062 Easy Marks (9 page)

“I looked for you yesterday,” Randi continued. “I still want to do that interview. Are you free at noon?”

Nancy decided it was time to be direct. “Randi, yesterday you called me Nancy Drew. How did you know my name?” She watched Randi’s face carefully. The threatening message had been sent from one of the terminals in the newspaper office after all. That fact alone put Randi in a very select group of potential suspects.

Randi rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on! It’s not such a big deal. I was just goofing on you yesterday. Can you blame me, after that art show story you gave me? Of course I know who you are. I’m a journalist, right? I read the River Heights papers every day. I’ve seen your name and picture.”

“Have you told this to anyone else?” asked Nancy.

“No,” replied Randi. “A good journalist doesn’t go around blabbing about her biggest story before she’s even written it. So tell me, what are you
really
doing here?”

“I can’t tell you. But I will when it’s over,” Nancy promised. “As long as you keep quiet about it now.”

“Deal,” Randi agreed.

Nancy groaned inwardly as she walked away. A reporter on the trail of a hot scoop was the last thing she needed. She just hoped Randi kept her word.

For the next couple of hours Nancy was too busy helping bewildered sophomores understand the mysteries of past participles to give any thought to her case. When she ushered her last student out the door, she returned to her desk to do some quiet thinking.

Could she eliminate Randi as a suspect? She was inclined to say yes. Yet one thing still bothered her. Randi had been the only one near the newspaper office when the threatening message was sent.

“Hey, I can practically see the wheels going around!” Victor said, interrupting her thoughts. He was standing in the doorway, grinning at her. “Do you know you have steam coming out of your ears?”

Nancy gave a laugh. “Hi, Victor,” she said, in a tone of resignation.

“Wow, what enthusiasm!” he replied, falling into the chair across from her. “You looked a lot more lively when I saw you down in the faculty lounge. Maybe you need to drink more coffee.”

“Maybe I need to do less tutoring,” retorted Nancy. “By the way, what were you doing in the faculty lounge?”

“Uh-oh, she’s starting to pull rank on me,” he teased. “I had a right to be there. I was picking up something for one of my teachers.”

Nancy sat up straighter. “Oh? What? For whom?”

He opened his eyes wide. “ ‘For whom,’ ” he repeated. “Golly, if I keep hanging around with you, can I learn to talk like that? Or am I a hopeless case?”

“You’re the one who said it, not me,” Nancy replied, with mock sternness. “But seriously, how about answering my question?”

“About the package? Sure. Mr. Parley, my physics teacher, ordered some reprints of an article, and he asked me to get them from his mailbox and bring them to the lab for him. Why?”

Victor’s story could easily be checked, so easily that Nancy doubted he would have told it if it weren’t true. Still, that didn’t mean that the reprints were the only thing he had picked up in the mailroom.

“You didn’t notice a brown envelope, about this big, did you?” she asked, indicating the size with her hands. “Someone was supposed to leave it for me, but it hasn’t turned up.”

“Nope,” he replied, shaking his head. “But I wasn’t really paying attention. I was too busy plotting my next exploit.”

Nancy raised an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

“Just imagine,” he said, leaning closer. “Tomorrow morning, at the beginning of first period, a cartoon of the headmaster’s face appears on the screen of every terminal in the school.”

“Victor—” Nancy began.

He held up his hand. “Wait, I’m not done. The eyes look one way, then the other. Then, just when everybody is getting spooked, he puts his thumbs in his ears, wiggles his fingers, sticks out his tongue, and makes a really rude noise!”

Nancy laughed in spite of herself. “You won’t really do it, will you?” she asked. “You’d get yourself expelled!”

“I know,” he said with a sigh. “I have to face it—I’m chicken.”

Nancy sat back and studied him a moment. She couldn’t think of anyone who made her laugh as often as Victor did. She was growing to like him and had to admit that she found him very attractive. But if he was guilty, Nancy couldn’t afford to be blinded by his charm.

She’d been hoping not to have to wade through stacks of paper records. But now she could see she’d have to do it. Obviously, she couldn’t cross-check everyone’s records. With four hundred students at Brewster, each taking five courses a year and being graded four times in each course, that would make—eight thousand data points to check. But she could start by cross-checking Victor’s and Kim’s grades, those of her tutoring students, and then a few other students at random.

Making an excuse to Victor, Nancy went downstairs to the school office.

“Hi, Ms. Arletti,” she said to the secretary. “Is the headmaster free?”

In response, Walter Friedbinder appeared in his office door and said, “Hello, Nancy. What can I do for you?”

Nancy explained that she wanted to check the school records of some students against their teachers’ grade rosters. “I’d like the files on Victor Paredes, Kim Forster, and a few others.”

“Victor Paredes, huh?” said Friedbinder. “His name keeps coming up, doesn’t it? His record and Kim’s are on the computer. You can use the one here in the corner. But digging out the grade rosters is another matter. They should be in the file room, shouldn’t they, Ms. Arletti?” He gestured to a door behind the secretary’s desk.

“That’s right,” Ms. Arletti replied. “But they’re in a locked file cabinet, along with other confidential papers. It might take me a while to hunt up the key.”

“Why don’t you come back after lunch?” the headmaster suggested. “I’ll make sure we’re ready for you by then.”

“Here’s a key to the outer door, in case I’m out,” Ms. Arletti added. “I’ll put the file cabinet key in an envelope with your name on it and leave it here on my desk.”

“Thanks,” Nancy told her. As she turned to go, she noticed the door to Phyllis Hathaway’s office was slightly ajar. Was she inside, listening?

Nancy went back to the learning lab and worked for twenty minutes, but soon her impatience got the better of her. Surely Ms. Arletti must have found the file cabinet key by now. Nancy didn’t want to wait until after lunch.

Downstairs, the office door was locked. Nancy found the key she had been given and went in. The envelope with her name was right where Ms. Arletti had said it would be. Nancy took it, went into the file room, and turned on the overhead light.

The room was lined with a dozen gray, four-drawer file cabinets and some shelves piled high with papers. Nancy realized that she had no idea which one she wanted. Was she going to have to try the key in each of them, one by one?

Then she gave a little snort of laughter. There was no point in trying the key unless the cabinet was locked! She tried the top drawer of the nearest cabinet. It opened easily. She shut it and tried the next, which also opened. She kept going until, on the fifth try, she found one that didn’t open. Maybe this was the one.

She tore open the envelope and took out the little key. She was about to fit it in the lock when a noise caught her attention—the sound of footsteps retreating down the hall outside the office. Someone was running away from the office. Then came a
whoof!
A yellow glare suddenly filled the room.

Nancy whirled and gasped in terror. Flames were shooting up from all around the open doorway, charring the paint on the doorframe. In a flash the flames swooped across the floor, setting stacks of papers on fire.

Already the doorway was completely blocked, and the flames were advancing toward Nancy. Her body tensed as she frantically searched the small, windowless room.

She was trapped!

Chapter Twelve

T
HE TINY ROOM
was filling with black, acrid smoke. Nancy’s eyes were stinging, and when she tried to take in a breath, the overheated air seared her lungs.

Struggling to remain calm, she buried her nose and mouth in the crook of her elbow and got down on the floor. The air was a little cooler and less smoky down there, but she knew that wouldn’t last. If she didn’t find a way out, and very quickly, she was going to die.

Somewhere outside, a fire bell was clamoring. Help was probably on its way by now, but she doubted it could arrive in time to save her. Should she try to run
through
the flames? She shivered with horror at the idea. There was no way to do that without being burned, but at least she would have a chance. By staying in the file room, she had no chance at all.

Why wasn’t the sprinkler system working? Nancy raised her eyes to the ceiling and spotted the manual turn-on valve. She didn’t hesitate or even take a moment to think or plan. Drawing in a deep breath, Nancy held it, and sprang to her feet.

Under the turn-on valve was a tall steel bookcase. Nancy hurled some of the books onto the floor.

Her chest felt as though a loop of barbed wire were tightening around it. She began climbing the bookcase. The hot metal of the shelves seared her hands, but she ignored the pain. It was happening to someone else, in a distant place.

The higher she got, the thicker the suffocating smoke became. Finally, teetering on the top of the case, her foot braced against a lower shelf, Nancy reached up to the sprinkler valve.

Come on! Come on! she thought desperately as the stubborn valve refused to move. A glob of purple darkness floated in front of Nancy’s eyes. A deep nausea rose up inside her. Nancy, you can’t pass out, she urged herself. Hang in there!

With a last, desperate twist, Nancy gave the valve all she had. Suddenly bursts of water sprayed down from the small sprinkler heads mounted in the ceiling.

In minutes the flames were dying and Nancy could see the doorway clearly. Coughing and feeling sick, she staggered across the smoky office, collapsing into the arms of a helmeted firefighter, who was just arriving.

When Nancy opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was a clear sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. She blinked, then turned her head. She was lying on a stretcher in the school parking lot, just outside the open door of an ambulance. On one side of her was an alert paramedic with an oxygen tank in his hand. On the other was Victor, more serious than she had ever seen him.

“Am I okay?” she croaked in a husky voice that surprised her. “The fire’s out?”

“I was going to ask you that,” Victor replied. “And don’t worry about the fire. You had it out so fast they’re going to make us go back to class soon.”

Nancy sent questioning messages to various parts of her body. Once she had received the answers she told him, “My hands hurt. And it aches when I breathe. Everything else seems to be all right.”

“We’ll be taking you to the hospital in a few minutes for examination and treatment,” the paramedic said. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions from the fire marshal before we go?”

“Sure.” Nancy started to sit up, then thought better of it when the parking lot started swirling around her. She would have to stay lying down for now.

The fire marshal was a man of about fifty with a deeply lined face and kind brown eyes. He squatted down next to the stretcher and asked her to tell him what had happened. “Then it was you who turned on the sprinklers. That was quick thinking, young lady. That probably saved your life, as well as kept the fire from doing serious damage. We’re not sure yet why the heat sensors in the sprinkler system failed. Brewster may be in for some heavy fines for having faulty safety equipment.”

“It was arson, wasn’t it?” Nancy said in a low voice.

“What makes you say that?” the fire official asked her, frowning.

“The way it started, all at once, and spread across the floor,” Nancy replied. “It seemed to flow, and to me that sounds like some kind of liquid was burning, not just a bunch of old papers.”

“We don’t know what else may have been stored in that room,” the fire marshal said. “We’re looking into that now. Thanks for your help, Ms. Stevens. If I have any more questions, I’ll be in touch with you.

“Okay, Bill,” he added, straightening up and turning to one of the paramedics. A few moments later Nancy’s stretcher was secured inside the ambulance, and the vehicle sped away.

Her father was already at the hospital when Nancy arrived. So was Harrison Lane. They joined her in her examining room. After she and the paramedic assured them that she was basically in good shape, Lane said, “Sally called and told me what happened. I called your father. Nancy, I feel terrible that I put you in such danger. I never expected anything like this. I want you to drop this investigation.”

“Not yet,” Nancy told him, shaking her head.

“I beg you,” the banker continued. “If there has to be a scandal at Brewster, so be it. We’ll live it down somehow. At least we won’t be putting you in further jeopardy.”

Nancy shook her head again.

“I told you you were wasting your time,” Carson Drew said to Lane. “Once she’s made up her mind, it’s impossible to talk her out of it.”

“I can’t give up now,” Nancy insisted. She paused while a doctor examined the burns on her hands and put a soothing ointment on them. As he began to wrap them loosely with gauze, Nancy continued.

“The reason the file room was torched is that I’m getting close to a solution to the case—too close for somebody. But I don’t think that I was meant to be trapped like that. If I had gone to the file room when I said I was going to, I would have found the fire department on the scene and the file room already gutted. But I was impatient to check something, so I went early.”

Her father gave her a sharp look. “Then you think the person who set the fire is someone who knew when you were planning to go to the file room. There can’t be too many people like that.”

Nancy thought a moment. Who
did
know she would be there? There was Friedbinder and Ms. Arletti. Phyllis Hathaway might have been in her office and overheard Nancy asking to check the files. It was possible a student had been in the office with her at the time. And, she recalled, she had suggested to Victor that someone might think to check the grade rosters.