Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (7 page)

Taking a chance that the heavy swinging door next to the entrance led to a stairwell, I snuck toward it at full tiptoe speed while Mel confronted the girls.

“But Ms. Raymond! We were just practicing for the big barrel-rolling competition next week!” I heard a shrill, whiny voice protesting as I pulled open the door.

Bingo! Stairs.

No time to eavesdrop. Letting my stealth drop, I raced up the steps two at a time. The stairwell smelled like a foul combination of gym clothes, Victoria’s Secret body-spritzer, and nail-polish remover.

When I got to the third floor, I was out of breath.

At the top of the flight Daisy stood next to the door, back pressed against the wall. She put a finger to her lips. “Charlie’s trying to get into Berlin’s room,” she whispered. “You should help him—I’m going to stand watch here.”

I nodded and swung open the hall door. Charlie stood in the hall, hunched over the doorknob to room 3C, busily fiddling.

“What are you doing?”

He looked up at me like I was an idiot. “Picking the lock, duh.” He clutched a subway fare card, which he slipped smoothly into the crack between the door and the door frame.

“Since when do you know how to pick locks?”

“I don’t, but I’ve seen them do it on TV a bunch. Plus this looks like a really cheap lock.”

I wanted to help him, but Charlie was too busy showing off to accept any assistance. He fumbled, trying to press the lock back with the flimsy fare card. All it did was hang flaccidly in the door crevice.

“Maybe if you watched more TV, you’d be better at it,” I teased. He shot me a withering glance.

At that moment Daisy’s head came popping around the hall door. “Hide!” she whispered urgently, then disappeared.

Charlie grabbed me by the waist and, in one motion, pulled me into the broom closet directly across the hall.

Those two had some nerve accusing
me
of being a wannabe sleuth. Charlie and Daisy were the ones who were acting like this was some big mission: impossible.

There were muffled voices in the hall. I couldn’t tell what was going on, but I felt reasonably confident that Daisy would be able to handle whatever Mel threw at her. Charlie, on the other hand, was a different story. He couldn’t talk his way out of a brown paper bag. If he was caught up here, we were dead meat.

I was so busy straining to hear Daisy that I barely noticed the fact that Charlie was still clutching me around the waist. My face was about
this close
to his neck, and he smelled like a funny combination of laundry detergent and milk. I know that sounds gross, but there was something comforting about the smell. We were both breathing quickly, nervous that we were about to be discovered. When I paid close attention, I almost thought I could feel his heart, thumping nervously in his skinny rib cage.

Suddenly there was a rattle at the doorknob.

It was Mel, and she was about two seconds from discovering us. “Never seen so much beer on the floor in my life,” she was telling Daisy. “Well, maybe back in seventy-nine, when I was bartending at Annie Oakley’s. But that’s another story. Man, I never did like those sixth-floor girls. Think they play by different rules. Now I gotta mop up their mess.”

The doorknob was still jiggling. “Dang,” Mel huffed. “This door is always jamming. Now, if I could just get one decent repairman in this place . . .”

Charlie pulled me tighter, and even in the dark I was afraid he could see me blushing.

Please, Daisy,
I thought.
Work your magic. And hurry!

“You’re going to mop up
their
beer?” Wonderful, loyal, true Daisy’s voice sounded. “Don’t you think that since they threw the party, they should clean up the mess themselves?”

A long silence. I held my breath.

“Sweet cakes,” Mel finally said, “you’ve got a point there. Gotta teach them kids a little respect.” I could hear footsteps and the voices receding.

The sound of the swinging stairwell door echoed through the hall outside, and I exhaled heavily in relief.

“Close call,” Charlie whispered. His face was unexpectedly near to mine. I could feel his eyelashes on my cheekbones and his slow breath on my face. A small tingle went up the back of my neck and a strange thought entered my head.

Charlie was about to kiss me.

If I’d been thinking rationally, I would have backed away, or turned my face, or
something.
But I didn’t—I guess I was in shock or something because I just stood there and closed my eyes, waiting for his lips to touch mine.

Thank goodness Daisy swung open the door just in time.

Me and Charlie? Please. My life was complicated enough. The adrenaline pumping through my veins must have induced some form of temporary insanity.

When the light from the hall came bursting into the broom closet, I jumped about a mile in the air and then realized that for the third or fourth time that day, I had been rescued by perfect timing.

Daisy didn’t seem to notice the fact that Charlie and I were in a somewhat intimate position. “I’m brilliant!” she congratulated herself. “Now let’s break into Berlin’s room.”

I quickly composed myself and stepped out of the closet. “Charlie was having a hard time with the door,” I said with, I guess, a hint of snark.

“Can’t I leave you two in charge of anything?” Daisy asked. She stepped toward Berlin’s door and pulled a bobby pin from her back pocket. She poked it gracefully into the keyhole. With a thoughtful expression and a never-mind flick of her wrist, she coaxed a satisfying
pop
from the bolt. “What a cheap lock,” she said.

Charlie was annoyed. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

“There’s this magical box in my living room that, like, makes pictures that move? It’s called television. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

“You’re going to have to teach me that trick,” I told her.

“You’ll need it if you’re going to be a famous girl detective,” she said.

I decided not to dignify her comment with a response.

Inside, Berlin’s bedroom looked like it had just been demolished by a mob of angry
Jerry Springer
guests. The drawers had been flung open. There were clothes all over the floor. The bedsheets and blankets had been ripped off the bed and strewn all over the room. At the sad little wooden desk in the corner, a sad little wooden chair had been flung on its back with the dead and gory aspect of roadkill or unsold purses at the end of a sample sale.

“What a pig,” Charlie said. “You’d never guess it from looking at her, would you? This is practically as filthy as my room.”

“No, it’s not,” Daisy and I said, almost in unison.

“Your room is full of dirty dishes and half-eaten food, and you never bothered to sweep up that wastebasket you knocked over a month ago,” I reminded him.

He frowned. “I was going to sweep it up tomorrow,” he said. “And what if I want to eat some of that food later? It’s still good, you know.”

The thing is, Berlin’s room really wasn’t like Charlie’s room at all. Aside from the clothes and sheets and general disarray, there wasn’t much in it. I couldn’t imagine that this was how Berlin really lived. Girls like her may be messy, but their mess usually involves lots of fashion magazines.

“There’s something weird about this room,” I said, taking the opportunity to reapply my lip gloss.

“Yeah. It’s like she has no personality at all,” Daisy said. “There are no decorations or anything.”

“True, but that’s not what I mean. I can’t quite put my finger on it.” Then a thought occurred to me. “You know, it looks like Theo’s apartment . . . after it got broken into!”

Theo is my dad’s scandalously thirty-ish boyfriend. His apartment was burgled about a year ago, when he, Dad, and I were on vacation at the beach. All the robbers took was his really old, very smelly baseball card collection, which didn’t seem like that big of a deal to anyone except Theo himself, who claimed (unconvincingly) that the cards were priceless.

The thieves had totally ransacked the place, though, looking for the more valuable stuff that didn’t exist. After the robbery his place had looked a lot like Berlin’s room—drawers flung open, everything strewn around randomly. . . .

“I think Berlin’s been robbed,” I declared.

“How do you know that?” Daisy asked.

“It’s her
intuition,
” Charlie sniped. “All amateur sleuths have it.”

Charlie was really getting a kick out of tormenting me. Boys can be such jerks.

“Shut up,” I said. “I’m totally right. Look how everything’s been scattered all over. Someone was looking for something.”

“I think it’s just a mess,” Daisy said carefully. “Your purse has got to be in here somewhere. It might take a few minutes to find it. Let’s just cross our fingers that Berlin doesn’t come home.”

“I hope she does,” I said. “She deserves what she gets when she steals someone’s favorite handbag. I’d like to tell her where to stick it.”

Daisy rifled through some of the clothes on the floor. “Just as long as you don’t end up needing a ride to the hospital.”

I snorted. “If anyone’s going to the hospital, it’s
her.
”

 

Charlie and I quickly got to work panning through the detritus in search of my missing bag. I was holding my breath, hoping to see the telltale beaded fabric, the hot pink strap.

“She’s got more clothes than even Genevieve,” Charlie said, practically buried in a pile.

“Yeah, and what’s the point when they’re all totally the same?” I mused. “I mean, who really needs ten sparkle tube tops in different shades of blue? Who even needs
one
sparkle tube top, for that matter?”

Suddenly I spied a swatch of hot pink under a pile of crap in the corner of the room. I lunged for it, triumphant. My beloved purse!

But as I grabbed at the fabric, I realized, with a sinking feeling, that it lacked the satisfying, familiar heft of my handbag. I lifted it from the pile. It wasn’t a purse at all. It was a crumpled, hot pink pair of underpants.

Yuck! I tossed them at Charlie, and he recoiled clumsily, not sure how to react.

We stayed at it for what seemed like forever, and after discovering about five hundred pairs of crumpled-up underpants, we realized that the purse was straight up not there. Charlie and Daisy thought I was silly for insisting that the place had been robbed, but I still thought I was right. In the back of my head I couldn’t help worrying that someone had stolen my purse from the original thief—Berlin.

We were just about to leave when Daisy chirped with surprise from the corner by the dresser.

“Hello! What is
this?
”

She held up one of those jewel-studded nameplate necklaces that everyone was wearing like two years ago.

“Ha!” I exclaimed. “Berlin would never wear that now. It must be a gift from the Ghost of Bad Fashion Trends Past.”

“I don’t think this is Berlin’s,” Daisy replied. “Look.” She tossed it to me from across the room. When I examined it, I realized that she was dead right: it couldn’t be the heiress’s. For one thing, I quickly saw that the jewels on it were plastic. Berlin is all diamonds all the time. But more important was the fact that instead of spelling out Berlin’s name, the letters on the necklace spelled out a mysterious, lonely word:
HATTIE.

I stared hard at those six sparkling letters and then, holding the necklace up to my throat, I examined my refection in Berlin’s mirror. There was no doubt about it: this was evidence. The real question was, how had gotten into Berlin’s room? I gave the trinket one last look before slipping it into my pocket, and then we were off.

THE BEST THING ABOUT JUNIOR and senior year at Orchard Academy is the third Friday of every month, which the powers that be like to call “Future Career Day.”

I guess the idea, once upon a time, was that the older kids would get a day off to research what they’re going to be when they grow up. Like, to follow some lawyer around for the day or help a doctor perform surgery.

Of course, now everyone uses the day off to sleep late, catch up on
Days of Our Lives,
and eat ice cream for breakfast. Then you have to write a paper about it, saying what you did and how it supposedly will help you gain job experience. The trick is making it sound like you actually did something without technically lying.

Eventually Dr. Felicia Bober, the headmistress, banned food taster and TV critic as acceptable future careers unless you spent the day hanging out at Nabisco or
Entertainment Weekly
or something, but we all found a way around that rule pretty quickly.

For our part, on this particular Future Career Day, Daisy, Charlie, and I were being more productive than most, using the time to continue our pursuit of Berlin Silver. She hadn’t shown up in school all week, and I was getting itchy to find her. I hated to say it, but the case of the pilfered handbag had become a full-fledged mystery—especially since we’d discovered the state of Berlin’s apartment.

Despite my most charming efforts, none of the administrators at school would give me any clue as to her whereabouts. So we decided to stage a stakeout. Figuring that Berlin would have to be coming and going at some point, Daisy and I set up camp in the park across the street from the hotel, hoping to catch her in the act.

I’d brought my digital camera along because truthfully, I do want to be a photographer when I grow up. I figured I’d just snap a few pictures and pass it off as “career” research. Daisy, on the other hand, claims to want to be a synchronized swimmer. There was no way hanging out in Halo Park was going to help her with that—unless she decided to do her hanging out in the fountain.

Instead she decided to change her career goal to investigative reporter. It wasn’t as glamorous as synchronized swimmer, but she was relieved not to have to wear a swimming cap. (Although I know she secretly thinks the swimming cap is sort of cool.)