The Cheating Heart (14 page)

Then it came to her—the stacks!; They were completely hidden from sight, an ideal place for a person crazed with revenge to take a victim. But there were several floors of stacks. Which level would they be on?

The entrance to the stacks was a small open doorway next to the checkout desk. Nancy jogged over there and studied a small floor plan posted by the doorway.

Ned's carrel, she knew, was on the third level, with the political science books. But Brook was an English major. If she had a carrel, it would be with the English books. Nancy studied the floor plan. It told her that the English books were down on the first level, deep underground.

Just beyond the doorway, a metal spiral staircase led down into the stacks, twisting like a corkscrew into the depths. Nancy headed for the stairs. Holding on to the central post with one hand, she swung down the spiral, going as fast as she could on the narrow metal steps.

She was dizzy by the time she reached the bottom level. It was dimly lit, with only a few bulbs along the long central aisle. Nancy peered down the seemingly endless rows of bookshelves. She couldn't see anybody, but she had a sense that someone was there.

Nancy moved as quietly as she could, glad that she happened to be wearing her rubber-soled cross-trainer shoes. With all her senses on alert, she went toward the far end of the aisle.

Then a tiny scuffling sound to her left caught her attention. Nancy turned and caught a glimpse of hot pink—the color of the T-shirt Brook had been wearing earlier.

Just then an electric bell began to chime for closing time. Nancy heard hard-soled shoes clanking down the metal steps. She ducked into a narrow space left between two of the sliding bookcases on their long tracks. If the librarians alerted Annie to her presence, she feared that Annie might get spooked and hurt Brook.

The faint scuffling at the far end of the bookcases stopped, too.

A librarian strode briskly down the aisle, then headed back toward the stairs. As she reached
the spiral stairs again, Nancy heard her flick a switch.

The stacks were plunged into darkness.

Nancy groped her way toward the section of bookshelves where she'd seen Brook's shirt. As she got closer, she heard muffled grunting and thrashing about.

Digging into her purse, Nancy pulled out her pocket flashlight. Stealthily, she squeezed around the far end of the bookshelves, into a back aisle lined with carrels.

Now she heard more distinct grunts and a sharp bang as someone knocked against a nearby carrel's steel partition. Judging the direction carefully, Nancy snapped on her flashlight.

The light caught two struggling figures. As they froze in the sudden glare, Nancy could see Annie, clutching Brook's head with one hand. With the other hand, she held a sharp paring knife at Brook's throat!

Nancy flashed her light in Annie's face, momentarily blinding her. She spoke in a low, firm voice. “Annie, let her go.”

Annie only stiffened and tightened her grip on Brook. “No!” she snarled. “She stole my boyfriend. Now I'm going to make sure she never steals another boy again.”

Brook yanked her mouth away from Annie's smothering hand. “What are you talking about?” Brook burst out. “You were never dating Paul. He barely knows who you are!”

Annie's eyes glittered feverishly in response to Brook's words. Nancy gestured to Brook to remain quiet.

“Annie, what did you have in mind?” Nancy asked, still in a calm, low voice.

Annie pressed her arm across Brook's windpipe and pushed the knife up under Brook's chin. “I'm going to slice up her face, so that no guy will ever be interested in her again,” she replied without pity.

Just then, loud voices and pounding footsteps were heard from the next level up. “Annie, they're coming for us,” Nancy said, hoping she was speaking the truth. “I asked Ned to bring in the campus police if I didn't meet him outside at nine-thirty. The game is up—let her go.”

Annie hesitated for a moment. Momentarily gathering her strength, Brook knocked Annie's knife hand away and dove into the narrow aisle between a nearby pair of bookshelves.

As the footsteps came clattering down the metal steps, Annie whirled around and moved suddenly out of sight. Nancy heard her dodge into another space between some shelves, a few rows farther along.

Nancy turned and shone her light into the aisle where Brook lay, dazed and shaken. “Come on, let's get out of here,” Nancy urged Brook. She scurried into the aisle and knelt down to pull her friend to her feet.

But just then, the two girls heard a nearby
creak of metal wheels. Annie was cranking the heavy bookshelves along the tracks, moving the shelves toward them.

Rolling along, the steel shelves were quickly picking up momentum. In a moment's time they would crush Nancy and Brook!

T
HERE WASN'T TIME
to get out of the way. As the heavy bookshelf began to roll toward them, Nancy scrambled up from her knees. She wedged her hips against the shelves in back of her. Her weight was pushing them slowly backward.

Groping for the approaching shelf with both hands, Nancy straightened her arms and braced herself. In an instant her shoulders were slammed back against the shelves behind her, but she kept her arms locked and straight.

By now, Brook had recovered somewhat and was staggering to her feet. She shoved her shoulder against the moving shelf, jamming a foot against the shelves behind her. In the darkness the two girls strained to keep a space open between the heavy rolling shelves.

Just then, the searchers coming down the stairs
found the light switch. The dim lights snapped back on. “Nan, where are you?” she heard Ned call out.

“Over here!” Brook shouted.

“Left side!” Nancy added.

The shelf behind the girls jolted to a stop. The bookshelves had rolled until there were no open spaces left in that direction. Now it was only Nancy and Brook's combined strength that kept the shelf in front of them from squashing them.

The searchers were still far down the aisle, but their footsteps pounded closer.

Then the shelf the girls were pushing against was suddenly released. Nancy and Brook tumbled to the floor as the shelves swung away from them.

Nancy looked up just in time to see Annie dash along the side aisle, heading for the exit.

Nancy leapt to her feet and chased Annie. “Ned, block the stairs!” Nancy called out.

“Got it!” she heard Ned call from the center aisle, while footsteps hammered back toward the stairs.

Though the side aisle was almost dark, Nancy could see Annie's figure at the end. Annie swung around the far corner, out of sight.

Then Nancy heard Annie's sneakers squeak to a stop on the linoleum floor. Annie's voice cried out, “Paul!”

Racing around the corner of the shelves, Nancy saw Annie facing Paul DiToma. The knife still
gleaming in her grasp, she swayed warily from side to side, as though she might spring at any minute.

“Calm down, Annie,” Paul said in a soft, soothing voice. “Drop the knife. Everything's going to be okay now.”

Annie's shoulders heaved with emotion. “How could you possibly love Brook instead of me?” she cried. “I've been true to you for almost two years now. She'll never love you the way I do.”

Peering over Annie's head, Paul gave Nancy a perplexed, shocked look. But he didn't lose his cool. “Why, I haven't really had a chance to get to know you yet, Annie,” he said gently. He held out a hand. “If you'll just give me that knife, maybe we can go have some tea at the student center. It'd be nice to sit and talk awhile.”

Annie stood still for a long moment, staring at Paul. Then, with a sob, she dropped the knife onto the floor.

Paul stepped forward and put his arm around Annie. She collapsed, weeping, against his chest. He led her gently toward the stairs.

Nancy scooped up the knife from the floor, then followed Annie and Paul to the center aisle.

All the way down the aisle, Nancy saw Ned standing with a protective arm around Brook. A pair of campus security officers waited beside them. They all seemed to understand that, for the moment, Annie was best left alone with Paul.

Paul went up the spiral stairs first, drawing
Annie gently by the hand after him. “Do you remember that night at Ryan Kelly's party?” she asked him in a wistful voice.

“Uh, sure I do,” Paul answered softly. “But why don't you refresh my memory?”

“I was sitting on the sofa,” Annie recalled dreamily. “And you came over and asked me what kind of dip was on the table, by the corn chips. And I said it was salsa, and you said . . .” Her voice grew faint as they climbed upstairs.

One of the security officers pulled out his walkie-talkie and radioed to two more officers posted outside. “A boy will be bringing the perpetrator outdoors in a minute,” he alerted his fellow officers. “He seems to have her under control. Can you take them to the infirmary?”

“Will do,” the officer outside radioed back.

“Dr. Singh is waiting at the infirmary,” the officer explained to Nancy, Brook, and Ned. “He'll keep her there overnight for observation. Why don't you three head on back to your rooms?”

“Gladly,” Ned said. “I think we could all use a good night's rest.”

• • •

“I really owe you an apology,” Professor Tavakolian said to Ned the next morning in Dean Jarvis's office. “I was so certain my answer key had been stolen, I guess I needed a scapegoat.”

“Well, if you hadn't filed that answer key in the wrong drawer, we would never have asked Nancy
to investigate this case,” Dean Jarvis pointed out. “And then we wouldn't have learned that Annie Mercer needed help.”

“I'm just sorry I didn't discover her story earlier,” Nancy said. “Brook could have been seriously hurt by any of Annie's acts.”

“Well, Annie will be leaving Emerson now,” the dean explained. “Her parents have come to take her home, where she'll get the psychiatric help she needs. Maybe in a year or two she'll be ready to try college again, though I don't think she'll want to return to Emerson.”

“Even if she could get in, with her grade average,” Ned added.

The dean shook his head. “She wanted so much to be smart—like her twin sister. And she wanted to go to Emerson so badly, she took a shortcut to make sure she'd get in. Apparently she'd begun to lose touch with reality a long time before she arrived on campus.”

“By the way, Dean, what happened with Steve Groff and Carrie Yu?” Nancy asked.

“Steve and Carrie have been placed on academic probation,” Dean Jarvis reported. “And Steve has also been suspended from the swim team for a year. But I didn't expel them—they're both basically good kids. They just couldn't resist the temptation of an easy high grade. Getting a good score became more important to them than learning. I guess this incident shows all of us that
we need to downplay academic competition—some students can really crack under the pressure.”

“I'm throwing out the results of the multiple-choice section of the test,” Professor Tavakolian said. “Students will be judged solely on the basis of the essay questions, which I finished scoring this morning.”

“And what were the results?” Nancy asked him.

“No surprises,” the professor said, smiling. “Linda Corrente and Gary Carlsen both got top scores. Tom Mallin's was not quite good enough to place out of the literature course. After all, he tried to learn about literature by cramming for a few days—he didn't really read all the books, like Linda and Gary did. You can't force-feed that kind of knowledge.”

“So Tom, Carrie, and Steve will have to take the required literature course after all,” Dean Jarvis said. “That's not so horrible.”

“Actually, I remember that that class was kind of fun,” Ned declared.

“You, Ned?” Nancy teased him. “Calling an English class fun?”

Laughing, the dean shook Nancy's and Ned's hands and showed them to his office door. As they walked out, Nancy saw a middle-aged couple on the bench outside. Next to them sat Annie Mercer.

Nancy met Annie's eyes, but the blond girl didn't even seem to recognize her. She's really snapped, Nancy thought, with a shiver.

Then the girl turned to her mother. “When will they let us see Annie, Mom?” she asked.

“After we talk to the dean, we can pick her up at the infirmary, Rona,” Mrs. Mercer replied.

So the girl on the bench
wasn't
Annie—it was her twin sister. Nancy walked on, feeling goose bumps prickle on her skin. It was uncanny how much the two of them looked alike.

Ned walked Nancy back to the Omega Chi Epsilon house. Her blue Mustang was parked by the curb outside, ready for the drive home. Brook sat on the hood, and Paul leaned against the fender.

“There's only one thing that bothers me about your solving this case, Drew,” Ned said as he and she walked up to her car.