THE DOOR HANDLE RATTLED AGAIN.
“James, do you have your keys?” the gruff voice asked.
“Yeah, hang on one second.”
“What do we do?” George asked frantically.
I cast my eyes around the room feverishly, looking for a solution. The room was sterile and white. There were no closets or piles of boxes we could hide behind, and even if there were, who knows how long we would be stuck there?
My eyes landed on the window. It was half-open, and I was confident we could both slip out of it. It was a good eight feet above the floor, but if we pushed the chair over, we could reach it.
I could hear footsteps coming down the hallway, and keys jingling.
“Nancy!” George hissed.
I pointed at the window. She nodded. As quickly and as quietly as we could, we slid the chair over to the wall.
“You go first,” I whispered to George.
George climbed on the chair and hoisted herself into the frame. She looked back at me momentarily and then jumped out. I heard her hit the ground with a thud. My turn.
I stood on top of the chair and reached up to the sill. I heard the keys enter the lock. In another few seconds, they would be inside the room. I lightly jumped off the chair and pulled myself up onto the sill. I had jumped too hard and propelled myself half out the window.
We were higher off the ground than I’d realized. I saw George standing on the open ground below, beckoning me. I started to feel a little dizzy. This was a much farther fall than I had expected.
Behind me, the lock turned. There was no time to think. I pushed myself forward. My stomach dropped as I hurtled through the air. As soon as I hit the ground, I tucked into a ball and rolled, just as I had been taught to do in PE class. When I stopped moving, I felt dizzy and the wind had been knocked out of me, making it hard to breathe.
“Hey someone’s been in here!” one of the security officers bellowed from inside the office. Above me, the window scraped farther open.
“Nancy!” George hissed. “Get back here!” She beckoned from the side of the building. I scrambled to join her, squeezed up right against the wall.
I made it just as a large bald head came poking out the window, surveying the grounds. George and I held our breath as he turned his head side to side, looking for anyone on the run. If he looked directly below him, he would see George and me covered with dirt, breathing heavily. There would be no doubt that we were the culprits. I wasn’t sure what the consequences of our actions would be, but I had a feeling they wouldn’t be good. Not to mention that I wouldn’t be able to solve the case.
The man looked left and right again. My leg was starting to cramp, and I could feel a cough tickling in my chest. I cast my eyes upward. I could see the bottom of the man’s chin, where he had missed a spot shaving. All of a sudden a large drop of sweat came cascading through the air, landing right on my forehead. I bit down hard on my lip to stop myself from crying out.
Finally the man pulled back inside the room.
“I don’t see anything. You sure you didn’t just forget to close out the monitors?”
“I guess, maybe,” the other guy said dubiously.
We heard the window slide shut. George and I took that as our cue and sprinted around the corner back toward the lobby.
Once we were safely back inside, blending in with the guests, we slowed down to a walk.
“That was close!” George exclaimed.
“Really close!” I agreed. “The worst part is we’re no closer to figuring out what happened! For every piece of evidence we have that says it’s Tami, we get another pointing toward Joe.”
“You don’t think they’re working together, do you?” George asked.
“I guess it’s possible, but it seems unlikely.”
Before I could elaborate, George’s phone started buzzing and buzzing and buzzing.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
George slowly turned her phone to me. “I set my phone to notify me when people tweeted about Brady.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Apparently Brady just tweeted that protesters are trash and deserved to be trashed like his room was. People are not happy with him. They’re saying this is just more evidence that he incites violence against people who disagree with him. It’s already been retweeted over eight hundred times, and more and more people are saying that they’re going to protest his show.”
“Why would he tweet something like that? He knows people would get mad.”
George shrugged. “Did you consider that maybe he’s doing this to himself? Maybe he doesn’t want to do this tour. I read that he stopped touring for a year because he got hit with stage fright. Maybe that video going viral made it start to come back and he wants out.”
“I don’t know. This seems like a lot of trouble to get out of his tour.”
“He’d probably face a lot of fees from the venues if he just canceled. If he argued that his safety was at risk, then he could probably get out of the performances without paying anything.”
“Maybe. We need to talk to him and get him to tell us why he sent that tweet.”
George and I headed back up to Brady’s room and knocked on the door. Bess answered.
“Oh my gosh. You two are filthy! What happened?”
“It’s a long story,” I answered.
“Well, come on. We need to get you cleaned up.”
We went into the room, but Bess veered off into the bathroom. Ned and Brady were hunched over the table, working on piecing together another page from the notebook.
“Whoa, Nancy,” Ned said. “Did you dive into a pile of dirt?”
“Basically,” I said.
“That’s my girl.” He winked.
Bess came back from the bathroom armed with two wet washcloths.
“Start scrubbing,” she said, hovering over us. Sometimes George teased Bess that she was the den mother of our group. Bess found it annoying, but I had to admit George wasn’t wrong.
I ran the washcloth over my arms. The small white piece of terry cloth quickly turned a light brown.
“Why’d you send that tweet?” George asked Brady without any warning. I probably would have tried to be a little gentler in my approach, but George was always the most direct of my friends.
“Because I’m trying to believe that your friend Nancy is going to save my show and I wanted people to come to it?” Brady said, sounding confused.
“And you thought threatening protesters was a good way to do that?” George continued.
Brady looked at her like she was crazy. He pulled out his phone. “Um, I don’t think saying ‘Can’t wait to do a show in my old college stomping grounds, River Heights! Hope to see you there!’ really qualifies as threatening,” he said, reading from his phone.
“No, the other tweet,” George said.
“That’s the only tweet I’ve sent all day,” Brady said.
“I was right next to him, looking over his shoulder, when he tweeted,” Ned said. “That’s what he said.”
Brady held out his phone and I could see it. Sure enough, the tweet said exactly what he had just read.
“George, let me see your phone.” She handed it over. It was still buzzing incessantly as people retweeted the incendiary tweet over and over. It was up to three thousand retweets just in the past ten minutes. I looked between the account on Brady’s phone and the one on George’s. They had the same profile picture and the same bio, but there was one difference.
“This account’s username is @Brady0wens with a zero, not with the letter O,” I exclaimed. “This is a fake.”
“Ugh,” Brady groaned. “Whoever runs that account has been a pain in my neck for the past several weeks. Everyone thinks it’s me, and its mission in life seems to be to get people mad at me. It tweets terrible, terrible things. I thought about complaining to the company. But if they consider it a parody account, it’s protected as free speech, and they won’t do anything to shut it down.”
“Besides,” said Bess, “wouldn’t that be a little hypocritical if you tried to restrict someone else’s free speech?”
“It’s different,” Brady protested.
“How?” Bess asked. I was curious myself. It didn’t seem like it was different, and I thought she had a good point. I was a little surprised that Bess was speaking up. She usually avoids conflict, but she must really feel that Brady was in the wrong about his mugging joke.
“It’s different,” Brady explained, “because when I make offensive comments, I own them. I don’t try to trick people into thinking someone else said them. This person is trying to make people hate me.”
I could see Bess taking a deep breath to respond—because she’s so kind, people think Bess is meek, but she is a bulldog when she feels passionately about something—but I needed to jump in. This was the type of question that could be debated for hours in a class like Professor Vega’s, and it wasn’t going to help me solve this case.
“Let’s refocus,” I said. “This tweet is very specific. They seem to know that your room was trashed. Have you said anything publicly about what happened?”
“No, of course not!” Brady said. “It’s humiliating. Why would I tell anyone?”
“So,” I said, feeling the excitement build in my chest and spread through my body the way it always did when I finally had a break in a case, “that means the culprit must have tweeted this.” I turned to George. “Is there a way to track who the owner of this account is?”
“Sorry, Nancy,” George said. “Even if I could, it would take several hours. Way more time than we have.”
“Okay,” I said. I knew this was key and I was going to figure out a way to capitalize on it. “We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way. We have two prime suspects, Tami and Joe,” I said.
“Are you still carrying on about Joe?” Brady asked. “Because this proves it’s not him.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Because Joe’s an old fuddy-duddy,” Brady said. “He still owns a record player. He reads books on paper, not on an e-reader. I’m pretty sure he still uses a typewriter.”
I remembered the typewriter I had heard Joe using in his office and realized Brady was right.
“So you’re saying Joe wouldn’t know how to set up a fake Twitter account?” I asked.
“I’m saying he doesn’t know what a Twitter account is,” Brady said.
“So it’s gotta be Tami,” said Ned.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a grin spread over my face. This case was so close to being solved. “Now we just need to prove it!”