Partners in Crime (9780545463119) Read online

  “Hi!” the girl said to us.

  Darcy and I waved.

  “This is my little sister, Mia,” Fiona said in a sweet, high voice. That definitely wasn’t a tone she used at school.

  “Can we play?” Mia asked.

  Fiona bent down. “I’m super busy right now, but I will definitely play with you after dinner. Okay?”

  Mia nodded happily and skipped away. Fiona shut the door behind her.

  I’d expected Fiona to roll her eyes and dismiss her sister as annoying. But she didn’t. At school, Fiona could be mean and insulting to kids who weren’t popular. But here she was, being super nice to her little sister. I couldn’t quite figure her out.

  “So,” Fiona said, opening a bag of chips, “now you know why I’m sure I’m not adopted.”

  Fiona sat on the rug. We joined her and she passed the bag of chips around.

  “Yeah, you’re a clone of your mom,” Darcy said.

  “Only on the surface,” Fiona corrected. “We look alike, but we are nothing alike. My mom doesn’t know anything about fashion or style. She spends all her time cooking and cleaning and doing her stupid puzzle books. Dad’s either working or reading technology magazines.” She shook her head in disgust. “They are such dorks.”

  “What does your dad do for work?” I asked, reaching into the bag for a chip. They were salt and vinegar flavored, my favorite.

  “He works for a computer company. And when he’s at home, he reads about computers.” She rolled her eyes. “They are so lame. I don’t know where I came from.”

  Darcy rubbed her chin. “So you’re not adopted, that’s clear. But maybe Bailey was. Do you have those baby pictures?”

  Fiona went to her desk, which was covered with various bottles of lotion and nail polish, slid open a drawer, and took out two photos. She handed the pictures to us, and Darcy and I studied them.

  Most babies kind of look alike to me anyway, but these two were almost exact. They both had small pale faces with the same little button noses. And they had an equal amount of light brown fuzz on the tops of their heads. The only real difference I could see was in their outfits and the fact that one baby’s head was turned slightly more to the left than the other. They could be twins.

  “And can we see the birth certificates?” I asked.

  Fiona pulled two pieces of paper out of her desk. Darcy took one and I took the other. We compared them side by side. Bailey’s certificate was faded in spots, like it was a photocopy, not an original. Some lines were clear.

  CHILD’S NAME (FIRST MIDDLE LAST): Bailey Ann Banks

  GENDER: Female

  DATE OF BIRTH: April 4

  PLACE OF BIRTH: Garretson, SD

  All of that, except the name, was the same as the certificate for Fiona Erin Fanning. Maura and Roger Fanning were listed as the parents on Fiona’s paper. On Bailey’s, the lines containing the parents’ names were too faded to read.

  “Do you remember living in Garretson, South Dakota?” I asked Fiona.

  Fiona shook her head. “I’ve never even heard of the place. I always assumed I was born here, in Massachusetts.”

  “Fiona!” Mrs. Fanning called from downstairs. “Dinner will be ready soon!”

  I think that was a polite way of kicking Darcy and me out.

  Fiona let out a sigh that sounded so sad. It was strange to see her vulnerable like this.

  On our way out, we were stopped at the foot of the stairs by a bellowing voice. “Fiona! Aren’t you going to introduce your friends?”

  Fiona groaned and pointed toward the den. “Dad’s home from work,” she whispered. “This will only take a minute.”

  We followed her into the room. Built-in bookcases lined the walls and were crammed with books from floor to ceiling. A desk had a pile of puzzle workbooks with titles like World’s Hardest Crosswords and Impossible Sudoku.

  In short, my kind of room.

  Mrs. Fanning was sitting in a recliner with a pencil in one hand. In the other she had a book called Mind Benders. She sure liked puzzles. Mr. Fanning was in a matching chair, reading PC Magazine. He looked at us over the rim of his glasses. “Who are your friends, honey?” he asked, and, like Mrs. Fanning, he had a note of suspicion in his tone.

  “Norah Burridge and Darcy Carter,” Fiona said impatiently. “They go to my school. But they have to head home now.”

  Fiona led us outside and walked us down the driveway to our bikes.

  “Why didn’t you tell your parents that we were coming over?” Darcy asked.

  Fiona waved her hands in the air dramatically. “Because they would have made a huge deal out of it and asked twenty questions about each of you. My parents are so totally overprotective. They always have to know who I’m meeting, where I’m going, what time I’ll be back, who all the kids’ parents are, blah, blah, blah. If this continues into high school, I’m never going to have a real social life.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes as I lifted my bike’s kick-stand with my foot. I didn’t feel like we were any closer to giving Fiona her answers, but I wanted to leave on a positive note. “Well, thanks for having us over,” I said. “We learned a little bit more.”

  “Not really.” Fiona put her face in her hands and groaned. “How will I ever find out the truth?” she asked, her voice breaking a little.

  I’d already decided I was going to help her, but I looked at Darcy. She nodded once and I knew we agreed.

  “We’ll do it,” Darcy said.

  Fiona looked up with hope in her glistening eyes. “You’ll help me find Bailey?”

  I placed a gentle hand on Fiona’s shoulder. “Sure. We’ll help you.”

  We all stood awkwardly for a moment. I didn’t know what we should do. Hug? We still weren’t exactly friends. Shake hands? That seemed too … professional.

  Darcy held her fist out. “Bump it,” she said.

  I bumped first and Fiona followed my lead with a grin.

  We weren’t going to see Fiona again until Monday, but that wouldn’t stop Darcy and me from investigating. We made plans to meet at Darcy’s house Saturday for some Internet research. My house was out of the question since our computer is in the living room, and my parents would be staring over our shoulders the whole time. Then they’d want to know what we were doing and I’d be faced with the choice of either (a) telling them we’re investigating a real missing person case (after which they’d freak out and decide it was too dangerous) or (b) lying to them (after which I’d feel so guilty I’d have a stomachache for days).

  So doing the work at Darcy’s would avoid all that unnecessary drama.

  I woke up Saturday morning and ate a bowl of cereal while watching TV — something I wasn’t allowed to do on school days. I had about ten minutes before I had to be at Darcy’s, so I decided to take Hubble for a walk. Mom and Dad were snuggled on the couch, sharing the newspaper, and I waved ’bye to them.

  After I’d clipped on his leash, Hubble pulled me down the driveway and to the sidewalk. “Hey, who’s walking who here?” I said.

  Yes, I talk to my dog. What of it?

  He stopped at the fire hydrant in front of our house and sniffed circles around it for a couple minutes. I sighed and waited.

  Finally, I said, “Listen, Hubble. You know you’re going to pee on the hydrant. I know you’re going to pee on the hydrant. You pee on that thing every day. Stop acting like you’re trying to make a decision and just do it.”

  He looked up at me, head tilted to the side, then lifted his leg and got down to business.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  After he’d finished, he suddenly got excited and started to do his head-to-tail-wiggle dance. Which meant only one thing. Darcy was here.

  I turned around and saw her stomping up the sidewalk toward me.

  I looked at my watch. “I’m not late!” I said. “I have two more minutes.”

  “Plans have changed,” she said, kneeling down to pet Hubble, who was so excited he was trying to li
ck her face off.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  She straightened and wiped her face with her sleeve. “The school called. Mom’s mad. Long story short, my laptop and phone have been confiscated for the weekend.”

  I groaned. “Can’t you go one week without getting in trouble?”

  “Hey, he started it. And you didn’t seem to mind that day when I was standing up for your dream boy.”

  “Wait, what?” I was so confused.

  Darcy’s shoulders sagged. “Hunter Fisk and his parents made a visit to the principal to complain about me tying his shoelace to his chair. They said I was bullying him.”

  My jaw dropped. “He’s the bully, not you! He was torturing poor Zane.” I was furious. Darcy was in trouble for only giving Hunter what he deserved, and he got away with his behavior. Again.

  Hubble looked up at me warily. He could always sense my emotions.

  “I’m going to call Principal Plati and tell him what really happened,” I said in almost a yell. “We can ask Zane, too, and then —”

  Darcy shook her head. “Don’t bother. If Zane tattled, it would only make things worse for him. Plus, it’s not like I got suspended or anything. Plati just called my mom.” She shrugged. “Two days without technology. I’ll live.”

  “But what about our investigation? We need your laptop.”

  “No biggie.” She pointed at my house. “We’ll use your computer.”

  I looked over my shoulder and back again. “Darcy … you know my parents have it in the living room so they can keep an eye on me. They’ll want to know what we’re doing and —”

  Darcy smiled as she interrupted me. “Don’t worry. I have an idea.”

  We came back into my house, and I unclipped Hubble’s leash. He ran off, probably to find his favorite toy. We turned the corner into the living room, and my parents were still on the couch.

  “Oh, hi, girls,” Mom said, looking up from her section of the paper. “I thought you were going to Darcy’s house today.”

  Darcy stuffed her hands in the pockets of her jeans and hung her head. “We were, but I asked Norah if it was okay if we met here instead. My mom’s kind of overwhelmed today and I thought I should get out of her hair.”

  I looked at Darcy, wondering where this was coming from.

  Mom’s and Dad’s faces grew concerned. “What’s wrong with your mother?”

  Darcy shook her head sadly. “You know, she just has so much to do. And it’s stuff I can’t help her with. Like today she wants to clean the gutters on the house. It’s just … it’s a lot.”

  Dad straightened. “Can we help her?”

  Mom nodded quickly. “We’d love to help out. It’s a beautiful day to do outside work.”

  “I don’t know.” Darcy shuffled her feet back and forth. “She sure could use the help, but she would never ask. And she’d be real mad at me if she knew I told you.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” Mom said, standing. “We’ll pretend we’re going for a nice walk and then insist on helping her. She’ll never know you told us.”

  Darcy looked at me. I tried my best to keep my expression flat.

  “That would be wonderful, Mr. and Mrs. Burridge!” she said.

  And, within minutes, my parents were out the door.

  I had to hand it to her. Darcy knew how to play my parents. They had a soft spot for Darcy’s mom and respected her for “trying so hard to raise a difficult girl as a single mother.” So anytime they saw an opportunity to help her out, they jumped at the chance.

  “Well,” I said, looking at my parents’ old desktop, “we have unsupervised computer use now.”

  “But only for an hour,” Darcy pointed out. “With the three of them cleaning those gutters, it won’t take long.”

  I pressed the button on the computer, turning it on. “Then let’s get started.”

  Darcy tapped her black-painted fingernails on the keyboard tray while we waited for the computer to boot up. “When did your parents buy this? The ice age?”

  I sighed. “I told you it was old. My parents aren’t very tech-savvy. As long as it still works, they won’t buy a new one.”

  The hard drive groaned and whirred. Darcy leaned forward and peered through the vents on the side.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “The hamster that powers this thing. Where’s his wheel?”

  I groaned. I was getting sick of Darcy’s jokes. Finally, the monitor flickered to life, and welcome noises came from the speakers.

  “Okay,” I said, offering up the keyboard to her. “Where should we start?”

  Darcy settled into the chair while I stood beside it. “Let’s start with a simple search engine lookup of her name.”

  Darcy’s fingers hammered at the keyboard. I didn’t know how she could type so fast. Entries for Bailey Ann Banks popped up on the screen.

  We scanned them for a while, clicking on a few from social networks. Finally, I said with disappointment, “These girls are all too old to be our Bailey.”

  “Yeah, I figured she would be too young to have an online page,” Darcy said. “But it was worth a try.”

  I glanced out the window, wondering how far along the gutter cleaning had come. We’d wasted too much time on these wrong Baileys. “So now what?”

  Darcy clicked the mouse and brought us to a website I’d never seen before. “Now we try the database.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s just this website I have a subscription to. You enter personal information like names and ages and track people down. You can even get background reports and phone numbers.”

  I had the feeling that Darcy had done this before. Hence, the subscription. I put my hands on my hips and gave her The Look.

  “What?” Darcy said innocently. “My mom went on a date last year with this guy I didn’t like. So I got access to this website so I could look into his background. Believe me, I saved her some trouble.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. It was hard to be annoyed with Darcy’s behavior when she did it out of protective feelings for her mom. Plus, it was coming in handy today.

  “So it’s really this easy?” I said. “We type in Bailey Ann Banks and we could have her phone number in a minute?”

  “Well, it will take a bit longer because most entries don’t include a middle name,” Darcy explained, typing away. “So we have to look through all the Bailey Bankses. We can start here in Massachusetts or in South Dakota, where she was born. But she could be anywhere, so we may have to widen the search.”

  Soon a list of Bailey Bankses came up on the screen. More than I would have liked. “That’s a lot of Bailey Bankses.”

  “It’s okay,” Darcy said. “We can immediately skip the ones with a middle name or initial other than A. We’ll focus on Bailey Banks, Bailey Ann Banks, and Bailey A. Banks.”

  I nervously looked at my watch. “When do you think my parents will be back?”

  Darcy leaned forward, closer to the monitor, with a determined look on her face. “You go spy out the window and see how much progress they’ve made. I’ll start looking for our Bailey.”

  I jogged to the dining room to play lookout. The window in that room faced Darcy’s house. I peeked out and — surprisingly — didn’t see anyone. The ladder was on the grass … as if they had already finished. I gasped and ran back to Darcy.

  “They’re done! The ladder is back on the ground!” I said, panting.

  Darcy was tracing her finger down the computer monitor and clicking around with the mouse. “Chill. They probably went in my house for some lemonade or something. My mom wouldn’t let them go that easily. She likes to talk their ears off.”

  “Did you find her?” I asked, pointing at the screen.

  “No.” She sighed. “There’s no Bailey Banks, age twelve, in the whole state of Massachusetts or South Dakota.”

  I groaned. “So what now?”

  “I have to examine every twelve-yea
r-old Bailey Banks in the entire country and see if I can narrow the list down at all.”

  That seemed like a big job. “I’ll go to the front of the house and watch for them,” I said, hoping Darcy wouldn’t take too long.

  But as I got near our front window, a shadow passed by. They were coming back!

  I ran into the living room and whisper-screamed, “They’re back! They’re back!”

  “Oh no!” Darcy rubbed her face. “I need more time.”

  “We’ll just have to quit for now,” I said. “Try again another day.”

  “No.” Darcy bent down and flipped the switch to turn the printer on. “Stall them.”

  My eyes widened. “I can’t!”

  “Just for one minute,” Darcy said as the printer whirred to life.

  Thinking quickly, I darted to the front door and tore it open. My parents stood there openmouthed in surprise.

  “We were just coming in, honey,” Mom said.

  “Have you seen Hubble?” I didn’t even have to fake the panicked tone of my voice. I was panicking.

  “No,” Dad said, his brow creasing. “Did he get out?”

  “I think so. I can’t find him!” I stepped outside and closed the door behind me. Mom, Dad, and I wandered around the yard, calling out, “Hubble! Hubble!”

  I looked under bushes and behind trees.

  Dad said, “It’s very strange. We’ve been outside working on Ms. Carter’s gutters. We would have seen him running around if he’d gotten loose.”

  “Hubble!” Mom cried out, louder this time.

  And he “woofed” in response.

  We all turned around slowly, facing the house. And there was Hubble’s little brown face in the window. He must have climbed onto the back of the sofa to peer outside and see what all the fuss was about. And, in doing so, he just may have gotten me busted.

  Mom and Dad looked at me.

  I opened my mouth, ready to spill everything.

  And the front door flew open.

  “I found him!” Darcy said, stepping outside. “We thought he’d gotten out because he wasn’t coming when we called in the house. But it turns out he’d somehow gotten himself locked in the bathroom.”