Partners in Crime (9780545463119) (10 page)

Friday
night, I went to the movies with a boy, and then we went to the most popular girl in school's birthday party!

Just kidding. I went to Darcy's house and we got pizza. But it was still probably the most exciting Friday night I'd ever had. Because I was getting ready to go undercover.

We were sitting at her dining room table with a pepperoni pizza, a laptop, and a checklist. Darcy's mom was watching a movie in the other room. When she'd asked us if we wanted to join her, Darcy said, “No thanks, Mom. We have a secret stakeout mission tomorrow and we have to plan.”

“Okay, honey,” her mom called over her shoulder.

I raised my eyebrows. I didn't know if she thought Darcy was joking or if she was just too tired to deal with it. Either way, it was time to get to work.

Darcy scanned the list. “Okay, I think we have all the equipment we need. Don't forget your part.”

I nodded. “I know where to bring my telescope in the morning.” I took a bite of the pizza slice, holding it tightly so the cheese wouldn't slide off and land on my chin. “Does Fiona know everything she has to do?”

Darcy nodded, but looked worried. “I went over everything twice. Hopefully, she remembers.”

I wiped my hands with a napkin and slid her laptop over to me. “Mind if I go online? I want to do a little research on Fiona and Bailey's place of birth.”

“Sure thing. I've been working on something in my clue book anyway.”

I typed
Garretson, South Dakota
, into the search engine and clicked on the first listing. It was an online encyclopedia that would give me some general information about the place. I took a few minutes to read through everything.

“Find anything interesting?” Darcy asked, tapping a pencil on her head.

“Well, it's home to Devil's Gulch.”

Darcy looked up. “Cool name! What's that?”

“A place where that outlaw from the 1800s, Jesse James, nearly got captured. But he escaped by riding a horse over a twenty-foot gorge.”

“Whoa.” Darcy gave an impressed nod. “Anything more recent?”

“Yeah, looks like Jesse James wasn't the only outlaw to hide in Garretson. Some guy who'd wronged the mob in the New York City was hiding out there, thinking they'd never find him in South Dakota.”

“Let me guess, he thought wrong.”

“Yeah, the mob boss caught up with him and killed him. Unfortunately there was a witness.” I squinted at the screen. “Some guy named Neil.”

Darcy let out a low whistle. “I bet things didn't turn out well for him. They never do.”

Totally. I remembered an episode of
Crime Scene: New York
that Darcy made me watch that had a similar story line.

But I had to focus back on Bailey and Fiona's place of birth. I scanned the rest of the information. “Wow,” I said. “I thought Danville was small. Garretson has less than twelve hundred people.”

Darcy shrugged. “Mr. Fanning probably moved the family here for a job.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “But we're still no closer to figuring out where Bailey went.” I pointed at her notebook. “What are you working on there?”

“This could just be a coincidence, but I figured out something kind of cool. Remember how Fiona said four is the family's lucky number?”

“Yeah …” I remembered when Darcy jotted something down in the investigation notebook that day in the bathroom. It must have been that fact about the number four.

“Well, if you add four to each letter of the alphabet, the initials
BAB
become
FEF
.”

I pictured the alphabet in my mind. Darcy was right. If you're at
B
and then you move down four letters, you get
F
. If you're at
A
and move down four letters, you get
E
. I gasped. “So Bailey Ann Banks plus four is Fiona Erin Fanning.”

“Yeah!” Darcy said, but then frowned. “I don't know if it means anything, though. It could just be a coincidence.”

Darcy's find
was
cool. And it might mean nothing. But Mrs. Fanning loved puzzles. It would make sense
that she'd name her children using some kind of code. That didn't get us any closer to finding Bailey, though.

We'd have to make a breakthrough tomorrow. If our plan didn't work … we might never find out the truth.

I
felt like a real undercover detective. We had our spy gadgets, we had a plan, and now all we had to do was put it into action.

But first … cheerleading.

I'd never gone to a sports game of any kind at Danville Middle School. But sometimes, in undercover work, you have to pretend to be something you're not. Like someone who has school spirit. So on Saturday, Darcy and I showed up at the school fields, ready to cheer on our team.

“What sport does Fiona do cartwheels for again?” Darcy asked as we walked behind the school.

“Football,” I said. Behind our school were two large
fields surrounded by a track for running. It looked like both fields were being used. Soccer in the front field, football in the back. I pointed at the far field, where a bunch of girls on the sidelines were pumping their pom-poms in the air. “She's down there.”

Darcy heaved a sigh. “Okay, let's go pretend we care if our school wins or not.”

I bumped her with my elbow. “It won't be that bad. Look at the scoreboard. We timed it perfectly.”

As part of the plan, we needed to meet Fiona here. But of course we didn't want to sit through an entire game. So I'd found out the start time, Googled how long a middle school football game lasts on average, and figured out approximately what time we'd have to get there for only five minutes to be left in the game. The scoreboard showed seven minutes left. Very close! If there weren't a bunch of parents and kids watching from the bleachers, I would've reached over and patted myself on the back.

The soccer game was ending as we passed by. Dozens of sweaty boys in uniform ran off the field as coaches and parents high-fived them. The team in white jerseys seemed to be happier, so they must have
won. Whether they were our team or the other town, I didn't know, and I wasn't planning on getting close enough to any of the sweaty boys to find out.

Until I heard my name.

“Hey, Norah!”

I stopped and started looking around, but Darcy must have figured it out before I did, because she gave me a sneaky smile and whispered, “I'll meet you over there.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to face Zane. His hair was all wet and crazy and he had a dirt streak on one cheek. But he was still cute.

He wore one of the white jerseys, with the telltale word
Danville
written above the number on his chest.

“Congrats on the win!” I said.

He took a giant gulp from his water bottle, then said, panting, “Thanks. It was a tough game. I'm glad we were able to pull out a win with that final goal. Did you see it?”

My thoughts raced.
Should I lie and say I did? But then what if he asks me a question about it and I can't answer and I look stupid? Oh, man, why do I always get tongue-tied around him? I'm smart. I had the vocabulary
of a fifth grader by kindergarten, but I cannot form a single sentence right now!

Since my voice box was in panic mode, I just did this jerky body movement that was half shrug and half shake of the head.

“So Maya told me she saw you in the library the other day,” Zane said.

It seemed like those two shared all their secrets.

“She said you invited her to sit with you and Darcy at lunch,” he continued. “That was nice. I've offered that before, too, but she doesn't want to sit with a bunch of guys.”

Ugh. Why didn't they just get a romantic table for two in the corner? That ugly green monster — jealousy — was starting to rise up in me and I wasn't proud of it. I told myself it wasn't Maya's fault Zane liked her instead of me.

“I just wanted her to know she didn't have to eat alone,” I said.

Zane smiled. “That's really cool of you. Maya lives on my street, you know.”

Here we go. Here's where he was going to tell me their whole love story. I was going to throw up on the soccer field.

Zane continued, “That jerk Hunter Fisk lives on the street next to ours. He's been giving her a hard time. Name-calling and stuff while she walked home from school all alone. So I've been walking her home for the last week or so. It seems to have helped. Hunter's moved on to bullying someone else for the time being.”

Wait … what? Zane was only walking Maya home to protect her? Did this mean …?

I blurted out, “So you're not boyfriend and girlfriend?”

Zane's face turned as red as Mars. (Known as the red planet. Though it's really more rust-colored, if you ask me.) He scratched at the back of his neck. His eyes stared at the ground. “No. I, uh, don't have a girlfriend.”

Then he looked up. Right into my eyes.

I felt my face getting hot. I imagined it as a big giant burning surface, like the sun, with solar flares shooting out of my pores as each second of silence dragged on. My mind yelled at my mouth.
Say something, stupid!

Zane looked back down. “Okay, well, I should go. My parents are here somewhere.”

And then, before I could say anything, he'd wandered away to the bleachers.

And I stood there wondering: If nothing was going on between him and Maya … then what was Zane's big secret?

By
the time I got over to the football sidelines, the game had ended. Darcy and Fiona looked so strange standing together. Darcy wore jeans, her black Converse sneakers, and a black T-shirt with white lettering that read
WHY BE NORMAL?
Fiona, meanwhile, had her hair up in a pink ribbon and wore her cheerleading uniform. And they were chatting.
If these two could act friendly
, I thought,
maybe there's hope for peace between all nations. Cats and dogs. Vampires and werewolves.

“It's about time you finished talking to Zane,” Darcy told me, and made an awkward kissing face.

“You look like a fish drowning in air,” I said. “Where are we with the plan?”

“The game just ended,” Fiona said. “My parents are sitting over there. Let's do this.”

Mr. and Mrs. Fanning sat prim and proper in the front row of the bleachers. Fiona's little sister, Mia, sat between them, playing a handheld video game. Confused looks colored her parents' faces as the three of us approached.

Fiona lovingly ruffled Mia's hair, then got down to business, putting on an Academy Award–worthy performance. “Oh my God, Mom! I totally, totally, totally forgot that, like, I have to work on a class project today with Norah and Darcy. And it's, like, totally due Monday. So we have to, like, totally go do it now at Norah's house.”

Mrs. Fanning frowned. “I don't remember you saying you had a project.”

“Well, duh,” Fiona said. “I forgot!”

“Though it's a good project,” Darcy said with a sparkle in her eye. “It's very … mysterious.”

Mrs. Fanning opened her mouth to say something else, but Fiona said, “So I'll see you later back at the house!”

Mia shouted, “'Bye, Fiona,” but never looked up from her game.

With a quick wave, Fiona turned and linked arms with Darcy and me, and we walked down the track like Dorothy, Scarecrow, and Tin Man down the yellow brick road.

When we got to the back wall of the school near the bike rack, we hid around a corner. Darcy poked her head out and peered into the parking lot.

“Anything?” Fiona asked.

“Not yet … okay, yeah. There they are, walking to their car.”

I leaned over Darcy's kneeling body and took a peek for myself. Fiona's parents stopped briefly outside their black car. Mrs. Fanning's arms flailed in the air like an angry bird. Was she upset that Fiona forgot about a project? Or mad that she was hanging out with us? Or something more?

Then they got in the car and drove away.

“We're clear,” I said.

“Good.” Darcy went over to the bike rack and unlocked two bikes. She pushed one to Fiona.

“What's this?” Fiona looked at the bike in disgust. It was a beat-up, black, boys' bike that had definitely seen better days. I recognized it as Darcy's old bike
from before she'd gotten her new one. Which was also black. And a boys' one.

“Walking will take too long,” Darcy said. “We have to bike there or we'll miss a big chunk of conversation.”

Fiona crossed her arms and refused to take it. “I won't be caught dead on that bike.”

Darcy groaned. “That can be arranged ….”

“Here,” I said, pulling my red bike out of the rack. “You take mine. I'll ride Darcy's old bike. Let's just get going.”

Ten minutes later, we were in the woods behind Fiona's house. We biked there as fast as we could and entered the forest a few houses down by cutting through the yard of an empty house that was for sale. Our stuff was all ready for us, right where we'd left it that morning.

The woods were quiet and kind of creepy, even though it was a bright sunny day. But the adrenaline rush of excitement was overwhelming any nervous feelings I had. I felt like a real private investigator on a big, dangerous mission. This was so much cooler than how I usually spent my Saturday afternoons.

The woods faced the back of Fiona's house. My telescope was aimed at one of the house's many windows. I looked through the scope and adjusted the focus. When we had decided to spy on Fiona's parents, we knew we needed some gear. Fiona's innocent comment about my telescope had given me the idea to bring it out here. Sure, I'd only pointed it at the stars before, but that didn't mean it
couldn't
be used for spying on people.

I had a clear view of the house. Mia ran upstairs, probably to play. Mr. and Mrs. Fanning were in the kitchen, right where we needed them to be. I tried to read their lips, but they kept moving around the room too much. It wasn't too hard to read their emotions, though. Red faces, hands flying through the air, mouths moving quickly. They were completely freaking out.

“They're in the kitchen,” I said. “Take it off mute! Now!”

Darcy lifted her cell phone from the large rock we'd left it on, turned on the speakerphone, and turned up the volume. Immediately, Mr. and Mrs. Fanning's voices filled the air.

Darcy had come up with this idea. She'd told
Fiona to make sure her phone was fully charged. Then, before she left for the game, she was to call Darcy's phone. Darcy would answer. But they wouldn't talk. They wouldn't hang up, either. They'd leave the line open.

Then Fiona would plant her cell phone somewhere in her kitchen. Not under too much stuff (so it could pick up conversation), but not in plain sight (so it wouldn't be found). Then we'd be able to sit out here and listen on Darcy's phone. It worked just like how cops bugged bad guys' houses. Pure genius.

“It might be time to do it again,” Mrs. Fanning said.

I watched through the telescope as their voices came across the cell phone. Mrs. Fanning looked less angry now and more depressed.

Mr. Fanning let out a loud sigh. “But how will we get new —” The last word was muffled.

“New what?” Fiona whispered.

Darcy shrugged. I looked back through the scope.

Mrs. Fanning tapped her fingernails on the kitchen counter. “We have to get in touch with our contact at the program.”

Mr. Fanning rubbed his hands down his face. “I really wish it hadn't come to this.”

“Me, too, Neil,” Mrs. Fanning agreed. “But it's gone too far.”

Mr. Fanning put an arm around his wife and gently led her out of the kitchen. I tried to follow them with my scope, but they went into his office, which faced the side of the house.

“We're out of range of the phone,” I said, and lifted my eyes from the scope. My thoughts were racing.

Darcy groaned. “What are we going to do now? Hope they go back to the kitchen?”

I took a deep breath. Everything we'd learned over the past few days had been floating around in my head like mismatched puzzle pieces. But one final word that Mrs. Fanning had spoken just made all the pieces click together.

“We don't need them to,” I said. “I figured out what's going on.” I turned to Fiona. “I know where Bailey is.”