Adrenaline surged through her as she realized that Josh was holding a bomb!
Gently he lowered the bomb to the bench. He checked his watch, then worked the hands on the timer. He was probably setting it. How long until the thing exploded?
Turning away from the window, Nancy slid back down to the floor. She had seen enough. It was time to call the police.
She crawled back behind the desk and groped for the phone. When her hands closed on it, she pulled it down and crawled into the knee space beneath the desk.
Quickly she punched in the emergency police number. The phone rang twice, then an officer answered.
“This is Nancy Drew,” she said in the barest whisper. “I’m at Emerson College. Someone is setting a bomb in the football team’s locker room.”
The officer started asking her questions, but Nancy was afraid she’d give herself away if she spoke any longer. “This is an emergency!” she whispered. “Please, send help.”
As she replaced the phone in its cradle, she felt something strange above her head. Looking up, she noticed a manila envelope taped to the underside of the desk.
What was that doing there? Why would the coach tape something under his desktop—unless it contained information he didn’t want anyone else to find.
Reaching up, she lifted the metal prongs on the envelope and slipped out the contents. The envelope contained only a single sheet of cardboard.
Nancy squinted as she studied the print on the cardboard in the dim light under the desk. The date of each Emerson game was listed in a column on the left. Emerson’s opponent for each game was listed in a column in the center of the page. The third column was full of numbers, that could have been final scores for each game.
She shook her head. The chart seemed pretty basic. Why would the coach bother to hide it in a secret place? She was about to slide the chart back into the envelope when the numbers at the bottom of the page caught her eye.
Hey, wait a minute—why were scores filled in for games that hadn’t been played yet?
Running her finger down the chart, Nancy checked the listing for that day’s game: Emerson versus Russell University. The numbers in the third column read: 6–10.
Nancy’s gaze lit on a word printed at the top of the third column: Spread. The numbers in that column weren’t scores at all—they were point spreads. And point spreads were what people used when they bet on sports games. Emerson was supposed to score between six and ten points in that day’s game. This was a betting sheet.
“That’s it!” she whispered.
Suddenly it all made sense. The Mitchells needed the Wildcats to lose so that they could make money gambling! Nancy had suspected that there had to be a deeper motive for the attacks on Randy. Now she knew what it was.
The coach was involved in a point-fixing operation. That was why he desperately wanted Randy out of the game, and why he had tried to convince Dean Jarvis to let Josh play. That way, he could make sure that the team finished with a score in the right range.
Then something else occurred to her. That first day, when Randy had brought her and Bess to talk to the coach, he’d been talking on the phone. What was it he’d said? Something about it all being on Sunday’s game. She’d assumed he was talking about putting all their energy or hopes into the game. Now she realized he must have been talking about money he was betting.
He’d mentioned some numbers, too. The same ones as were listed for that day’s game—6–10.
Nancy stared at the scores for Emerson’s first three games, which had already been played. I’d be willing to bet that Emerson’s final score in those games fits into the point spreads on this chart, she thought to herself. There was one thing she still didn’t understand, though. If Randy had agreed to lose the game, the coach still wouldn’t win unless he scored within the spread range. She couldn’t help wondering how Coach Mitchell had been planning to deal with that.