Behind the Curtain Read Online Free PDF

Stacy.
    But they couldn’t find it.
    “Maybe it’s in Sean’s room,” Stacy said. “He got a new DVD player.”
    “Your parents gave him a DVD player?”
    Stacy shook her head. “Some friend of his didn’t want it anymore.” She pressed a button and the robot came over.
    “I’ll go look for the DVD,” Ingrid said.
    “Okay,” said Stacy, reaching for another Coke.
    Ingrid went upstairs. Sean’s room was at the end of the second floor. Like Ty’s, it was a horrible mess, the smell a little off. But there were differences. For example, posters of sports heroes covered Ty’s walls. Sean’s were bare, except for bits of masking tape where posters had once hung. Just a little thing, a trifle, but it had to mean something. Sherlock Holmes’s whole method was based on the observation of trifles.
    Where to even begin a search in this squalor? Ingrid chose the bottom drawer of Sean’s desk. Was that really where he’d keep the Happy Gilmore DVD? Probably not. There was just something about that bottom drawer, the hardest to get to.
    The bottom drawer of Sean Rubino’s desk was crammed—packets and packets of wrinkled homework, most undone or partly done; old magazines, all of them about cars and drag racing; and down at the bottom a baseball glove. Ingrid remembered that Sean had once played Little League. Wasn’t there some story about the field getting torn up late one night? She took out the glove, put it on, went to punch her fist in the pocket.
    Ingrid paused, fist in midair. A roll of money lay in the pocket of the glove. A big fat roll, like a gambler might have in some movie. She counted it: $1,649.
    “Hey,” called Stacy, coming down the hall. “You find it?”
    Ingrid saw herself as others, even a best friend, would see her now—a snoop—and made a snap decision not to tell Stacy, at least not yet. Maybe all that money was somehow perfectly innocent. And if not, wouldn’t it be better to first get a few more facts? Theorizing without data was a capital mistake, as Holmes told Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
    Ingrid folded the glove around the wad of money, stuck it back in the bottom of the drawer, exactly as she’d found it.
    “Let’s watch something else,” Ingrid said.
    “ Fawlty Towers ?” said Stacy, coming into the room.
    “Sounds good.”
    Stacy went over to Sean’s TV, popped a DVD out of the player. “ Happy Gilmore ’s right here,” she said, looking at Ingrid in surprise.
    “Oh,” said Ingrid, all at once feeling very bad.

four
    I NGRID HAD A DREAM she dreamed over and over, all about being in a snug boat on seas that sometimes got rough. She was dreaming it now, maybe a little late even for a Saturday morning, when her door burst open.
    “Phone,” said Ty, and then came a thump on the pillow.
    Ingrid opened her eyes. The portable phone lay on the pillow and Ty was gone. Beside her on the bed, Nigel opened his eyes too, saw how light it was, and quickly closed them. Mister Happy, her teddy bear and no favorite of Nigel’s, was jammed into the tiny space between the bed and the wall. She waskind of jammed there as well. Nigel had plenty of room.
    Ingrid reached for the phone. “Hello?”
    “Ingrid? It’s Chloe.”
    Ingrid sat up. Chloe Ferrand calling her? Had this ever happened before? No. They’d been friends years ago, back in the time of being too young to make phone calls. In fact, Mister Happy was a present from Chloe, who had an identical teddy bear she’d named Mister Bumpy. But that was then. Now Chloe, the most beautiful thirteen-year-old girl in Echo Falls, with genuine modeling jobs to prove it, went to Cheshire Country Day and they seldom saw each other. Plus when they did, there was even some bad feeling between them, like on the set of the Alice in Wonderland production, when Ingrid ended up with the title role.
    “Hi,” Ingrid said.
    “Busy today?” said Chloe.
    “Huh?”
    “Your schedule.”
    Ingrid didn’t really have a schedule on