“Whoever it was is gone,” she said, letting out a sigh. “I just hope Joy didn’t hear….”
“Too late for that,” a voice spoke up right next to Nancy and George.
Joy stood on the path right next to them. Her hands were poised on the hips of her red parka, and her backpack was slung over one shoulder. In her eyes was an ice-cold glare that swept over Nancy and George like an arctic blast.
“Take some advice and quit following me,” Joy said coolly. “If you don’t, you’ll be sorry.”
4
You’ll Be Sorry
Nancy faced Joy squarely. “I’m sorry if we scared you,” Nancy said. “It’s just that …” Now that she and George had been discovered, she decided to be direct. “We think someone may be trying to rig the Clues Challenge.”
“You mean, cheat?” Joy’s expression remained cool.
“Someone put some crushed pills on our dessert tonight,” George said. “Plus, we’re pretty sure someone sent Mr. Lorenzo a threatening message telling him to hand over the answers to the challenge.”
Joy tightened her grip on her backpack strap and stared down her nose at Nancy and George. “What does that have to do with me?” she asked
“We’re just trying to make sure the Clues Challenge gets off to a fair start,” Nancy said. “We saw you talking to Mr. Lorenzo, and—”
“So you decided to follow me? How fair is that?” Joy snapped.
“You have to admit, this is a weird place to be, so late at night,” George said, picking her way over the snow to join Nancy and Joy on the path. “Were you meeting someone?”
Joy pressed her mouth into a tight line. Her eyes flew over the snowy landscape, as if she were searching for answers in the night shadows. Finally she faced Nancy and George once more and said, “What I do is none of your business. Period.”
Shooting one last glare at them, Joy turned and walked back down the path toward the West Campus.
George brushed the snow from her parka and jeans, staring after Joy. “Well, she’s not going to win any Miss Congeniality awards.”
“We obviously got in the way of something, and she didn’t like it,” Nancy said. “Too bad she heard us before we could figure out what it was.”
As they headed back toward Ned’s frat, they saw Joy ahead of them. Her silhouette moved farther and farther away, until it disappeared down the path to the West Campus. Just as Nancy and George were turning onto the path themselves, they spotted two familiar figures walking toward them from town.
“Ned! Grant!” Nancy waved, stopping to wait where the path forked off.
“We found out what the pills are,” Ned said, holding up the plastic bag of white tablets. “Comptamine.”
George stared at him blankly. “Run that by me again, only in English this time?” she asked.
“It’s a muscle relaxant,” Grant explained. “The pharmacist told us it’s used to control pain and muscle spasms resulting from injuries.”
“Say, shoulder injuries?” Nancy inquired. She slipped her hand into the crook of Ned’s arm as they continued toward the West Campus.
Ned nodded. “Shoulder, neck, back … that kind of thing. The pharmacist says we’re lucky no one ate the stuff. Comptamine has a tranquilizing effect, so it probably would have made us sluggish in the Clues Challenge.”
“Wow,” said Nancy. “So whoever put that stuff in our tiramisu really was trying to slow us down.”
While they walked, Nancy and George told Ned and Grant about their runin with Joy. When they were done, Grant let out a whistle that echoed in the cold night air.
“Joy must have been meeting the other person you heard—the one who ran away,” he said. “And I bet they were up to something underhanded. Why else would the other person run away like that?”
“Do you think she was meeting Dennis?” Ned asked.
“Maybe,” Nancy said. “But why would he and Joy meet on the sly? They’re not even on the same team,” she said. She blew out a cloud of breath, thinking. “Still, we should try to find out what medication Dennis took for his injury. And what he and Joy know about computers.”
“Plus, we should tell Mr. Lorenzo about the pills,” George added. “Maybe he’ll tell us what Joy said to him that made him so uncomfortable.”
“Most of all,” Grant said, angling a warning glance at George, Nancy, and Ned, “we’d better watch our steps. Whoever spiked that dessert means business.”
Nancy shivered involuntarily. She was glad to see the green-and-white banner that hung over the front door of Omega Chi Epsilon a minute later.
“I’ll drive you and George back to Centennial,” Ned offered.
He stomped over a pile of snow to the curb, where his sedan was parked. Nancy stayed where she was. She glanced down the row of fraternities, toward a guy who was headed up the front walk a few buildings down from Omega Chi Epsilon.
“Isn’t that Dennis?” she said.
“Looks like him.” Ned glanced up, then unlocked and opened the passenger door. “I guess he just got back from the Eatery.”
Nancy went to the car, slipped in the front seat, and moved over to make room for George. “But Dennis left the restaurant an hour ago,” she said. “He told me he was going straight back to the frat to sleep.”
“Hmm,” George said. Her breath clouded up the windshield as she leaned forward to watch Dennis disappear inside Sigma Pi. “I guess he took a detour.”
“Yeah. But where?” Nancy wondered. “And why did he lie about it?”
“Remind me why I volunteered to get up before it’s even light out on a freezing cold Saturday morning?” George yawned, stomping her boots on the packed snow as she and Nancy walked toward the bell tower.
