Nancy barely had time to hang up her stuff before
Ned dragged her and George to the dance floor.
“After a day outside in the freezing cold, it feels
good to work up a sweat,” she said over the music.
C.J. and Dede were already dancing. And Grant left
a soda on the counter to come over to dance with
George. Nancy caught sight of most of the other Clues
Challenge contestants, but it was so much fun to be
close to Ned that Nancy didn't pay much attention to
anyone but him.
“I need a break!” she said after six long songs.
While Ned headed to the counter for sodas, Nancy
searched for a place to sit.
“That must be Randy,” she murmured as the flash
from a camera made her blink.
He was taking pictures of C.J. and Dede from an
alcove near the dance floor. Seeing that the two other
chairs in the alcove were empty, Nancy quickly wound
through the crowd to him.
“Still working on your article?” she asked.
“That's what I'm here for.” Randy snapped off an-
other shot, then gestured to the empty chairs. “Have a
seat.”
“Thanks.” As she sat down, Nancy glanced curiously
at him. “Do you work in this area a lot?” she asked. If
he did, then it was possible that he knew Mr. Lorenzo
from before.
“I usually cover the West Coast,” Randy told her.
“This is my first time here. I'm out of film,” he said.
“I've got another roll in my jacket. Be back in a sec.”
After he disappeared, Nancy noticed his notebook.
It lay on the coffee table in front of them. Inside the
front cover were the folded-up sheets from his Jeep
that Nancy had seen him put there earlier. Right after
he'd spent the afternoon away from Randy, she
remembered.
Nancy glanced quickly over the crowd. Then taking
a deep breath, she slipped the papers out and unfolded
them.
“A fax,” she murmured. The cover sheet showed that
it had been sent to Randy at the Emerson Inn that
afternoon.
Nancy flipped to the page beneath. It was a copy of
a Sports World article, dated three years earlier. The
title was, “Point-Fixing Scandal Ruins Western Tech.”
And the name on the byline was . . .
“Randy Cohen,” Nancy murmured.
Why would Randy want an article he wrote three
years earlier?
Quickly Nancy read on: “Three of Western Tech's
top basketball players were expelled last week after
admitting their involvement in a point-fixing scam.”
Nancy knew it was illegal for players to score low on
purpose to lose games. She also knew that there was
lots of gambling on college basketball games and that
point fixing was a way to guarantee winning big money.
What did that have to do with what was going on at
the Clues Challenge?
Nancy turned her attention back to the article: “Ty
Brubaker, Kent Atwood, and Jamal Warner all gave
statements to the district attorney, stating that they had
kept scores low in order to lose games. Their coach
expressed shock and disappointment in his three top
players, all of whom had hoped to . . .”
“What are you doing?” a voice spoke up right next to
Nancy, making her jump about a foot in the air.
“Ned!” She breathed a sigh of relief as her boyfriend
sat down, setting two glasses of soda on the table.
“Thank goodness it's you. I was just. . .”
Her voice trailed off as the band stopped playing in
midsong. Mel Lorenzo stepped up to the microphone,
wearing a parka, hat, and scarf.
“Excuse me for the interruption,” he said gruffly.
“I'd like to see the members of the Omega Chi Epsilon
team at the drinks counter right away.”
“He sounds serious,” Ned murmured.
“Maybe he found out something about the sabo-
tage,” Nancy said. Shoving the faxed papers back under
the cover of Randy's notebook, she got to her feet. She
and Ned made it to the counter at the same time as
Grant, George, and C.J.
“What's going on?” C.J. asked.
Mr. Lorenzo unzipped his jacket with a yank. “I
have reason to believe that someone from your team
has broken Clues Challenge rules,” he said.
“What!” Nancy, Ned, C.J., George, and Grant all
cried at once.
“You know the rules. Searching for clues after sun-
down is forbidden,” Mr. Lorenzo went on. “Yet on my
way here I saw one of you in the woods near the
library.”
Nancy blinked at him. “That's impossible. We were
all right here,” she said.
“I know what I saw. Those yellow Omega hats are
impossible to miss,” Mr. Lorenzo insisted. He turned
his eyes on each of them in turn. “I'm sorry, but as of
this minute your team is disqualified from the Clues
Challenge.”
11. An Unfair Judgment
Nancy's mouth dropped open. “I don't know who you
saw,” she said, “but it wasn't any of us.”
“We've all been here for at least half an hour,”
George added.
Mr. Lorenzo pulled off his parka and hat, and shook
out his ponytail. “I'll need more than just your
assurance,” he told them. “You'll have to prove it.”
Mr. Lorenzo scowled as Randy joined the group
with his camera and notebook. Randy must have heard
them talking because he said, “I saw them, Mr.
Lorenzo. All five members of the Omega team have
been here for some time now.”
Sparks of irritation shot from Mr. Lorenzo's eyes.
“You expect me to believe that?” he scoffed. “You re-
porters will say anything.”
“He's not the only one who saw us,” Grant said.
He, C.J., and Ned began pulling over other students.
Mr. Lorenzo spoke to them one by one. After talking to
about ten people, he waved the rest away.
“See, Mr. Lorenzo?” said Ned. “With all those
people to back us up, you have to believe us.”
Mr. Lorenzo nodded grudgingly. “All right. Omega
Chi Epsilon is back in the Clues Challenge,” he said.
“Does he have to sound so disappointed?” George
whispered in Nancy's ear. “It's almost like he wants to
disqualify us.”
“Hmmm.” Nancy turned to George and Ned and
said, “I want to check something.”
She led the way to the alcove where they had left
their jackets. “We all wore our team hats tonight,” she
said. “If Mr. Lorenzo saw someone wearing one of the
hats . . .”
“Then someone else must have taken one of them!”
Ned finished. “Here!” he said, plucking two bright
yellow Omega hats from the jumble of things. “C.J.'s
and Grant's are still right here.”
George scanned the rows of jackets and coats that
were piled on top of one another. “Here's yours, Ned,”
she said, pulling out a green sleeve. “The hat's in you
r
pocket.”
Nancy finally found her own jacket. She reached in
the pocket searching for her hat, but came up empty-
handed.
“It's gone,” she said.
George leaned against the wall. “So someone wore
your hat to set us up to be disqualified,” she said. “But .
. . how could anyone know Mr. Lorenzo would see
her?”
“Or him,” Nancy said. “We don't know how yet. But
maybe we can figure out who.”
She stepped out of the alcove and looked over the
party. “Dennis was here,” she said as she caught sight
of him near the band. “I saw him dancing a few
minutes before Mr. Lorenzo got here.”
“So he probably wasn't the person, because he
couldn't be in two places at once,” Ned said. “What
about Joy?”
“She was here when we arrived. But not now. Do
you guys see her anywhere?”
Ned and George shook their heads.
“We'd better make sure.” Nancy pressed her mouth
into a determined line and moved toward the other
end of the room, where the band played. She, Ned,
and George made their way up one side of the room
and down the other.
“She's missing in action,” Ned said. “Wait—scratch
that.” He nodded toward the entrance. “There she is.”
Nancy turned in time to see Joy step out of the al-
cove where the coats were. “Her cheeks are bright
red,” Nancy murmured. “And look at the way she's
blowing on her hands—like she needs to warm them
up after being outside.”
Nancy, George, and Ned practically bowled over the
people on the dance floor in their rush to get to Joy.
“I've been looking for you,” Nancy said. “Where've
you been?”
“Been?” Joy shot a cool glance at George and Ned,
who had ducked into the alcove where the coats were.
Ned reemerged a moment later, holding up a bright
yellow Omega team hat.
“Look what I found in your jacket pocket, Nancy,”
he said, holding it up. “Your hat made a miraculous
reappearance.” He fixed Joy with a probing stare. “You
wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would
you?”
Joy's eyes flickered uncertainly. “I—I don't know
what you're talking about,” she said.
“Someone took Nancy's hat and did some clue
searching in the woods near the library,” George ex-
plained. “Our whole team was here, but nobody's seen
you for a while. Now you reappear—and so does
Nancy's hat.”
Joy shook herself, and her uneasiness hardened to a
look of cool arrogance. “I haven't broken any rules, and
you know it,” she said. “You act like victims. But if you
ask me, you're the ones causing all the trouble around
here.” With that, she elbowed past Nancy and headed
for the dance floor.
George stared blankly at Nancy and Ned. “Can
someone explain what just happened?”
“Joy obviously isn't going to admit she took my hat,”
Nancy said. “I guess she knows we can't prove for sure
it was her. But I still want to tell Mr. Lorenzo.”
“Someone took my team hat,” Nancy told Mr.
Lorenzo. “Ten minutes ago we couldn't find my hat or
Joy, but then the hat reappeared in my jacket pocket.
Right after Joy turned up again.”
Nancy wasn't surprised to see the doubt on Mr.
Lorenzo's face. “I know it's not proof,” she said quickly.
“But you have to admit it's suspicious.”
“I still don't have enough to disqualify anyone,” he
said, picking up his soda from the counter. “But I'll
keep my eyes open.”
“Thanks,” Nancy said. She hesitated a moment, not
sure how to phrase her next question. After all, she
couldn't admit that she had sneaked into his office at
the store. “About the threat I saw on your computer,
are you sure it wasn't serious? No one is trying to
blackmail you?”
Mr. Lorenzo's eyebrows shot up. “Your imagination
is working overtime, Nancy,” he said. “There's no
threat. No blackmail.”
This time Nancy knew he was lying. All she had to
do now was find out why.
“What a day.” Nancy yawned as she, Ned, and
George walked back across the campus toward Ned's
frat. “We've been soaped, icicled, filed, disqualified,
and reinstated—and we're still not done for the day.”
George pushed up the cuff of her parka to check her
watch. “What time did we tell C.J. and Grant we'd
meet to brainstorm the third clue?” she asked.
“Nine-thirty,” Ned said. He glanced at the brick
fraternity house to their left, then chuckled. “I guess
we're not the only ones working on clues.”
“Sigma Pi,” Nancy said, reading the Greek letters on
the banner over the doorway. She glanced through the
front window and saw Philip, Jake, and Malik. They
were sitting around a wooden plank balanced on milk
crates that served as their coffee table. On the plank
was a slip of paper that looked like a clue.
“Where's Dennis?” she wondered out loud.
As she spoke, a door to the left of the living room
opened. Dennis and the other guy on the Sigma Pi
team emerged from a bedroom and joined everyone
else.
“Did you guys see that bedroom? Do you think it's
Dennis's?” Nancy asked.
Without waiting for an answer, she stepped off the
path and waded through the snow toward the brick frat
house.
“What are you doing?” George whispered.
Nancy made her way around the side of the house to
the window of the bedroom from which Dennis had
emerged. “If he's the saboteur, maybe we'll find
something to prove it in his room.”
“We don't know for sure it is his room,” Ned pointed
out. He followed Nancy, shooting uncertain glances at
the living room window. “What if they catch us?”
Nancy pushed the window frame up, then grinned
when it rose noiselessly. “We'll have to make sure they
don't, that's all.”
“I'll keep watch,” George whispered, ducking next to
some bushes near the living room window. “Just be
fast!”
Moving as quickly and quietly as they could, Nancy
and Ned climbed through the window. To their left
was a desk with a sleek laptop computer that Nancy
recognized immediately.
“That's Dennis's. We're in luck!” she whispered.
The muffled sounds of Sigma Pi voices came
through the door. Nancy took a calming breath and
looked around at the bed, dresser, and bookshelf that
took up most of the space. The walls were plastered
with
Emerson
Wildcat
pennants.
Trophies,
photographs, books, and papers cluttered every
surface. A jumble of clothes and sports equipment was
visible through the
half-open closet door.
“I'll check in there,” Ned whispered, tiptoeing to the
closet.
Nancy nodded. “Keep your eyes open for soap, a
screwdriver, or any sign that Dennis is the one black-
mailing Mr. Lorenzo.”
She turned to the desk. Nancy didn't dare turn on
the computer—Dennis would definitely hear it boot
up. Instead she sorted through the books and papers
on the desktop.
Nancy glanced at a couple of photographs as she set
them aside to get at a notebook. One photo was of
Dennis, a middle-aged couple, and a slightly older boy
with dark eyebrows that stretched above his eyes in a
solid line. Nancy guessed they were Dennis's brother
and parents. The other was an autographed photo of
Ziggy Laroquette, the hottest player in professional
basketball. At the bottom of the photo someone had
written a message: “The stars are in your reach. The
sky's the limit.” The signature, in the same slanted
scrawl, read simply, “Pops.”
Pops? Nancy knew Laroquette's nickname was the
Rocket. Did that mean someone else had written that
message?
Nancy forced herself to focus on the sabotage and
blackmail. Putting the photo aside, she continued her
search.
Notebooks, address book, schedule of football
games . . .
She was just moving to the drawers when she heard
Dennis's voice, right outside the door.
“I'll get my computer,” he said. “I think I have a
program that will . . .”
Nancy gasped. Ned straightened up from the closet
like a bolt. His brown eyes locked on the door,
widening as the doorknob rattled.
Dennis was about to catch them red-handed.
12. Close Call
Nancy watched helplessly as the doorknob twisted.
The sound of a door banging open made her jump.
Her body went totally rigid—until she realized the
door she'd heard wasn't the one to Dennis's room.
“Hello?” George's voice called out. “Dennis! I need
to talk to you.”
Nancy went limp. It must have been the front door
of the frat that had been opened.
Go talk to George, Nancy begged silently. She kept
her eyes on the bedroom door, hardly daring to
breathe. Please, don't come in now!
The knob stopped moving. “What do you want?”
came Dennis's voice. Nancy heard his footsteps move
away from the bedroom.