Gabby Duran and the Unsittables (3 page)

“In your
what
?!” Romina wailed.

“Actually, it
was
in my belly,” Ali amended, “until…”

She mimed flushing a toilet, making the whooshing and gurgling sounds with her mouth. Romina’s jaw dropped.

“Oooh,” Adam clucked. “That’s a toughie. Maybe we should call special effects? They blow up buildings; I bet they can blow off the handcuffs.”

“
Blow
off?!” Romina cried.

Gabby bent down and whispered to the girls. “This is gonna take a while. How ’bout we go play?”

The triplets nodded eagerly and, like little ducklings, followed Gabby to the back of the soundstage. Everyone around stopped and stared. It was the first time since the shoot started that the
tiny trio wasn’t wreaking havoc on the set.

“It’ll never last,” the director muttered to his assistant. “Within the hour they’ll be back ruining the shoot, or I’ll give you my sports car.”

Much to the delight of the assistant, who drove away that night in a shiny red convertible, Gabby had a plan. She waited until she and the girls were out of earshot of anyone else, then crouched
down low and beckoned them close, all the while glancing around as if to make sure no one was listening in.

The girls were curious—what was Gabby trying to hide? They huddled nearer to her.

“I’m actually here on a mission,” Gabby admitted, pushing a lock of brown curls behind her ear, “and I need the three of you to help.”

“A spy mission?” Ila asked.

Gabby nodded. “A
secret
spy mission. But it’ll only work if we stay
supremely
quiet, and don’t let anyone see us for even a second.”

The triplets nodded. This was obviously very important.

“Somewhere in these halls”—she gestured behind her, away from the set, to the hallways dotted with dressing rooms, catering stations, working carpenters, prop collections, and
wardrobe areas—“is a wooden turtle. Not just any turtle—a secret spy turtle filled with secret spy codes. Our mission is to find it.”

The girls were entranced. They hung on Gabby’s every word as she pulled from her purple knapsack the tools of their spy trade: little notebooks and pens they’d use to draw pictures
and make notes about everything they saw. She gave them the plan: they’d go into each room together, quiet as mice, then spread out and scope the scene without touching a thing or letting
anyone know they were there. They’d communicate with hand signals, which Gabby took time to teach them well. After each new room they’d huddle together and whisper about what they
found, discuss their upcoming plan of action for turtle hunting in the next room, then continue on with the search.

For thirty minutes the triplets sat rapt. Then they started their mission.

It went flawlessly.

For the rest of the afternoon, the girls and Gabby were as invisible as whispers. Pointedly avoiding any area where they might interfere with the movie shoot, Gabby led the team of super-spies
through every room. They made no sounds and disturbed nothing. They took copious notes in their notebooks and exchanged intricate hand signals conveying their many suspicions about everyone they
saw. Sure, the crew members looked harmless, but on closer inspection they were clearly secret-spy-turtle-thieves mired in deception and conspiracy. Not even their dad was beyond suspicion.

Gabby waited until the shooting day was almost over, then pulled the girls together to share their clues in hushed whispers.

“What do you think?” she asked, pulling out her own pencil and notebook to compile their thoughts. “Any idea where the turtle is?”

“I know! I know!” Ila jumped up and down and waved her arm in the air. “It was stolen by the woman in black!”

“One of the stagehands,” Gabby scribbled, nodding knowingly. “I wonder what plans she has for the turtle’s secret codes.”

“Not one of the stagehands!” Ila said. “I mean the
old
woman in black!”

Gabby’s pencil froze. “The
old
woman in black?”

“Uh-huh,” Ali agreed. “I saw her, too. She was
really
old. And she stood super-tall, like she was being stretched up to the sky.”

Gabby remembered the old woman who stared at her back in her neighborhood.
She
stood tall like that, too.

And so did a million wicked stepmothers in kids’ movies, Gabby reminded herself. Plus, the triplets were little—their idea of “really old” probably wasn’t the same
as her own.

Gabby forced herself to put silly ideas out of her head and keep writing. “Okay,” she said, “this is good stuff. What else can you tell me about the old woman in
black?”

“She was like magic,” Lia whispered. “She’d be in a room and I’d see her out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked right at her…
poof!
”

“She disappeared? Like in a puff of smoke?” Gabby asked the question hopefully. If the woman poofed in and out of existence, she was definitely a figment of the girls’
imaginations.

“No!” Lia retorted. “She wasn’t magic, she had
skills
.”

“Ninja skills!” Ila added, and demonstrated with a whirling air kick that landed her flat on her bottom. It didn’t faze her. She rolled to her knees and pointed a tiny finger
in Gabby’s face. “And she knew
you
were our leader. Every time I saw her, she was staring right at you.”

“Like she was tracking your every move!” Ali added eagerly.

“And wouldn’t rest until she’d followed you to the ends of the earth!” Lia finished.

Gabby clutched her pencil so tightly it snapped in her grip. “Ow!” she yelped as a splinter sliced into her finger.

“Gabby!”

“Are you okay?”

“Can we help?”

The three girls huddled around Gabby, concerned. While they examined her shaking hand, Gabby nervously scanned the room, half-expecting the old woman in black to leap out of the shadows and
attack her.

No one was there. No one unexpected, at least. Just the regular crowd of people working on the movie; all of them too busy to pay attention to Gabby and the girls.

Gabby took a deep breath. It had to be a coincidence. Even if the girls
had
seen a black-clad old woman around the soundstage, that didn’t mean it was the same woman Gabby had seen
at home. The woman could still be a stagehand. Or she could be the person Gabby thought she saw reflected in the security guard’s glasses. Gabby had jumped to the conclusion that the
reflection was the woman from her neighborhood, but it made far more sense that she was actually an extra, or a caterer, or even an Adam Dent fan who snuck her way onto the set. That wouldn’t
explain her following Gabby around and staring at her, but that part could easily be the girls’ imagination.

Gabby concentrated on doctoring her splinter. She let the girls help, and by the time they were done and the stage manager called a wrap, Gabby felt much more relaxed. She made a show of
studying the clues the girls had gathered all day and determined that according to their calculations, the turtle with the secret spy codes should be in a prop cannon—the same prop cannon in
which Gabby had secretly hidden it earlier in the day. The triplets’ screams of delight when they found it brought their dad running.

“Hey!” he exclaimed. “There you are! Is everything okay? You guys were so quiet all day I got worried!”

“We found the turtle!” Ila cried.

“The old ninja woman wanted it, but we thwarted her!” Ali added.

Lia held the turtle high in triumph. “Now we can save the planet from Ninja-Nana Annihilation!”

As the girls jumped and cheered, Adam scrunched his face in thought. “Ninja-Nana Annihilation?” He paused a second, then shouted out to the director, “Reggie! Come here! I
think we need to do some rewrites!” Then he wrapped Gabby in a huge hug. “Thanks a million for today, Gabby. You’re a lifesaver. You’ll do it again?”

“I don’t know…” Gabby sucked on her teeth like it was a tough call. “Only if the girls
really
want—”

“YES!!!” they chorused, hurling themselves on her for a giant group hug that they only gave up when Gabby threatened to use her psychic freckles to find their ultimate tickle spots.
As the girls squealed and ran off, Romina came over to escort Gabby back to the waiting limo.

As the car sped away, Gabby sprawled back in the seat. She giggled, imaging a
Decimator Four
filled with evil old women doing backflips while chasing secret wooden turtles. She’d
have to take her friend Satchel to see it in 3-D. The two of them loved cheesy movies, the splatterier the better. They’d been watching them together since birth. Or more precisely, since a
week after their same-day births, when their maternity-ward-roomie moms had gotten together to share labor videos. Ugh.

The limo took Gabby to the Bonita-Dents’ private jet, where Gabby spent the flight feasting on steak and thick-cut fries. The meal was so giant, Gabby insisted Amelia, the flight
attendant, share it with her, and the two chatted happily for most of the flight. When Amelia had to prepare for landing, Gabby leaned back and hummed the solo for Friday afternoon’s concert
while she pantomimed the finger motions on an imaginary French horn. It wouldn’t be as effective as Madison’s practice session, but it was something. She got so lost in the notes that
she went from the airplane to the limo waiting to take her home in a musical daze. Only when she finished humming the solo did she look up to smile apologetically to the driver.

“Hi, Alber—” she started.

But her voice stuck in her throat when she realized the cold, dark eyes staring at her in the rearview mirror weren’t Albert’s at all.

Someone else was driving the car.

An old woman, dressed in black.

And the woman did
not
look pleased.

G
abby lunged for the door and tried to throw it open, but the lock clicked shut.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the woman’s icy voice said. “Unwise to leap from a moving car. And you struck me as so intelligent.”

The woman was right. Jumping from the car would be highly hazardous to Gabby’s health and her chances of getting Friday’s solo, which would be impossible to play from a hospital bed.
Still, Gabby couldn’t peel her hands off the door handle. She was frozen in place. Only her eyes moved, to stare back at the face in the rearview mirror.

It wasn’t a coincidence this time. It couldn’t be. That face was the same one she saw reflected in the security guard’s glasses in Florida. The same one she saw in her own
neighborhood that morning.

But how? And why?

Gabby took a deep breath and tried to slow her thundering heart. She was stuck in this car now, at the mercy of this stalker, and she’d be much better equipped to escape if she stayed
calm. She forced a laugh and said, “Sorry about that. I guess you startled me. I thought you’d be someone else.”

“Intriguing,” the woman said with a nod. “Because so far, Gabby Duran,
you
are
exactly
who I’d hoped you’d be. Aside from the near lemminglike leap to
oblivion, of course. That I must admit was disappointing.”

Gabby was stunned. “You know my name.”

“I know many things.”

Outside the window, Gabby watched her exit whiz by. “Um…I think we need to turn around,” Gabby said. “I live that way.”

As she spoke, she eased open her purple knapsack. If she moved slowly and didn’t get the woman’s attention, she could sneak out her phone and dial 911.

“You can call the authorities if you’d like,” the woman said. “But I have no intention of harming you. Quite the opposite. I have a proposition for you. One I believe
you’ll find intriguing, and one you won’t get to hear should you report this event to another human being. Or electronic device, in case you imagined that was a loophole.”

Gabby
had
thought that was a loophole. If she texted her mom, she wouldn’t
technically
be reporting directly to another human being. So much for that idea.

“You were in front of my house this morning,” Gabby said. “And at the studio in Florida.”

“And cats bathe by licking themselves, and Henry the Eighth had six wives,” the woman sighed. “Would you like to recite more facts I already know?”

Gabby felt chastened, even though she was fairly sure she was the one being wronged in this situation. She sat a little straighter and challenged the woman. “What if I don’t want to
hear your proposition? What if I tell you to immediately turn this car around and take me home?”

“Well, I certainly hope you’d have the decency to ask rather than tell me, but if you indeed made such a request, I would do just that. After admonishing you for carelessly splitting
infinitives, of course. But then you’d never know what you’d missed.”

Gabby leaned back in her seat, considering. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She supposed she should be. An interstate stalker who spoke in cryptic promises and drove Gabby away from home
without asking first was pretty much a textbook call-for-help situation. Yet the more she spoke with the old woman, the less frightened she became. The woman’s voice had the clipped tones of
a no-nonsense boarding school headmistress. It was the kind of voice that didn’t suffer fools and wouldn’t waste time on lies. If she said she wouldn’t harm Gabby and would take
her home if she asked, Gabby believed her.