“English, please.”
“Sorry—I’m taking Econ 101. They only make a few bags so everyone wants one, no one can find it except a privileged few, and once they find it, they have to spend a ton to buy it.”
“Like this overpriced candy you just bought,” Tasha says, fishing out another piece.
“Right, so maybe you should stop eating it,” I say. “Then I was trying to figure out what the stolen goods have in common besides all being top of the line and stupid expensive.”
“And?”
“They were all taken during study-hall periods. But there are two study-hall rooms in Percy Hall.”
“That school has so many buildings they have to name them?” Tasha asks. “North only has one building, unless you count the overflow trailers, and no one’s naming those. One day you need to take me over there to see it.”
“Assuming I’ll still be there and not in jail.”
“Oh yeah. You were saying?”
“Since we only get one study-hall period a semester, and each item was stolen from a different study hall period, it would be impossible for one kid to do all the stealing. They’d have to have help.”
“Maybe there’s a ring of thieves, like a porn or drug ring.”
Tasha’s suggestion sounds a little Hollywood, but I don’t dismiss it. A theory, even a crazy one, is a possibility until you can disprove it.
“Wouldn’t it be kinda hard to steal in study hall? I mean everyone would see the thief,” Tasha says.
“Maybe at North, where it’s just a regular classroom. At Langdon, they also have study rooms like you see at the public library—little rooms with a small table, a chair, and a large window looking out into the main room. Everybody tries to get there early enough to claim one of those rooms so they can nap or text or whatever they want because the teachers can’t see them unless they walk by. All the thefts happened out of those rooms.”
“So the kids must have been out of their study rooms when the items were stolen, but wouldn’t someone have noticed the thief going into the rooms?”
“That’s what I keep thinking. To complicate things, today something was stolen from a PE locker so now I can’t even confine the thefts to study hall.”
I’ve been so focused running the case by Tasha, I’m surprised to find we’re already halfway home. Tasha has helped me lay out all the facts (and eaten half my candy). Now I just need to connect them into a story. That’s always the fun part.
When I get home, I find Lana at the kitchen table reading blueprints. They’re spread all over the table and floor with sticky notes stuck to them. She does this whenever she’s on a new case, studying not only the building she’s staking out, but buildings nearby. That’s a big part of being a detective—knowing your surroundings. She says it’s a gift we have, the ability to look at a thing once and understand it better than other people, to see how it fits into everything else. Even though she sometimes treats me like I’m already one, she claims to hate the idea of me becoming a cop. Too dangerous, she says.
“Lana, now I don’t want you to get all crazy when I tell you this.”
“Oh no, don’t tell me you’re pregnant. . . .”
One thing Lana fears more than chasing down an armed suspect is me getting pregnant. I guess because she knows how hard it was to have me when she was in high school. I’m sure I could tell her anything else—I’m on drugs, I’m a compulsive shoplifter, maybe that I gamble on the weekends when she’s working a late surveillance—and she’d be fine with that, just as long as I don’t tell her I’m pregnant.
“I’m not preggers, Lana. You’ll be the first to know when it happens.”
“Don’t even joke about that.” She knocks three times on our wooden table in case I’ve jinxed myself. But unless you can get pregnant from just dreaming about sex, I’m safe. “So what is it you don’t want me to get ‘all crazy’ over?”
“Look what I got for you,” I say, handing her what’s left of the candy. “There’s some Mary Janes in there, and some Sugar Babies.”
“Bribes, Chanti? It must be bad.”
“The headmistress is trying to set me up for some thefts at school.”
“Oh, thank goodness. I thought it was something serious,” Lana says. Not quite the response I was hoping for, but pretty much what I expected.
“I consider a theft charge pretty serious, especially when I’m the accused.”
“Sure you aren’t overreacting a little? You tend to do that, you know. Remember the time you called the fire department because you smelled smoke, certain our house was burning down, and it was the neighbors’ barbecue? Had an ambulance and three fire trucks over here.”
“That was being cautious, not overreacting. And in this case, I’ve got proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
“Monday Smythe called us all down to her office. . . .”
“Who is us? Don’t give me half the facts.”
“All the scholarship kids . . .”
“Is that what they call you?”
It’s hard to get a story out when Lana goes into interrogation mode.
“Never mind that, Lana. She called us all down to say someone had been stealing and, not that she wanted to make any accusations, but it must have been one of us.”
“Because . . .”
“She claims they had no thefts until we started at the school.”
“That woman better watch herself,” Lana says, and I know from the inflection in her voice that it isn’t an idle threat.
“Or what?”
“Just a mama bear looking out for her cub.”
Now I know something is up. Lana would never reference a mama bear and her cub. When I was a kid, her bedtime stories were G-rated versions of her day at work. Sort of like an Officer Friendly version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, except that the dwarfs were juvenile delinquents, and Cinderella was more worried about her probation officer than her evil stepmother.
“You have something on her, don’t you? Is Smythe the favor you used to get me into Langdon?”
“Chanti, you’re getting off track.”
“Let’s see. She must have committed some crime for you to have any dirt on her.”
Lana says nothing, just stares at her blueprints, and I know I’m right.
“Nooo! Did you catch her in a sting? Is Smythe a drug dealer after school?”
“You’re talking crazy.”
“Was she stealing something? Maybe she’s my suspect. She really wants us scholarship kids gone—maybe she’d set us up just to get us out of Langdon.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Chanti.”
“You know I’m going to figure out how you met her, so you might as well tell me.”
“I’m not telling you anything.”
“So there is something to tell. I knew it. Does she know your cover?”
“No, I stayed under.”
“A-ha! Vice Bureau has arrested her for something.”
Silence from Lana.
“I guess I don’t need to know what she did, but it explains why she treats me the way she does. She thinks I’m the daughter of one of your alter egos. Hooker, crackhead, con artist, drug dealer—doesn’t matter which one. No wonder she’s convinced it’s me.”
“You know what happens when you can’t verify a theory. No evidence, no case.”
“You’re just peeved because I outsmarted you.”
This new revelation about Smythe doesn’t give me much in the way of solving the school thefts, but at least I know who I’m working with. For the first time since all of this began, I feel like I’m one step ahead.
“Can we get back to the school thefts, please?” Lana asks. “Why are you just telling me about this?”
“I thought I could handle it on my own, but I need help. I was able to get a look at the list of what was stolen.”
“I probably don’t want to know how you were able to get a look at that, right?”
“Right.�
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No doubt I’m the only kid at Langdon whose mother would beam with pride over the fact I may have done a little B and E for the sake of solving a case. I lay out the facts as I know them. We don’t need to write them down because we’re both looking at the same list in our heads. We’re quiet for a minute while Lana processes what I’ve told her.
“I agree, it isn’t a boy, for all the reasons you said. Given the way the study rooms are set up, someone would notice a student going in and out of another student’s study room, certainly the study-hall teacher would. It has to be someone who could go into a study room while the student is out and be above suspicion.”
“So that leaves the study-hall teacher?”
“Or some other staff, like facilities people.”
Oh no, I couldn’t imagine Mildred doing that. But she isn’t the only facilities person at Langdon. There are lots of them because the campus is so big.
“Not just facilities staff,” Lana continued, as if reading my mind. “Was someone in there changing out lightbulbs on the days the thefts occurred? Could they have had contractors in to paint or fix a stuck window, anything like that?”
“I’m not sure. But it has to be someone who is in the school every day because the thefts haven’t been clustered in sequential days, they’ve been spread out since our first day at the school. They wouldn’t allow the facilities people to disrupt class time. I can’t rule out friends of the victims, who no one would suspect if they went into a friend’s study room. So that leaves staff or students who have access to study hall during that time.”
“You said the bracelet was stolen from the PE locker room, so you can’t limit your search to just the study halls.”
“Yeah, but I think that theft might be unrelated,” I say, still believing Annette was behind that. Now that I think of it, I should find out if she has study hall this semester. Maybe mall shoplifting has lost its thrill.
“What’s going on in that school? I sent you there to stay out of trouble. . . .”
“See what I’m saying? Okay, if I ignore the bracelet for a minute and just focus on study hall, I can narrow it down to a couple hundred people, including the alleged victims. They could be trying to set someone up, or one of them could be a thief. Two hundred suspects—not very narrow.”
“Well, let’s look at it again. Use the advantage of being new to this world and examine the anomalies. What jumps out at you about the girls who had their property stolen?”
“They’re all rich, but that doesn’t set them apart at Langdon. Everybody is rich.”
“Instead of looking at wealth as a common denominator, look at it as the backdrop for the anomaly.”
“So someone who isn’t rich? But you always tell me shoplifters are usually females who don’t need the loot, they just want the thrill.”
“That’s true of shoplifters. But I think we’re dealing with something different at Langdon. I don’t think this is a thrill seeker, or they wouldn’t limit their hunting grounds to the study-hall rooms. They’d branch out, get bolder. As an outsider, tell me what you think about the items stolen.”
“Well, first off, I can’t believe kids are walking around with five hundred dollar BlackBerrys and messenger bags. Even if we could afford it, there’s no way you’d let me spend that kind of money on a phone. Sometimes I want to introduce those Langdon kids to the real world, like closeout sales and after-school jobs and praying all winter that the furnace won’t die. They don’t know how good they got it.”
By the time I was done, my observations had turned into a rant. Lana looks at me like I’ve just cracked the case.
“Find someone as angry as you are about some people having too much and others not having enough, and you’ll have narrowed that list considerably.”
Maybe Lana’s right, but I don’t know anyone remotely as angry as I am about overindulged Langdonites. Well, except for one really ticked-off bio teacher. I’m about to go back to my room and make some notes when Lana stops me.
“Chanti, on second thought, I want to look into this. If she’s really suggesting you’re a thief, that’s a serious accusation.”
“But if you go down there and talk to her, won’t that blow your cover? She thinks you’re what—a drug dealer? Or a pro?”
“I never told you what she thinks I am.”
“Whatever it is, she must not be too worried about you exposing her if she’s willing to pick on me like this.”
“I’m not going to tell you, Chanti, so give it up. But you do raise a good point about blowing my cover, since she thinks I’m doing time right now. Maybe she thinks I can’t expose her from a prison cell.”
“Prison?”
“It was part of my story to get you into Langdon. You know, ‘I want to save my child from a similar fate, let her into that school,’ blah blah.”
This is why I’m such a good liar when I need to be. It’s inherited.
“And you asked her to let me into the school in exchange for . . . ?”
“My silence about that which shall not be named. She probably figures she held up her end by letting you into the school and now that I’ve been locked up in a land far, far away, she can renege. Who will people believe, anyway? The principal or the con? By the way, she thinks you live with a foster family.”
“Oh my God, Mom. Did you have to make the fake me into such a mess?”
Between Smythe’s accusations and having two ex-cons mad at me, the real me has enough problems. Lana ignores my anguish.
“I’ll just have to send someone from the office to have a chat with her, let her know she has no case against you.”
“Unless one of your cop friends has a student at Langdon who knows I’ve been accused, that won’t make any sense, some detective just showing up out of the blue when Smythe herself hasn’t involved the cops yet.”
“You don’t know all my cop friends.”
“I know if you have one with kids at Langdon, he’s probably got Internal Affairs all over him ’cause a cop’s salary could never swing the tuition.”
Lana tries to think of a comeback, but accepts defeat.
“So I’m supposed to just let this woman call my kid a thief?”
“After talking to you, I have some ideas I want to check out. If I don’t find the real thief soon, or if she escalates and goes to the police, then you can go after her. But at this point, setting Smythe straight is not worth blowing your cover.”
“How’d you get so smart?”
“Good genes.”
She smiles, but only for a second before she turns into Officer Mom.
“I don’t want flattery. I want to know everything you find out. Don’t hold out on me, Chanti.”
“Deal,” I say, hoping her mom/cop radar won’t pick up on the mental finger-crossing I’m doing as I say it.
Chapter 16
I was actually looking forward to school when I woke up this morning. Not only do I have a lead on catching the real thief, I also have a lunch date. Some would call it a study session at the library, but I like to think bigger. Langdon’s library is nicer than most city branch libraries, with two floors, a ton of books, and a multimedia center. It gets more use than the library at my old school, but Marco and I manage to find a secluded table in the humanities section. We’re sitting side by side, so we can collaborate on our skit for French class.
“I want to apologize for last weekend,” he says, and I’m so relieved we’re finally going to talk about it.
“I’m sorry if I said something stupid.”
“No, it was all me. I’m just a little sensitive about that subject.”
I hope he tells me why because that would mean he trusts me, but he doesn’t say any more about it and opens his French book. But that’s okay. He isn’t angry with me and we can get back to turning our friendship into something more. The table we picked is the perfect spot for a little extracurricular activity, but unless he makes the first move, I know it’ll never happen. I can’t thi
nk of anything to restart the conversation, so I focus on unwrapping my sandwich, part of the contraband lunch we’ve sneaked into the library.
“So what do you think we should do?” Marco asks.
I think we should kiss, but that’s not what I say. What I say is, “About what?” because I’m an idiot.
“What should our skit be about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this, what we’re doing now. Petit-déjeuner au bibliothèque.”
“Except that’s breakfast. Lunch would be dejéuner au bibliothèque. And we’re breaking Langdon law by having lunch in here. Maybe we should move lunch to the café for our skit.”
I’m feeling the whole French thing, so I tell him it’s a great idea: “C’est une grandes idée, Marco.” I hope the way I say his name sounds seductive instead of ridiculous.
“Let’s come up with the dialogue, or should we do the setting first?”
“Let’s do the setting. But after we eat. I’m starving.”
Oops, yet again I’ve broken the first rule of dating—don’t let on to the guy that you are ever hungry. Oh well. That’s a stupid rule, especially when he’s already seen me go through a basket of fries like there might be gold hidden at the bottom of it. So I bite into the sandwich and try to think of something else I can do to let him know I’m a delicate flower, because I know my hips and butt will never convince him that all I ever eat are salads.
He opens a bag of chips and I notice that the tan line on his wrist is nearly faded away.
“Any luck on finding the missing bracelet?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. She broke up with me.”
“Over that? No way.” I try to look sympathetic instead of incredibly happy.
“It was more than the bracelet. I saw it coming. She says I’m different now, and Angelique does not like different.”
Angelique. Sounds like a beautiful girl’s name, the kind of girl who could make him forget she ever left him, forget my name, and take him back, all before breakfast. I pretend I didn’t hear it.
My Own Worst Frenemy Page 11