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.
IT 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.
By the time the story was over, Kerrie’s dad was reassuring Sadie that she would probably be all right. It was nearly midnight now and the party was winding down. I still had a lot of questions, but they would have to wait for another day. Right now, I just wanted to go home and get some shut-eye.
Doug drove me home, only missing my street once. He even managed to stay in his lane most of the time.
At my door, he gave me the kind of heart-stopping good-bye kiss that a girl dreams about. He put his hands on either side of my face and drew me close and, well, you’ll excuse me if I keep some things private. When my diaries are published and I’m famous, you’ll know all.
Until then, suffice it to say that I was in a kind of dreamy mood when I went to bed that night.
Oh, and did I mention? Doug asked me to the Mistletoe Dance.
Epilogue
SADIE OR Sarah as we came to know her, did okay. Kerrie’s dad managed to cut a deal for her. She wasn’t even charged with anything as long as she spilled her guts about Dwayne and Angelica, both of whom were extradited to California. (“Extradited,” by the way, means that Maryland sent the pair back to their home state for prosecution. It’s one of the many legal and criminal justice terms I am learning as I prepare for my new career.)
The nuns at St. John’s kept Sadie on but adjusted her schedule to suit her age. She left our lowly sophomore class and resumed school as a senior, taking a few lower-level classes the rest of the year to make up for what she’d missed when she’d dropped out of school.
The condo that Sadie had stayed in belonged to one of Dwayne and Angelica’s victims, who she knew was a convicted criminal already sent to prison.
Even though Sadie was “borrowing” the condo, she had still paid the rent. And by California standards, the rent didn’t seem out of line. She never bothered to buy furniture because she used all her money for school and food—just the basics. The insurance she’d received from her mother was a fifty-thousand dollar policy. Mr. Daniels insisted she bank what was left for college.
Kerrie’s parents took Sadie under their wing, which was a delight for Kerrie, who’d always wanted a sister. (It didn’t take long, though, before Kerrie realized siblings are as much a bother as a boon. But that’s another story.)
Sadie would stay with the Daniels the remainder of the school year, applying to colleges and working part-time in one of Mr. Daniels’ client’s businesses so she could make some extra money. She insisted on paying him for his legal help.
Because of her new schedule, I didn’t see Sadie much over the next month when all this stuff was sorted out. But whenever I did, she gave me a big smile, which went a long way toward making me feel better about the whole mess. I had a nagging sense that I had-n’t exactly handled it superbly.
I guess the moral of the story is a pretty simple one. It’s easy to gossip and raise your eyebrows about the tribulations of others. It’s far harder to roll up your sleeves and actually help out.
Hoping for the best but thinking the worst, we all like to snicker and guess when a friend looks headed for trouble. It would be better, though, to offer to solve those problems.
Such was the case with Sadie. I had known she had problems. And I’d wanted to think she was on the road out of whatever mess she was in. But at times I had thought the worst deep down—that she was into drugs or even prostitution.
In reality, she was running away from people who had exploited her. If I had been as tenacious in making her talk about it as I was in digging into her past, maybe she would have felt like she had a place to run to.
You see, I could have solved the Sadie mystery by being a little more insistent at the outset. From the way Sadie gave it all up in the Daniels’ study that night, I don’t think it would have taken much to get her to tell her story to us if we had persisted. Instead, we played Private Eye, which was risky, especially when the only “heat” you’re packing is of the sugar-coated variety.
So it’s less like a moral and more like an etiquette lesson. That is, it is preferable to ask one’s friends directly if they have a problem rather than resorting to spying on, and speculating about, them. Sometimes the more direct approach is the best.
Speaking of best, this all ended well for me, too. Doug and I are seeing each other. When I’m not at school, out with Kerrie or Sadie, or out with Doug, I’m helping my mom sew that green velvet dress for the Misteltoe Dance.
Trust me, it’s going to be a knock-out. The flapper costume will look like rags in comparison.
Acknowledgements
Because this is my first work of published fiction, I would like to acknowledge a number of people who have helped me along the writer’s path:
My sister Mary Ann, who was the first person to suggest to me, during a period of “self-unemployment,” that I should consider doing what she knew I always wanted to do—write.
My cousin Paul and his wife Nancy, who have been unflagging cheerleaders throughout this endeavor.
My sister-in-law Leslie, another unfailing supporter.
Bruce, my editor, agent, and friend—a writer’s dream.
And finally, in addition to my daughter (to whom this book is dedicated), my two sons, who continually inspire me, and my husband Matthew, who steadfastly believed in me no matter how many rejection letters filled my files.
About the Author
Author Libby Sternberg is a freelance writer whose social and political commentary regularly airs on Vermont Public Radio.
Her articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Baltimore Sun, the Indianapolis Star, Insight, and The Weekly Standard.
She is the co-author of a book on healthcare, and was a finalist in several novel-writing contests in 2001 and 2002. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University.
A Baltimore native, she now lives in Rutland, Vermont, is married, and has three children.
Uncovering Sadie's Secrets is her first published novel. Hector’s Hidden Talents, the next installment of her Bianca Balducci mystery series, is due out in April 2004.
Table of Contents
Cover Image
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
; Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Uncovering Sadie's Secrets Page 16