The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy (15 page)

O
n Tuesday afternoon, during math class, there was a gentle knock on the door. Mr. Granger put his chalk down and went to open it. There stood Ms. Lollyheart, with an apologetic look on her face.

“I'm sorry, but we need to see Frances Sharp in the office.” She scanned the classroom till she spotted me and made a little “come along” gesture. My heart sank. Trembling, I gathered up my books and papers and put them into my backpack. Mr. Granger stood there waiting, a bored expression on his face, while the whole class stared. I heard a giggle from the back of the room.

All I could think was that the police had made their visit. Best scenario was that they were about to
arrest Dr. Bodempfedder, and they wanted to question me as a witness. Worst scenario, the police had come and gone and I was up to my eyeballs in trouble. When I asked Ms. Lollyheart why I had been called to the office, and she said she wasn't allowed to discuss it, I knew it was going to be really, really bad.

Brooklyn and Cal were already in Dr. B's office, flanked by two security guards. I joined them and we stood there for another five or six minutes in complete, utter, horrible, painful, sickening silence, while Dr. B sat at her desk flipping through some paperwork, ignoring us completely. Ms. Lollyheart had left again, to fetch Prescott.

When he arrived, Dr. B looked up and gave the four of us an ice-cold stare.

“Cheating is not tolerated here at Allbright,” she said.

“Cheating!” Prescott practically shouted. “I don't cheat! I don't
need
to cheat! I…”

“Please shut up, Mr. Bottomy,” Dr. B said, “and don't interrupt me again. As I said, cheating is not tolerated here. There are no second chances, and you would have been expelled anyway for that alone. But breaking into my office to steal the test answers is absolutely criminal. Then going to the police to play practical jokes—I am utterly aston
ished. We liked you, we trusted you, and you have betrayed this school and utterly disgraced yourselves. You are expelled from Allbright as of today. I have already called your parents. They're on their way to bring you home.”

“But!” we all gasped at the same time. Dr. Bodempfedder kept right on going.

“Miss Fiorello, I am aware that your father is not available to pick you up—”

“He's in Goristovia!” Cal croaked.

“Exactly. I have contacted him by e-mail, but in the meantime, it was my intention to contact Child Protective Services—”

“What!” Prescott said.

“Mr. Bottomy, I told you to be quiet. I am in no mood to listen to anything whatsoever you might have to say. Now, Miss Fiorello, Ms. Lollyheart has agreed to look after you till your father arrives. Apparently he is an old friend of hers, and she wishes to do this as a kindness to him. I have agreed. But you are not to leave her apartment, attend classes, converse with other students, or eat in the dining hall. Is that understood? If necessary, we will post a security guard outside the door.”

Cal turned to look at Ms. Lollyheart, who stood in the doorway, her hands folded, staring at the floor. Then she turned back to Dr. B. “Thank you,”
she said. “But I didn't cheat.”

“You will be escorted to your rooms by these guards. You will pack your things and stay there till your parents arrive. And I don't ever want to see any of you on this campus again. Is that clear?”

She wasn't expecting an answer. She looked back down at her papers, and the guards hustled us out.

Ms. Lollyheart took charge of Cal, and they headed off for Larkspur. One of the guards followed Prescott to Sunflower, and the other went with Brooklyn and me to Cyclamen.

Then I was in my room, shoving clothes into my laundry bag, tears running down my face. I would explain everything to my parents once we got in the car, but I couldn't bear the thought of their getting that phone call: “Your daughter is being expelled for cheating. Come pick her up right away.” I was so sick with shame and embarrassment that I really thought I might throw up. I had never cheated in my life, but just to be accused of it, for my parents and classmates to believe I had done such a thing—was beyond horrible. I sat on the floor for a good ten minutes and cried.

After I calmed down enough to speak, I got my cell phone out of the drawer, went into my closet, and shut the door. First I called Zoë and left a message, telling her what had happened. “Please call Mom or Dad, whoever you can reach, and tell them
it isn't true! You don't have to give them the whole story, but just say…whatever.” I started crying again. When I finally pulled myself together, I left the same message on J. D.'s phone. Then I went back to packing.

B
oard meetings were held on Saturday mornings at ten in the beautiful wood-paneled conference room downstairs in the administration building. At this particular meeting, in addition to Dr. Gallow and Dr. Bodempfedder, there would be seventeen of the twenty regular directors—all headliners out of
Who's Who
—plus nine members of the alumni board, successful Allbright graduates who were no slouches themselves. The parking lot would be full of limousines and, since former vice president Jonas Ford was coming, a lot of Secret Service types would be lurking about. The addition of a tall, angry-looking African-American officer from the Baltimore Police Department would go entirely unnoticed.

Ms. Lollyheart was always at these meetings, taking notes and running the PowerPoint presentations. Being a careful and conscientious person, she liked to have everything set up in advance. So, on Friday afternoons, she would take the equipment into the conference room, check to make sure the data projector hadn't blown a bulb, pull down the retractable screen, get all the trailing cords taped down so no elderly directors would trip over them, run the PowerPoint presentation through to check for glitches, and lay out the place cards that indicated where each person was to sit at the table. Then, once she was satisfied that everything was as it should be, she would turn off the equipment and lock the door.

The next morning, she would be back again early to open up the room, turn things on, make sure the kitchen staff brought in the coffee and water and sweet rolls and arranged them nicely on the serving table, and check everything out one more time.

This particular Saturday morning, however, Ms. Lollyheart did two additional things. First, she slipped a CD into the laptop. Then she went over to the handsome mahogany bookshelves that lined one wall of the conference room and added another volume to its collection of leather-bound books. She angled it slightly, so that the spine pointed directly
toward the conference table, then carefully tucked the attached high-power 2.4-GHz wireless transmitter behind the other books. It was, in actual fact, a Nanny Cam, the best that money could buy, complete with an eight-hour rechargeable battery, X-vision for low-light conditions, and a wide-angle lens. Prescott had ordered it online for overnight delivery to Ms. Lollyheart's apartment at Larkspur.

Ms. Lollyheart, as you've no doubt figured out by now, was helping us. She had overheard Dr. B's conversation with the police, in which the four of us were mentioned specifically by name, followed by references to children, brownies, and chemicals. Immediately afterward she'd heard Dr. B accuse us of cheating. Knowing us as well as she did, she had the feeling something really screwy was going on. Apparently it hadn't taken her very long to figure it out.

And so, we were there too, that Saturday morning, sitting in Ms. Lollyheart's apartment. With the support of our parents, and the assistance of a secretary and a kitchen custodian (Brooklyn had called Reuben and asked him to help), we were about to bring down two criminals. That was the plan, anyway.

We'd arrived early, around five thirty, when everybody at Larkspur was still asleep (except for Cal and Ms. Lollyheart), long before Dr. Bodempfedder or Dr. Gallow would appear on cam
pus. The night guard at Larkspur didn't know the Allbright kids at all, and he certainly didn't know who we were or that we'd been expelled. Ms. Lollyheart had simply told him she was expecting several guests, which was something of an understatement. In addition to the four of us—Brooklyn, Cal, Prescott, and me—there were Beamer, Zoë, J. D., and all of our parents (except, of course, for Cal's dad, who wouldn't arrive in the States till later that afternoon, and Brooklyn's mom, who had her own role to play). It was pretty crowded in there.

We had gathered to watch what we hoped would be the grand climax of the Allbright affair, in living color, on Ms. Lollyheart's TV, the receiving end of the Nanny Cam. There was already a blank tape in her VCR. As soon as people began to arrive and images came up on the screen, we were ready to press
RECORD
.

Since it's against federal law to use audio in hidden cameras, there wouldn't be any sound coming out of the television. And a whole lot of people sitting around talking without any sound wouldn't be all that informative or exciting. So, for our benefit, Ms. Lollyheart had slipped a baby monitor into her purse. The listening end was sitting next to the television. The sound quality wasn't great, but it was better than nothing. For posterity—or for possible use in court—she would also make a high-quality
recording of the meeting, openly and with everyone's permission, supposedly to help her later in typing up the notes.

From around nine fifteen, when Ms. Lollyheart put the book cam in place, we could see pretty much everything that went on in the room. We watched Reuben, dressed spiffily in a white waiter's jacket, set out the beverages and breakfast rolls, while Ms. Lollyheart carefully placed a booklet, neatly bound in a blue paper cover, in front of each chair.

Two of the booklets, we knew, contained the usual material—the agenda for the meeting, the annual budget; the names of the following year's incoming students, complete with their special accomplishments and remarkable test scores; a list of the early-decision college acceptances of Allbright seniors, and lots of other inspiring stuff—the latest and greatest achievements of their current students and graduates. These two booklets were on top of the heap. We watched Ms. Lollyheart flip through them, double-checking that they were the right ones, and then place them on the table where Dr. Gallow and Dr. Bodempfedder would sit.

Everybody else got the other booklets. Though they too opened with the agenda and the budget, they also contained copies of the most damaging documents we had found: the chemical analysis of the brownies, the list of Moderation/Modification
Delivery Products, some choice quotes from Dr. Gallow, Dr. Bodempfedder, and Dr. Planck, plus Prescott's windfall discovery of just three days before. (Having been sent home, he'd had plenty of extra time to spend going through Dr. B's files, and the effort had paid off.)

We saw Ms. Lollyheart speaking softly to Reuben. He nodded and smiled. Then he finished setting up, rolled the food cart out of the room, and shut the door.

About twenty minutes later people started to arrive. The first three were graduates on the alumni board. Clearly excited by the prospect of sitting at a meeting with some of America's most famous and accomplished people, they had made it a point to get there early. Every one of them, in typical Allbright fashion, was good-looking and well dressed in a clean-cut, conservative way. As they came in, they each went over and hugged Ms. Lollyheart warmly, then took water or coffee and sat down. One woman, a wholesome-looking brunette in her thirties, picked up her booklet and started to flip through it.

“Don't!” Ms. Lollyheart said quickly. “No peeking till the meeting starts.” This clearly surprised the woman, but she did as she was told.

Dr. Gallow came in next, followed by Dr. Bodempfedder. The former students jumped to
their feet and went over to shake hands. They remained standing as more and more people arrived. Caroline Kelley and Michael Gates came in together, followed by Jonas Ford and Martha Evergood. It was like watching the show before the Oscars, where all the movie stars come up the red carpet and stop to chat with the press—except that the board members weren't all young and gorgeous and they weren't wearing tuxes and strapless gowns.

“I sent Dr. Evergood an e-mail
and
left a message on her answering machine,” Zoë told the group. “But I don't know if she had time to check them. She got in so late last night.”

“What did you say?” Mom asked, more or less into Zoë's hair. Mom had both of us in sort of a bear hug, like she had just pulled us out of the way of a speeding truck and now somehow just couldn't let go. She had tried to scoop J. D. into this embrace, but he had escaped and was, as usual, sprawled out under a piece of furniture (the coffee table), gazing at the TV.

“I just told her something very important was going to happen at the meeting and to please make sure they watched
all
of our student video, no matter what. Oh, and I said if she could order some cocoa just before the meeting started, that would really help.”

Brooklyn's dad, a giant man with a full beard
and bright pink cheeks, burst into a fit of operatic laughter. “Ho, ho, ho, ho! Cocoa!” he boomed, at which we all went “Shhhhh.” We were supposed to be quiet in there.

“But such an enigmatic telephone call, my dear,” he said in a quieter voice. “So mysterious. What will the great lady think of it, I wonder?”

“I don't know,” Zoë said, making a cute, wincing face. “That I've gone totally 'round the bend, probably.”

“Hey,” Brooklyn said, “check it out. Saul Roth!”

“And is that”—Prescott leaned forward to stare at the screen—“Leon Marcowicz?”

“Yes, that's Leon.” This from Dr. Prescott Bottomy Jr., who, together with his wife, Dr. Arlene Clawfoot-Bottomy, was sitting in the back of the room in two of the very few chairs available. “I've met him, actually, several times. Brilliant scientist.”

It was the sort of show-offy thing Prescott used to say all the time. Being around his parents made me appreciate how much progress he'd made.

“Look!” Cal said excitedly. “That's Toby. I'm sure of it.”

“Yup, no question,” I agreed. Mr. Future President himself. I had to admit, he did have star quality, what they call charisma. There was an easy confidence about him; he seemed genuinely modest—and kind, and warm, and funny, too. You
sort of knew all that, just by looking at him. Even in a room full of famous faces, you couldn't take your eyes off him. It seemed weird that somebody so appealing should be the one they chose to undermine our whole democratic system. But then again he would be, wouldn't he? He needed that personal magic to get where they wanted him to go. After that it was just a matter of controlling him.

Poor Toby, I thought, as I watched Dr. Gallow go over and drape an arm over his shoulder in a friendly way. You have no idea what that dreadful man has planned for you and your brain!

“I wish I knew what those two are saying,” I complained. It was hard to make out their conversation over the buzz of voices.

“Nothing important,” Dad assured me. “Just small talk.”

As it neared ten o'clock Dr. Gallow indicated that anyone who wanted coffee or water should go ahead and get it. Then, if they would please take their seats, the meeting could get started.

Just then Martha Evergood made her way over to Dr. Bodempfedder and touched her arm to get her attention. Dr. B, nearly a foot taller, had to lean way down to hear. Though Dr. Evergood's voice was lost in the background noise, we knew what she was saying: Might she have some cocoa, instead of the coffee? Would that be possible? Not too much trouble?

Yes! Dr. Evergood had gotten Zoë's message! We had one more ally in the room.

Dr. B nodded and smiled, then pulled out her cell phone and dialed the kitchen. Could they bring a pot of cocoa over to the conference room, please? Dr. Evergood smiled graciously, like the diplomat she was, and took her seat, folding her hands and looking as innocent and peaceful as your grandma in church.

Finally everyone sat down and Dr. Gallow began.

“Good morning,” he said. “I want to thank you, as always, for taking time out of your busy lives to come here four times a year in support of this remarkable school.”

“They don't start with the Pledge of Allegiance?” Cal said. “That's so weird.”

“For a board meeting?” Dad said. “Why would they?”

“They start
everything
with the Pledge,” I explained. “And ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.' Allbright is very patriotic.”

“Oh?” he said. “So patriotic that they want to do away with democracy?”

“Yeah, ironic, isn't it?” Brooklyn said.

Dr. Gallow was continuing with his opening remarks. Saying nothing, really, except the obvious: the board was full of really famous and important people, they were so generous to give their time to
the school, and yadda, yadda, yadda. When he was done flattering the board, Ms. Lollyheart signaled to him by holding up her tape recorder. Dr. Gallow nodded. “Evelyn is going to tape the meeting, unless anyone objects. Helps her keep the minutes more accurate.”

No one objected. Ms. Lollyheart set the recorder down in the middle of the table and pressed
RECORD
. Then, while Dr. Gallow got the meeting under way, she reached into her purse, which sat on the floor beside her chair. After some fiddling around in there, she pulled out a tissue and delicately dabbed at her nose. Ms. Lollyheart did not have allergies or a cold. She didn't really need the tissue. It had just been an excuse to reach into her purse and press the speed-dial button on her cell phone.

Outside, just down the hall, Reuben was waiting with a silver tray and a pot of lukewarm cocoa. He had Brooklyn's cell phone in his pocket, set on
VIBRATE
. When it went off, that was the signal for him to walk down the hall to the conference room and knock on the door.

“Evelyn, would you get that please?” said Dr. B. Ms. Lollyheart got up and opened the door. Reuben came in with the tray, laid an empty cup in front of the former secretary of state, and was about to pour cocoa into it. But somehow he lost his balance, and
the contents of the pot went not into the cup but on the table—in the exact spot where Dr. Gallow and Dr. Bodempfedder were sitting. Needless to say, it got all over them. That's why it wasn't hot.

Dr. B gasped, but—I have to hand it to her—she kept her composure. Dr. Gallow, on the other hand, jumped to his feet screaming and turned on Reuben in a rage. “You idiot!” he hissed. “You're fired. Get out of here—now!”