The Cheating Heart (8 page)

“Sorry to disappoint you girls, but we'll need binoculars to see Dillon Patrick from here,” Ned joked as they finally spotted four empty seats at the far end of a row high in the stands.

Paul grinned. “Ned and I don't want you two to be distracted by some hunk on stage—we want you to ourselves.”

Brook flashed Nancy a happy smile.

To reach their seats, they had to sidle along a narrow steel walkway, past the knees of the other people in the row. They flipped down the plastic seats and settled down, first Paul, then Brook, then Nancy, and finally Ned.

Soon the concert began, with a terrific opening act—a woman rock singer they'd never heard of before. “Dillon Patrick will have to be incredible to top her,” Ned declared as they applauded her finale.

“Six months from now, I bet she'll be a hot star. We'll be able to say we saw her first!” Paul agreed.

“Oh, you guys just liked her because she was wearing a leather miniskirt,” Brook teased.

The boys took it in good humor. “Well, I'd like
to go get a soda,” Ned said. “Can I get anything for anybody else?” As he stood up, his seat flipped up automatically on its steel springs. “Whoa!” He laughed, surprised.

“A lemonade would be great.” Brook smiled.

“I'll have a cola,” Paul said. He pulled out his wallet, but Ned insisted it was his treat.

“I'll help you carry,” Nancy offered, standing gingerly as her seat flipped up.

“We'll stay and save your seats,” said Brook.

Paul chuckled. “Now seriously, Brook, who would steal these seats? We're up so high we should be wearing red lights on our heads so that airplanes don't crash into us.”

Brook playfully slapped Paul's shoulder, and Ned and Nancy were still laughing as they went back down the row and started down the long flight of open metal steps.

“Brook really brings out the fun side of Paul,” Ned commented. “Usually he's so serious he keeps to himself. And he's always trying to save money. I think he misses out on a lot of college life.”

“So you really don't know him all that well?” Nancy asked.

“Well, there are other guys I hang out with more,” Ned admitted.

At the bottom of the steps was a food stand the Varsity Club had set up for the concert. While Ned bought drinks and popcorn, Nancy looked for a phone to call Carrie Yu again. The closest
phone was just outside the stadium fence, and three or four people were lined up waiting to use it. As Nancy stood in line, she idly peered up through the high steel skeleton of the bleachers at the legs and feet of the people sitting way above her.

Finally the phone was free, and Nancy made her call. There was still no answer at Carrie's room, and Nancy hung up the phone, disappointed. Pushing through the milling crowd, she returned to the stadium to find Ned.

She laughed when she finally saw him, struggling to keep four paper cups of soda and two boxes of popcorn upright. “Nan, help!” he gasped.

Nancy deftly lifted the tower of paper cups from him and steadied it with two hands. “What would you do without me, Nickerson?” she teased.

“I was just asking myself the same thing,” he replied gallantly.

Carrying the drinks and popcorn, Nancy and Ned trudged back up the steps to their seats. “Wasn't this where we were sitting?” Ned asked uncertainly as they reached their row.

The four seats they'd been sitting in were all flipped up. Both their row and the one in front of it were empty.

“Brook and Paul must have left for a minute,” Nancy reasoned. “Maybe they saw someone they wanted to talk to. Let's take their seats so they
won't have to step over our knees when they come back.”

Ned edged along the walkway in front of the seats, using his knee to flip down his own seat. Following Ned, Nancy needed both hands and her chin to steady the tall stack of cups. Reaching her place, she turned around and sat on her upright seat, flipping it down.

After resting her weight on the seat, Nancy felt herself being tossed forward, tipping at a wild angle.

The drinks in the paper cups fell, splashing over her feet. Slipping on spilled soda, Nancy's right foot shot off into the gap behind the wet metal walkway and the seats in front of her. She slammed into those seats, which flipped down under her weight. She was thrown forward over them in a jackknife.

“Nancy!” Ned cried, dropping the popcorn boxes and reaching down to grab her around the waist. He began to lift her up, but then he slipped on the wet walkway, too—accidentally pushing her down into the gap between the walkway and the next row of seats.

Nancy's right leg, and then her hip and torso, bumped and slid through the opening. Ned desperately grabbed hold of her left leg.

Nancy tipped upside down, dangling under the walkway. Her arms flailed uselessly in empty space.

H
OLD ON,
N
ANCY
!” Ned called down to her as he continued to dangle her by her left foot.

“You hold on, too!” Nancy shouted back, trying to keep the fright out of her voice. In the darkness she couldn't see the ground clearly, but the steel girders supporting the bleachers glinted all the way down, and she could tell that it would be a very long drop if she fell.

Feeling her left ankle slip slightly in Ned's grip, Nancy desperately sought a toehold with her right foot. Her toe stabbed against the bottom of the steel walkway and she wedged it into the only crack she could find.

Summoning all her upper-body strength, she raised her shoulders toward the bottom of the bleachers above. With split-second timing, she
swung her right arm at the very instant she was closest to the girders. Her fingers slapped against a small steel strut and closed around it.

Tightening her fragile hold, Nancy pulled her body upright. As quickly as possible, she grabbed another strut with her left arm.

Ned took one hand off her ankle and thrust it down through the steel framework. He grasped her left arm firmly. “I'll let your foot go now, Nan,” he warned her.

“Okay.” Nancy braced herself. As soon as Ned had dropped her leg, he reached down and got a good grip on her other arm.

“Ready?” Ned asked, squatting on the walkway. Nancy nodded. “Okay, then, heave ho!” Ned hoisted her up through the gap between the walkway and the girder behind it.

Nancy twisted her lithe body and squirmed through the space. As soon as her shoulders were above the walkway, she managed to get an elbow up onto the steel plank and pull herself up.

A crowd of students had gathered to watch, unable to help because of the narrow space. As Nancy hauled herself onto the walkway, they let go a collective gasp of relief and then broke out clapping.

Ned sank back onto the walkway, exhausted. Nancy collapsed gratefully into his arms.

“Nancy, Ned, what's going on?” she heard Brook's anxious voice behind the circle of on-lookers.
Brook pushed her way through the gathering with Paul right behind her.

“Nancy's seat crashed down,” Ned reported in a shaky voice. “She fell through the bleachers and almost . . . almost . . .”

Nancy scooped her reddish blond hair away from her perspiring face. “I'm okay, guys,” she said calmly. In fact, her heart was still pounding and her muscles were sore, but she flashed her friends a confident smile. “I've had far worse accidents, believe me.”

Ned chuckled halfheartedly. “Yeah, but that's only because you get threatened by goons trying to scare you off a case.”

Brook's dark eyes grew round. “Do you think that someone was trying to hurt you, Nancy?”

“I doubt it,” said Nancy as she got to her feet. She hadn't really considered that angle—but as soon as Brook raised the possibility, her mind started working. Despite her discretion, several people now knew that she was checking into the results of the literature test. Maybe the test thief—whoever he or she might be—had gotten scared and was telling Nancy to cool it!

Just then, the surrounding circle of students broke open to let two campus security officers through. Nancy had worked with various members of the force in the past, but she didn't recognize these two.

“We saw there was some kind of commotion
up here,” said the first officer, a middle-aged man with thick glasses.

“Yeah, this girl fell through the stands,” said a nearby student.

“Fell through the stands?” the officer said, squinting at Nancy.

“Yes, Officer,” Nancy reported. “Luckily, my boyfriend here grabbed my foot in time.”

“Well, everything's okay now,” the man said. “Why don't you kids go back to your seats and wait for the concert to start.”

“Officer?” Nancy stopped him. “The reason I fell was because of my seat.” She knelt down beside the flip-up plastic seat and showed them that it had wrenched loose from its steel base.

“I knew those fancy new seats weren't safe,” muttered the second officer, a thin, black-haired man with a reddish face. “The way they flip right up when you stand up . . .”

“It had nothing to do with the flipping mechanism,” Nancy stated. “See this thick spring here? That's what flips the seat up when you get up. It's a good idea—it keeps the seats folded up when they're not being used.

“But as you can see,” Nancy went on, “the spring is intact. It's still attached to the base post. Normally, this metal plate attached to the spring should be bolted onto the seat.” Nancy pointed to Ned's seat to show how the seat should have worked. The officers nodded.

“But those bolts weren't attached—and they
weren't broken, either,” Nancy finished. “It looks as if somebody may have unscrewed them.”

The first officer frowned. Edging Nancy aside, he bent down and peered at the broken seat.

“Maybe they weren't screwed in tight in the first place,” the second officer suggested. “The workers only finished the seat renovations a week ago.”

Brook shivered. “To think that I was sitting in that seat the whole first act,” she said.

“That's right!” Nancy exclaimed. “So it couldn't have been a plan to hurt me. Unless the person forgot where I was sitting. You didn't notice anything wrong with it?” Nancy asked, turning to Brook. Brook shook her head.

“The way that bolt was unscrewed, there's no way you could have sat there without dislodging it,” Nancy noted. “I'll bet the damage was done during intermission—after you and Paul got up.”

“Did any of you notice anyone tampering with the seat?” the officer asked the students who had been sitting nearby. They shook their heads. “There were lots of people walking around, talking to one another,” one guy mentioned.

“This could just have been a prank,” the older officer said. “We get a lot of them this early in the year, before you kids have knuckled down to your work.”

“It's a pretty dangerous prank,” Ned said.

“Well, we'll make our report, and we'll keep an eye out for any other mischief,” the officer said. “Meanwhile, why don't you move to other seats and enjoy the music?”

“They sure weren't very helpful,” Ned muttered as he and Nancy followed Paul and Brook up the aisle to the last few empty seats.

Nancy shrugged. “What could they do? They can't inspect every seat in the stadium to see if the bolts are loose. And I'm sure they wanted to play down the danger so that other people wouldn't panic.” She gingerly tested her new seat with her hand before sitting down.

“You could have been badly hurt, Nancy,” Brook said, worried.

“Well, I wasn't,” Nancy said. “Thanks to Ned's quick thinking.”

“Not to mention my superhuman strength,” Ned added, joking. Nancy grinned, then slid her hand warmly into his as they watched Dillon Patrick walk out on stage.

• • •

The music was still ringing in Nancy's ears two hours later as she and Ned walked across campus after the concert. Brook and Paul had gone out for a cup of coffee, but Nancy had begged off. After her near-fall from the stands, her muscles were a bit sore, and a good night's rest sounded very appealing.

Ned pulled her against his shoulder as they walked. “Thanks for saving my neck tonight,
Nickerson,” she murmured, nuzzling against him, admiring the hard muscle of his shoulder.

“Anytime,” Ned replied. “It's the least I can do for you, considering how you've just saved me from being expelled.”

“I hope so,” Nancy said. “I'll be interested to see what Carrie Yu has to say for herself.”

“What
can
she say?” Ned asked. “You've practically caught her red-handed. Why else would she have written those answers on that memo slip?”

“I don't know, Ned,” Nancy said. “But remember, you were found with a copy of the answers, too. And you couldn't explain why.”

An awkward pause fell between them, and Ned pulled his arm away. “I'd think you'd want to wrap up the case, so I won't get expelled.” He sounded hurt, and Nancy cast about in her mind for a tactful reply.