The Cheating Heart by Carolyn Keene

Tavakolian erupted. “You’d better come up with a culprit soon, or I shall ask the dean to take action against Nickerson!” He hung up abruptly.
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    After a jog and breakfast with Ned on Monday morning, Nancy took a long, restorative shower in the Theta Pi house. She passed Brook in the hallway. “I’m off to the bookstore—catch you later!” Brook called out with a wave.
    Back in the room, Nancy settled down on the bed to make some phone calls. After her last conversation with Professor Tavakolian, she knew more than ever that she’d need concrete evidence to convince him that Ned wasn’t guilty.
    First she dialed Dean Jarvis to report what she’d learned about Steve Groff and Carrie Yu. Next, she called home. Her father, Carson Drew, was at his law office, but she spoke to Hannah Gruen, the Drews’ long-time housekeeper. Nancyexplained that she would be staying at Emerson a day or two longer than she’d planned.
    Just as she hung up, the phone rang again. It was Ned. “So what’s the agenda for today?” he asked.
    â€œCan you come with me to Ivy Hall?” Nancy asked, drying her hair with a towel. “I’d like you to walk me through what happened last Monday.”
    â€œAt your service,” Ned said promptly. “I’ll stop by for you in ten minutes, at noon.”
    Ms. Belzer waved hello as Nancy and Ned walked into the empty department office a half hour later. “If anyone comes in looking for me, I’m going to return these to the library. I’ll be back in ten minutes,” Ms. Belzer explained, carrying a pile of books out the door. Nancy nodded.
    Glancing around, Ned began his story. “Okay. I stopped by Tavakolian’s office just after three o’clock. He gave me the test—it was ten pages long. I brought it down here and put the first couple of pages through the photocopier.” He moved through the archway into the photocopier nook. “Soon I had to reload the paper tray—two hundred copies use up a lot of paper.
    â€œThen, after I started the copies of page three, I noticed page four was missing,” he went on. “So I went back to the professor’s office.”
    Nancy followed Ned back out into the hallway and down to Professor Tavakolian’s office, whichwas locked shut. “You came down here, but he wasn’t in,” Nancy prompted Ned.
    â€œRight,” Ned replied. “I found the disk on his desk and took it back to the department office.” They went back up the hallway. “Ms. Belzer let me boot up the disk on her screen,” Ned finished, standing before her desk.
    â€œHow did you know which file it was?” Nancy asked, trying to visualize the scene.
    â€œThere was only one file on the disk, called Frosh Lit Test,” Ned recalled. “I scrolled through the file until I found the missing page, then I printed it out.”
    Nancy thought a minute. “Were the answers in the same file as the test questions?”
    Ned nodded. “When I scrolled through the file, I saw the list of answers, at the end of the test questions.”
    â€œOkay. Now tell me how you printed out the missing page, step by step,” Nancy asked.
    Ned explained patiently, “I scrolled through the file to the section that represented the missing page. I highlighted it on screen. Then I hit a series of buttons to tell the printer to print just that page.” He pointed to the buttons on Ms. Belzer’s keyboard.
    Nancy looked around. “You printed it out on this printer on the table by the window?” She paced around the bank of file cabinets over to the window as she spoke.
    Ned nodded, following her. “I went to take thesheet of paper out of the printer. Then I returned to Ms. Belzer’s computer, hit the button to exit from the file—”
    â€œYou mean you left the computer for a minute, with the test still on