The Cheating Heart

  “I’ll help you carry,” Nancy offered, standing gingerly as her seat flipped up.

  “We’ll stay and save your seats,” said Brook.

  Paul chuckled. “Now seriously, Brook, who would steal these seats? We’re up so high we should be wearing red lights on our heads so that airplanes don’t crash into us.”

  Brook playfully slapped Paul’s shoulder, and Ned and Nancy were still laughing as they went back down the row and started down the long flight of open metal steps.

  “Brook really brings out the fun side of Paul,” Ned commented. “Usually he’s so serious he keeps to himself. And he’s always trying to save money. I think he misses out on a lot of college life.”

  “So you really don’t know him all that well?” Nancy asked.

  “Well, there are other guys I hang out with more,” Ned admitted.

  At the bottom of the steps was a food stand the Varsity Club had set up for the concert. While Ned bought drinks and popcorn, Nancy looked for a phone to call Carrie Yu again. The closest phone was just outside the stadium fence, and three or four people were lined up waiting to use it. As Nancy stood in line, she idly peered up through the high steel skeleton of the bleachers at the legs and feet of the people sitting way above her.

  Finally the phone was free, and Nancy made her call. There was still no answer at Carrie’s room, and Nancy hung up the phone, disappointed. Pushing through the milling crowd, she returned to the stadium to find Ned.

  She laughed when she finally saw him, struggling to keep four paper cups of soda and two boxes of popcorn upright. “Nan, help!” he gasped.

  Nancy deftly lifted the tower of paper cups from him and steadied it with two hands. “What would you do without me, Nickerson?” she teased.

  “I was just asking myself the same thing,” he replied gallantly.

  Carrying the drinks and popcorn, Nancy and Ned trudged back up the steps to their seats. “Wasn’t this where we were sitting?” Ned asked uncertainly as they reached their row.

  The four seats they’d been sitting in were all flipped up. Both their row and the one in front of it were empty.

  “Brook and Paul must have left for a minute,” Nancy reasoned. “Maybe they saw someone they wanted to talk to. Let’s take their seats so they won’t have to step over our knees when they come back.”

  Ned edged along the walkway in front of the seats, using his knee to flip down his own seat. Following Ned, Nancy needed both hands and her chin to steady the tall stack of cups. Reaching her place, she turned around and sat on her upright seat, flipping it down.

  After resting her weight on the seat, Nancy felt herself being tossed forward, tipping at a wild angle.

  The drinks in the paper cups fell, splashing over her feet. Slipping on spilled soda, Nancy’s right foot shot off into the gap behind the wet metal walkway and the seats in front of her. She slammed into those seats, which flipped down under her weight. She was thrown forward over them in a jackknife.

  “Nancy!” Ned cried, dropping the popcorn boxes and reaching down to grab her around the waist. He began to lift her up, but then he slipped on the wet walkway, too—accidentally pushing her down into the gap between the walkway and the next row of seats.

  Nancy’s right leg, and then her hip and torso, bumped and slid through the opening. Ned desperately grabbed hold of her left leg.

  Nancy tipped upside down, dangling under the walkway. Her arms flailed uselessly in empty space.

  Chapter

  Nine

  HOLD ON, NANCY!” Ned called down to her as he continued to dangle her by her left foot.

  “You hold on, too!” Nancy shouted back, trying to keep the fright out of her voice. In the darkness she couldn’t see the ground clearly, but the steel girders supporting the bleachers glinted all the way down, and she could tell that it would be a very long drop if she fell.

  Feeling her left ankle slip slightly in Ned’s grip, Nancy desperately sought a toehold with her right foot. Her toe stabbed against the bottom of the steel walkway and she wedged it into the only crack she could find.

  Summoning all her upper-body strength, she raised her shoulders toward the bottom of the bleachers above. With split-second timing, she swung her right arm at the very instant she was closest to the girders. Her fingers slapped against a small steel strut and closed around it.

  Tightening her fragile hold, Nancy pulled her body upright. As quickly as possible, she grabbed another strut with her left arm.

  Ned took one hand off her ankle and thrust it down through the steel framework. He grasped her left arm firmly. “I’ll let your foot go now, Nan,” he warned her.

  “Okay.” Nancy braced herself. As soon as Ned had dropped her leg, he reached down and got a good grip on her other arm.

  “Ready?” Ned asked, squatting on the walkway. Nancy nodded. “Okay, then, heave ho!” Ned hoisted her up through the gap between the walkway and the girder behind it.

  Nancy twisted her lithe body and squirmed through the space. As soon as her shoulders were above the walkway, she managed to get an elbow up onto the steel plank and pull herself up.

  A crowd of students had gathered to watch, unable to help because of the narrow space. As Nancy hauled herself onto the walkway, they let go a collective gasp of relief and then broke out clapping.

  Ned sank back onto the walkway, exhausted. Nancy collapsed gratefully into his arms.

  “Nancy, Ned, what’s going on?” she heard Brook’s anxious voice behind the circle of on-lookers. Brook pushed her way through the gathering with Paul right behind her.

  “Nancy’s seat crashed down,” Ned reported in a shaky voice. “She fell through the bleachers and almost . . . almost . . .”

  Nancy scooped her reddish blond hair away from her perspiring face. “I’m okay, guys,” she said calmly. In fact, her heart was still pounding and her muscles were sore, but she flashed her friends a confident smile. “I’ve had far worse accidents, believe me.”

  Ned chuckled halfheartedly. “Yeah, but that’s only because you get threatened by goons trying to scare you off a case.”

  Brook’s dark eyes grew round. “Do you think that someone was trying to hurt you, Nancy?”

  “I doubt it,” said Nancy as she got to her feet. She hadn’t really considered that angle—but as soon as Brook raised the possibility, her mind started working. Despite her discretion, several people now knew that she was checking into the results of the literature test. Maybe the test thief—whoever he or she might be—had gotten scared and was telling Nancy to cool it!

  Just then, the surrounding circle of students broke open to let two campus security officers through. Nancy had worked with various members of the force in the past, but she didn’t recognize these two.

  “We saw there was some kind of commotion up here,” said the first officer, a middle-aged man with thick glasses.

  “Yeah, this girl fell through the stands,” said a nearby student.

  “Fell through the stands?” the officer said, squinting at Nancy.

  “Yes, Officer,” Nancy reported. “Luckily, my boyfriend here grabbed my foot in time.”

  “Well, everything’s okay now,” the man said. “Why don’t you kids go back to your seats and wait for the concert to start.”

  “Officer?” Nancy stopped him. “The reason I fell was because of my seat.” She knelt down beside the flip-up plastic seat and showed them that it had wrenched loose from its steel base.

  “I knew those fancy new seats weren’t safe,” muttered the second officer, a thin, black-haired man with a reddish face. “The way they flip right up when you stand up . . .”

  “It had nothing to do with the flipping mechanism,” Nancy stated. “See this thick spring here? That’s what flips the seat up when you get up. It’s a good idea—it keeps the seats folded up when they’re not being used.

  “But as you can see,” Nancy went on, “the spring is intact. It’s still attached to the base post. Normally, this metal
plate attached to the spring should be bolted onto the seat.” Nancy pointed to Ned’s seat to show how the seat should have worked. The officers nodded.

  “But those bolts weren’t attached—and they weren’t broken, either,” Nancy finished. “It looks as if somebody may have unscrewed them.”

  The first officer frowned. Edging Nancy aside, he bent down and peered at the broken seat.

  “Maybe they weren’t screwed in tight in the first place,” the second officer suggested. “The workers only finished the seat renovations a week ago.”

  Brook shivered. “To think that I was sitting in that seat the whole first act,” she said.

  “That’s right!” Nancy exclaimed. “So it couldn’t have been a plan to hurt me. Unless the person forgot where I was sitting. You didn’t notice anything wrong with it?” Nancy asked, turning to Brook. Brook shook her head.

  “The way that bolt was unscrewed, there’s no way you could have sat there without dislodging it,” Nancy noted. “I’ll bet the damage was done during intermission—after you and Paul got up.”

  “Did any of you notice anyone tampering with the seat?” the officer asked the students who had been sitting nearby. They shook their heads. “There were lots of people walking around, talking to one another,” one guy mentioned.

  “This could just have been a prank,” the older officer said. “We get a lot of them this early in the year, before you kids have knuckled down to your work.”

  “It’s a pretty dangerous prank,” Ned said.

  “Well, we’ll make our report, and we’ll keep an eye out for any other mischief,” the officer said. “Meanwhile, why don’t you move to other seats and enjoy the music?”

  “They sure weren’t very helpful,” Ned muttered as he and Nancy followed Paul and Brook up the aisle to the last few empty seats.

  Nancy shrugged. “What could they do? They can’t inspect every seat in the stadium to see if the bolts are loose. And I’m sure they wanted to play down the danger so that other people wouldn’t panic.” She gingerly tested her new seat with her hand before sitting down.

  “You could have been badly hurt, Nancy,” Brook said, worried.

  “Well, I wasn’t,” Nancy said. “Thanks to Ned’s quick thinking.”

  “Not to mention my superhuman strength,” Ned added, joking. Nancy grinned, then slid her hand warmly into his as they watched Dillon Patrick walk out on stage.

  • • •

  The music was still ringing in Nancy’s ears two hours later as she and Ned walked across campus after the concert. Brook and Paul had gone out for a cup of coffee, but Nancy had begged off. After her near-fall from the stands, her muscles were a bit sore, and a good night’s rest sounded very appealing.

  Ned pulled her against his shoulder as they walked. “Thanks for saving my neck tonight, Nickerson,” she murmured, nuzzling against him, admiring the hard muscle of his shoulder.

  “Anytime,” Ned replied. “It’s the least I can do for you, considering how you’ve just saved me from being expelled.”

  “I hope so,” Nancy said. “I’ll be interested to see what Carrie Yu has to say for herself.”

  “What can she say?” Ned asked. “You’ve practically caught her red-handed. Why else would she have written those answers on that memo slip?”

  “I don’t know, Ned,” Nancy said. “But remember, you were found with a copy of the answers, too. And you couldn’t explain why.”

  An awkward pause fell between them, and Ned pulled his arm away. “I’d think you’d want to wrap up the case, so I won’t get expelled.” He sounded hurt, and Nancy cast about in her mind for a tactful reply.

  “Of course I don’t want you to get expelled,” she finally said. “But the dean warned me that I can’t give you special treatment. What would it look like if I accused Carrie and then found out she wasn’t the thief? I’d rather she confessed to me before I go back to the dean.”

  “Well, I guess you don’t care that my college career is on the line here,” Ned said.

  Nancy was taken aback. “That’s not true, Ned! That isn’t true at all! And I am working on the case. But it’s very—baffling.”

  “Too baffling for the great Nancy Drew?” Ned asked skeptically, striding ahead.

  “No!” she defended herself, walking fast to keep pace. “But all I have is a piece of paper with some letters written on it. I can’t prove when Carrie wrote them down, or why. And I can’t prove that she stole that answer key. She had no more access to it than—”

  “Than I did?” Ned snapped back, stopping abruptly. He whirled around, and Nancy could see the cold fire in his dark eyes. “So that’s it. You do think I’m guilty.”

  Nancy’s mouth dropped open. “What? I’ve never believed you were guilty, not for a second. But that won’t convince Professor Tavakolian—or the dean, apparently. So I’ve got to catch the real thief, to get you off the hook.”

  “Then you’d better do it pretty fast,” Ned said hotly. “I can’t get expelled—I love Emerson! I love the basketball team, I love my frat, I love my classes and my friends. I can’t believe I’d have to leave, just because I made photocopies for a professor I don’t even know!”

  Nancy’s throat tightened in sympathy. “Please, Ned,” she said urgently. “If I’m going to clear your name, I have to do it the right way—not the easy way.”

  Ned and Nancy locked gazes for a long moment. Then Ned ducked his head and muttered, “Sorry. I guess the pressure is getting to me. Come on, let me walk you back to your house.”

  At the door of the Theta Pi house, Ned took Nancy in his arms and gave her the kind of hug that made her think that everything was all right. Relieved, she lifted her face to his for a kiss. As they clung together for several minutes, their kiss went well beyond making up. Nancy felt limp in his strong grasp, powerless to do anything other than continue the long embrace. When they finally let each other go, it was slowly, reluctantly.

  Her head still spinning, Nancy went inside, hurrying past the girls chatting in the living room. As she passed the small desk in the front hall, the girl sitting there, Mindy Kwong, looked up with a smile. “Hi, Nancy,” she said brightly. “Oh, I think there’s a message for you.” She hunted on the cluttered desktop.

  “From Professor Tavakolian?” Nancy asked.

  “I don’t know—someone just dropped this through the front door mail slot,” Mindy explained, holding up a plain white envelope.

  Nancy took it and held it close to the desk light, curious to know why it was unmarked. She turned it over and broke open the sealed flap. Inside was a sheet of plain white paper. She unfolded it, discovering a typed note:

  Dear Detective, If I were you, I’d check on Paul DiToma. He’s the guy who stole that test.

  Chapter

  Ten

  NANCY REREAD the note in disbelief. Had Paul DiToma stolen the answer key and sold it to Carrie Yu—and maybe to other students as well?

  Nancy forced a smile. “Thanks, Mindy. Good night!” She skipped lightly up the front stairs. Mindy was known to be a gossip, and right now Nancy didn’t want to supply her with any material.

  Alone in the second floor hallway, Nancy studied the mysterious message again. As she thought through the facts, she realized Paul really could have stolen the sheet. He was an English major, so he’d know his way around the English faculty offices. Paul wouldn’t have needed to steal the answers for himself, but as Professor Tavakolian had said, other students would pay to get the answers—and Paul was in need of money.

  But how did this connect to the mysterious phone calls he’d received, and the ad in the Emersonian: “Paul DiToma—I’m waiting for you”?

  Could Paul’s friendship with Ned somehow be a factor in all this? Nancy felt slightly sick to her stomach at this thought. Ned was very touchy about being a suspect—the last thing she wanted was a reason to doubt him.

  One thing was for sure—she’d better get to sleep before Brook came back. How could Nancy t
alk to Brook, knowing that Paul was under suspicion?

  • • •

  “Oh, Nancy, I can’t believe this is all happening,” Brook said. She sat up in bed the next morning, hugging her knees to her chest.

  Nancy moved around the room, getting dressed. “So you had a good time last night?” she asked, trying to sound noncommittal.

  Brook stretched lazily. “We were out until midnight—it’s the first time I’ve ever had to use my night key to get in after lockup time!” She giggled. “We just went to the Night Owl diner. But we got talking about everything in the world—our families, classes we’re taking, books we’ve read, places we want to travel to—just everything!”

  Nancy buttoned her jeans and pulled her burgundy-colored cotton sweater out of her duffel bag. “So you two really have a lot in common?”

  “Oh, it’s more than that,” Brook said, gushing. “I feel as though I’ve known him all my life. I can’t believe that we only met on Thursday.”

  As Nancy stepped to the mirror to brush her hair, she felt an ache in her throat. She was glad Brook was happy, but it only made her feel bad that the reason for Brook’s happiness was now one of her suspects.

  Brook leaned over to check her bedside alarm clock. “Paul and I were going to meet for brunch—do you and Ned want to join us?” she asked.

  Nancy slung her purse over her shoulder. “No, thanks—maybe we can double for dinner. Why don’t you ask Paul to make plans with Ned?” With a quick wave, Nancy was out the door.

  Nancy went downstairs to the phone to call Ned. “I have to track down Carrie Yu this morning,” she explained to him. “I’d better do it alone because I need to get her to open up to me.”

  “Stop by the house when you’re done—I’ll be waiting to hear what happened,” Ned said anxiously. “I’ll shoot baskets with Jerry and Rich till you get here. And, Nan—good luck.”

  “Thanks, Ned,” Nancy replied warmly. She hung up and dialed Carrie Yu’s number. This time Carrie’s roommate answered. She told Nancy that Carrie was taking an orientation tour of the chemistry labs.