If you were writing a simile involving brown-nosing, you would say "brown-nosing around like" what?

I'm trying to write a paper for my English class, and I want to make a simile about this woman's really nosy cousins who are trying to explore a room she'd kept locked away in her life because she's dead now. So I've said, "They had always wondered about that room, brown-nosing about it like..." I need to finish it.