Secret Weapons
Authors: Zilpha Keatley Snyder
A Castle Court Kids Book
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
For kids and dogs everywhere
A Biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder
K
ATE NICELY CHECKED HER
watch for the umpteenth time and then twisted around to look out the back window of the car. And for the umpteenth time Fifi had to look too. Standing on her skimpy hind legs, she shoved a face full of apricot-colored fuzz under Kate’s nose and yipped mournfully. “Cool it, you dumb poodle” Kate told her. “Whining isn’t going to help.”
Kate looked at her watch again and frowned—a fierce Karate Kate scowl. She was getting more frustrated by the minute, and having a frantic poodle whining in her ear wasn’t helping any either. Fifi always hated it when Kate’s mom went off and left her in the car, but this time she seemed more hysterical than usual. And, to make matters worse, Carson, Kate’s eight-year-old worrywart of a brother, had been slightly hysterical too—at least until a few minutes ago.
“Where’s Mom, Kate? Where’s Tiffany?” Carson kept saying. “I bet the terrorists got them.” (Carson had been worrying a lot about terrorists lately.) “Do you think the terrorists got them? Do you, Kate?”
But then, all at once—silence. Carson was like that. He could be right in the middle of a major anxiety attack and suddenly—
clunk!
Sound asleep.
Kate leaned over to check and, sure enough, he was still conked out in the front seat. She checked the time again and snorted. Then, in a very refined, adult-sounding voice, she said, “We just have to pick up Tiffy’s new skirt, dear. Would you mind staying in the car to keep an eye on Carson and Fifi? We’ll be back in ten minutes.” And then in her own voice she added, “Gimme a break, Mom!”
Gimme a break, for sure! How could anybody in their right mind believe that it was possible to take a teenager like Tiffany Nicely into a clothing store and be out again in ten minutes?
Putting her hand on the door handle, Kate considered—also for the umpteenth time—going into Macy’s to look for them. She’d have gone a long time ago, except that would have meant leaving Fifi and Carson alone in the car. And a public parking lot didn’t seem like a particularly good place to leave a hysterical poodle and an unconscious kid. Peeking over the front seat again, Kate nodded. Yep.
Unconscious
was the only word for it. She sighed and sank back on the seat.
Fifi was pawing at the window now and her yips were getting louder. In desperation Kate grabbed the poodle around the middle, flipped her over, and began to scratch her stomach. Stomach scratching usually took Fin’s so-called mind off her problems, at least for a while. It worked. Fifi’s lips pulled back in a doggy grin and one hind foot began to twitch. Kate sighed. Long-term scratching could get pretty boring, but anything was better than long-term yipping. So Kate went on scratching—and Fifi went on twitching.
Several more minutes had passed when, so suddenly that it scared Kate half to death, the peacefully twitching poodle exploded into a yapping tornado, ricocheting joyfully from one side of the car to the other. And sure enough, there they were, the long-lost Nicelys—Mom and Tiffany.
“Well,” Kate said, glaring at Tiffany, who was carrying two Macy’s shopping bags and looking very pleased with herself. “That must have been the longest ten minutes in the history of the world!”
Tiffany opened both doors, pulled Carson out of the front seat, and dumped him across Kate’s lap. Carson went on sleeping.
“What’s eating you, twerp?” she said to Kate as she climbed into the front seat.
Kate folded her double-jointed little brother into a knobby blob on the seat beside her. Glaring at the back of Tiffany’s stylish hairdo, she said, “I’m late! Humongously, fatally late. That’s what’s eating me. I promised Aurora I’d be home by four to work on our science project. She probably gave up and did it herself, and our procedure rules say that we have to do it together.”
“Yuck,” Tiffany said, pretending to gag. “Everybody is so sick of hearing about your big old super-secret science-fair project. I mean, it’s been going on practically forever. When is this stupid science fair going to be over with, anyway?”
“Next month,” Kate said. “The Annual Interschool Science Fair is going to be held next month, and Aurora and I are going to win.”
Tiffany had tipped the rearview mirror and was using it to check her makeup. “Next month!” she squealed around the lipstick she was slathering on her lips. “Another whole month! I can’t stand it.”
“What’s it to you?” Kate said.
“What’s it to me? Well, for one thing, there’s the smell. Whatever secret project you guys are working on, I know one thing about it. It
stinks
.” Staring at herself in the mirror, Tiffany wiggled her lips together like a monkey eating a banana, checked the results, and then said, “And you stink! Haven’t you noticed, Mom? Whatever it is she’s doing over there at the Pappases’, it definitely makes her
stink
.”
“Tiffany dear,” Mrs. Nicely said absentmindedly as she waited for a chance to get out of the parking lot into the rush-hour traffic. “
Stink
is not a nice word to use about your sister.”
“But she does, Mom,” Tiffany said. “Haven’t you noticed? Every time she comes back from the Pappases’ lately she smells awful. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“I don’t stink,” Kate said. “We always wash our hands after—”
“After what?” Tiffany turned around quickly and gave Kate a sneaky smirk. “After what, sister dear?”
Kate smirked back. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Mrs. Nicely had been busy beating out a bright red sports car but, once out into the line of traffic, she finally got around to answering Tiffany’s question. “Noticed—a smell? Well, I did notice something the other day. But I thought it was just Carson.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the unconscious lump in the backseat. “His room, that is. I thought the smell was probably coming from Carson’s room.”
“Yeah, Tiff,” Kate said triumphantly. “That’s all it was. You were just smelling Carson’s room.” Carson’s bedroom, where he kept a huge menagerie of weird bugs and animals, always had a very strange odor.
Tiffany shook her head. “No, that wasn’t it at all. She wasn’t anywhere near Carson’s room at the time. And she definitely smelled like a garbage pail.”
“Now stop that, Tiffany,” Mrs. Nicely said firmly, and Tiffany, after giving Kate a final over-the-shoulder sneer, stopped.
Kate ignored her. She was checking the time again when Carson opened one eye and mumbled something.
“Fish,” he said. “Kate smells like dead fish.”
Kate gasped and sniffed her hands. They smelled okay to her. She glared at Carson but both his eyes were closed again. “Carson,” she whispered softly, not wanting Mom or Tiffany to overhear. “Carson?” But there was no answer. He’d either gone back to sleep, or he was doing a good job of pretending.
Kate sniffed her hands again, thoughtfully. Had she really been going around smelling like dead fish all this time? And it had been a long time. It had been way back in January that Mrs. Davis, the fifth-grade teacher at Beaumont School, started talking about the rules for the science fair. And the very first rule had been to get started right away, even though the fair was months away. So Kate and Aurora had picked out a hypothesis (which, according to Mrs. Davis, was a kind of educated guess) and started in right away on their experiments to prove that their hypothesis was correct.
That had been a long time ago. But, as Mrs. Davis kept pointing out, you needed to get an early start because some experiments took a long time to complete. Kate sighed. Mrs. Davis had certainly been right about that!
Kate sniffed again thoughtfully and, as the car turned into the Castle Court cul-de-sac, got ready to jump out and run.
A
RI PAPPAS WAS IN
his favorite observation post (the cherry tree in his front yard) writing in his notebook and waiting for the Nicelys’ Lincoln Continental to come down Castle Avenue. He’d been there for a long time. Long enough to finish his article on how many of the teachers at Beaumont actually ate the crummy stuff in the school cafeteria. And there’d even been time to get started on his next expose story, the one about the principal’s new toupee.
Besides writing, he’d also observed quite a lot of stuff. He’d watched the
Daily Journal
being delivered all around the cul-de-sac, and Mrs. Grant and Mr. Brockhurst getting home from work. He’d also noticed some strangers in a black van who drove around the cul-de-sac two times and then parked in front of the Andersons’ house. He’d checked his watch and jotted down the exact time of each observation, because that was what investigative reporters were supposed to do.
But in all that time—
no
Lincoln Continental. He was beginning to feel stiff and uncomfortable and a little bit cold when a superclean and shiny dark-blue car finally came down Castle Avenue. He nodded and smiled. Okay! Kate was here at last! Sitting back, he put his pencil behind his ear and waited for his sister to appear.
“I give her about five seconds,” he said out loud. “One, two, three, four, four and one-half …” And there she came. Just as Ari got to
five
Aurora Pappas flew out the door, skimmed down the front steps, and headed toward the street with her huge mop of curly hair floating out behind her.
Ari shook his head, wondering how Aurora did it. Either she’d been sitting near a window all this time, or else she just knew that Kate was arriving, in the strange way she had of knowing all sorts of mysterious things. But however she managed it, she came flying out the front door at almost the same moment that Kate Nicely jumped out of her mother’s car and started across the street.