Famous Mistakes Read online

  I took a deep breath and marched toward Tami.

  I got closer and closer, until I was only a few inches away. Then, right on cue, I heard Ned call out, “Nancy!”

  I spun, twisting my torso with vigor, allowing the centrifugal force on Bess’s purse to make it spin out. It whacked Tami right across the arm. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, but it definitely surprised her. Her phone was flying out of her hand and scattering across the floor. The contents of Bess’s purse also went everywhere. I still cradled George’s phone in my left hand. The whole room turned to look at me.

  “I am so sorry!” I exclaimed.

  Tami looked at me. Her mouth gaped open.

  “Watch where you’re going,” she finally snapped.

  “I am so sorry,” I repeated. “Let me clean this up.” Crouching down, my hands moving quickly and in all directions, I began picking up the contents of Bess’s purse: Kleenex, lip gloss, breath mints. I glanced up and saw that Tami was watching my hands fly over the mess, her eyes bouncing back and forth.

  “I can’t believe how careless I was. I’m not used to carrying this purse,” I prattled on, wildly gesturing with my right hand and using a trick I had learned from a pickpocket I caught a few years ago. Distract with one hand; pick up with the other. With my left hand, I dropped George’s phone and palmed Tami’s, quickly depositing Tami’s phone into Bess’s purse.

  I picked up the phone on the ground, which was George’s, and held it out toward Tami.

  “Here’s your phone,” I said with an apologetic smile. “Again, I am so sorry!” I said.

  “Yeah, fine,” Tami grumbled.

  I scurried back to my friends and handed Tami’s phone to George.

  “Quick,” I said. “We only have a few minutes before Tami realizes we switched phones.”

  George grabbed the phone and started working her magic.

  “I’m glad you put a phone in her hand,” Ned whispered. “She was starting to get jittery.”

  All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tami marching toward us. One glance back at George told me she was still working.

  “Excuse me,” Tami said curtly. “You took my phone.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” I asked, as innocent-sounding as I could. Behind me, I felt Ned and Bess slide in front of George, blocking Tami’s view of her.

  “I’m assuming it’s yours,” Tami said, as if I was the dumbest person in the world.

  “Oh, did I switch them?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” Tami said.

  “Sorry about that!” I said, digging in my purse. I threw a quick look behind me. Bess subtly moved her fingers in a circular motion, telling me to stretch it out with Tami to give George more time.

  “Let me see if I can find it in here,” I said. “Hang on one second.”

  Tami sighed and actually tapped her foot. I had always thought that was just an expression. I had never seen anyone do it.

  “You know,” I said, deciding to take advantage of our situation, “I noticed earlier that members of your group were spreading that tweet about Brady saying that protester should be trashed.”

  “Yeah, of course,” Tami answered. “People need to see what lines that man is willing to cross.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you knew this, but Brady didn’t actually tweet that,” I said as I continued pretending to search Bess’s purse, again using my fake-innocent voice. I was curious to see how she would react.

  “Yeah,” Ned chimed in. “That’s actually a fake account.”

  Tami stared at us. “What do you mean?”

  Ned and I showed her the fake account name. I pointed out the zero in his Twitter handle.

  Tami sighed, “Well, I didn’t know. I’ll tell the group.”

  “But you know,” Tami went on, “Brady could have tweeted that trash tweet. The fact that I couldn’t tell means that what he does post is over the line.”

  She didn’t let me respond. “Can I just get my phone back, please?” She held out her hand.

  I resumed digging in the purse. “Oh, sure. Sorry,” I said.

  I felt Bess nudge me. I slipped my right hand back and Bess dropped the phone into it. I palmed the phone, reached that hand into the purse, and then pulled it out, extending her phone toward her.

  “Thanks,” she said, handing George’s phone back to me and turning away.

  As soon as she turned, Bess, Ned, and I all pivoted toward George. Her face was downcast and she shook her head.

  “I didn’t find anything that indicated she’s behind that account,” she said.

  “She wasn’t acting like she controlled it either,” I said, ushering everyone out of Joe’s office and into the hallway, so we could talk more freely.

  “It’s possible she hid it really well, but I checked all the obvious places,” George said. “She seems to have only one account.”

  I had been so sure that Tami was our culprit. The case had felt so close to being solved just a few minutes ago, and now it felt further away than ever. I had no more suspects.

  “I’m sorry, Nancy,” George said. “Maybe if I’d had more time, I could have found something.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “We just need a new angle.”

  “Let’s go outside,” Ned suggested. “Fresh air always helps me think.”

  But as soon as we pushed open the door, we found ourselves in a huge mob. There were hundreds of people everywhere, streaming toward the theater.

  Some were holding signs that said TRASH BRADY OWENS! Others were chanting, “Stop Brady! Stop Brady!”

  “Holy cow!” Bess exclaimed.

  “I can’t believe how big this got,” I said.

  “That’s the power of social media,” said George. “The idea of protesting in front of the theater just went viral.”

  “It sure did. It looks like people from all over town are here,” Bess said.

  “Yeah, I see a lot of people I recognize from school here,” Ned added.

  “You were right, George,” I said, “when you told those women that people are always watching online. I guess they just needed a little push to get them to take action in real life.”

  “How does Brady perform in an environment like this?” George asked.

  “Nancy!” I heard behind me, barely rising over the noise of all the protesters. I turned to see Joe Archer fighting through the crowd.

  “Did you figure out who’s behind this yet?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s five o’clock, Nancy. If I don’t have a culprit in an hour . . .” He trailed off.

  “I know. I’m working as fast as I can.”

  “Well, either way, I have to put more security out here now. This crowd is out of control,” Joe said. He paused for a moment. “It’s really terrible timing, too. We’re getting the Dutch masters show ready tonight, but I don’t have a choice. We have to put all our security on this madhouse.” He indicated the mass of people in front of us.

  “Does that mean The Zebra Finch is coming tonight?” Bess said.

  Joe nodded miserably. “Before Brady became a lightning rod for controversy, it would have been fine. We had plenty of security to cover both events, but now . . .”

  “Don’t you think you should delay moving in The Zebra Finch, then?” asked Bess.

  “Do you know how many months of negotiations it took to get Donna Ellis to let us exhibit that painting? She is a nervous mess about letting this painting out of her vault. If I ask to change one detail, the whole arrangement will fall apart and I’ll have to explain why one of the first performing arts shows was protested and the most famous painting in our first visual arts show was pulled. The Arts Complex would officially be a failure. It would take years to recover from that reputation. Who would risk spending the money to travel here if our shows fall apart at a moment’s notice?”

  We stood in silence for a moment, all lost in our own thoughts. The Arts Complex was great. The space
was amazing, and Joe seemed like he had really interesting ideas for it. I didn’t want it to fail. I thought about how much money the Towering Heights Resort had put into their renovations. If the Arts Complex didn’t draw the crowds they expected, they would lose money, and a lot of people like Pete—and even the security guards after George and me—would be out of jobs. I couldn’t let that happen.

  I smiled confidently back at him. “I’m going to figure out what’s going on here,” I told Joe.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Mysterious Man

  “I HOPE SO,” JOE SAID. “If we don’t know who the culprit is in an hour, I’m going to have to cancel the show altogether. I can’t risk anyone getting hurt.”

  Joe walked away and I turned to my friends. “Let’s go someplace quieter,” I said.

  A few minutes later we were sitting in the Coffee Cabin, sipping iced teas. It was technically closed, but George had a set of keys and her boss didn’t mind if we came after hours as long as we paid for our drinks and left everything exactly as we had found it. It was a huge perk of George working there. We considered it our unofficial clubhouse.

  “We need to go back to basics,” I said. “I feel like we’re not approaching this case from the right direction. The biggest problem in my mind is that we don’t know the motive. Is this culprit trying to get Brady’s show canceled? Are they trying to destroy Brady’s career?”

  “How do we figure that out?” Bess asked.

  I took a long sip of my iced tea. “I don’t know,” I sighed. “But I think the tweet is key. It kicked this whole situation into another gear. But if it’s not Joe and it’s not Tami—and I think we have pretty good evidence that it’s not either of them—how do we figure out who it is?”

  “I have an idea,” George said.

  We all turned to look at her.

  “Have you guys ever heard of something called social engineering?” she asked.

  Neither of us had.

  “Well, social engineering is when instead of using computer programs to hack into someone’s account, people use their knowledge about that person to guess their password.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ned. I was glad he asked, because I wasn’t sure I was following.

  “Well, a famous example is a few years ago, when a man in Florida broke into the e-mail accounts of a lot of celebrities, but he wasn’t a computer programmer or anything. He was just a really big fan. He read everything he could about the various famous people and learned everything he could—what street they grew up on, their pets’ names, and so forth—and used that to guess their passwords. He got into the private e-mails of about twenty movie stars. He tried to argue that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He claimed what he did wasn’t actually hacking, since he’d used only public information.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous,” Bess said. “That’s like when Jessie at summer camp tried to argue that she hadn’t done anything wrong reading my diary because it didn’t have a lock on it.”

  “I agree,” George said. “And so did the courts. He’s in prison now.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked. “That we should social engineer the Twitter account?”

  “Yeah, but like reverse social engineer it,” George said. “Even though this person is tweeting in the voice of Brady, they can’t help but let aspects of themselves through. If we read the tweets, we can pick out information about the culprit and start to paint a portrait of him or her.”

  “George, you’re a genius!” I exclaimed.

  George blushed and shook her head. She always gets really squirmy if you try to give her a compliment.

  “It says here that the Brady Owens—with a zero—account has made four hundred tweets,” Ned said.

  “So what if we each take a hundred tweets?” I said. Everyone nodded. “Let’s go clockwise, so George, you take the first hundred, Bess the second, Ned the third, and I’ll take the last.”

  “I’m glad tweets are only a hundred forty characters!” Bess said.

  “Me too,” I agreed. “We only have forty-five minutes to do this! Start reading!”

  We all went quiet and bent over our phones. If anyone looked at us through the window, they would think we couldn’t stand talking to one another, as we all ignored the others and stared at our phones. I quickly scrolled to the bottom of the fake Brady’s account and started reading.

  It was exhausting reading tweet after tweet from this account. They were all so angry. Most of them just felt whiny, like the whole world was out to get the operator of the account. Explaining how to use the remote to my grandma for the hundredth time, one tweet read. “Feel like I’m stuck in Titian’s painting of Sisyphus.” I didn’t know the painting, but I did know that Sisyphus was a character from Greek mythology who is punished in the underworld by having to push a boulder up a hill over and over again, unable to actually complete the task.

  “Hey,” Ned asked. “What day was the water main break on Maple that caused that flooding?”

  “Oh,” Bess said. “Wasn’t that in early April?”

  “Yeah, April twelfth,” George confirmed after a quick search online.

  “Well, on April twelfth, this account tweeted that their street was flooded. ‘Beginning to look like Claude Monet’s Flood Waters here,’ ” Ned read, before looking up, excitement flashing behind his eyes. “I think that proves that the culprit lives in River Heights. This isn’t someone who came from out of town.”

  “Wait,” George said. “Claude Monet’s a painter, right?”

  “Ya,” I said. “A French impressionist.”

  “Because I saw some tweets in my batch that talked about art too. Actually, one mentioned The Zebra Finch,” she said, “which is kind of a weird coincidence. Here, let me find it. ‘Waiting for the cable guy to come and fix my TV. Said they’d be here by twelve thirty. Two o’clock still not here. Feel like the Zebra Finch, chained to my perch.’ ”

  “Mentioned art in a bunch of mine, too,” Bess chimed in.

  “Mine too,” I said.

  “So our culprit lives in River Heights and is into art,” George said.

  “More specifically, I think they’re into painting,” I said. “Did you see any mentions of sculptures or photographs in your tweets?”

  Everyone shook their heads. “I think we need to go back to Erica Vega,” I said. “It feels too coincidental that the protests are being led by people who met in an art class and our culprit is passionate about painting. I think she knows more than she’s letting on.”

  “Let’s go!” Ned said. “We have twenty-eight minutes!”

  We quickly threw out our iced-tea cups, put the pad of paper back in the storage room, and placed the chairs on top of the table. The Coffee Cabin looked like we had never been there.

  We headed back to the Arts Complex.

  “Maybe we really got this case wrong,” I said. “Maybe Brady’s not the target at all. Maybe this is about revenge against the Arts Complex. Do you remember any stories about people not liking the complex or being mad that Joe Archer was hired to run it? Maybe someone wants it to fail.”

  Bess, Ned, and George all shook their heads. “After the controversy over the design worked itself out, I thought everyone felt pretty positive toward it,” Ned said.

  “Yeah,” George agreed. “All the blogs and everything I read thought Joe was a great hire.”

  “Well, it doesn’t mean that someone didn’t feel slighted,” I said. “The board couldn’t know that Joe would want to leave his job in San Francisco and come back to River Heights. They must have interviewed other people.”

  “That’s another thing to ask Erica,” Bess said.

  We rounded the corner to the street the Arts Complex was on. Outside the theater, it was still jam-packed with protesters, but Joe’s extra security guards had moved everyone onto the sidewalk, so they were no longer blocking the street. All in all, it did seem more orderly. I knew that Brady was disappointed, but there was no doubt that J
oe had made the right decision in assigning more security to the protest.

  Fortunately for us, the back entrance that was closer to the visual arts side was clear. In the loading dock sat an unmarked van.

  Bess hit me on the arm. “Do you think The Zebra Finch is in there?”

  “Oh, maybe,” I said.

  Bess looked like a girl staring at the boy she had a crush on. Her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly agape.

  “You can stare as hard as you want, but you’re not going to be able to see it through the sides of the van,” George pointed out.

  “I know, but just to know it’s so close . . . I can’t describe it. It’s like if you knew Sherlock Holmes was in that van, Nancy.”

  “Sherlock Holmes is fictional,” George pointed out.

  Bess sighed, frustrated.

  I pulled on the complex’s back door and was surprised to find it open.

  “That’s weird,” said George. “I thought we’d have to work a lot harder to get in.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Guess we’re finally getting a lucky break,” Ned said.

  We headed down the hall to Erica’s office. George had looked up where it was before we left the Coffee Cabin. As we turned a corner, I spotted a man walking in front of us. He was sporting a suit and a baseball cap.

  “Hey,” I whispered to George. “Doesn’t that look like that man on the surveillance footage who was avoiding the cameras?”

  George nodded. “Same build, same outfit.”

  “Look at his sleeves,” Bess hissed. I didn’t know what she meant at first. He was a good twenty feet in front of us and his arms were swinging as he walked, but suddenly it clicked.

  “Gold buttons!” I said.

  “Do they have anchors on them?” Ned asked.

  “Only one way to find out,” I said as I picked up my pace to catch up with the man.

  “Excuse me,” I called out. He didn’t turn around. I walked even faster and called out again, more loudly. “Excuse me!”

  The man stopped and turned around. He had slight features and pale skin and wore glasses, but I barely looked at his face. My eyes went straight to his jacket. There, right in the middle between two other buttons, was an empty space.