“Nancy, I want to thank you. You’ve made me see how stupid I’ve been.”
“Then you’ll tell me what all those negative numbers mean?” she asked triumphantly.
“I . . . no. They don’t mean anything. Not anymore,” he said.
Nancy felt her jaw drop. “But—”
“Listen, you don’t have to worry about me. I’ve made a few mistakes, I guess, but I’m not the kind of person you think I am. Not by a long shot. Now, will you excuse me? I have some important business to take care of.”
With that, he strode purposefully from the room. Nancy watched him go in shock. What was happening? Just when she thought she had turned him, he was walking out!
A minute later she was on her way back to the dorm, trying desperately to figure out how she had blown it. Had she pushed too hard? Not hard enough? Whatever it was, she had failed to get the confession she needed.
That wasn’t good. The practical joker was still at large, and who could tell what kind of trouble he would make next?
Partway across campus, she stopped. Ahead of her, half a dozen police cars had pulled up outside a classroom building. What was going on? she wondered.
She walked up to a policeman. What he told her sent an icy chill down her spine. “It’s another one of those assaults, miss . . . and this one looks especially bad!”
Chapter Twelve
A feeling of horror swept through her. In no time she remembered how Mike had hurried from the fraternity common room. Was this the “important business” that he had insisted on attending to?
It was possible. Ten minutes or more had passed since she, too, had left the fraternity. Mike could have done it in that time. Especially if he had been driving a Camaro. It was harder to imagine the police also arriving so quickly, but who could tell? The way this case was going, Nancy was ready to believe almost anything.
She had to get inside, Nancy decided. She felt responsible for what had happened. If she had thought faster she might have stopped Mike. The assault might not have occurred.
The police had roped off the building’s main entrance, so she walked instead to a door on one side. It was easy to find the scene of the assault: Policemen were everywhere, their radios crackling. In the middle of it all lay the student. A red emergency blanket was spread over him, but his face was visible. Nancy edged close . . . and gasped.
It was Captain Hook, the hunk she had seen talking on the phone!
With a jolt, she remembered how handsome she had found him that morning in the student bookstore. He didn’t look very good now, though. His face was purple with bruises, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. He wasn’t moving.
Nancy turned to a nearby policeman. “Is he going to be all right?” she asked.
“Hard to say,” the officer shrugged. “He was worked over fairly hard.”
“Is he conscious?”
“No, he’s out.”
Nancy turned away, then walked outside, feeling shaky. Maybe she should have taken Bess’s advice and remained in bed, she thought. That wasn’t realistic, though. Time was quickly running out. The final Emerson game was that night, and unless she put the practical joker out of action before then it was dead certain that he would stage one final prank, a prank that would be aimed at knocking Emerson out of the running for good.
That wouldn’t be the end of it, either. Who could tell how long the beatings would continue? They might go on until each and every Emerson student had either been attacked or frightened away!
What should she do? As she walked toward the dorm, she turned over the possibilities. She couldn’t go to the police, of course. She had evidence against Mike, but no positive proof.
Maybe she could get to him through Jan Teller, she thought. If she told Mike’s girlfriend about the awful things he was doing, Jan might agree to talk to him, to ask him to turn himself in. But no, she decided, that plan had too many problems. It would take time, for one thing. For another, there was no guarantee that Mike would cooperate.