Finding the Forger

by Libby Sternberg

  “Here’s his number,” she said. “I wrote it down for you.”

  I narrowed my eyes and took the paper, trying to telegraph in the broadest possible terms that this was not something I enjoyed doing. I wanted her to be an expert witness in my good-girlfriend trial, you see. (“So, Miss Constance Balducci, did your sister like calling Neville Witherspoon?” That was the key question I imagined the prosecutor, who looked a lot like Doug, asking. And Connie would answer, “No, sir. She was extremely reluctant to make the call. I had to force her to do it.”)

  “Do you mind?” I asked after punching in the numbers. Connie just shrugged and walked out of the room. As the call rang through, I got up and closed the door.

  “Witherspoon residence,” a maid-like voice answered.

  “Is Neville there, please?”

  A few seconds later, Neville was on the phone, cheerily thanking me for getting back to him.

  “The reason I was calling, love, is I have an extra ticket to a gala of some sort. Tomorrow night. Some charity event at the symphony, I think. Would you be so kind as to escort me?”

  With no regret, I explained that I couldn’t accompany him. No dates allowed on school nights. That was the Law of the (Balducci) Land. Thank you, Mom.

  Then I had a veritable brainstorm. Connie! Connie could accompany him! Sure, she was nearly ten years his senior, but she was pretty cool looking, and she was the one who wanted to get close to the Witherspoon clan, not me.

  “Hey, but my sister could go,” I said, and launched into a description of what a babe she was and how interesting she was and how much she would like to meet him—how she’d told me so after I’d described him to her. Yes, I was pouring it on, and not feeling a twinge of guilt for doing so.

  To my surprise—and maybe even a little disappointment— Neville didn’t bat an eyelash at this sister-swap. If anything, he jumped on the idea with tremendous enthusiasm.

  “That sounds marvelous. I can pick her up at 7:00. Or would she prefer I meet her at the Meyerhoff Hall?”

  Knowing Connie liked an exit strategy for new dates, I had mercy on her and suggested she meet him at the hall, and arranged for the rendezvous.

  My heart lighter, I chatted easily with Neville for a few minutes and got off the phone feeling like a heavy weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I’d killed two birds with one stone—I’d been nice to Connie and I’d gotten rid of Neville! Woohoo!

  All silver linings have clouds, though. In the hallway a second later, I nearly collided with Tony, which meant he was off the phone. While this brightened my mood considerably, our conversation did not.

  “Doug called,” he said as he headed for the bathroom. “Connie said you were on the phone with that Neville guy, so I told Doug you’d call him back.” He shut the door behind him.

  What? “On the phone with that Neville guy”? Did Tony tell Doug that?

  “Tony!” I shouted through the door. “What did you tell Doug?”

  “Huh? I don’t remember. You were on the phone.”

  I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of him, so I sagged back to Connie’s room. Her door opened as I approached.

  “What did Tony tell Doug when he called?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. What did Neville say?” She held out her hand for her phone, which I started to give her, then retracted at the last minute.

  “Wait a second. Bargain. I’ll tell you about Neville—and it’s good, by the way—if you tell me precisely what Tony told Doug when you told Tony I was on the phone with Neville.”

  “Look, I don’t remember, okay? I didn’t think it was something I’d be interrogated on. C’mon, tell me about Witherspoon. Can I see his dad or not?”

  I knew I could hold out and make her life miserable for the evening, but what was the point? Chances are she was telling the truth—that she truly didn’t take note of what Tony had told Doug. Some private investigator she was! So I went ahead and returned her phone while I told her about her terrific date with Neville. She moaned and groaned about the usual things—the age difference, the fact that Neville wasn’t her type (which gave me plenty of opportunity to rib her about the guy who currently was “her type”—namely, Kurt, “the Hunky Man”), and the fact she had nothing to wear. But all in all, I think she was pleased to have the opportunity to talk with Neville, who, she was sure, would get her in to his father’s office.

  I, meanwhile, was not pleased. I tried calling Doug back, prepared to tell him the full truth about the phone call and even throw in a line about how “forward” Neville had been, which would then lead me to toss off a line about how he even “kissed me goodnight the other night, which I thought was so rude.”

  But Doug’s line was in use—the voice mail picked up immediately. I tried a few more times in the next half hour—to no avail. So I decided to call Kerrie to pour out my troubles. No dice there, either. Her line was tied up as well.

  I sat down at the computer and, firing up the Internet and email, IM’ed Kerrie, letting her know I just tried to call her.

  She wrote back immediately: “i’m on the phone with doug.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “ON THE PHONE WITH DOUG.”

  The words were like a knife to my heart. After Kerrie IM’ed me she was on the phone with my boyfriend, I made polite cyber-chat for a few minutes, then wrote a cheery, “i need to talk to doug myself, so i’m gonna go now,” which any half-intelligent person knew really meant “get off the phone so I can talk to my boyfriend!”

  But when I tried his number again, the voice mail still picked up almost instantaneously, which meant Kerrie had either ignored my hint or didn’t get it. I can’t imagine she didn’t get it.

  In fact, she didn’t get it for hours. I tried his number five more times before going to bed, and each time the line was in use. I tossed and turned all night.

  I was in a foul mood the next day, and my mood perfectly matched the weather. It was raining—a soaking, heavy downpour that left none of us unscathed. Even those with umbrellas were wet, and I’d forgotten mine, so I was drenched. My sophisticated new haircut lay matted against my head, and I was sure I looked like a wet dog after a reluctant bath, except maybe not as cute.

  Rule of the Universe: At the very moment when you’re looking your most uncute, expect your boyfriend to want a heart-to-heart talk with you.

  Actually, I was the one who decided on the heart-to-heart. I’m not good at waiting for bad news. No, far better to meet it head on than loll around in it, right? So when Doug came into the locker hall that Tuesday, I was loaded for bear. I marched right over to him and said, in a charmingly accusatory way, “I tried to reach you all night last night, but you were on the phone with Kerrie.”

  He stared at me for a second like I was nuts. Then he grimaced, threw his books in his locker, and leaned against it.

  “I was only on with her for a few minutes. My brother was using the phone.”

  Oh well. So much for my grand confrontation. Somehow, I felt disappointed. Okay, time to switch to a new tack.

  “Did you get the Mistletoe Dance tickets?” I asked, again in that attractive voice that combines whining with a dash of irritation.

  “No.” Then, the coup de grâce—the words that would haunt me all day. “I didn’t know if you still wanted to go with me,” Doug said.

  The bell rang. The bell always rings at the wrong time. But we still had a few minutes’ grace period. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to use them to reconcile our rift because Sarah breezed in late and her locker was near Doug’s. When she saw us together, she looked at me with mopey eyes and told me she needed to talk with me.

  “About Hector,” she said. “I talked to him last night. He’s thinking of quitting.”

  Sarah and Kerrie must have come in together because Kerrie soon joined our little gathering. At the mention of Hector, Kerrie scowled. Sarah noticed.

  “It’s serious, Ker. He could be in real trouble,” Sarah said.

  “R
ight. ‘Real’ being the key word there,” Kerrie said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sarah asked. After shoving her lunch inside the locker, she twirled her combination lock and quickly grabbed her books for the day.

  “Hector has a record. He’s a likely suspect. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist …” Kerrie said, shrugging her shoulders.

  The blood rushed to Sarah’s face, turning it beet red.

  “Hector’s not like that! He’s a good person. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time!” She looked at me as if I was supposed to help out here, but I had reached my trouble-quota already today.

  Doug, however, decided to once again play mediator, and, as usual, stepped in on Kerrie’s side!

  “I think Kerrie’s just trying to look out for you,” he said to Sarah. “She doesn’t want you to get hurt.”

  Now it was my turn to steam and stew. So that’s what Doug and Kerrie were IM’ing each other about last night—Sarah and Hector? Once again, my friend Kerrie was using Doug as a sympathy sponge. It wasn’t fair and I was tired of it.

  I looked at Sarah. “I’ll talk to Connie,” I told her, and I knew she’d know what I was saying—I’d try to find out more info and pass it along.

  Kerrie let out a little snort. The second bell rang, and with the morning grace period over, we had to hightail it to class or be marked late.

  “What?” I asked Kerrie.

  “Nothing,” she said in a harrumphy kind of voice. “Connie might find out something Sarah doesn’t want to face.”

  Sarah slammed her locker shut. “You just don’t like Hector because he’s a Latino.”

  Kerrie practically sputtered with indignation. “I can’t believe you said that! You’re accusing me of being a … a … racist!”

  “If the shoe fits …” Sarah said.

  Oh man, this was bad. Really bad. Kerrie was accusing Sarah’s boyfriend of being a criminal. Sarah was accusing Kerrie of being a racist. Doug wasn’t getting the Mistletoe Dance tickets. Where would it all end?

  “Look, let’s … calm down,” I was about to say. But Doug did me one better. He walked over to Kerrie, who looked like she was going to cry, and put his arm around her shoulder. Now I felt like crying!

  “We can talk later,” Doug said to no one in particular. And we all went off to our homerooms.

  But we didn’t talk later. We just brooded in our separate little stewpots. I became so depressed about the whole thing that I didn’t seek out Doug to continue our conversation because I became terribly afraid of where it might lead. Although I’d not done anything wrong with Neville (okay, the kiss was a mistake, but I wasn’t planning on repeating it), I was beginning to suspect that Doug was getting ready to dump me and take up with Kerrie. If that happened, I’d lose both my boyfriend and my girlfriend, and my heart would be broken.

  It was only natural, then, that I gravitated toward Sarah. At lunch, during which Kerrie sat with some other girls, Sarah talked more about Hector and the museum. To keep myself from going bonkers over my Doug and Kerrie problems, I paid sharp attention.

  “Does Hector have any idea who it might be?” I asked Sarah.

  She scowled a little, as if she didn’t like fingering people, even if doing so meant clearing Hector. “Well, he’s not too crazy about Ms. Dexter.”

  “Why would she be doing something like this?”

  “Publicity? I don’t know. He said something about how it could draw attention to the museum. You remember that big fuss over the Brooklyn Museum?”

  Yeah, I remembered. We had discussed it in religion class one day. The Brooklyn Museum had launched an exhibit of new works that included some stuff considered sacrilegious by some Catholics. No matter which side you were on in that debate, one thing was clear—the museum got tons of attention. Not bad for a place that had always played second fiddle to places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

  “Well, if she wanted that kind of publicity,” I said, “she would have gone to the police and made a big deal over it.”

  “If she’s the criminal, she wouldn’t want the police involved,” Sarah said.

  “Then how does she get the publicity without the police involved?”

  “I don’t know.” Sarah said it so sadly I figured this was a point neither she nor Hector had figured out yet.

  Before I left school that day, I passed the office, where girls and boys stood waiting to purchase Mistletoe Dance tickets. I didn’t see Doug in the line. In fact, I saw him rushing past the office door to the walkway outside. For all I knew, Kerrie was out there waiting for him.

  It turns out, though, that Kerrie was staying after school for drama club, so Sarah offered to take me home.

  Once there, I saw a note on the kitchen table from Connie.

  “Mom says fix spaghetti.”

  I did my homework and got dinner started. While working in the kitchen, I rearranged the poetry magnets yet again, this time to read: “All over/boyfriend gone/life sucks.” I wasn’t in the mood for florid phrases.

  At least one of the Balduccis was happy that evening, though. When Connie breezed in right before supper, she was perkier than a Christmas ornament.

  “I got in!” she announced, shaking off her raincoat. “I’ve got an appointment to see Witherspoon! Just agreeing to go out with Neville must have done the trick!”

  “Woohoo,” I said in a rather subdued tone of voice. As we ate dinner a little while later, Mom peppered us with questions about our lives. Tony answered with grunts, Connie with vague replies about how things were “moving along,” and I just mumbled, “okay.”

  “We need to finish that green velvet dress,” Mom said, pointing her fork at me. “We all get so busy this time of year. I’m afraid if we don’t get on it now, we’ll be rushing around at the last minute.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that maybe I wouldn’t even need the dress, so I just nodded my head and acted like I had a mouthful of food and couldn’t answer. But after dinner, she made good on her offer and had me try the thing on for a fitting.

  Not that it mattered, since my Mistletoe Dance prospects were being sucked relentlessly down the drainpipe of lost dreams, but the dress wasn’t shaping up. Don’t get me wrong—I love my mom and know she means well. But her sewing skills are inconsistent. Some times she can make a really fine dress that looks like it came from a high-priced boutique. Other times, she can make skirts that look like they were whipped up by a designer whose inspiration was Picasso during his cubist period. This green velvet was falling into the latter category.

  While she pulled pins from her mouth to hold up the hem, I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to determine exactly what was wrong. Perhaps it was the way the seams at the shoulders bunched awkwardly on one side while laying flat on the other. Or maybe it was the way the heavy fabric bubbled at the empire seam below the bust, creating a sort of maternity dress effect. Or maybe it was the color. It had seemed like a nice-looking jade under the bright fluorescent lights of the fabric store. In our house, though, it looked like mashed peas—kind of dull and sickly.

  Normally, this sort of thing would cause me to search for tactful reasons I couldn’t wear the thing, or at least ways to secretly destroy it when Mom wasn’t looking, thus justifying the purchase of a real dress. But in my mood, with my prospects of even going to the dance now dimmed, I stood soldier-straight, reconciled to my fate. If Mom enjoyed pinning the hem, let her pin the hem. It was my gift to her, right?

  After our seamstress session, I thanked her, ran upstairs to change, and then stopped in Connie’s room for a chat about the Hector situation. She was grabbing up a bunch of beauty products and getting ready to take a shower.

  She was in such a good mood that she listened patiently. Even so, she didn’t have any good news to offer. Like everyone else, she was assuming Hector might be involved.

  “The Fawn Dexter theory doesn’t work,” she said, and then gave me the very re
ason I’d given to Sarah at lunch—if publicity was the motive, where was the publicity?

  “But we know Hector didn’t do it—he’s not on the tape,” I said weakly.

  “Nobody was on the tape, as you wisely pointed out, kiddo. The tapes were switched with one from an earlier time frame. I found out this afternoon.”

  “So it was someone who had access to the security tapes,” I said. Like a security guard. Gulp.

  “The best thing you can do for Sarah,” she said ominously, “is tell her to stay away from the guy.” With that, she went into the bathroom to get ready for her “date.”

  As a thank-you for my help with the case and the new Witherspoon account, Connie showed pity on me and actually shared some of the case information.

  Well, maybe not actually shared. But hey, she did leave the file out on her bed when she knew I was home, so that’s a form of sharing, right? She had to know I’d come in her room and look at it.

  In the file, Connie had copies of reports and interviews, and background info that she herself had gathered. The bad news was that Hector had a couple of hefty debts to pay off—his student loans and some credit card bills. The good news was that Hector was a top student in college. He supported a younger sister and sent money to an aunt in Mexico every month.

  But here was the thing that grabbed me—he had a great job lined up. According to Connie’s notes, Hector had interviewed with a prestigious graphic design firm in New York City and was told that he was a “prime candidate” for a slot they had opening next year. They would even pay for night classes so he could finish his degree at a New York art college. A copy of the letter making this offer was in her file.

  Now a guy with debts might do something stupid to make the money he needed to clear up his financial mess. But a guy with a future wouldn’t risk it, especially a guy like Hector, who appeared to be on the road to responsibility. Call me crazy, but I just didn’t see it.

  Besides, Neville had said it would be hard to sell the stuff on the black market, and I couldn’t envision Hector taking contemporary pieces from the museum and putting them into his own private collection. Connie had included a few photos of Hector’s work—they were all realistic pieces. The few “abstracts” were graceful explosions of color that resembled photographs of the Northern Lights. He just didn’t seem to have the taste for the stuff that was faked.