Uncovering Sadie's Secrets by Libby Sternberg Read Free Book Online Page A

arm.
    “When you see her,” the woman snarled at me, “tell her that her mother wants to talk to her real bad.” With a heart-stopping movement, she grabbed my backpack and, with the knife, slashed through its strap. It fell off my arm, thudding to the floor. Just as quickly, she let go of my hair and walked out the front door. As soon as I saw her go, I ran to the office to call my brother. I wanted a ride home. This was definitely not a day for the bus!

    T HAT NIGHT at dinner, I could hardly hold my fork steady. I was still trembling from my afternoon encounter. I was so distracted that I let Tony grouse uninterrupted for ten minutes about having to pick me up at school that afternoon. After telling him to stop complaining, my mother told me I’d had a phone call. “Forgot to tell you,” she said. “It was on the voice mail when I got home. Must have come in when Tony was picking you up.” She reached for the salad and put some on her plate after eyeing the huge uneaten pile of it on Tony’s. “Sadie, it sounded like.”
    “Did she leave a number?” I asked with sudden interest.
    “No, she said she’d call later. Is she a new friend? I haven’t heard you mention her.”
    “Just another low-life she hangs with,” Tony sneered, but Connie kicked him under the table. Sometimes Connie was all right. I could tell from her silence at the table that she was in one of her “can’t wait to move into my apartment” moods where quality family time wouldn’t be a big factor.
    “Yeah, she’s a friend of Kerrie and me,” I said and finished off my baked chicken and Rice-a-roni as fast as I could. “May I be excused?”
    “All right. But you’re doing dishes tonight.”
    My shoulders sagged. “Con, can I switch with. . .”
    “Not on your life. I’ve got a serious date with LexisNexis tonight,” she said.
    Ouch. Double bad news. Not only would she not do the dishes for me. She was going to tie up the phone doing Internet research.
    “Okay, okay,” I said and headed for the hallway. “Just let me make a quick call.” I grabbed the broken end of my backpack strap and climbed the stairs to my room two steps at a time, first taking the cordless phone off the hall table as I went by.
    “What did you do to your backpack?” my mother called after me. She missed nothing.
    “It just broke. That’s all.”
    “That’s an L.L. Bean,” I heard her murmuring as I reached my room.
    Before the backpack hit the floor, I had already dialed *69. A ring, then a nasal electronic voice came on. “The number of your last incoming call was. . .” I grabbed a piece of paper and pencil stub in a frantic effort to catch the number, only to hear the phone number of the school pay phone pop up. It was my call to Tony, not Sadie’s call to me. Disgusted, I hung up and quickly dialed voice mail, feeding in my sister’s office number and password. A few run-of-the-mill messages and a hang-up. Why did I have the strong feeling the hang-up was Sadie?
    One last try—I dialed Kerrie’s number. But before it could ring through, I heard the telltale clicks of my sister using the phone line to log on to the Internet. I hung up and silently cursed my continuing bad luck.

Chapter Five
    “Y OU KNOW we should get one of those dedicated Internet server lines—the ones that connect to your cable television or something,” I complained a few minutes later to Connie, who was flipping through web pages with lightning speed. The dishwasher was humming along and I was scraping rice bits out of a sauce pan in the sink.
    I was jittery to get on-line myself for some cyber companionship. Ever since my encounter with Lemming Lady that afternoon, I’d been on edge. I mean, someone slicing through your backpack is nothing to sneeze at. Even though I consider myself to be pretty unflappable (okay, okay, except maybe around Doug), the blade in Lemming Lady’s hand was enough to put the fear of God into me.
    Only problem was I had no one