Uncovering Sadie's Secrets

by Libby Sternberg

  I reached into my purse and pulled out a card for Balducci and Associates. “Here, give this to her, I mean him. Have him call anytime. She’s got voice mail and everything and she checks it all the time.” What Connie didn’t know is I checked it too. I knew her password because she had written it on the telephone instructions when she set the thing up.

  Sadie took the card and looked at it, then slipped it into her jeans pocket. “Thanks,” she said. She was the only one among us who had had nothing to eat or drink, and she hadn’t purchased anything all day. I wondered if she had any money.

  “Look, I was going to get a milkshake,” I said standing up and abandoning my pretense of eating healthy. “My treat. Anybody want anything? How about you, Sadie?” She looked surprised, then one side of her mouth twisted up into a lopsided smile.

  “No, thanks. I have to get going anyway. Getting late.” She stood up. “Thanks. It’s been fun. See ya.” As she walked toward the door, I noticed her reaching into her pocket and fingering Connie’s business card.

  TONY WASto pick us up at four-thirty, so it wasn’t much longer before we were heading for the parking lot. Doug was still walking next to me and I wondered just what kind of touching farewell gesture he would make. An embrace, perhaps? A romantic back-bending kiss? A long look into my eyes that would be drenched with meaning? A. . .

  “Well, we’ll be seeing you,” Doug said when we reached the floor with Hecht’s department store on it. “Adam’s dad is picking us up.” He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders as if apologizing for the abruptness of the parting. Then he lifted his hand and it seemed to glide in slow motion as I imagined all the possibilities that this promised and how his arm would feel around my shoulders.

  “Take care!” he said, gently punching me in the arm.

  “Yeah, you too,” I managed to squeak out.

  The two boys lumbered off, and Nicole and Kerrie and I let out an afternoon’s worth of giggles and gossip in the few minutes it took us to walk to the designated pick-up spot.

  “He likes you!” Kerrie squealed and I looked behind us to make sure the boys were out of earshot. Of course, with Kerrie’s penetrating voice, they’d have to be in Kentucky not to overhear, but at least I didn’t see them.

  “Do you think he’ll ask you to the Mistletoe Dance?” Nicole asked, leaning into us as we walked. “If he doesn’t, you should ask him!”

  “It’s a junior dance, Nicky,” Kerrie said. “She can’t ask him. But he can ask her. I think he’ll ask you, Bianca. He might even have his driver’s license by then.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound disinterested. “Maybe he’ll ask Sadie.”

  Nicole and Kerrie both burst out laughing simultaneously, then got a case of the guilts and stopped just as abruptly. “That was weird running into her,” Nicole said.

  “Yeah. I didn’t quite picture her as the mall type,” Kerrie added.

  “Neither did I. She seems more the downtown type if you know what I mean,” I said. They all nodded and we all imagined Sadie wandering into incense-laden bookstores and little boutiques that sold tie-dye shirts and Indian skirts.

  “Where’s she live anyway?” Nicole asked.

  “Don’t know. She kind of hangs by herself,” Kerrie said.

  “Maybe we should try to get to know her better,” I said as we walked through the doors of the mall to the dark parking lot. I looked around. No Tony. He was late, as usual. “She looks like she could use a friend.”

  “Or a probation officer,” Nicole said.

  “Nicky!” Kerrie cried and rapped her on the arm.

  “Just kidding.”

  In the distance, I saw Tony’s blue Civic wending its way through the rows of cars. In a few seconds, he was at the curb, and we all piled in. He said nothing to us and we chatted among ourselves throughout the ride back to our homes.

  After we dropped off Nicole and Kerrie, the silent treatment continued. The radio was broken in his car, so we couldn’t even listen to that. As we headed east toward home, I stared out the window at the gray landscape. The sky was overcast and the air was beginning to cool.

  Doug had called my name and punched me in the arm. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.

  Chapter Two

  THAT NIGHT, my family ate at Cara Mia’s in Little Italy, a restaurant my great Aunt Rosa Molvone owns.

  Aunt Rosa is a big lady who always reminds me of a small tug boat the way she nudges and pushes everybody into doing what she wants. And, she’s a little on the chunky side, to put it charitably.

  Although I know she’s my mother’s mother’s sister, I can never tell if she is pushing fifty or ninety. Her hair, always pulled back in a tight bun on the crown of her head, is coal black from the henna rinse she regularly uses on it.

  She used to own the restaurant with her husband, my great Uncle Cesare, but he passed away two years ago. Everybody says Aunt Rosa has been a different person since then, and from the way they nod their heads when they say it, I take it that widowhood suits her.

  “The shrimp scampi is good tonight,” she said, hovering over our family’s table. “Good shrimp. As big as a clam. And the lasagna is fresh. Just made it this afternoon.” Her hawk-like eyes caught sight of the empty bread basket on our table. In a flash, her hospitable mood changed to haughty anger as she scooped it up, turned to a waiter, and spit out something in Italian, which I assume meant something like “get more bread here, you bumbling son of a one-eyed witch.”

  My mother, who knows a little Italian, grimaced. “Whatever you recommend sounds good, Aunt Rosa,” she said, and Rosa left to place our unarticulated orders in the kitchen.

  Once a month we went through this ritual, coming to Cara Mia’s, pretending to look at the menus, and letting Aunt Rosa (or Uncle Cesare before her) pick out what we would eat. When I was a kid, it didn’t matter much to me since I couldn’t understand the menu anyway. But now that I was older, I wouldn’t have minded selecting something for myself, like a veal dish or surf and turf from the “American Food” column.

  The first time I’d uttered that wish to my mom, however, she’d reacted as if I had told her I was joining up with the Heaven’s Gate fellows. “Surf and turf at Aunt Rosa’s? She’d never speak to us again!”

  If Tony and Connie were ever told the same thing, I don’t know. They just put their menus down with a little eye-rolling and waited for their dinners. The refilled bread basket soon appeared, placed on the table by a dark-skinned, dark-haired young man who gave Connie the once-over as he walked away.

  “Why don’t you ask him out?” Tony said, reaching for a slice.

  “Shut up, jerk,” my sister softly replied.

  “Do any business today?” I asked her and she looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Business? You mean work?” Connie asked.

  “Yeah. Work. Like find any missing treasure or locate some kidnapped heiress,” I said.

  Connie’s mouth turned up on one side. “I think you’ve been watching too many old movies.”

  “No, she was at the mall today with those hoodlum friends of hers,” Tony interjected, his mouth stuffed with bread.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” my mother said.

  Tony swallowed. “I had to take her too. And I had a lot of stuff to do.”

  “You mean like multi-tasking?” I asked. To Tony, multi-tasking was watching TV and napping at the same time.

  “Like getting started on a history paper,” he said in a “so-there” voice.

  “It’s always such a pleasure to spend this quality time with you all,” my mother sighed, and we settled down.

  “Seriously, Con, did a girl by the name of Sadie Sinclair call you?” I asked.

  “No. No one by that name,” Connie said. “Why?”

  “Nothing, I guess. She’s a new girl from school and we ran into her at the mall. When she found out you’re a P.I., she started asking some questions and I ended up giving her your card.”

/>   “Questions about what?”

  “About being framed for—a crime she didn’t commit,” I said, deliberately leaving out the fact that Sadie had specifically mentioned “murder” as the crime. Didn’t think that would play real well with my mother.

  Connie paused before answering. “No, no Sadie called asking about that.”

  “Well, if she did, how would you go about helping her?” I asked. Just then, my Aunt Rosa returned with two plates that she put on the table with a flourish. One held an ante-pasta selection and the other was a steaming hot platter of stuffed mushrooms.

  “Mmm, those look great,” my mother said, smiling at Aunt Rosa.

  “Yum, crab meat,” Connie said tasting one. Tony reached for two. “Your dinners will be out soon. Enjoy,” Aunt Rosa said. “Connie, you didn’t answer my question,” I said. Connie kept eating, taking some of the salami and ham and provolone from the antipasto plate. Her health-food regimen went on pause whenever we came to Cara Mia’s.

  “Well, it’s a tough question,” she said slowly. “It depends. I mean, has the crime been reported to the police, and if so, what do they have? That’s where I’d start.”

  “What kind of trouble is your friend in?” my mother asked. “None. And she’s not really my friend,” I answered. “Just some new girl.”

  TWO HOURS later, I was lying on my bed wondering why I thought I could eat that last cannolli when I had already wolfed down appetizers, lasagna, salad, and bread.

  It was a typical Saturday night. Connie was in her room and Tony was downstairs watching television. Mom was reading in the living room. Sometimes Tony or Connie went out on dates or with friends, but it wasn’t unusual for us all to be hunkered down in our own little worlds.

  I thought about calling Kerrie to debrief her on the mall visit and scope out what she thought of the possibility of Doug asking me to the Mistletoe Dance and what I would wear if he did. But I decided to get a Coke first because Coke always calms my stomach. I wandered downstairs to the kitchen in the back of the house, past my mother in the living room.

  In the darkened kitchen, I could hear Tony’s television booming away downstairs in his basement room as he flipped from WWF showdowns to C-Span to AMC and back through the dial.

  Our house was an old row home where the kitchen had originally been in the basement. Renovations had moved the kitchen to the first floor, within easy reach of the dining room, so everything in the kitchen was new, including the wiring. My mom had put the family computer in that room on a desk against the side wall, where it could easily be plugged into a dedicated line that would-n’t fizzle out if the circuits shorted, and could easily be connected to the telephone line too. I glanced over it as a screen saver played out a scene of a lawn mower blazing through rapidly growing grass.

  Coke in hand, I decided to sit down at the computer and do a little investigating of my own before calling Kerrie.

  “I’m getting on line,” I called out to my mother and anyone else who would hear. I sat down at the small desk and pointed and clicked my way into cyberland, first answering a couple of emails from school chums, including one from Kerrie that would save me a phone call.

  “tried to call you but no answer,” she wrote. “marsha called. she said doug is definitely interested in you, asked about you last week at some debating club thing. remember that rose velvet dress at lerner’s? that would look good for the mistletoe dance. . .”

  I wrote her a quick note back, thanking her for her intelligence report, reporting to her that Sadie hadn’t called Connie about the “attempted murder,” I ate too much at dinner, and was now going to look up where Doug lived. I sent it off and a few seconds later got an Instant Message back, heralded by a wind-chime noise.

  “Turn off the sound, hon,” my mother called from the living room. So I pushed the off button and watched the screen as Kerrie weighed in again.

  “sadie is spooky. marsha says she talks like she’s from somewhere else. doug lives in towson, near nicole but don’t know exactly where. . .”

  “How come you never told me?” I IM’ed back.

  “you never asked,” came the answer a second later. “how do you know sadie didn’t call connie?”

  “I asked her,” I wrote Kerrie. Then we went back to gossiping about school, complaining about our teachers, and bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have any study halls together. An hour later, Connie came into the kitchen and glanced at me as she went to the fridge for water.

  “You still on? You’re tying up the phone!” she said.

  “We’ve got voice mail. Besides, I’ll be off soon,” I said and waited for her to leave before signing off with Kerrie and wandering into an Internet search engine. I punched in the name “Sadie Sinclair” and waited. Most of the places I searched didn’t turn up anything, but I did get a few interesting hits for some artist out in California named Sadie Mauvais Sinclair.

  Just for fun, I went to a few of those articles, one of which had a photo, but the artist looked nothing at all like our Sadie Sinclair. She was a Tahitian woman who specialized in “neo-primitive paintings with an island theme.”

  I dutifully checked the voice mail after logging off and there wasn’t a single call for my family of forgotten souls. But before I put down the receiver, I decided to check the voice mail again, not our voice mail but Connie’s office. After all, I did know the password.

  I punched in the numbers and waited. “You have two new messages,” the electronic voice said. I checked them both, careful not to do anything to them, but neither was from Sadie. One was a telephone solicitor, the other a call from a client about rescheduling a meeting. I was about to hang up when I decided to listen to the “saved” messages as well. There were three of those.

  The first two were run-of-the-mill calls about ongoing jobs. Then, bingo, I heard her voice.

  “Hi,” she said tentatively. “I’d like to talk with Constance Balducci. . . a friend recommended you. . . for a friend of mine. . . Anyway, I’ll call back. I guess you’re not in on Saturdays. My name is. . . Bobbie McCormack. . .”

  Bobbie McCormack? I hit the replay button and listened again. That was no Bobbie McCormack. It was Sadie’s voice. This was getting too weird. First, she asks about private eyes to help “a friend” with a frame-up for murder, then she uses a fake name? I hung up the phone and meandered back upstairs, trying to figure out what to do with this information. Information is power, I always say, so it’s best to think it through before spilling all you know.

  I sat in my room awhile, hugging a pillow to my chest while I listened to a couple CDs. Then, I walked down the hall and rapped on Connie’s door.

  “Yeah?” she called out.

  “It’s me.”

  A few seconds later, she came to the door and opened it, letting me in.

  “What?” she asked. She had on her robe, and a towel was wrapped around her head. She had slathered some cream on her face that smelled like cucumbers and looked like guacamole. New Age chant-like music was coming from her CD player, and a bottle of nail polish was open on her dresser. After she let me in, she went back to polishing her toenails a deep red color, sitting in an old rocking chair by the window. I sat on the edge of the bed. “What can I do you for?” she asked.

  “You know, I forgot to mention this. That friend who I gave your card to—her name was Sadie but she said the friend that needed help was Bobbie McCormack. Did Bobbie McCormack call you yet?”

  I saw her pause for maybe a nanosecond as she decided whether to share any information with me. Then, she finished polishing her right toe nails, capped the bottle, and spread her feet in front of her as they dried.

  “Bianca, part of being a private investigator is keeping people’s business private.”

  “Come on, Connie. If she called and left a message, you haven’t even had a chance to talk to her. So, it’s not really private yet.” Strange reasoning but enough to do the job.

  “Okay,” she said. “Yeah. Some gal named
Bobbie called today. But she didn’t leave a number. She just said she’d call back.”

  What a sleuth I was! I just found out something—that I already knew! Sherlock Holmes, watch out.

  “Well, I didn’t tell you but she said this friend was being framed for murder,” I said.

  Connie leaned back in her chair and got serious. “Murder? That’s nothing to fool around with. And that would be in the police reports, in the papers. That’s not something that goes unnoticed.”

  “I thought it was kind of odd myself.”

  “What’s your friend like? The one who said her friend is being framed?” Connie asked.

  “She’s new to school this year. And she’s different. Keeps to herself mostly. Really skinny. Nobody knows much about her.”

  “Maybe you should get to know her,” Connie said, and I perked up immediately. Wow. Connie was asking me to help on a case.

  “Yeah. That would help. I could find out stuff.”

  Connie frowned. “No, you dufus. I meant maybe you should get to know her because she’s new and it would be nice for somebody to reach out and make her feel at home.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I was getting to that,” I said. In the distance, the phone rang. I ran down the hall to grab the extension in my room before Tony could pick it up.

  “Bianca! I’m so glad I got you,” Kerrie said breathlessly on the end of the line. “Nickie just called and told me the most incredible news. . .”

  “What? What?”

  “She said she saw Sadie going over to Doug’s house.”

  My heart sank. I sat down on the bed and pretended not to care, and listened while Kerrie told me the whole gruesome tale.

  Chapter Three

  BY THE time Monday morning rolled around, I had imagined a hundred different scenarios for why Sadie Sinclair, Woman of Mystery, would be visiting Douglas Patterson, My Own True Love, on a Saturday night.

  The Saturday night after the afternoon in which he had punched me in the shoulder and called out my name.

  Unfortunately, none of the scenarios was really good for me. They ranged from torrid romantic liaison to secret science project cloning the school’s star basketball player.