Uncovering Sadie's Secrets (8 page)

“I’m sorry to ask but I don’t have any change. Could I use your phone to call my sister here in town to pick me up? I won’t be more than a second.”

She looked at me with an irritated grimace. Not only was I not going to buy anything. I wanted to use her phone for free. But she gave in and handed it to me reluctantly. I quickly punched in Connie’s numbers, praying she had remembered to charge up and turn on the cell. Eureka! After two rings, her tentative voice came on the line.

“Hello?”

“Con, this is Bianca. I’m at Harborplace. Can you pick me up? I’ll be at the corner of Pratt in ten minutes.”

“What are you doing there? And why are you calling me on my cell phone?”

“I can’t talk now. A nice lady is letting me use her phone,” I said, smiling at the sales clerk. “Just pick me up in ten minutes. Please?” I didn’t have to fudge the pleading tone in my voice. Heck, it bordered on desperate.

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

I hung up and thanked the sales clerk. All I had to do now was stay alive for the ten minutes it would take Connie to get here. Feeling better for having arranged the ride, I sauntered out into the mall with renewed confidence.

Until I ran right into a six-foot-three block of man whose imposing stature alone would scare even the bravest soul.

T
HE MAN loomed over me like an obelisk. He had thick dark hair and a squarish face that was rugged and tan. He wore a trench coat, a white shirt, and gray slacks. A slight bulge near his shoulder indicated he was packing some heat, as they say in detective novels about folks who carry guns.

He looked down at me with twinkling blue eyes, and smiled.

“Bianca, how’s your mom?” Suddenly, it hit me. He was Steve Paluchek, a detective with the Baltimore City Police who had served with my dad and occasionally checked in on us. I liked him. He was like an uncle to me. And right now, he was the one person in the world I was happiest to see, because out of the corner of my eye I could now see Lemming Lady approaching.

“Fine, fine,” I said, keeping track of the Lady. She had slowed down when she saw me talking with a stranger. I couldn’t help noticing that her wardrobe selections had not improved. She still wore impractical boots and skin-tight pants, but today her choice had run to electric blue leggings topped by a black sparkly tube top under the leather jacket.

“Wish you would come over some time,” I said, trying to keep the conversation going. To my relief, Detective Paluchek didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

“I was thinking of stopping by soon. I was out of town at a diversity-training seminar for awhile. Then I had a broken arm that laid me up.”

While Detective Paluchek went over the litany of reasons he hadn’t visited, I finally saw the Invisible Man. He came up to Lemming Lady from the other side of the mall, joining her in trying to look nonchalant, pretending to scrutinize a display of handcrafted silver jewelry.

He was as frightening as I could have imagined, but not because of his physical stature. He was only a few inches taller than the woman and, though reasonably muscular, not overpowering. He had brown hair pulled into a tiny pony tail at the nape of his neck and he wore a long dark raincoat that nearly touched the top of his expensive-looking shoes. Everything about him looked expensive, from his coat and shoes to the glistening diamond stud in one ear, and the silk shirt I glimpsed when he moved.

But it was his face that really bothered me. Along one cheek was a two-inch scar starting right below his left eye and nearly meeting his nostril. His thin lips didn’t smile and his squinty eyes looked like steel.

He was no longer Invisible Man. He was Ice Man, cold and cruel-looking, an image reinforced by the way he grabbed Lemming Lady’s arm and steered her where he wanted to go without a second thought for her comfort or safety.

At some point, he made the decision to come my way, pulling her with him while she struggled to gain her balance. I had to think fast or he was likely to swoop by and snatch me without a second thought to the fellow I was talking with.

“Show me your badge!” I said quickly to the Detective.

“What?” Paluchek looked confused.

“Your badge. I want to see if it’s changed. I read somewhere that they were doing something different with the seal.” Not bad for reasoning powers under panic conditions.

Detective Paluchek shrugged and pulled out the leather-covered wallet that held his badge. Meanwhile, I moved slightly so that when he displayed it, it would be in clear view of Lemming Lady and Ice Man. For added effect, I pulled a tissue from my pocket and dabbed at my eye to give the impression that I was a crying child tattling on my would-be stalkers.

It did the trick. As soon as Paluchek’s badge glistened in the light, both my pursuers stopped dead in their tracks.

“Something the matter?” Detective Paluchek asked.

“No, just something in my eye,” I nearly whispered to him. With my other hand, I fingered the badge. Despite my desperate circumstances, looking at the police badge conjured up melancholy feelings as I thought about how much I missed my dad. Even though I hadn’t known him, I still had plenty of opportunities to miss him, like the many Father-Daughter dances at school where nice guys like Paluchek had to stand in.

“Looks the same. Must have been a false story,” I said softly. My followers were slinking into the background. But I didn’t want to leave the mall without protection. Connie should be arriving soon.

“You know, Connie would love to see you. She set up shop as a PI,” I told him. “She’s coming to pick me up. Should be here any minute. Why don’t you walk me out and you can say hi. She’d really, really,
really
like that. She had some questions she wanted to ask you.”

He looked confused but took the bait. “Okay. I’m not in any hurry. Where to?”

I took him by the arm and walked to the street with him, my own personal bodyguard who didn’t even know he had the job. Lemming Lady and Ice Man dropped out of sight.

P
ALUCHEKAND
I ended up spending a bizarre twenty minutes on the curb waiting for my tardy sister. I must have told him every detail of my high school life, including stuff about Doug that I previously had divulged only to Kerrie. Funny what desperation does to a girl.

Whether or not the detective was confused by my sudden effusiveness wasn’t clear to me. I was too focused on two things: keeping up a constant stream of banter so he would stay by my side, and scanning the crowd for my potential abductors. By the time Connie arrived, we had both forgotten about the “questions” she had to ask him, so I was able to make a clean escape with just a few pleasantries exchanged between my sister and Paluchek.

I wasn’t so lucky with Connie alone. She peppered me with questions, but I stuck to a simple, inelegant story—I had fallen asleep on the bus and missed my stop. She couldn’t quite understand why I didn’t catch another bus, but I suspect she just chalked it up to my self-centered laziness. Okay by me. Better to reinforce her poor opinion of me than to swim with the fishes because of Ice Man and Lemming Lady.

At home, I quickly got dinner started per my mother’s instructions, slapping together some ground beef and onion to make meat loaf and throwing it in the oven with a few potatoes to bake. It was almost therapeutic, taking out my fear and anger on the glob of ground beef in the bowl.

Then I called Kerrie. Thank goodness she was home. I finally spilled my guts about my adventures, even delighting in her screaming reactions to each new revelation. In fact, the more she screamed, the less fearful I felt. At the end of my tale, her voice became low, as if afraid of being overheard.

“Why didn’t you tell the policeman you were being followed?” she asked.

“I guess I think that Sadie could be in trouble, and before I go blowing the whistle, I want to find out what the trouble is.”

“We have to find out what’s happening with her,” Kerrie said.

“I know,” I said. “But how?”

“Nobody knows where she lives or what her phone number is. And who knows if she’ll come to school tomorrow.”

“She could be in
big
trouble,” I said.

“She could need our help.”

“What if she doesn’t come to school tomorrow, or the next day?”

“Rehearsals for
The Mikado
start next week,” Kerrie said. “She has to show up then.”

Round and round we went, mostly coming up with questions that had no answers. But by the time our marathon chat was over and the meat loaf was setting off the smoke alarm—a certain signal that it was done—we knew what we had to do. We had to find out where Sadie lived, or her phone number. And we had to find out why seedy folks like Lemming Lady and Ice Man were after her.

E
ASIER SAID
than done, it turned out. Sadie was not in school the next day or the day after. Kerrie and I continued our fruitless speculation over lunch and through long phone conversations and IM sessions on the computer. All to no avail. In fact, all this phone work did was make my sister mad at me, my mother worry about my school work, and Doug miss hooking up with me.

That’s right. Doug
called me!
Surely you must hear my heart pounding because it’s drowning out everything else on my end. He called on Wednesday night, the last respectable night for asking somebody out on a weekend.

In fact, Wednesday night is probably the night when phones across America are tolling with potential date-makers hanging onto every ring. Calling on Monday or Tuesday could appear too eager, too obsessive-compulsive.

Thursday, however, is too late. It communicates either a careless disregard for the potential date’s schedule or feelings, or worse—it sends the message that the potential date is a second choice and the first choices already responded negatively on Wednesday.

Wednesday, you see, is the perfect date-making night. Not too eager. Not too late. Especially if you call early in the evening, which is what Doug, Love of My Life, did.

He called Wednesday at exactly 6:33 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. I know because I listened to the voice mail message about ten times before forcing myself to erase it. Saving it would provide too much ammunition for Tony.

After a brief pause, Doug had said, “Uh. . . this is Doug and if Bianca is in, could she call me back at. . .”

Only problem was I didn’t get the message until 10:53 p.m. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit it. I tied up our darn phone all night—but for a good cause, school work. Right after dinner, I got on the Internet, researching a paper.

Okay, okay, I was Instant Messaging Kerrie and Nicole at the same time.

Instant messaging can slow a body down when surfing the cyberwaves, so it was nearly 10:30 by the time I got off. And then I didn’t think to check the voice mail until pulling the blankets over me. It made for a sleepless night thinking of Doug wondering why I hadn’t called him back.