic strip characters who have bright ideas. Mom didn’t want Connie to be a PI because she was afraid Connie would suffer the same fate as Dad. And maybe she had wanted Dad to be something more, as well.

I shifted in my seat, mumbled a grumpy, “Oh. Well. . .” that I hoped would pass for something of an apology, and began talking about Sadie, eager to change the subject away from my transgressions.

Without revealing my subterfuge for gaining access to the school office, I told my sister all I had learned about Sadie so far.

Sadie was supposedly only fifteen, yet she was driving alone. Her school transcripts had never arrived from California. She drove a car with California plates. And, I was beginning to think her mother was not Lemming Lady.

“Let’s go through it fact by fact,” Connie said, sipping on her own strawberry shake while I polished off a chocolate one. (I don’t understand strawberry shakes. I mean, why drink a shake if it’s not a chocolate one? Why do they make those other flavors anyway?) “No speculation. Just the facts.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sadie Sinclair is new at St. John’s this year. She’s strange.”

“Stick to the facts,” said Connie. “Forget opinion. She’s new to school this year. She somehow knows the two people we met last week. One of them claims to be her mother. They both accompany her to a bank where she makes a withdrawal. She drives a car. What did her application say for birth date?” Connie stared at me. I had told her about my foray into the files, but I had made it sound like the filing cabinet was left unlocked and the file folder had jumped into my lap like some kind of dancing fish.

“I don’t know. Let me think.” I closed my eyes and visualized the application. I spit out the date of birth triumphantly, the image coming back to me. The year was consistent with a fifteen-year-old. And then another image came to me, a row of neat numbers, her Social Security number. But something was odd about it, something I couldn’t put my finger on.

“What?” Connie asked as I continued to squinch up my eyes. “Why are you making that face? What’s bothering you?”

“What was it you told me about Social Security numbers? About that one you said was phony?”

“It had double digit zeroes in the group number. Never done,” Connie said, slurping the last of her shake from the bottom of the glass.

That was it! Sadie’s number had the same mistake. I told Connie.

“Okay,” Connie summed up, “we know she has a Social Security number on her app that doesn’t exist.
And
she drives, so it would make sense that maybe she faked her date of birth somewhere along the line too. And, her apartment, I couldn’t see all of it, of course. . .”

“What about it?” I asked, feeling like we were getting close to something, but I didn’t know what.

“It was awfully bare. No furniture that I could see in the living room. Just one pole lamp. And the room to the right of the door looked bare too.”

“She’s living in an empty apartment?”

“Maybe she’s living by herself.”

“What do you mean?” I asked Connie.

“Maybe she’s a runaway,” Connie said. “All I could find on the condo is that it belongs to a Mister Ryan Greavey. Greavey was convicted of drug dealing last year. He’s in prison.”

“Drug dealing? Oh my God!”

“Hold your horses,” Connie said. “That doesn’t mean anything. Greavey, or whoever is managing his stuff, could have just sub-let the place. It doesn’t tell us much. Give me that license number you memorized. I have a friend in Motor Vehicles. She might be able to get me something on a California plate if I tell her Kurt was asking about her.” She winked at me.

“Don’t forget—Sadie also asked about being framed for murder. And she called you about it,” I volunteered.

“She didn’t call me. Somebody else did, remember?” Connie said. “But it could have been her just giving a fake name.”

Of course it had been, but I couldn’t reveal that I knew my sister’s voice-mail password, so I shut up about that. “Did this friend ever call again?” I asked instead.

“No. Never did. Maybe the threat evaporated.”

“If she’s a runaway, Connie, how does she support herself?” I ate the last of the fries.

“She looked like she had more than enough money if she was able to give some to that woman and guy,” Connie said.

“Maybe she’s in trouble with the law.” I sucked in my shake. We lapsed into silence for a few seconds.

“If she calls again,” I said, then corrected myself, “if her friend calls again, maybe you could kind of point her in the right direction. Kerrie’s dad is a lawyer, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Later, after Connie had paid the bill and we were at a stoplight on our way home, she turned to me and became very stern again. “Don’t forget what I said, Bianca, about your little excursion into the school office. This isn’t a game, you know.”