The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy (16 page)

Reuben looked appropriately horrified and hurried out of the room.

Meanwhile, Ms. Lollyheart and a couple of the younger alumni dashed over to the buffet table for napkins and did their best to clean up the mess. They even used some of the bottled water to wipe up the sticky remains of the cocoa. But nothing could be done about the ruined clothing.

“Dr. Bodempfedder,” Ms. Lollyheart reminded her, “you have that navy-blue suit in your office closet.”

Dr. B nodded. “I hope you'll excuse us,” she said to the directors, even managing a smile. “It shouldn't take us too long to clean up.”

“That is one classy lady,” Cal said. “Evil, but classy.”

“Shall I go ahead with the PowerPoint while we wait?” Ms. Lollyheart asked sweetly.

“Sure,” grumbled Dr. Gallow on his way out.

“What do you bet
he
doesn't have a change of clothes on campus?” I said, shamelessly enjoying his misery.

As soon as they left, Ms. Lollyheart flipped off the lights and fiddled with the computer for a second. Then my photo of the Allbright campus came up on the screen and soft background music began.

“This presentation is a student piece,” she said. “Made by eighth graders. I think you'll be impressed.”

Everyone turned toward the screen, wearing the patient, polite expressions you might expect from brilliant, famous, accomplished people who spend their days running huge corporations or dealing with vital world issues and are then asked to sit through an eighth-grade student presentation.

They would perk up in a minute, though. I was sure of that.

We were sitting there, glued to the TV and waiting for the fireworks to begin over in the conference room, when we heard a gentle knock. We all exchanged terrified glances.

“It's Reuben,” said a voice from outside the door. With a sigh of relief, Cal ran over and opened the door.

“Awesome job, dude!” Brooklyn said, and we gave him a quiet little round of applause.

“It was a pleasure,” Reuben said. And you could
tell by the way he smiled that he'd definitely enjoyed pouring cocoa in Dr. Gallow's lap.

“Check it out, guys,” J. D. said, pointing to the screen. “Jonas Ford—eyes as big as saucers!” He wasn't the only one. As the presentation continued, and they began to understand what it was all about, rage and alarm showed on every face.

“Stop it for a moment, Evelyn, would you please?” Vice President Ford said. She reached over and pressed
PAUSE
. “What
is
this? You said it was a student film.”

“Yes, sir. That's correct.”

“And that…,” he said, gesturing toward the spot where the director and headmistress had so recently been sitting, covered in cocoa, “Did you arrange that, too?”

Ms. Lollyheart nodded. “I'm afraid so. It's crucial that you see this, sir. It was the only way we could think of to make that happen.”

“Let's keep going,” Dr. Evergood said. “I want to watch the rest of it.”

Zoë grinned. “Yay, Martha!” she said.

Ms. Lollyheart started up the presentation again. Everyone now watched with extreme interest. When the conversation switched from brownies and formulas to Toby Bannerman's future, heads turned to gaze at him in shock and sympathy. Toby was clearly thunderstruck. He leaned forward on his
elbows in rapt concentration, his mouth hanging open just a little. He must have been thinking back over years and years of seemingly innocent events and what they had truly meant.

Toby lowered his face into his hands and his back heaved.

Just then Dr. Gallow came in. He had rounded up a clean jacket somewhere, and wore it buttoned up all the way—hoping, I guess, that between the jacket and the tie he could cover up most of the stains on his shirt. His trousers were still wet where he had tried to clean the cocoa off with water. It must have been embarrassing for him. Ah, but
just you wait,
I thought. Wet pants will be
nothing
compared to what's going to happen to you over the next ten minutes.

Dr. Gallow hadn't seen the PowerPoint presentation that was planned for that meeting; Dr. Bodempfedder
was the one who organized them. But he knew what to expect. According to Ms. Lollyheart, they were always uplifting fluff pieces, very inspirational and never too long. They were just to get everybody in the mood and remind them what a great place Allbright was.

So now he stood there, gazing in puzzlement at something very different from what he expected, something very familiar—and we could see the realization washing over him. That was
his
picture up there. That was
his
voice. That was
his
private conversation with Dr. B, and he had no clue how it had been recorded and why it was being played for the board.

Suddenly, he lunged toward the laptop to stop the presentation. But he hadn't noticed upon entering that the policewoman who had opened the door for him (he'd assumed she was part of Jonas Ford's detail) had slipped in behind him. She now had a firm grip on his arm.

“Not so fast, Doctor,” she said. With her other hand she pulled his chair out, away from the table and well out of reach of the laptop. “Sit!”

He glared at her viciously, but she gave him another yank on the arm. “I
do
mean it,” she said, and you could tell that she really did. “I have handcuffs, if you want to do this the hard way.”

Dr. Gallow sat.

Every face in the room was turned in Dr. Gallow's direction. These were people you didn't want to mess with, people with immense power and influence, people with a lot of pride. And the timing couldn't have been better, because just then the recorded voice of Dr. Gallow said, “And, Katrina, make sure this current chaos on campus doesn't get back to the board. I've got enough on my plate already. I don't want Jonas Ford or Martha Evergood snooping around out here.”

Ford rose to his feet in outrage. Toby still had his head in his hands.

“Excuse me, please, Mr. Vice President,” Ms. Lollyheart said. “There is actually quite a bit more you need to see. Then you can have your meeting and decide what you want to do about all this.” Ford sat down, but he was boiling with anger.

Now Linnaeus Planck came up on the screen. It was a still picture, taken from the beginning of the interview. He looked elderly but elegant, sitting there in his wing chair, the sunlight from the window shining on his neatly combed white hair. Beamer had recorded a brief voice-over at this point, introducing him as co-founder of the school and an eminent scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize.

For many of the board members, Planck had been their original link to the school. He was a pub
lic figure in a way Dr. Gallow had never been, and he had a lot of influential friends. In his younger days, he'd been on television a lot, had testified as a science expert before Congress, and had written a couple of bestselling books. It was due entirely to him that people like Jonas Ford and Martha Evergood had donated money to the school and given their time to recruit and mentor students and sit on its board of directors.

Heads turned. You could tell they expected something positive from him—something hopeful—just as we had. The illustrious Linnaeus Planck to the rescue. The still picture began to move. You could hear the gentle strains of Bach in the background and Prescott's voice asking that first question.

We heard an intake of breath around the table, and
just then Dr. Bodempfedder came in, looking good as new in her navy-blue suit. As Dr. Gallow had done before her, she stood for a few seconds, gazing at the screen with a puzzled expression on her face. That was just enough time for Officer Offloffalof to pull out another chair and invite her, very firmly, to sit in it.

“Stop that!” she snapped. “Who are you? What's going on here? Horace?”

“You and Horace are going to sit right where you are and keep quiet till this little show is over,” the officer said.

I could see why Brooklyn had been so careful about when to get his mom involved. She was a pretty scary lady. Dr. Bodempfedder turned and looked at this beautiful woman wearing a police uniform and a menacing gaze, and visibly recoiled.

“Like I told your friend, here, I'm not fooling around. We can do handcuffs if you want to.”

“Your mom is
so
cool,” Cal said.

“Yeah, she is. But you really don't want to mess with her.”

The board was not paying much attention to the little face-off going on at the far end of the room. They were too busy watching, with horror, as their esteemed and trusted friend and colleague, Dr. Linnaeus Planck, revealed his true nature.

Dr. B, who was clueless about what had been going on while she was out of the room, leaned forward, yanked her arm away from Officer Offloffalof, and said in a loud voice, “That man is very old and has severe dementia. It's absolutely disgusting and disrespectful to film him like that. He's raving. Whose idea was this? Evelyn?”

“Please shut up, Katrina,” Michael Gates said. “You're in way over your head.”

Her jaw literally dropped.

“Woo hoo!” I cheered as we watched it on TV.

“Shhhh,” Prescott said.

Then came our last piece of evidence, Prescott's big discovery. It was titled “Overview,” and Dr. Bodempfedder had written it for Dr. Gallow, at his request, basically laying out every detail of how they created what Dr. Bodempfedder so charmingly referred to as “first-rate final products.”
Allbright graduates, that is.

It was a long document, and though it was extremely creepy to read the whole thing, we'd decided to pick out only the most incriminating sections for the presentation. We included the full document in their packets for future enjoyment. I was thinking that it had been a good call; the board looked exhausted.

And so, without going into every grim detail, we showed how the teachers and PD counselors had been carefully programmed by Dr. Gallow during monthly in-service meetings (occurring right after lunch, at which Big Brother was served in the form of brownies), turning them into unwitting accomplices. But it was during Dr. Gallow's weekly lectures—also held after lunch, when students would be most vulnerable to outside influence—that the real programming work was done. Week after week, year after year, Dr. Gallow had gradually formed the students' attitudes and beliefs. In short, he was building little human guided missiles to be sent out into the world to forward his agenda.

“The Allbright experiment,” Dr. Bodempfedder's memo concluded, “the result of many years of creative thought, dedicated effort, and constant fine-tuning on both our parts, can be judged an unqualified success. America is now in the capable hands of a small army of right-thinking Allbright
graduates, and the future looks bright.”

Jonas Ford gripped his head in his hands, completely beside himself. “This is an absolute disaster,” he said.

Ms. Lollyheart closed the laptop and went over to turn the lights on.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the board, I know you have a lot to discuss,” she said. “But if you'll bear with me for another thirty seconds, I need to let you know what happened after this presentation was made, in case you still have doubts as to the truthfulness of all this.”

Heads nodded all around.

“Go ahead, Evelyn,” Michael Gates said.

“Thank you. I mentioned earlier that this presentation was put together by students—a small group of eighth graders, to be exact. They were the ones who first discovered what was going on at Allbright. They investigated the matter and began gathering evidence. When they felt they had enough, they went to Dr. Planck, hoping he would help them. When that failed, they reported it to the police. The police, as you might imagine, didn't take the matter very seriously, but they
did
make a token visit to the campus. As a result, Dr. Bodempfedder found out that the children were onto her.

“In an effort to control the damage and make anything the kids might say about Allbright in the
future seem suspect, she had them expelled on a trumped-up charge of cheating. Please believe me, they are completely innocent.

“Fortunately, one of the students has a mother in the Baltimore PD, Officer Offloffalof.” Ms. Lollyheart gestured toward Brooklyn's mom, who nodded and smiled. “She brought the documents you just saw—you have copies of them in your packets, if you'll just turn to page six—she brought those documents, and the transcript of the conversation you heard, to the attention of the police once again. This time with better results. They obtained a search warrant for Dr. Bodempfedder's computer and files, as well as everything in Dr. Gallow's office and lab over at the National Science Institute. I expect they're probably over there right now, busy as little bees.”