“But what?”
“But he’s a real sweet guy,” Sally replied. “The only reason I thought of him is that he’s a computer whiz. His name’s Victor Paredes. If anyone could break into that computer, it would be him. He’s a senior.”
Nancy nodded, making a mental note of the name. The two girls went downstairs just as Harrison Lane was coming in the front door. After greeting him, Nancy made arrangements with him to check out the account number. Then, after saying goodbye to Sally and her father, she left.
Twenty minutes later, as she pulled into her driveway, Nancy saw Hannah Gruen, the Drews’ long-time housekeeper, rushing out the door. “What’s the matter, Hannah?” Nancy called from her car.
“Nothing, dear,” said Hannah, smiling warmly. “I’m spending the evening with a friend, that’s all. Oh—here comes my taxi now.” Hannah waved and headed down the driveway toward the cab that had pulled up. “Dinner’s warming in the oven,” Hannah called over her shoulder. “Eat it before it gets dried out.”
“ ’Bye, Hannah,” Nancy told her. “Have fun.”
Going inside, Nancy saw that there was mail on the low table in the entrance hall. Most of it was for her father. But Nancy felt her heart skip a beat when she came to a letter with familiar handwriting. A letter from Ned!
A tingle ran through her as she took it up to her room to read it.
Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s boyfriend, was away at Emerson College. This was the first letter she’d received from him since he’d returned to school from summer break. It wasn’t a very long letter—just news about classes and his friends. But the part at the end about how much he missed her made Nancy resolve to visit him soon.
She settled back against the pillows on her bed to write him back. By the time she was done, her father had come home and it was time for dinner.
Over baked chicken with chestnut stuffing, Nancy told her father about her case. Carson Drew had a respected law practice in River Heights and was often a help to her.
“I’m not sure if other kids are involved, or if Sally was singled out. And what makes it especially tricky is that changing a grade in a computer file doesn’t leave any trace,” she concluded, spooning a second serving of stuffing onto her plate. “You can’t examine a floppy disk for erasure marks or analyze how old the ink is, the way you can with something on paper.”
Her father smiled. A distinguished-looking man in his forties, he had dark hair that was flecked with gray at the temples. “Don’t I know it! A few years ago, people were talking about the ‘paperless office’ that computers were supposed to create. But I probably use more paper in my practice now than I did before we computerized. We print out every version of every document we draft, so that if any problems come up we can pull the file and put our finger on the exact bug. I’m surprised that Brewster Academy doesn’t do something of the sort as well.”
“Maybe they do,” Nancy said. “But I don’t know about it. I hope I don’t wind up having to go over a ton of paperwork to check which grades have been changed,” she added, sighing. “But if that’s what it takes, I’ll do it. I’d rather catch this hacker by checking the bank’s information.”
“Hacker,” Carson Drew repeated. “What a funny word that is! I remember the first time I heard it. It was six or seven years ago. A high-school girl here in River Heights managed to figure out how to monkey with the billing on the telephone company’s computer.”
“Uh-oh, I think I see what’s coming,” Nancy guessed. “She had a boyfriend in Tokyo, right?”
Her father smiled. “Not exactly, but you aren’t far from wrong. At summer camp she had gotten to be very close friends with her counselor, who was also from River Heights. But in September the counselor went off to college on the West Coast. The girl was having some emotional problems, I gather. She got into the habit of calling her former counselor two or three times a week and talking to her for an hour or more at a time.”