Uncovering Sadie's Secrets (23 page)

“Let me call Connie,” I whispered. I got her on the phone in a flash, and she told me that she and Kurt, though just a few blocks away, were having a hard time getting over to the Barrington Arms through a maze of unfamiliar streets. So Doug had one up on the hulky Kurt. Doug knew Towson. My Doug. My hero.

“They’re getting in the car!” Doug hissed at me. He unlocked his door and started to get out.

“Doug!” I hissed back. “Don’t let them see you.”

Either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t listen because Doug slammed the door, not hiding his presence from the diabolical duo and Sadie. Except the diabolical duo was the Diabolical Uno. Only Angelica was walking toward the black car, hauling a big box with Sadie behind her carrying another box. Her computer.

“Bianca! Bianca! What’s happening?” Connie’s voice squawked at me from the cell phone.

“Doug got out of the car. I have to go after him,” I whispered. I slid over to the door and unlocked it, then quietly left the car, being careful not to slam the door. Unlike Doug, I stayed down and out of sight. I had no idea what he was planning, but I wasn’t comfortable with overt actions.

“Hey, you there! Hold it! What’s in those boxes?” Doug said forcefully.

Doug was shouting at Sadie and Angelica in a strong voice. It was deeper than usual and sounded as if it came from someone in authority.

Come to think of it, it
was
The Voice of Authority, or what such a voice sounded like. Peering from my hiding space behind the right back fender of Doug’s Honda, I could see that Doug had put on his sunglasses and was striding purposefully towards Sadie and Angelica. He was pretending to be an officer of the law, just what Angelica had thought he was when she’d seen him at the party! Doug had brains. Doug was cool. Doug was my guy.

Sadie played along.

“Angelica,” she said. “You better do as he says.” And then Sadie just dropped her box, smack in the middle of the parking lot. In fact, it sounded as if she threw it rather than dropped it.

Angelica was undaunted. She just sped up her pace, threw her box in the back seat of the black car, and yelled at Sadie to “come on!”

Uh-oh. I wasn’t sure Doug had a counter punch to Angelica’s disregard for the law. Or the law that he was pretending to be. I crept forward, expecting to see Doug back off and come back to the car. Boy was
I
surprised.

Doug stopped in his tracks, spread his legs wide, and reached into his breast pocket, from whence he pulled out a—gun!

Yikes! A gun? Was he nuts? Was he certifiable?

“Halt! FBI!” he yelled at them. With both hands he aimed the shiny gun at Angelica. That stopped her. Open-mouthed, she stared at Doug, her hand resting on the edge of the car door. Sadie backed away from the car, equally surprised at the turn of events.

“Back away from the car,” Doug said menacingly, a steely edge in his voice. He waved the gun ever so slightly to the left, indicating he wanted them to step out into the open part of the parking lot, away from the car. He was really getting into this. He was going for an Oscar with this performance.

Only trouble was, what was the denouement? What was he planning on doing with Angelica and Sadie once he had them? He couldn’t possibly have handcuffs, too. And what would we do— make a citizen’s arrest for violating nice-person rules?

As Doug moved towards them, I caught Angelica looking back at the condo. My gaze followed hers and zeroed in on what she saw. Ice Man! He was headed their way, silently coming up on Doug from behind. And he was reaching into his jacket, too. My heart went on a roller coaster ride. My ears rang. My mind screamed. I had to do something or Ice Man would do something that I didn’t even want to think about.

Where were Connie and Kurt? Come on! If Doug could find his way through Towson, surely bounty hunter Kurt could. He’d been this way before, too.

Sweat covered my brow even though it was cool outside. Doug was to my left. Ice Man was to my right. If I stepped out and screamed, would Ice Man do something desperate—like aim his gun at Doug or me? Would Doug turn around and shoot? Ay-yay-yay. We hadn’t covered these problems in our “Religious and Moral Dilemmas in the New Millennium” class. And somehow I suspected that Sister Rose Marie Cornish didn’t have this situation anywhere in the syllabus.

I nervously placed my strand of beads in my mouth. The beads! The beads would slow Ice Man down. I ripped the strands over my head and chewed furiously on the string that held them together while I sneaked up toward Ice Man, cowering below the car lines. He was walking slowly toward Doug, so I would soon be within bead-shooting range.

Crazy things go through your head at times like these. I started wondering how to calculate exactly when my progress forward would meet up with Ice Man’s progress toward Doug. It was like a math problem—a criminal traveling at five miles an hour leaves his end of the parking lot at 10:05, while a flapper traveling at three miles an hour leaves her end of the parking lot at 10:06. When will the two meet?

I vowed to pay more attention in Honors Algebra.

There was no time for math regrets now. I figured if I could get close to Ice Man, I could start spraying him with beads, and maybe he’d think they were bugs or something. I’d throw them at him until he stopped. Or until Connie arrived. Where
was
Connie anyway, I thought for the millionth time.

Ba-boom, ba-boom, my heart was saying. I gulped. I positioned the beads in my fingers, ready to draw them off one-by-one and pummel Ice Man.

Ah, the best laid plans often end up as guacamole in the blender of life. Just as I was about to start my bead-shooting routine, something happened. I dropped the strands. All of them at once. Like glassy rain, they bounced and pinged on the asphalt, gliding across the parking lot in a hundred thousand shards of gleaming glass.

“What the—?” Ice Man said, looking down. It was too late. He’d stepped forward into the sparkling mess before realizing what was happening. Like it or not, Ice Man was now Skating Man, the beads acting like ball bearings under his feet.

He wasn’t very good at skating, either. He had no grace, no panache. No balance. In a few seconds, the ground had been swept from under him and he was on his back, the gun flying from his hand into the air, where it was caught by. . .

Kurt! Kurt and Connie chose that moment to squeal into the parking lot, coming up behind Ice Man just in time for Kurt to reach out the driver’s window and pluck the gun from the air. Did someone choreograph this thing or what?

Connie and Kurt exited the Jeep and came around to help. I stood up and let my presence be known.

Angelica glared at me and sneered, “You!” Which I took as a compliment.

Kurt took care of Ice Man while Connie grabbed Angelica and told Doug to put his “piece” away.

With a broad smile, Doug stuck the end of his gun in his mouth.

And began to chew it.

“Gummy candy,” he said. “I thought it looked pretty cool.”

I ran forward to hug him, not caring if Connie saw me draped over my boyfriend. She smiled.

And so did Sadie.

I
T TOOK
a couple of hours to get everything straightened out. Doug and I took Sadie back to Kerrie’s house while Connie and Kurt handled Angelica and Dwayne. Yup, that’s what Ice Man’s name is—Dwayne Norton.

At Kerrie’s, the party was still rolling, although the crowd had considerably thinned out, so we were able to seclude ourselves in Mr. Daniels’ study on the second floor while Sadie told us the whole story and Mr. Daniels gave her advice.

Most of it was stuff I’d already figured out, which made me feel really smart. I wished I could get them all to sign affidavits attesting to my brilliance so I could wave it under Connie’s nose in the future.

Sadie was Sarah McEvoy and, as I had surmised, she was an eighteen-year-old high school dropout. Her mother had hung with some bad folks, so Sadie’s life hadn’t been too pleasant. After Sadie dropped out of high school, she worked in a computer store, which is where she’d met Angelica, who worked there, too.

In their spare time, Sadie would show Angelica all sorts of things you could do on the computer. Sadie was a whiz at it. When Angelica got sacked, Sadie was friendless. But not for long. Angelica came back asking Sadie for help. She told her she had a cousin who was in trouble.

“She gave me the woman’s name, social security number, and birth date and asked me if I could access her credit card on the computer because Angelica said she wanted to pay her bill for her. I did it. I didn’t know what she was really doing.” Sadie sniffled and leaned forward in the straight-back chair next to Mr. Daniels’ desk. Doug and I stood near the door and Kerrie sat on the edge of the desk.

“What was she doing?” Mr. Daniels asked patiently. He handed Sadie a tissue.

“She—and Dwayne—were stealing people’s identities. She wanted access to the credit cards so she could use them. I didn’t know.”

“So you worked for them?” Mr. Daniels asked.

“Yes. For nearly a year. I was stupid. I thought Angelica was my friend. She’d give me little bits of information about people she said were her friends or relatives, then ask me to access their bank records, their credit card records. Then she asked me to open a corporate checking account for Dwayne, which I did. And then I figured out what was going on.” Sadie held the tissue in her hands between her legs. “Will I go to jail?” she asked pitifully.

“I don’t think so,” Kerrie’s dad said. “I think we can avoid that. How did you figure out what was going on?”

“One of the so-called relatives Angelica was supposedly helping had been a customer. That’s probably where she got the person’s address and credit card number to begin with—from receipts or checks. Anyway, this person came in the store again to buy something. Her credit card showed she was maxed out, and she was flabbergasted. She said she hardly used her credit card. She couldn’t understand it. After she left the store, I remembered Angelica asking me to access her records a couple months earlier. I checked them out again and found out Angelica had not paid off her debt or helped her. In fact, a whole long list of purchases had been racked up since Angelica had asked me to hack into her account. That’s when I figured it out.”

“And what did you do?”

“I told Dwayne and Angelica I couldn’t help them anymore.”

“And?”

“And they went away for awhile. But then my mother died.” Sadie started to cry in earnest as she told the story of her mother’s death. The car Sadie had been driving—her mother’s boyfriend’s vehicle—was rammed when someone ran a stoplight. Sadie’s mother hadn’t been wearing a seat belt.

Sadie wiped her eyes with the tissue. “I got a lot of insurance money I didn’t know she had. Dwayne came by one night and told me he could make the police believe I had killed her, that I had caused the accident deliberately. He said he was going to frame me for murder and nobody would believe me because I was already guilty of identity-theft and I had a record. At the very least, the cops would get me on the identity fraud rap.”

“A record?” Kerrie’s father was taking notes on a yellow legal pad.

“I shoplifted a CD player one day. It was a stupid thing to do. I got probation.”

“So that’s when you decided to leave, to take on the identity of Sadie Sinclair?”

“I didn’t steal her identity!” Sadie said, pounding the desk. “I told Bianca that already.”

I looked at Sadie and wondered why she insisted on lying about that. Then it hit me. “She’s right,” I chimed in. “She didn’t steal Sadie Mauvais Sinclair’s identity. She only used her name.” Then I explained that Sadie had made up a new Social Security number for herself. She hadn’t stolen Sinclair’s. She’d merely used the name after seeing it in the newspaper.

“How do you know what her Social Security number is?” Mr. Daniels asked me.

“Uh. . . uh. . .” I stammered. I really didn’t think I wanted to reveal the story about how I looked at Sadie’s school file. Call me crazy, but I had this idea that Mr. Daniels would feel obligated to notify some authorities. Some real ones. Not the Doug kind.

“I told her!” Sadie said, looking at me with gratitude in her eyes. “I told her one day.”

Sadie explained the rest of the story in short order. Her mother, whose family was all gone now, had moved to California from Baltimore after graduating from St. John’s. So Sadie had headed to her mother’s home turf to get away from Dwayne and Angelica. But the Diabolical Duo were not good at the computer stuff. When their money-machine left, they decided they’d take a little trip, find her, and entice her back into the identity-theft ring. It was a cash cow, she said. By this time, Dwayne was writing counterfeit checks right and left using the fake corporation he’d set up and various other identities he’d managed to pilfer through Sadie’s work.

“All I wanted to do was start over,” Sadie said. “I wanted to get my high school diploma with the money from my mom and maybe go to college and find a job.” She broke down again. Kerrie’s dad told Kerrie to get a glass of water for Sadie.

Sadie had faked her age in order to pick up her high school career where she’d left off—right before she’d dropped out—as a sophomore.