Suddenly she leaned forward. “Hey, look at this. The capital E in each note is the same. The bottom of it is broken off.” She pointed to the E’s in both her note and Randy’s. “These were definitely typed on the same typewriter.”
“Which means that you’re really in danger,” Bess said with a quaver. “Oh, Nan, maybe we should leave in the morning. We don’t have to stay all weekend.”
“We can’t leave just because things are heating up,” Nancy protested. She leaned forward to study the notes once again. “If I could just find the machine that these were typed on . . .”
Bess rolled her eyes. “Oh, sure, it’ll only take a few hundred years to try out every typewriter on campus,” she teased.
Shooting her friend a challenging glance, Nancy said, “We don’t have to try every typewriter,” she said. “But some of our suspects do happen to live right in this dorm. We can’t check Tamara’s room, since we know she’s in there now. But she’s not our only suspect.”
“You mean Danielle? But what if she’s in her room?” Bess asked nervously.
Nancy grabbed Bess and pulled her toward the door. “There’s only one way to find out.”
A few minutes later, after checking the directory in the lobby, the girls were walking stealthily down the empty third-floor hallway.
“Here it is,” Bess whispered. “Three fourteen.”
Holding her breath, Nancy knocked on the door. There was no answer. “Perfect,” she said, kneeling and pulling her lockpick set from her purse. A moment later she had the lock clicking open.
“Okay, you wait in the lounge by the elevator,” she instructed. “And—”
“And if Danielle comes, I’ll stall her,” Bess finished. “We’ve already been over this, Nan. Don’t worry about me. Just hurry!”
As Bess went back down the hall, Nancy slipped into Danielle’s room and turned on the light. She glanced quickly around the small room, taking in the dresser, bed, desk, and closet.
Going methodically around the room, she searched them all, checking for a typewriter or for anything that could hold kerosene. She even opened the makeup jars on top of Danielle’s dresser, but she didn’t find anything unusual.
After ten minutes Nancy made herself stop and take a deep breath. There should at least be a typewriter, she thought. Where was it?
She froze as she heard footsteps in the hall outside, but a moment later they passed by. That was when Nancy’s gaze lit on the small computer on Danielle’s desk. Of course, she thought. Danielle wrote her papers on her computer.
She leaned against Danielle’s desk, thinking. There was no way she had time to turn the thing on and figure out how to print something. From what she knew of computer printouts, though, it would be unusual for any computer to type an imperfection such as the broken E in the threatening notes.
It was too soon to take Danielle off her list of suspects, Nancy knew, but the cheerleader was now taking a backseat to Zip, Susannah, and Tamara.
Nancy gasped as she checked her watch. She’d been in the room more than fifteen minutes! Putting her ear to the door, Nancy waited until she was sure there was no one around, then she slipped back into the empty hallway.
The next morning Bess was trying to get Nancy to move faster. Bess grabbed her denim jacket off the back of her chair in the student center, where she and Nancy had just finished a quick, late breakfast of muffins and hot cocoa. “Come on, Nan. I don’t want to miss the fair. It’s ten-thirty already.”
“Just a minute,” Nancy told her. “I have to call Dean Jarvis. There’s something I’d like to find out about Susannah Carlson.”
The girls found a campus phone in the student center’s entrance. Checking the campus directory that hung from the booth by a cord, Nancy called Dean Jarvis’s extension. It was Saturday, but to Nancy’s relief, the dean was in.
“This is a delicate matter,” Dean Jarvis said after she told him what she wanted to know. “But if it’ll help your case, I guess I can tell you. Let me access the file.” He put her on hold, and Nancy drummed her fingers against the phone until he came back on the line. “Ms. Carlson was dismissed from Emerson because of a failing grade-point average,” the dean told her.