Uncovering Sadie's Secrets (13 page)

The weekend came around with no call from Doug. I was desperate, depressed, and nearly delusional. I imagined all sorts of scenarios—from Sadie lying to me about her relationship with Doug to. . . well, trust me, you don’t really want to know.

We had a play practice at school that weekend, the first of many. I was beginning to regret letting Hilary con us all into auditioning. Gilbert and Sullivan wasn’t my cup of tea in the first place, and now it meant going to school on Saturdays.

Plus, I was beginning to think in those darn patter-song couplets.
If Dougie doesn’t call me soon/I’ll descend into an endless gloom/So please be kind, oh Mister Doug/And give this girl more than a shrug.

Okay, okay. So I’m not good at the patter thing. But you get the idea. The only silver lining about the rehearsal was that Doug would be there.

Or so I thought. When Kerrie and I walked into the auditorium on Saturday afternoon, he was nowhere to be seen. And he didn’t show up for the whole boring three-hour stretch of rhyming lines and tongue twisting choruses. I was in a pretty bleak mood after the rehearsal, so Kerrie decided to cheer me up.

Of course, it involved a plan.

“My Dad will pick me up when I call him,” she said as we left the school building. “Why don’t we go out to Charles Village? There’s a really neat vintage clothing store there. We could probably find all sorts of things for costumes.” Kerrie was really into the costume thing. My guess is she had thought about visiting this store all week. In fact, she might have been planning this trip since last Easter.

“I don’t have any money.”

“I’ll lend you some if you see something you like. I’ve got my mother’s charge card.”

Kerrie always had her mother’s charge card. I think it was really Kerrie’s card but she was embarrassed about flaunting her family income.

I agreed to go. After all, Doug hadn’t called me yet and he hadn’t shown up at rehearsal. That all conformed with Delusional Scenario #54, the one where he’s called in to work extra hours because some co-worker has run off to Tahiti with the boss’ daughter. Who could leave their employer in such a pinch, right? Doug was a great guy.

Kerrie had mapped out this plan carefully enough to know that the bus we needed to catch was a street over, behind the school. We started walking that way, talking aimlessly about homework, clothes, the weather, the rehearsal—anything except Doug. As we got closer to the bus stop, Kerrie stopped and pulled back behind a scrawny city tree.

“Hey, look,” she said staring down the block. I followed her gaze. There was Sadie, oblivious to our presence, getting into a car. Getting into the
driver’s
side of a car. Starting the engine, pulling out into the street.

I yanked at Kerrie, pulling her down behind some parked cars so Sadie wouldn’t see us as she drove off. As the vehicle sped away, I got up and squinted at the back, memorizing the license plate number. It wasn’t a Maryland tag. It was a California plate.

“That is weird,” Kerrie said in awe-struck tones under her breath. “She’s driving already.”

For a few moments, we didn’t say anything to each other. Too many thoughts were cascading through our brains simultaneously. Was Sadie older than we thought? Or was the driving age lower in California? But then Kerrie articulated the one thought that both of us were zeroing in on.

“Sadie is not who we think she is.”

T
HE TRIP to the vintage clothing store evaporated like mist on a fall morning. We stood on the sidewalk gawking, or maybe it was more like meditating—the goal of which was to pull from the cosmos the telltale clues to who the real Sadie Sinclair was. We didn’t like feeling duped. We had helped her, reached out to her. And she wasn’t telling us something. She was leaving out some vital piece of information. We had to find out what it was.

Well, at least I did. Things had gone so wrong in my life, specifically the Doug date debacle, that I felt a strong urge to find a scapegoat. Sadie would do.

“Come on,” I yelled at Kerrie, grabbing her arm and marching back toward the school building.

“Bianca, what are you doing?”

“We’re going sleuthing,” I said, taking long strides. I wanted to get there before Williston closed up.

“What? How? What are we looking for and how are we going to find it?” Kerrie sounded hysterical. Happy, but hysterical. Knowing how much she liked plans, I made one up myself.

“First we’re going to get into the school office. Then we’re going to look up the file on a Miss Sadie Sinclair, recently of California, and alleged high school sophomore.”

That did the trick and Kerrie followed enthusiastically. When we got back to the school, the doors to the auditorium wing were still open. In the lobby, we could hear Williston and the accompanist rehearsing with Hilary and the other leads. As the piano clanked out its tinny background music, I pulled Kerrie with me, trying to imitate my sister Connie’s confident style the night we. . . actually, I didn’t want to think about that night much.

We went upstairs and down the long, dark first-floor hall. The office was near the central stairwell, the last door on our right. Like all the doors, it had a pebbled glass window on its upper section. No lights shone through, indicating it was empty. And locked. I twisted the knob to and fro just to confirm the obvious.

“Bianca, I don’t know. . .”

“Shhhh!” I knelt down and peered into the room through the keyhole. But there was nothing to see except the beige wallboard of the counter top that greeted the unfortunate students called to the office from time to time.

“We can’t break in,” Kerrie whined at me. What a disappointment she was turning out to be in the PI department.

But she did have a point. I couldn’t break in. I didn’t know how. I stood up. “When brawn doesn’t work, use brains,” that was my motto—one that I just made up.

“Okay, okay,” I said to Kerrie. “Here’s the plan. You go back to Williston. Tell her you forgot—you were supposed to pick up. . .” I bent down again and scanned the counter top in the room beyond. It was loaded with forms. “Your PSAT application! Your father will kill you if you don’t get it done this weekend. You just have to have it. Come on, Kerrie, you can do it!” I said it as if I were a football coach sending the team out to take on a bunch of all-stars.

But Kerrie bought it. Probably because I started out by telling her it was a plan. While I waited, she happily marched off toward the auditorium. I could have gone with her, of course, but I didn’t want to interfere with her performance. Really.

After a brief interval, I heard the music stop in the auditorium. I held my breath, hoping that Kerrie was going to come back with the key without Miss Williston in tow. A couple minutes later, Kerrie appeared, key dangling in front of her, and a triumphant grin on her face. She ran the last few feet to the door and giggled when I unlocked it.

Once inside, I walked behind the counter to the long rows of filing cabinets that held the secrets of our young lives—the parent-teacher conference notes, the report cards, the detention notices. What power I had in my hands right now, I thought, as Kerrie, standing next to me, waited for my latest directive.

“What’s next?” she whispered.

“What’s next is you grab a form off the counter and take the key back to Williston,” I said. “I don’t want her sending someone up here to get it from you.”

“But what about Sadie’s file?”

“I’ll stay inside here and look for it. Close the door behind you and turn off the light. When you come back, tap on the door three times like this.” I knocked softly on the desk behind me, two quick beats followed by a pause and the final beat. “And I’ll let you in.”

“Okay.” She dutifully picked up the form and ran off, closing and locking the door behind her. I was glad she wasn’t with me. I didn’t want her getting into trouble too if I was caught. Going through student files was serious business and I knew I could be expelled if someone came in and caught me. I started thinking of possible explanations to offer if that happened.

My mother asked me to bring a copy of my report card home? I couldn’t remember what my last Stanford Achievement Scores were? I saw a shadow and thought I’d investigate? Extraterrestrials had landed? The voices in my head told me to do it?

They were all lame lines, so I kept thinking of other excuses as I approached the filing cabinets.

Let me elaborate on that—the
locked
filing cabinets. Good grief, I thought, the whole world is locked up tight like a prison. But wait a minute. The key would probably be nearby.

I turned to the desk and slid open the pencil drawer in the center. It was neatly organized with rubber bands and paper clips and pennies in different plastic compartments. And small keys, just the kind you use to open file cabinets. I pulled them out and started trying them on the drawers. It didn’t take long to get the right one. It unlocked a whole row. I found the “S’s” and started searching.

When I found Sadie’s file, I wished I’d had a camera so that I could take photos of the pages, even though there weren’t that many of them. Compared to most of the fat, paper-stuffed folders for the other students, Sadie’s was pretty slim. All it contained was a letter from her mother, whose last name, I noted with surprise, was the same as Sadie’s—Sinclair. Amy Sinclair.

In the letter, Mrs. Sinclair told the principal that she was enrolling her daughter, enclosing a deposit on the tuition, and having her records sent from Mount Carmel High in Salinas, California. They should arrive any day, she’d added.

But no Carmel High transcripts or other records were in the file, and the letter from Mrs. Sinclair to the school was dated July 18 of this year. There was the usual application form and a copy of the note I had seen in Sadie’s possession the other day, notifying her mother of Sadie’s advanced placement opportunities.

I pulled out the application and began to scan it. Father was deceased. Mother was employed as a financial consultant? Hmmm. . . the woman I’d seen hadn’t looked like any financial consultant. I glanced at the other information on the app, which was pretty standard—dates of vaccinations, previous schools. Nothing jumped out at me. Nothing said, “This is why Sadie is weird and Doug won’t talk to you.”

Buh-bump. Bump.
It was the signal. Kerrie was at the door. I put the folder back in its place, closed and locked the file drawer, and ran to the door to tell Kerrie what I’d found out. Maybe the two of us could make sense of all this.

I turned the knob. Nothing happened. Was it stuck? I tried again. Nothing. The lock held fast.

“Kerrie,” I whispered through the door.

“What?” she whispered back.

“It—won’t—open,” I said, the situation slowly sinking in. Our school had been built in 1933. It was in excellent condition because the administrators were constantly upgrading facilities. Just last year, there had been a big campaign to “enhance security.” That included nifty new locks on the office door. I remember reading about it in the newsletter sent to parents once a month. Now I knew what exactly was so secure about these locks. They required a key—on
either
side of the door.

“Do you still have the key?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “No! I gave it back to Mrs. Williston,” she said, sounding panicky.

“Well, go back. . . that’s it,” I said and hastily added, “that’s the plan. Go back and tell Williston you forgot something. You forgot your purse.”

“I have my purse!”

“Well, leave it here. Hide it in the bathroom. Tell her you accidentally left it in the office when you picked up the application. Hurry up, Kerrie. They won’t be rehearsing all day!”

I heard her running off down the hall. It seemed like an eternity before she returned. And when she did, I noticed something odd about the footsteps. There were too many of them. As they came closer, I heard Kerrie speaking in a strangely loud and high-pitched voice.

“Thank you,
Miss Williston
,” she practically shouted in my direction, “for coming up here
with me to unlock the door
. I’m sure I left it in there.” Kerrie sounded as if she was practicing for an elocution class, her diction was so fierce and her voice so strong.

“No trouble, dear,” Miss Williston said, although she sounded extremely put out.

I ran behind the counter then, decided that was too out in the open, and quickly scooted farther behind the desk, knocking over a trash bin in the process. It fell with a muted clunk. Kerrie must have heard it and started coughing.

“You better get that checked,” Miss Williston said as she unlocked the door. “You don’t want to infect the entire cast, now do you?” I heard the door swing open and their steps entering the room. I murmured a silent prayer to keep them on the other side of the counter. Fast thinking Kerrie jumped in to save the day.

“Oh my goodness!” she cried. “It’s not here. And you know what? I remember now. I left it in the bathroom! Oh, I’m so sorry, Miss Williston. I didn’t mean to hold you up.”

“Well, come on and get it and I’ll walk you out. Do you have someone picking you up?” Miss Williston asked her. Their voices became farther away as they walked to the door, closed it (I heard the lock tumbling shut), and walked away.