Uncovering Sadie's Secrets

by Libby Sternberg

  I like Kerrie, but even I was rolling my eyes after the thirtieth description of the kind of toys that were not acceptable as donations. “Nothing made in China, if you don’t mind. Nothing on the Consumer Safety Products Warning List. Nothing made by BonCo Toys because they use child labor in India. . .”

  By the time she was done, I felt like running to the mike myself and sobbing to the mesmerized crowd, “I confess, I confess”—quite a few of the forbidden toys were stashed away in my old toy box. My mother hadn’t been as enlightened, I guess, when she’d played Santa Claus.

  My guilt at inadvertently exploiting the underprivileged played second fiddle to other, more immediate concerns. First off were the encounters with Doug.

  Deciding how to react to Doug, how to interpret his reactions, and plotting future encounters with him was beginning to occupy a lot of my time at school. Not that some classes weren’t interesting enough to divert me. My history teacher, for example, was one riveting lady who made us all work so hard we forgot we were working hard.

  Hmm. . . history would come in handy in my new career path—World Court High Justice (I’d moved up from the Supreme Court, you see.)

  Anyway, I saw Doug a few times during the day and once he actually smiled and said, “Kerrie’s party!” while pointing his index finger at me. In the shorthand of the day, I was sure he really meant, “I cannot wait until our tryst, my darling beloved.”

  Kerrie’s party, in fact, was beginning to take on mythic importance. It would give me the opportunity to be with Doug, maybe even dance, hold hands (that sent a shiver down my spine), and generally be close. It would make up for those encounters of the fouled-up kind we’d been having. Or not having.

  And I also had a kind of electric feeling that something big would happen at the party. Sadie had been invited, and probably was going to come. Thus, there might be opportunities to pry more information out of her, or to observe her or learn something new about her. I wasn’t sure how. Maybe someone would show up dressed as a medieval torture chamber operator, and could scare information out of her.

  My mind was so full of hope because of Doug that I was beginning to think anything could happen: a revelation from Sadie; an admission of devotion from Doug; a job offer from Kerrie’s lawyer father. The possibilities were endless.

  Of course, part of my hope for getting info out of Sadie was buoyed by my simmering resentment of Connie. I wanted to show her up, to uncover Sadie’s secrets on my own, and make Connie feel bad for offering me anything less than the equivalent of a partnership in her PI agency. It’s amazing what an energy boost resentment and anger can provide.

  As it turned out, I didn’t see my sister much the rest of the week. She was busy on an insurance fraud case, my mother told me on one of the nights Connie’s chair was empty at the dinner table. And one night Connie actually had a date—with Kurt of all people. I wondered if my mother had ever seen the guy.

  These Connie-less dinners were actually nice occasions to chat with my Mom, who was usually pretty frazzled from work. Tony was out a lot that week, too, because of his college and work schedule, so that meant lots of bonding time for me and Mom.

  On Thursday night that week, I talked to her about Sadie, explaining how odd she was and how Kerrie and I didn’t think she was telling us everything.

  My mother grimaced while her fork of macaroni and cheese paused in mid-air.

  “There are a lot of girls who don’t have the best home life,” she said philosophically. “Have you ever met Sadie’s parents?”

  I didn’t want to tell her about Lemming Lady and Ice Man, so I just said “no.” Besides, I really didn’t think they were her parents. They wanted something from her all right, but it wasn’t a daughter’s affection.

  “Have you ever seen any signs of trouble, of abuse?” Mom asked. “You know, funny bruises, black eyes, anything like that?

  “Heck no,” I answered quickly. “If anything, Sadie seems to be alone. Like her parents don’t exist.”

  Mom got even more serious.

  “Do you think she could have run away from home?” she asked me.

  “Connie thinks that’s a possibility. But how could she live on her own at the age of fifteen?” I asked. “How would she support herself?”

  My mother didn’t answer at first, but ate silently for a few seconds. Then she blurted out her theory.

  “What if Sadie was earning money to support herself? Does she have a job?”

  “No. No visible means of support.”

  “Do you think she’s into drugs, prostitution?” My mother peered at me through squinty eyes, obviously concerned that I’d be hanging out with a bad type.

  “No!” Methinks I dost protest too much, my inner (Shakespearean) voice declared. I had, of course, suspected Sadie of those things. I just hadn’t articulated them.

  In truth, Sadie’s life did not paint a picture of goodness and light. Look at the people around her. The knife-wielding, tough-talking Lemming Lady was no saint. Just thinking of her gave me the creeps. And then there was the condo—owned by a jailed drug dealer. Finally, Ice Man looked as if he had seen his share of trouble and liked it that way.

  “How would you know?” my mother asked, and I began to fear we’d soon be treading into dangerous waters.

  “Uh, well, you know. Kids talk. You hear things,” I said. I stood and took my plate to the sink, scraping the scraps into the garbage disposal.

  “If you hear things, you should tell me. You should not let friends engage in dangerous behaviors.” Mom, too, stood and did the plate-scraping routine. We loaded the dishwasher together.

  She was right, of course, and if I ever saw Kerrie or Nicole doing or saying anything that led me to believe they were headed for trouble, I’d make sure responsible people knew so they could help.

  But, despite Sadie’s unseemly circle, I sensed in her a desire to be wholesome, as if she might have run away from a seamier life and was trying to start over.

  “Do you have homework?” my mother asked. She placed the last dish in the machine, poured detergent in the little compartments, and flipped the thing on.

  “A little. I need the computer,” I said, improvising. I needed it all right, but to look up more stuff about Sadie Sinclair and Melinda McEvoy. Sure, I had a one-page essay to write, but I could do that pretty quickly.

  “Well, I’m going to watch the news.” As she went by, Mom gave me a cheery punch in the shoulder and headed for the living room, where she settled in her favorite chair and flicked on the tube. As I heard the sounds of the evening newscast skittering into the room, I plunked myself in front of the computer and got to work.

  To my credit (if I do say so myself), I whipped off the one-page essay on “a discussion of internal and external conflicts in the play Antigone” first. Then I turned the sound off so as not to disturb my mother, and started up the old Internet engine.

  I revved up my imaginative and investigative instincts to a high pitch. Sadie seemed to be running away from something. She had a California car that had belonged to Melinda McEvoy. Had Melinda McEvoy employed her? Abused her? Been her mother?

  With lightning speed, I raced through search after search trying to find out if Melinda McEvoy had had any children. Her obit did-n’t list survivors. I tried plugging in “Sadie McEvoy,” “Melinda Sinclair,” “Melinda Sadie,” any combination I could think of. Nothing.

  I tried looking through on-line archives of newspapers in California searching for a clue, using anything I could think of. But the brick wall I kept running into was this—if Sadie was running from something, chances were she wasn’t using her own name. Chances are she’d faked a lot of stuff, maybe even a driver’s license.

  After an hour and a half of this, I gave up and disconnected. Checking the voice mail on the phone, I found I had three messages. My heart leapt for joy. Surely one of the messages would be from Doug.

  But Tony’s cold voice greeted me instead.

  “This is
Tony. I’m stuck at Burger Boy. My car won’t start. Battery’s dead. Can you come help me out?”

  Next message: “Tony again. I still need a jumpstart. Nobody here has cables.”

  Final message, five minutes before I got off the Internet: “If that’s you on the phone, Bianca, you’re gonna pay. I need someone to come get me. For crissake, get off the phone!”

  So that Mom would not be disturbed by Tony’s cursing, I thoughtfully erased the messages. Then I informed her of his distress.

  She immediately jumped up and muttered, “Oh, dear,” then ran for her purse and coat.

  “I’ll be back in an hour or so. Stay off the phone and the Internet in case I need to call you,” she said at the door.

  After she left, I was all alone. And despite Mom’s warning about staying off the phone, I knew that she wouldn’t be in a position to use a phone for at least twenty minutes, maybe even more, until she reached Burger Boy.

  So, for a brief period of time, I would be in teenage paradise— an empty house and access to the phone. Thinking quickly, I checked the time. It was nearly seven-thirty.

  Seven-thirty, eastern time. It would be four-thirty on the West Coast. That meant offices there would still be open.

  To heck with the Internet, I thought, picking up the receiver. I would go directly to the source. I flipped through the phone book looking for the area code for Sadie’s old stomping grounds. Finding it, I punched it in and the number for information. When the mechanical voice came on asking me what I was after, I blurted out, “Department of Social Services.”

  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.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHEN 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?”