The Cheating Heart Read online

  Nancy walked across campus to the science labs. The glass front doors were open, and Nancy walked down the empty, echoing corridors. She spotted a few older students in various laboratories—working on long-term projects, she imagined. Otherwise the building was quiet.

  Nancy soon found the tour group in progress. A lab director was demonstrating how to use a bank of computer terminals. Nancy spotted Carrie among the students.

  Ten minutes later, when the tour was over, Nancy fell into step beside Carrie. “Remember me from Friday?” Nancy asked.

  Carrie nodded warily. “You’re the English professor’s assistant.”

  Nancy drew a breath. “I’m working for Dean Jarvis as well. We’re looking into a possible cheating ring on the literature test.”

  Carrie stopped still, but she said nothing.

  “Look,” Nancy went on. “I found this stuck to your shoe.” She held up the yellow memo slip, hoping Carrie wouldn’t ask how she’d found it.

  Carrie stared at the paper, visibly upset.

  “These letters match a series of answers on the test,” Nancy said. “Did you have these answers stuck on your shoe when you took the test?”

  Carrie blinked. “I took them into the auditorium with me,” she confessed in a tight voice. “But I didn’t use them!”

  Hooray! Nancy was thinking—I have my thief. “How did you get the answer sheet out of the professor’s office?” she asked Carrie.

  “What office?” Carrie frowned. “A guy stopped me outside the English department office, just after I signed up for the exam. He offered to sell me the test for fifty dollars.”

  Nancy frowned. “You bought the test?”

  “Yes,” Carrie said, her eyes cast down in guilt. “Then I took the test to the library and looked up the answers to the questions. I wrote down the letters on three yellow slips—but like I said, I didn’t use them!” She looked up pleadingly.

  “You got a perfect score,” Nancy noted.

  “Well,” Carrie admitted, “after looking up all that stuff in the library, I—I remembered the right answers without looking.”

  Nancy reflected for a moment. It was the answer key that had been stolen from Tavakolian’s office, not the complete test. Was there another cheating ring at work? Carrie had said a guy sold her the test—that could have been Steve Groff, Gary Carlsen, Tom Mallin, Paul, or even . . . Ned.

  “Who sold you the test?” Nancy asked, continuing to grill.

  Carrie shrugged. “I don’t know his name. He was tall, like an athlete—”

  “Dark hair?” Nancy asked, not really wanting an answer.

  “Oh, no.” Carrie shook her head. “His hair was white blond.”

  The image clicked in Nancy’s mind—Steve Groff.

  Fifteen minutes later Ned came charging into the living room of the Omega Chi house, where Nancy was waiting for him. Dressed in baggy sweats, with a basketball under his arm, he was gorgeous, she thought.

  Nancy jumped up and flung an arm around Ned’s neck, planting an excited kiss on his cheek. “I’ve got a hot break in the case,” she whispered. “Where can we go to talk?”

  Ned led her into the empty study lounge, where she quickly recounted her interview with Carrie. “Steve Groff?” Ned whistled. “The same guy who argued with Paul at the party yesterday?”

  “It may not just be a coincidence,” Nancy said guardedly. Then she showed Ned the note she’d received the night before, accusing Paul of the theft.

  “You don’t think they’re in this together, do you?” Ned asked, aghast.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Nancy admitted.

  Ned shook his head. “I can’t believe Paul is involved. But you have to talk to Steve Groff.”

  “I just called his dorm room—he wasn’t in,” Nancy said.

  “You know where he is, most likely,” Ned said.

  Nancy nodded. “The pool’s my next stop.”

  “Can I come along?” Ned asked. “Steve seems to be a hothead—you could probably use some backup.”

  “Sure—thanks.”

  There were several swimmers doing laps in the big pool when Nancy and Ned arrived. It took them a few minutes to pick out Steve. Watching him churn up and down the pool, Nancy was impressed with his strength and endurance.

  As Steve finally emerged, dripping wet, from the pool, Nancy and Ned hurried along the wet tile floor to cut him off. Steve first rubbed his head with a towel, then looked up to see Nancy. He sneered. “I’ve got nothing more to say to you.” When he noticed Ned standing behind her, he hesitated.

  “Steve,” Nancy said patiently, hoping to keep the encounter calm. “I just talked to Carrie Yu—she said that you sold her a copy of the test.”

  Steve began to flush. “She bought it!” He protested. “She’s as much to blame as I am.”

  For the moment Nancy let that pass. “We just want to know how you got the copy,” she said.

  Peering quickly over his shoulder, Steve muttered, “I—I just found it.”

  “Found it?” Ned repeated in dismay.

  “You’ve got to believe me!” Steve burst out. “I was outside the English department, and I happened to look in a big trash basket in the hall. There it was right at the top. ‘Freshman Literature Placement Test.’ It was too good an opportunity to pass up! And then that girl walked by and I decided to make a buck. I told her I had the test and asked how much was it worth to her. I made her a photocopy of it for fifty dollars.”

  “And you don’t have any idea how the test got in that trash bin?” Ned asked.

  Steve shook his head. “That test could have been stolen by anyone—even Paul DiToma.”

  Nancy’s head jerked back. “Why do you mention Paul DiToma?” she asked quickly.

  Steve gave her a sly look. “I ran into him in the department office, just before I found the test copy in the trash.”

  Nancy recalled Paul saying he’d spoken with Steve in the department office that Monday. Her eyes narrowed. “Did you write me that note about Paul being the thief?”

  Steve was too surprised by her deduction to try to lie. “Yeah, I wrote it,” he said. “I don’t like that guy—so I made that up. But I should have known you wouldn’t believe it. He’s your buddy. I saw you all together in the student center yesterday.”

  “That’s true,” Nancy said. “Was it you who wrote on his leather jacket?”

  Steve was obviously confused. “Wrote on what jacket? He wasn’t even wearing a jacket when I saw him.”

  Nancy still was skeptical, but she had no proof that Steve had been the vandal. “Well, I’ll have to tell Dean Jarvis that you took the copy of the test—and that you sold it,” she said.

  “It was such a stupid thing to do,” Steve said. “You know what killed me? I knew most of the answers right off the bat. I would have gotten a good score even if I hadn’t found the test. But now they’ll never know that.”

  As Nancy and Ned walked away from the sports complex, they both felt discouraged. “I guess Steve’s sorry he cheated now,” Ned said. “But that was a rotten thing he did, implicating Paul.”

  “And he took some trouble to do it—he had to find out where I was staying to leave the note,” Nancy added.

  “Maybe Steve was hoping to divert you from learning that he’d sold the test to Carrie,” Ned said. “He’ll get in a lot of trouble for this.”

  “Unfortunately,” Nancy said, “we’ve caught two cheaters now—Steve and Carrie—but we still don’t know who stole the key from the professor’s file.”

  Ned’s face darkened. “You mean—I’m not off the hook yet?”

  Nancy sighed and shook her head. “Nope. And I don’t know how that copy of the test got in the trash bin, where Steve found it.”

  “I didn’t throw a copy away,” Ned declared.

  “I believe you,” Nancy said, “but Professor Tavakolian will probably think you did—after all, you copied the test for him. I’d better not tell the dean what I’ve learned
—not yet.”

  Seeing Ned’s face crease with worry, Nancy hooked her arm in his and gave it a reassuring tug. “I still haven’t solved the case,” she said gently, “but I’m not giving up yet.”

  • • •

  At six-thirty that evening Ned and Paul picked up Nancy and Brook at the Theta Pi house. The four young people headed for a local pizza restaurant. Inside the door, a short line of people waited to be seated, and another line waited for take-out pizzas. Ned waved to a couple of his basketball teammates at a nearby table. Someone in the take-out line behind them said hello to Paul, and he turned around to smile at her. Nancy noticed that it was Annie Mercer.

  “Everybody’s here tonight,” Brook said, gazing out toward the dining room. The brick walled restaurant was dimly lit, with candles stuck in olive oil bottles on each table.

  The restaurant owner, a bustling, plump, bald man, handed menus to the kids waiting for tables. “Read these now, and then you’ll be ready to order when you sit down,” he suggested.

  The two couples huddled over the menu. “Let’s get one large pizza to share,” Ned suggested.

  “Great idea,” Paul agreed. “I vote for a mushroom pizza.”

  “Mushroom?” Brook wrinkled her nose.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t like mushrooms!” Paul teased. “And I thought I’d found the perfect girl—well, that’s the end of this romance.”

  Nancy smiled. “We could have half of the pizza with mushrooms, and the other half plain.”

  “Oh, plain is so boring,” Brook said. “How about having spinach on the other half?”

  “Spinach? Too healthy for me,” Ned joked.

  They finally agreed: one-half mushroom, one-quarter spinach, and one-quarter pepperoni. As soon as they were shown to a table, they gave their pizza order to the waiter. Weaving his way through the crowded restaurant, he stuck their order on a spike on the small, high counter leading into the kitchen. He picked up a hot pizza the cook had just set on the counter, sidestepping the owner, who was handing a pizza box to someone in the take-out line.

  “The noise level here is unbelievable,” Ned shouted across the table.

  “What? I couldn’t hear.” Brook laughed.

  Just then a waiter dropped an entire trayful of empty water glasses right next to the counter. The entire restaurant burst into applause. The waiter took a sheepish bow. The other two waiters set down the pizzas they were picking up from the kitchen and helped sweep up the shattered glass.

  “I hope the cost of those glasses doesn’t come out of his salary.” Paul winced. “Last summer I worked in a pizza restaurant, and that’s what they did to us if we broke anything.”

  “After working in a pizza restaurant all summer, aren’t you sick of eating it?” Brook asked.

  Paul grinned. “Nothing can take away my appetite for pizza. Look, here comes our order.”

  Their waiter set the hot pizza down in the center of the table. Whipping out a wheeled pizza cutter, he swiftly cut it into eight slices.

  “Anyone else want spinach?” Brook asked as she picked up a slice from the spinach portion.

  “You know, it does look good.” Paul grinned. “I’ll give it a try.”

  Brook laid one of the spinach topped slices on Paul’s plate. He picked it up and was about to bite in. “Watch out, it’s hot,” Nancy cautioned as she tested her own slice.

  Paul backed away from the slice and blew on it, dislodging a small clump of spinach. A strange look crossed his face.

  “What’s wrong, Paul?” Nancy asked.

  Paul tilted his slice of pizza toward the candle on their table to study it in the light. Then he laid it down on his plate and poked with his fingers under the mounds of dark green spinach. Nancy leaned over for a better look herself.

  Lightly embedded in the cheese, under a clump of spinach, lay a long shard of razor-sharp glass.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  PAUL’S HANDS were shaking as he pushed his plate away. “Suddenly I’ve lost my appetite for pizza,” he said grimly.

  “Check the other slices,” Nancy ordered Ned and Brook. They inspected the pizza for more pieces of broken glass, but found nothing.

  Meanwhile, Nancy craned her neck around, looking for their waiter. The restaurant owner, spotting trouble, hurried to their table. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  Paul silently showed him the glass in the pizza slice. The owner grimaced. “That’s horrible!” he exclaimed, picking out the glass.

  “It’s a piece of one of your drinking glasses—it has the same yellow tint,” Nancy noted.

  The owner seemed perplexed. “Maybe when the glasses broke, a piece fell into the toppings in the kitchen.”

  “When the waiter broke those glasses, our pizza was already out of the oven,” Nancy informed him. “It was brought to our table right after they finished sweeping up. If you don’t mind, could I look around your kitchen?”

  The owner hesitated. “They’re awfully busy in there. . . .”

  “I won’t get in the way,” she promised. “It’ll only take two minutes.” She stood up and headed for the kitchen without waiting for an answer. As she’d hoped, the owner didn’t stop her.

  A doorway to the right of the pass-through counter led into the brightly lit kitchen. One pizza cook stood in a corner, kneading a huge ball of dough. Two others stood at a large marble topped table making the pies.

  One pounded some dough into a large flat crust, then spooned on tomato sauce with a metal ladle. The other took handfuls of shredded cheese and sprinkled them over the pie. Then he reached into a bowl of pepperoni slices and scattered them on the top. Watching the pizza makers work, Nancy felt sure they would have noticed a shard of glass when they put toppings on the pie.

  When the pies were assembled, Nancy saw the cooks using a wooden paddle to carry them over to a huge iron oven. With the same paddle, they pulled out pizzas that were done and slid them onto round metal trays. Then they tossed the trays onto the counter for the waiters to pick up.

  Nancy walked over to the pass-through counter. It ran almost the entire width of the restaurant, ending behind the cashier’s desk. The line of people waiting for tables or for take-out snaked along the counter, where hungry customers could be tempted by the smells.

  Anyone in the kitchen, or someone from the dining room, could have hidden the piece of glass in their pizza without being noticed, Nancy decided. And the commotion caused by the breaking glasses would have made it all the easier.

  Turning for one last look at the kitchen, Nancy saw a familiar figure, standing by the large chrome dishwashing machine. With a canvas apron tied over his jeans and T-shirt, he was obviously the dishwasher. He saw Nancy looking at him and turned away.

  It was Tom Mallin!

  The restaurant owner bustled up behind Nancy. “Seen enough?” he asked anxiously.

  Nancy nodded. “Just one question. How long has Tom Mallin worked here?”

  He acted worried. “Two years or more. He’s an excellent worker. Why?”

  “Just curious.” Nancy smiled.

  The owner followed her back to her table. “I’m so sorry your pie was ruined,” he said earnestly. “We’ll replace it at once.”

  Ned and Nancy exchanged glances with Paul and Brook. “Uh, thanks,” Ned said, “but can we take a rain check? We’re not all that hungry anymore.”

  “Yes, yes, any time you want, you just come back and I’ll give you a free dinner,” the owner offered. Thanking him, the two couples left.

  “We can make it back to the Theta Pi house before they clear away dinner,” Brook said, checking her watch. “If anyone’s in the mood for heartburn—it’s chili night.”

  “Better heartburn than a sliced-up mouth,” Paul said wryly.

  “Paul, I’m starting to think someone really has it in for you,” Brook declared.

  “First the phone calls, then the ad, then your jacket—” Ned added. He stopped himself before he mentioned the n
ote accusing Paul of stealing the test.

  “Steve Groff seems to have it in for you,” Nancy suggested, gauging Paul’s reaction.

  Paul seemed puzzled. “But the phone calls and ad were before I met Steve Groff in the English office. He didn’t even know my name or where I lived—not until Saturday, when he saw me at the frat open house.”

  As they walked into the Theta Pi house, Brook ran to pick up the ringing phone on the front desk. “Nancy Drew?” she said. “Why, yes, she’s right here.” She handed the phone to Nancy.

  “Hello?” Nancy said.

  “Miss Drew? Frank Tavakolian. I have an interesting bit of news for you. I, er—I have solved our little mystery.”

  Nancy caught her breath. “You have?”

  The professor chuckled sheepishly. “Well, yes. I found the missing sheet of test answers. They were in another file folder in my cabinet. I must have shuffled the papers around when I was putting the files back on Monday afternoon—and I thought I was being so careful. . . .” Nancy could tell that he wasn’t the type of man who could easily admit he’d been wrong.

  “But, Professor,” Nancy said, interrupting him. She spoke in a low voice, so Brook and Paul wouldn’t overhear. “There was cheating going on. I found two students who got hold of a copy of the test—the whole test, not the answer key.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line for a moment. Then Professor Tavakolian cleared his throat. “I knew that six perfect scores were too many,” he said at last. “So Nickerson was guilty—he took an extra copy when he was photocopying, no doubt.”

  Nancy flushed. “One of the cheaters—Steve Groff—found the test in a trash bin outside the English office, he says, and he sold it to the other student, Carrie Yu. We have no evidence linking Ned Nickerson to the theft.” And we never did, she was tempted to add, but she knew it wasn’t wise to antagonize the professor.

  “But he was the only person besides myself who had access to the test,” the professor said huffily. “Perhaps he made extra photocopies to sell.”

  “He didn’t—and he swears he didn’t throw away a copy of the test,” Nancy protested. She tried to keep her voice low because she knew Ned was standing right behind her, listening to every word. “Someone else got hold of it somehow.”