Partners in Crime (9780545463119) Read online

  “Oh,” Mom said. “Maybe the wind closed the door on him.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Darcy said, nodding. “Anyway, thanks so much for helping my mom. I bet she’s in a better mood now. Let’s go, Norah.”

  Darcy grabbed my hand and led me down the sidewalk.

  “Be home in time for dinner,” Mom called to my back, and I waved in response. Mom was making lasagna tonight, so I was actually looking forward to that.

  But first … I wanted to see what Darcy had found.

  We ran upstairs to Darcy’s room, and she closed the door.

  I looked at her empty hands. “You couldn’t get the list to print?”

  She smiled and reached under her purple-and-black striped T-shirt, then whipped out the paper and waved it in the air triumphantly. She’d stuffed the printout in the waistband of her jeans.

  “Brilliant! Let’s see it,” I said eagerly.

  “There are six pages of names.” Darcy flipped through the papers. “Let’s split it up and see what we find.”

  She handed me three pages. We both sat cross-legged on her bed and started reading.

  Bailey K. Banks… I mentally crossed her off for having the wrong middle initial.

  Bailey Banks, no middle name, in Kansas. I checked her age: forty-four. Nope.

  I traced my finger down the page to the next entry. There was a Bailey A. Banks! My heart raced, thinking I might have found her. But it sank again as I saw she was twenty years old.

  I continued down the list until the end, then looked up to find that Darcy had finished first. From the sour look on her face, I guessed she had come up empty-handed, too.

  “Any luck?” I said, trying to force positivity into my voice.

  “Nope. You?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “How could she not be anywhere in the country?”

  Darcy picked at her fingernail polish and stared at the wall. “It’s like Bailey Ann Banks doesn’t exist.”

  On Monday, even though we were in the middle of the most exciting project of our lives, everything seemed back to normal. Fiona ignored us in front of her friends. Hunter and Slade snickered at us as we walked by them in the hall. Zane wore a T-shirt with some band on it I didn’t know and looked really cute. I got a 98 on a history test I had freaked out over. (I thought I had missed more than one question and had nearly given myself an ulcer worrying about it.) Darcy got a 96, with much less angst involved.

  Darcy and I sat together at lunch. The cafeteria smelled like hot dogs. Not the good barbeque-grilled-hot-dogs-in-the-summer kind of smell. Steamed hot dogs. Barf.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  I should have suspected something was going on in that brain of hers. Darcy had scarfed down her entire lunch in the time it took me to unwrap my sandwich. That was normal. But she’d stayed quiet in the minutes after. Now, that was unusual.

  “I don’t trust her,” Darcy said.

  I immediately knew who she was talking about. I turned to see Fiona sitting at the popular table, giggling with her friends.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Did you watch her in class today?” Darcy said, still looking at Fiona. “She was scribbling in a notebook the entire time.”

  “Taking notes, you mean?”

  Darcy shook her head. “No, even when the teacher wasn’t talking, she was scribbling. She definitely wasn’t paying attention. She was doing something else.”

  “Do you mean that pink notebook she carries around with her everywhere?” I asked, and took a bite of my sandwich.

  Darcy pointed at me. “Yes! And the fact that it’s with her almost all the time. It makes me suspicious.”

  Now my wheels were turning. “What do you think it could be?”

  Darcy’s already dark eyes darkened further. “Maybe a slam book.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Something you write rumors and gossip in. Mean stuff about other kids.”

  “That sounds terrible.” I dropped the remains of the sandwich back in the paper bag. I don’t do crusts. “But what does that have to do with our investigation?”

  “What if it’s all a prank?” Darcy suggested. “What if Fiona, Hunter, Slade, all the popular kids are in on it? They sent us the e-mail and are making us go through this whole investigation for nothing. And she’s making fun of us in that notebook.”

  Darcy sometimes sees conspiracies where there aren’t any. She can get a bit paranoid. When she’d first brought up the idea of it all being a trick, I’d thought there was a possibility. But now we’d come so far. We’d matched Fiona’s birthday. We’d seen actual evidence. “What about the birth certificate?” I asked.

  Darcy thought for a minute. “It could have been faked. It was kind of faded.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. Faking an official document seemed like way too much trouble to go through just to mess with us.

  “Plus, she wasn’t in the database,” Darcy said. “The bottom line is we need to see what’s in that notebook. We need to be sure.”

  I gazed over my shoulder at Fiona. She threw her head back in laughter at something one of her friends said. She was so confident. So put together. And, yeah, she could act like a mean girl sometimes. But Friday, when she was nearly in tears asking us for help … that couldn’t have been an act.

  Could it?

  After the final bell rang, I grabbed my jacket from my locker and headed outside to walk home with Darcy. It was one of those days that had started off cool in the morning, but now the afternoon sun had warmed the air up. I didn’t need my jacket, so I stopped to tie it around my waist.

  “Hold on a second,” I said.

  Darcy waited while I fumbled with the jacket arms. After a minute, I was ready. “Okay, let’s go.”

  But someone came up behind us and said in a bubbly voice, “So whose house are we going to today?”

  Darcy and I turned around slowly to face Fiona.

  “For what?” Darcy snapped.

  “To talk clues, of course,” Fiona whispered. “I want to work with you guys and find out what you’re learning as we go. Plus, I don’t have cheering today.”

  “So we’re not cool enough to talk to during the school day, but we’re good enough to do all this work for you?” Darcy crossed her arms and made her angry face. It was only slightly different from her normal face.

  Fiona looked at me — the nicer one — for support, but I just shrugged. Darcy had a point.

  “Listen,” Fiona said. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings by not chatting with you guys at all today. But I figured we’d want to keep this whole thing secret until we know what’s going on.”

  That made sense, but I could tell it wasn’t enough for Darcy. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “See? I even wore my pearls.” Fiona pointed to the string of pearls that hung around her neck over her pink sweater. She grinned. “Like Nancy Drew!”

  I couldn’t help but soften. Only Fiona would match fashion to mysteries. “Okay, we can go to my house today,” I offered. Working on the investigation might be easier with Fiona, since she could have more information that she hadn’t even thought of yet.

  Plus …

  I motioned with my eyes at the pink notebook Fiona held clutched to her chest, then looked back at Darcy.

  My best friend smiled. “Yeah, let’s go to Norah’s. It’ll be fun.”

  Darcy had understood my look. At my house, we’d find a way to peek into Fiona’s notebook and find out if her motives were for real …

  … or not.

  At first it felt strange walking home with Fiona. For one, it was always just Darcy and me. So adding a third anytime would have felt a little unusual. The fact that our third wheel was Fiona Fanning made it überweird.

  But after a while, it was okay. We talked about classes and how one of the lunch ladies was so nice and the other so evil (they’d been nicknamed Mrs. Angel and Mrs. Devil). And before we knew it, w
e were at my house.

  I opened the door and called out, “Hey, Mom! I have friends over!”

  A moment later, Mom came around the corner, and her eyes lit up. “Hi, girls!” she said excitedly.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “This is Fiona Fanning.”

  Fiona smiled sweetly and gave a little wave. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Burridge.”

  “Oh, I know Fiona,” Mom said. “You did great at that runway show fund-raiser the PTA held last year.”

  Of course Mom recognized Fiona. Everyone in town knew who she was. Pretty, popular girls tend to be memorable.

  “I love your nails,” Mom said, taking one of Fiona’s hands. “Did you do this yourself?”

  I hadn’t even noticed, but Fiona’s nails were painted a glittery pink (probably to match her sweater) with a little design in the middle of each one.

  “Oh, I had them done at Stylish Nails in the center of town,” Fiona said gleefully. “Didn’t they do a great job?”

  “They sure did,” Mom said. “I’ve been meaning to try them sometime. Do they do pedicures, too?”

  “Of course!”

  Darcy and I shared an eye roll. I started to pull Fiona away. “Okay, nice chatting with you, Mom, but we’re going to go upstairs and do our homework now.”

  “Oh, okay,” Mom said. I sensed disappointment in her voice. As we started up the stairs, she yelled, “Let me know if you want any snacks!”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I whispered to Fiona.

  She waved me off. “No problem. Your mom’s really cool.”

  Once we got upstairs, I closed the door to my room behind us. I slipped my backpack off my shoulder and dropped it on the bed, then motioned for Darcy and Fiona to do the same. I assumed Fiona’s special notebook was in her backpack. We’d have to find a way to take a look at some point.

  “What’s this?” Fiona pointed to my telescope. “Do you spy on your neighbors?”

  “Of course not,” I said. Darcy started laughing, since she was my neighbor. I explained, “It’s a telescope for watching the skies. You know, stars, planets, moons. I’m really into astronomy.”

  “Oh, cool!” Fiona said. “I’m an Aries.”

  Darcy was really laughing now. I wanted to put my face in my hands, but instead I calmly said, “Horoscopes and stuff … that’s astrology. Totally different.”

  Fiona frowned. “Oh.” She seemed much less interested now.

  Darcy flopped onto her usual beanbag chair and I settled into the other. Fiona just stood there. Then I realized the problem. I only had two beanbag chairs. I’d never had more than one friend in my room before.

  I slid off the chair. “Fiona, you can take this one. I’ll sit on the rug.”

  Darcy shot me a disapproving look and I glared back.

  Yeah, we didn’t know yet if we could trust Fiona. But I was still going to be a polite host until we knew for sure.

  “Okay, let’s go over what we have,” I said.

  Darcy opened a notebook she’d been writing the case information in. She read out loud, “Bailey and Fiona were born on the same day, in the same hospital, in the same city. There were also two baby photos showing two different babies who looked almost exactly alike. The parents’ names were too faded to read on Bailey’s birth certificate, though, so we can’t be sure Fiona and Bailey have the same parents. And then there’s the question of why Bailey would have a different last name. But we know that Fiona wasn’t adopted or kidnapped, because she looks exactly like her mother.”

  Fiona fiddled with her pearls. “Though if I was kidnapped, that would explain a lot.” She said dreamily, “Maybe my real mother lives in New York City and works at Vogue and has spent her whole life mourning her daughter, who was kidnapped as an infant.”

  “Let’s focus on the facts,” I said. Just because Fiona’s mom was nothing like her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t her mother. Case in point: my parents and me. Nothing in common. At all.

  Darcy frowned, flipping a page in her notebook. “The strange thing is that, though Bailey exists on that birth certificate you found, she doesn’t exist in the database.”

  “What do you mean?” Fiona asked, her forehead creasing.

  I explained, “Darcy looked up all the Bailey Ann Bankses through this online website that private investigators use.” And people like Darcy, I added silently. “There are no Baileys with that birth year born in South Dakota. Nothing that matches the birth certificate. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

  “Or that her existence was wiped,” Darcy said.

  Thinking out loud, I asked, “But who would do that? And why?”

  “Kidnappers!” Fiona said.

  She really seemed to be sticking with that theory.

  “Okay,” I said. “So she’s not in the secret database. Files can be deleted. Why don’t we go to the source? Get the original birth certificate.”

  Darcy snapped her fingers. “That’s a great idea, Norah!” She pulled out her smartphone and typed something in.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting the phone number for the city hall in Garretson, South Dakota,” Darcy said.

  A moment later, she put the phone in my hand.

  “Me?” I yelled. My heart started thumping. “What am I supposed to say?”

  Darcy said, “You’re Bailey Banks and you need a copy of your original birth certificate.”

  An older woman’s voice came on the line. “City Hall. This is Mary; how can I help you?”

  My mouth opened, but nothing came out. Darcy made a spinning motion with her hand, signaling me to get talking. Fiona just sat there looking confused by the whole thing.

  “Um, yes,” I said, my voice finally working. “My name is Bailey Banks and I don’t live in South Dakota anymore, but I was born there. My birth certificate is all faded and, um, messed up and I need a new one for … um … school.”

  “Ah, transferring, are you?” the woman said.

  “Yes, I’m transferring to a new school,” I replied.

  Darcy nodded in approval at my act.

  Mary said, “Okay, I can help you out.” I heard her fingers clicking at a keyboard. “I’ll need you to mail in — wait a minute.”

  She paused and I pushed the phone harder into my ear like that would help me see what was going on in the town hall right now.

  “Well, that’s strange,” Mary said. More keyboard clicking.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Are you sure you were born in Garretson, dear?”

  “Yes. That’s what my birth certificate says.”

  “Well, we have no birth certificate on file for a Bailey Banks ….” The woman’s voice trailed off, and I wondered if she thought I was pranking her.

  “Maybe it’s not in the computer, but the hard copy is still in the file?” I said. “You know … computers these days.” I figured that was a statement an older woman could relate to.

  She agreed with a little grunt. “Hold for a moment and I’ll check.”

  I covered the phone with my hand and whispered to Darcy and Fiona, “I’m on hold.”

  “What’s going on?” Fiona whispered back.

  “She couldn’t find Bailey Banks in the computer, so she’s checking the actual files to see if a hard copy of the birth certificate is in there.”

  A few minutes later, the woman returned to the phone. “I’m sorry, darlin’, but there’s no paper original here either. You must have some bad information about where you were born.”

  I thanked her and hung up. Darcy and Fiona were basically panting like Hubble does when you hold a treat in front of his nose.

  “What? What?” Darcy said.

  “What did she say?” Fiona echoed.

  I shrugged. “The city of Garretson, South Dakota, has no record of Bailey Banks being born.” I nodded at Fiona. “I think the only evidence that Bailey ever existed is in your house.”

  They both groaned and leaned back in the beanbag chairs. I wasn
’t ready to give up, though. “Is there anywhere else we can look for proof that Bailey really existed?” I asked.

  Darcy scratched her mop of hair. “The only other place to try would be the Social Security database, but that would be hard to get into. I’m not saying impossible, but —”

  “Darcy,” I interrupted. “Do not hack into a government website. We could end up in juvie.”

  Fiona gasped. “Do they make you wear those orange prison jumpsuits? Orange is my worst color.”

  “No one’s going to prison,” I said. “No one’s hacking any websites. We’re doing this legitimately. Fiona, have you found anything else in your house that seems suspicious at all?”

  She thought for a moment, one hand clutching her pearls. “I haven’t really searched since I found the birth certificates and the photos.”

  “So here’s our next step,” I said. “You search your house. Especially in any drawers or file cabinets your parents have. Like in the den. See if you can find any other evidence that Bailey is real.”

  I glanced at Darcy to see if she had anything else to add, but it was like she wasn’t even listening anymore. She suddenly stood up, said, “I need a snack,” and leaned over the bed where the backpacks were.

  Fiona shrugged and looked back at me.

  But I knew what Darcy was doing. That wasn’t her backpack she was unzipping.

  The guilt must have shown on my face, because Fiona looked back over her shoulder just as Darcy slid the infamous pink notebook out of Fiona’s backpack.

  “Hey!” Fiona yelled. “That’s mine.”

  “Really?” Darcy said, smiling. “What is it?”

  Fiona clumsily scrambled to her feet. It’s hard to get out of a beanbag chair quickly, especially when you’re wearing heels. “Give it to me! That’s private!”

  Darcy slid her finger underneath the cover. “Why, what’s in it? Secrets? Gossip you spread about other kids?”

  “What? No!” Fiona looked confused. “Give it back.”

  Fiona stretched out her hand to grab it, but it was just out of reach.

  And too late. Darcy flipped the cover open for all of us to see what was inside.