Uncovering Sadie's Secrets

by Libby Sternberg

  Well, at least I did. Things had gone so wrong in my life, specifically the Doug date debacle, that I felt a strong urge to find a scapegoat. Sadie would do.

  “Come on,” I yelled at Kerrie, grabbing her arm and marching back toward the school building.

  “Bianca, what are you doing?”

  “We’re going sleuthing,” I said, taking long strides. I wanted to get there before Williston closed up.

  “What? How? What are we looking for and how are we going to find it?” Kerrie sounded hysterical. Happy, but hysterical. Knowing how much she liked plans, I made one up myself.

  “First we’re going to get into the school office. Then we’re going to look up the file on a Miss Sadie Sinclair, recently of California, and alleged high school sophomore.”

  That did the trick and Kerrie followed enthusiastically. When we got back to the school, the doors to the auditorium wing were still open. In the lobby, we could hear Williston and the accompanist rehearsing with Hilary and the other leads. As the piano clanked out its tinny background music, I pulled Kerrie with me, trying to imitate my sister Connie’s confident style the night we. . . actually, I didn’t want to think about that night much.

  We went upstairs and down the long, dark first-floor hall. The office was near the central stairwell, the last door on our right. Like all the doors, it had a pebbled glass window on its upper section. No lights shone through, indicating it was empty. And locked. I twisted the knob to and fro just to confirm the obvious.

  “Bianca, I don’t know. . .”

  “Shhhh!” I knelt down and peered into the room through the keyhole. But there was nothing to see except the beige wallboard of the counter top that greeted the unfortunate students called to the office from time to time.

  “We can’t break in,” Kerrie whined at me. What a disappointment she was turning out to be in the PI department.

  But she did have a point. I couldn’t break in. I didn’t know how. I stood up. “When brawn doesn’t work, use brains,” that was my motto—one that I just made up.

  “Okay, okay,” I said to Kerrie. “Here’s the plan. You go back to Williston. Tell her you forgot—you were supposed to pick up. . .” I bent down again and scanned the counter top in the room beyond. It was loaded with forms. “Your PSAT application! Your father will kill you if you don’t get it done this weekend. You just have to have it. Come on, Kerrie, you can do it!” I said it as if I were a football coach sending the team out to take on a bunch of all-stars.

  But Kerrie bought it. Probably because I started out by telling her it was a plan. While I waited, she happily marched off toward the auditorium. I could have gone with her, of course, but I didn’t want to interfere with her performance. Really.

  After a brief interval, I heard the music stop in the auditorium. I held my breath, hoping that Kerrie was going to come back with the key without Miss Williston in tow. A couple minutes later, Kerrie appeared, key dangling in front of her, and a triumphant grin on her face. She ran the last few feet to the door and giggled when I unlocked it.

  Once inside, I walked behind the counter to the long rows of filing cabinets that held the secrets of our young lives—the parent-teacher conference notes, the report cards, the detention notices. What power I had in my hands right now, I thought, as Kerrie, standing next to me, waited for my latest directive.

  “What’s next?” she whispered.

  “What’s next is you grab a form off the counter and take the key back to Williston,” I said. “I don’t want her sending someone up here to get it from you.”

  “But what about Sadie’s file?”

  “I’ll stay inside here and look for it. Close the door behind you and turn off the light. When you come back, tap on the door three times like this.” I knocked softly on the desk behind me, two quick beats followed by a pause and the final beat. “And I’ll let you in.”

  “Okay.” She dutifully picked up the form and ran off, closing and locking the door behind her. I was glad she wasn’t with me. I didn’t want her getting into trouble too if I was caught. Going through student files was serious business and I knew I could be expelled if someone came in and caught me. I started thinking of possible explanations to offer if that happened.

  My mother asked me to bring a copy of my report card home? I couldn’t remember what my last Stanford Achievement Scores were? I saw a shadow and thought I’d investigate? Extraterrestrials had landed? The voices in my head told me to do it?

  They were all lame lines, so I kept thinking of other excuses as I approached the filing cabinets.

  Let me elaborate on that—the locked filing cabinets. Good grief, I thought, the whole world is locked up tight like a prison. But wait a minute. The key would probably be nearby.

  I turned to the desk and slid open the pencil drawer in the center. It was neatly organized with rubber bands and paper clips and pennies in different plastic compartments. And small keys, just the kind you use to open file cabinets. I pulled them out and started trying them on the drawers. It didn’t take long to get the right one. It unlocked a whole row. I found the “S’s” and started searching.

  When I found Sadie’s file, I wished I’d had a camera so that I could take photos of the pages, even though there weren’t that many of them. Compared to most of the fat, paper-stuffed folders for the other students, Sadie’s was pretty slim. All it contained was a letter from her mother, whose last name, I noted with surprise, was the same as Sadie’s—Sinclair. Amy Sinclair.

  In the letter, Mrs. Sinclair told the principal that she was enrolling her daughter, enclosing a deposit on the tuition, and having her records sent from Mount Carmel High in Salinas, California. They should arrive any day, she’d added.

  But no Carmel High transcripts or other records were in the file, and the letter from Mrs. Sinclair to the school was dated July 18 of this year. There was the usual application form and a copy of the note I had seen in Sadie’s possession the other day, notifying her mother of Sadie’s advanced placement opportunities.

  I pulled out the application and began to scan it. Father was deceased. Mother was employed as a financial consultant? Hmmm. . . the woman I’d seen hadn’t looked like any financial consultant. I glanced at the other information on the app, which was pretty standard—dates of vaccinations, previous schools. Nothing jumped out at me. Nothing said, “This is why Sadie is weird and Doug won’t talk to you.”

  Buh-bump. Bump. It was the signal. Kerrie was at the door. I put the folder back in its place, closed and locked the file drawer, and ran to the door to tell Kerrie what I’d found out. Maybe the two of us could make sense of all this.

  I turned the knob. Nothing happened. Was it stuck? I tried again. Nothing. The lock held fast.

  “Kerrie,” I whispered through the door.

  “What?” she whispered back.

  “It—won’t—open,” I said, the situation slowly sinking in. Our school had been built in 1933. It was in excellent condition because the administrators were constantly upgrading facilities. Just last year, there had been a big campaign to “enhance security.” That included nifty new locks on the office door. I remember reading about it in the newsletter sent to parents once a month. Now I knew what exactly was so secure about these locks. They required a key—on either side of the door.

  “Do you still have the key?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “No! I gave it back to Mrs. Williston,” she said, sounding panicky.

  “Well, go back. . . that’s it,” I said and hastily added, “that’s the plan. Go back and tell Williston you forgot something. You forgot your purse.”

  “I have my purse!”

  “Well, leave it here. Hide it in the bathroom. Tell her you accidentally left it in the office when you picked up the application. Hurry up, Kerrie. They won’t be rehearsing all day!”

  I heard her running off down the hall. It seemed like an eternity before she returned. And when she did, I noticed something odd about the footsteps. There we
re too many of them. As they came closer, I heard Kerrie speaking in a strangely loud and high-pitched voice.

  “Thank you, Miss Williston,” she practically shouted in my direction, “for coming up here with me to unlock the door. I’m sure I left it in there.” Kerrie sounded as if she was practicing for an elocution class, her diction was so fierce and her voice so strong.

  “No trouble, dear,” Miss Williston said, although she sounded extremely put out.

  I ran behind the counter then, decided that was too out in the open, and quickly scooted farther behind the desk, knocking over a trash bin in the process. It fell with a muted clunk. Kerrie must have heard it and started coughing.

  “You better get that checked,” Miss Williston said as she unlocked the door. “You don’t want to infect the entire cast, now do you?” I heard the door swing open and their steps entering the room. I murmured a silent prayer to keep them on the other side of the counter. Fast thinking Kerrie jumped in to save the day.

  “Oh my goodness!” she cried. “It’s not here. And you know what? I remember now. I left it in the bathroom! Oh, I’m so sorry, Miss Williston. I didn’t mean to hold you up.”

  “Well, come on and get it and I’ll walk you out. Do you have someone picking you up?” Miss Williston asked her. Their voices became farther away as they walked to the door, closed it (I heard the lock tumbling shut), and walked away.

  “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.

  AS 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.

  Chapter Eleven

  CONNIE 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.