Uncovering Sadie's Secrets (17 page)

This was vague enough to get a real live operator on the line who helped me navigate through some governmental listings until I had a couple phone numbers for various branch offices of social services.

It was now seven-forty. I figured offices closed at five, which would be eight o’clock our time. Plus, Mom would be at Burger Boy by then and if she tried to call me, I’d be dead meat when she got voice mail. (Of course, I could always tell her a telephone solicitor called me, tying up the line for ungodly amounts of time. I was good at improvising pre-emptive excuses.) Anyway, I had about twenty minutes.

Deadlines are good for yours truly. Deadlines make me think. Deadlines make me smarter.

In my limited time, what information did I want the most? I already knew that asking about Sadie Sinclair was likely to lead nowhere. By now I was convinced that Sadie Sinclair was an alias. In fact, I was beginning to think that Sadie had plucked it out of the air after seeing promotional material for the artist Sadie Mauvais Sinclair.

She’d probably figured no one in their right mind would ever track down the connection. (Please do not insert a sarcastic thought here about whether I am in my right mind. My ego, after all, is no less fragile than your own!)

No, if I wanted to find something, I would have to stick to real people and real names. And the only real name I had was Melinda McEvoy’s.

I dialed the number while mentally racing down a list of excuses I could use to find out more about the recently deceased McEvoy. As the phone rang and rang, my pulse pounded. Think, Bianca, think.

A disembodied voice came on the line, asking me if I needed help.

“Uh, yes, I, er, need to find out some information about Melinda McEvoy,” I said. Brilliant, Bianca, I thought to myself. What imagination!

When the woman justifiably asked for more info—like just what I needed to find out and who Melinda McEvoy is, my brain finally got a jolt of Creativity Plus.

“I’m calling on behalf of Lifetime Insurance,” I said, my voice becoming stronger now that the charade came to me. “Ms. McEvoy had a policy worth five-hundred-thousand dollars. I understand she’s passed away and I’m trying to find her daughter, who is listed as the beneficiary. I thought her daughter might be a ward of the state now.”

How
did
I come up with this stuff? I have no idea. It popped into my mind as if some cartoonist were drawing dialogue balloons right over my head. I just knew that Melinda and Sadie were connected and that if Melinda passed away, maybe Sadie was running away from the fate that awaited her in foster care.

I was put on hold. I fretted. I sweated. I looked at the clock. I worried what my mother would say if and when she saw this long-distance call on the phone bill. Luckily, I’d have a few weeks to make up that explanation. I wondered if there was something illegal about pretending to be an insurance representative. Maybe fraud investigators were tracing my call right now.

It was seven-fifty-three. My finger hovered over the switch-hook, ready to end this call before I was apprehended, before Mom tried to call home.

Then, eureka! Success! Beyond my wildest dreams!

“This is Mrs. Santos,” a woman said. “I understand you’re looking for Melinda McEvoy’s daughter. According to our records, Sarah McEvoy turned eighteen right after her mother died, so we have no more jurisdiction over her. But the last address we have is one in Salinas. I can give you that.”

With a trembling hand, I wrote it down. It was familiar. Where had I seen it before? It was the same as the return address on Sadie’s school file letter—the letter supposedly written by her mother explaining her transfer to St. John’s.

Sadie was Melinda McEvoy’s daughter. Her real name was Sarah McEvoy. And she wasn’t fifteen.

W
HEN
I figured out that Sadie Sinclair was really Sarah McEvoy, I felt like I’d discovered gold. I wanted to rush out and tell everyone what I knew, but at the same time I wanted to keep it quiet in case someone would elbow in on my territory.

Actually, the “someone” I most had in mind was Connie. Finding this information before she did was a real coup, one that showed I knew my stuff and was overqualified for a lowly file-clerk position in her office. If I just handed the info over to Connie, however, she most likely would take it and run with it and leave me in file-clerk land. By the time I was done, I wanted her to offer me an equal partnership.

But, full to bursting with this tidbit, it was all I could do to keep from spitting it out when Mom returned home with a very disgruntled Tony forty minutes later.

“Bianca,” my mother said in a tired voice after she threw her keys on the half-table by the door. “Tony says he tried calling several times but you were on the phone.”

Tony, who was in the kitchen by now swigging a bottle of juice, chimed in.

“Yeah. I must have tried five times and got the voice mail each time.”

“You did not try five times!” He had left only three messages.

“Did too, punk. Didn’t leave a message each time.”

Mom stepped in. “Don’t call your sister names, Tony. I’ll deal with it.”

Tony stood waiting to witness my execution, but Mom told him to go upstairs to work on school stuff. Then she sat at the kitchen table and looked as stern as Connie had tried to look the night she lectured me in Fast Mickey’s.

“Bianca, I can’t afford a second phone line right now. So that means we all have to be considerate. I had no idea you were on the computer so long or I would have told you to get off.”

“Maybe I can get a job,” I said, thinking of my new investigative skills and how valuable they’d be to Connie once I solved the Sadie mystery completely. “And I can pay for the second line.”

“It’s a monthly fee,” my mother continued. “It’s not a one-time expense.”

“Well, maybe I can still chip in. . .” I petered out, not sure I wanted to commit to a long-running debt.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to make a rule,” she said. “No tying up the phone for more than a half hour at a time.”

That smarted. Of course I wondered about the subsections of this new law. Like, was there a paragraph in there that said “whereas if half-hour sessions are interrupted by sessions off the phone that are at least five minutes in duration, unlimited half-hour sessions on the phone may be scheduled”? I wasn’t sure. But I
was
sure this was not a good time to ask.

And, just as obviously, it wasn’t a good time to get on the phone, either. So my plan to reveal my Sadie info to Kerrie just flew out the window. But it made me take some time to think through what I knew and how I could use it.

I went up to my room and did just that. I dug through the pile of papers on my desk and found an old notebook that I’d hardly used. After ripping out the pages with old history essays, I started writing down what I knew:

• Sadie Sinclair is Sarah McEvoy
  
• Sarah McEvoy is eighteen years old.
  
• Sadie/Sarah is a whiz at computers and knows something about music.
  
• Sadie/Sarah worries she might be framed for murder.
  
• Sadie/Sarah is being pursued by Lemming Lady and Ice Man.
  
• Lemming Lady claims to be Sadie’s mother. Sadie affirmed her motherhood. But both are lying.
  
• Sadie has given money to Lemming Lady and Ice Man.
  
• Sadie’s real mother was Melinda McEvoy, who passed away this spring.
  

What haunted me most about the whole list was the final factoid. Sadie’s mom had died in the spring, and, from the sound of the social worker in California, it didn’t look like Sadie had a dad. That meant she was all alone, thrown out into the world at the age of seventeen, then legally on her own just a short time later after turning eighteen. I flipped my notebook shut and ran downstairs.

My mother was watching television, but she muted it when I came in the room and a commercial started to air.

“Mom, what happens to kids in foster care when they turn eighteen?” I plopped into an arm chair, my legs sprawled over the arm.

“That’s a tough one. Once a kid turns eighteen, they’re legally considered an adult. I know of kids who were in the foster system all their lives, then were completely left to their own devices just a few months from high school graduation. It’s very sad.” She looked at me quizzically. “Why do you want to know?”

“No reason. Just a paper I was thinking of writing.” When she turned her gaze to my legs, I shimmied around and sat up straight. “But how do those kids survive? Do they get jobs?”

“Most have to work to survive, which means they drop out of school. A few organizations are springing up to help solve the problem. There’s a shelter downtown for high school kids who turn eighteen and get tossed out of ‘the system.’ I understand they’re doing some wonderful work, even helping kids get into college and find scholarships. Do you want me to bring you some information on it?”

“Sure. That would be great,” I said.

The show Mom was watching started flickering back on the screen, so I shut up and let her unmute the thing. After a few seconds watching some deadly dull animal show, I ran back upstairs.

Opening my notebook, I added one new observation to my list. Sadie lives alone, but has money. Where does she get it?

Musing on this problem the rest of the evening, I downed a bowl of peanut butter fudge ice cream and some microwave popcorn. Tony stayed secluded in his room the whole night, Connie was still out, and Mom was watching her diet as well as TV, which left the refrigerator-grazing all to me.

As I wandered in and out of the kitchen, the siren call of the computer beckoned. I considered getting on line for the permissible half hour. Mom was engrossed in her show, right? But I figured that would be pushing it, and I didn’t want to irritate Mom.

Back upstairs, I thought so much that, to keep my brain from exploding, I found myself forced to actually clean up my room. But as I hung up clothes, and threw away old papers, an idea began to take hold.

Lemming Lady and Ice Man had something on Sadie. They were the ones who got money from her. And they were the ones who probably had threatened to frame her for murder. What was it they knew that Sadie didn’t want known? My guess was it had something to do with the way she earned her money.

W
HEN
I woke up the next morning, it was raining, a gray, steady curtain of rain. Tony was still mad at me, and Mom had arranged for Connie to drive me to school, probably in an attempt to keep familial harmony.

Connie was being nice to me that morning, which made it easier to keep to myself the secret of Sadie’s true identity. If Connie had acted like a jerk, I might have been forced to reveal the info as a sort of missile defense shield—something sent into the atmosphere to knock out incoming, ego-bursting projectiles.

As she drove me into school, Connie asked me about my Halloween costume and seemed genuinely interested in my dress and hair plans. One date with Kurt had sure put her in a good mood. Come to think of it, he
was
a hunky guy.

At school, I looked eagerly for Kerrie but didn’t see her in the locker hall. But when I caught a glimpse of her outside French class, I could have sworn she was getting ready to audition for the part of an extra on “Night of the Living Dead.” Her face was pallid, and her eyes looked red.

I didn’t find out why until lunchtime, when I managed to rush into the cafeteria and snag two prime private seats in the far corner by the auditorium doorway. Kerrie caught sight of my cheery wave as soon as she entered, and headed my way.

“What’s up with
you
?” I asked, foraging through my change purse for milk money. “You looked awful this morning.”

“Thanks a lot, Bianca.” She threw her books down on the table with a plop. “It’s this rain.”

“Everybody gets a little down in the rain. But it’s been really dry. We need it.”

“Well, I wish we could have another dry weekend. This rain is going to ruin my party! I was planning on putting up lanterns in the back yard and all.”

Now I know it probably sounds really superficial for Kerrie to be so upset about the weather affecting her party when the rain was probably helping farmers, but you have to understand my friend. She’s a planner. She plans things so thoroughly that she makes lists of the lists she has to make to get things done.