Spying on Miss Muller (12 page)

“Oh, no,” Lizard moaned.

Behind me I heard Ada whisper, “Eat it, Jessie. Quick. That's what spies do.” I imagined the pulp clogging up my intestines if I ate it. I just couldn't. I sat with the letter under my hand.

“If Mohammed won't come to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed,” Carol announced, and came stalking toward me.

I scrunched up the letter and let it fall on the floor. Lizard kicked it quickly under the desk.

“Pick that up.” Carol's voice was white with rage.

Lizard bent under cover of the desk. She gave me a despairing glance.

Carol held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

I gave it.

As she walked back to her desk, I saw Carol uncrumpling my letter from Ian. My first-ever love letter that was so wonderful and so mine, not hers.

“Mean old biddy,” Maureen hissed.

Carol whirled. “Who said that?”

“I did,” Maureen said.

“One hundred lines. ‘I will not talk in study hall.' ”

“We'll help, Maureen,” Ada whispered.

“Who said that?” Carol was beside herself.

“I did,” Ada said.

“Another hundred lines from you, ‘I will not talk in study hall.' ”

“We'll help, Ada,” Lizard said.

Carol was about to have apoplexy. Before she could ask her famous question, there was a chorus of “We'll help” all around study hall.

Carol's apoplexy was about to choke her. “One hundred lines from everybody, due tomorrow. If I had the authority to give you detention, I would give it.”

“You bet she would,” someone said.

“Who said that?” Carol asked.

“We did,” a dozen voices answered.

“Make that two hundred lines for tomorrow—from everybody.”

Carol had reached her desk. She frowned down at Ian's crumpled letter, then she frowned at me. “This is very serious,” she said. “I think we would all benefit from hearing this epistle and recognizing its implications.”

“Please, Carol.” Lizzie Mag was standing, her face flushed pink. Lizard is not one for speaking up, so I was astonished. “It is not fair to read other people's mail,” she said.

“This letter couldn't have been too private,” Carol said. “I see it is addressed ‘Jessie Drumm,' but you were all reading it.” Carol was skinny and her red-checked frock made her look like a brick chimney and just as immovable.

“We had Jessie's permission,” Lizard said in her little voice, so little now that Carol had to crane her head to hear. “Excuse me, Carol, but you don't have Jessie's permission.”

“I don't need permission for anything that goes on in my study hall,” Carol said in the most superior voice I'd ever heard. “Sit down, Lizzie Mag.”

Lizzie sat. I gave her a smile of thanks, but it was pretty weak. I was dying.

Lizard nudged me and whispered, “Look, Jessie.”

I looked. Every single girl in study hall had her fingers in her ears, even Mean Jean Ross. Everyone except Greta Ludowski. She was staring around study hall, very alert and with a strange questioning look on her face. Now everyone was humming. The room sounded like a busy beehive.

Carol's mouth moved. I think she said, “Take your fingers out of your ears this minute and be quiet,” but it was hard to tell. She glared at us. Then she read the letter, but all the words were drowned in the buzzing.

At the end she sat down. She put the envelope on the edge of the desk and motioned for me to come get it.

I did.

As I walked back, all fingers came out of all ears and the humming stopped.

“Get on with your homework,” Carol Murchison said in a voice so cold it frosted the air around her face. “And don't think you've heard the last of this,” she added.

“Tee hee,” Ada whispered.

If that was a quotation, I didn't recognize it. I knew Carol had heard it, but she didn't want to start anything new. For the moment she was defeated.

I wriggled my fingers behind me in all directions to thank my friends, but I did it secretly so the wrath of Carol wouldn't fall on us again. Then I opened my geometry book.

It was bad sometimes being a boarder, but sometimes it was nice. Ada said we'd stay best friends all our lives because we were like sisters, only better. Lizzie Mag said when we were grown up her parents would be home from India and we'd all live on the same street and she'd be auntie to my children and I'd be auntie to hers. And we'd love them to bits. “A big, big family,” she said, “all of us.”

I smiled over my isosceles triangle. Auntie Jessie. Uncle Ian.

Carol was biting her nails and looking as if she'd swallowed a crab. She'd tell all the other prefects about my letter from Ian. The thought made me cringe, but not for long. As Maureen would say, “Jealous, jealous, jealous.” I bet none of the prefects had ever had a love letter from someone as smashing as Ian McManus.

I finished my geometry and started on my two hundred lines. Thirty-two done. “I will not talk in study hall. I will not talk...” When ending bell rang, Carol stood up.

“I'm supposed to remind all of you that last night we had an air raid. There could be another one tonight.”

“Oh boy... boys!” Maureen whispered behind me. But I was remembering the direct hit and the house that had disappeared and the man who had had to go to Purdysburn. The idea of another raid, even if it meant being kissed again, wasn't so great. There had to be an easier way.

“You are to be sure to have your emergency cases properly packed,” Carol went on. “Miss Rose says there may be an inspection
anytime,
and contraband found in any case will be confiscated and the girl punished.”

She looked with satisfaction around the room. “I am to remind you also that if we do go to the shelters,
there is to be no unseemly behavior. Any girl caught doing what Pearl Carson did—”

Ada interrupted. “Could you please tell us what she did, Carol? We aren't sure, and if we're to avoid—”

“Be quiet, Ada Sinclair.” Carol glared at us silently, then said. “All of you, two hundred lines tomorrow night. You may leave.”

“Thank you, Carol.” We sounded meek as mice but we were triumphant mice.

We clattered our belongings together and headed down the corridor.

“It was Maureen who started the ear plugging and humming,” Lizard said, patting Maureen on the back.

I gave Maureen a quick hug. “Thanks, Mo.”

“Imagine our girl having that much gumption,” Ada said. “Have you been taking gumption lessons, Mo?”

“I have natural ability. I just keep it hidden,” Maureen said.

I was looking around for Greta, and when I saw her walking along as usual, I whispered to the others to go on. “I have to talk to her,” I said.

Greta glanced at me when I caught up to her but she didn't speak.

“I'd like to have my nail file back,” I said.

She didn't answer. Once, when she first came, I would have thought she didn't understand, but now I knew she understood perfectly.

“It was interesting what happened in study hall tonight,” Greta said in a dreamy kind of voice. “Dictators win in the beginning, but if everyone stands together, if everyone fights together, then a dictator can be defeated. That is what we hope.”

She was walking fast and I had trouble keeping up. The cords of my dressing gown had come untied and I was tripping on them. There was no way I could retie them unless I stopped and put down my books.

“Listen,” I said. “I know you took my nail file and I know why. If you don't give it back, we won't come for you when we follow Miss Müller. We're not planning on hurting her, we just want to find out what she's doing.”

Greta smiled. “We
will
find out,” she said. “And I will be there, whether you come for me or not. I promise you that.”

P
ARTWAY ALONG
the corridor there was a little room that we called halfway house. We could stop there on our way back to the dorm from study hall and get a glass of milk from the big white jugs the maids left out. The first and second and third formers were dismissed from their study halls before we were. So halfway house was always a mess of used glasses and half-empty jugs. There were always pools of spilled milk on the table and on the floor, too.

I stopped at the room, but Greta went on. I didn't think we had anything more to say to each other.

Lizzie Mag and Maureen and Ada were waiting for me outside the door, and I told them what Greta had said.

Lizzie Mag frowned. “But what did she mean, she'd be there whether we came for her or not? How would she know which night?”

“Maybe she means she'll be there in spirit, like God,” Maureen suggested.

We stared.

“Well, you know when he said, ‘Lo I am with you always,' and I asked Reverend Patton in Bible school how that could be, and Reverend Patton said it was God's spirit that was with us always.”

We were aghast. Ada made the Catholic cross sign on herself and said, “You'll be struck dead, Maureen Campbell, comparing Greta Ludowski to God.”

“I never...” Maureen began.

“Mo didn't mean it like that,” Lizzie Mag said quickly. “She just meant Greta would be with us in her thoughts, because of her father.”

“Of course that's what I meant,” Maureen said. “You are so dense, Ada. Do you think I'd be rude to God? I think God is great.” She looked at us, baffled.

“We know, Maureen.” I turned to Lizzie Mag. “You did promise you'd go and get Greta when we follow Miss Müller, but you won't, will you?”

Lizard shook her head. “Not if Greta's going to hurt her.”

“Well, we're on our own again,” I told the others. But I was remembering Greta's voice, the way she smiled, and I wasn't so sure.

“I want milk,” Ada said, “if those greedy little kids have left any.”

“Phyllis Hollister said if I came right away, she'd give me some of her eye-bag stuff,” Maureen told us. “I'm going. See you in the dorm.”

The three of us went in. Halfway house was crowded and right away everyone began asking me about Ian's letter.

“Come on, Jessie, share. We know it was from him. Did he say he loved you?” They moaned and closed their eyes and staggered about, holding their hearts and knocking over the almost-empty milk pitchers.

It turned out Mean Jean Ross hadn't plugged her ears all the way. She fingered her big silver cross and announced, “He told her he liked kissing her, I can tell you that much.”

“He also said Mean Jean Ross has a mouth like a barbed-wire fence and no boy boarder would be caught dead kissing
her,”
Ada said quickly. “Pass it on.”

“He did not, and same to your mouth and double it over,” Mean Jean shouted.

“Let's go,” I whispered to Lizard. The three of us picked up our books and gas masks and started back to the dorm. My fingers smoothed Ian's letter in my dressing-gown pocket and I thought it was sort of nice to be teased about it. As far as I knew, and I
would
know, I was the first in my form to get a letter from a boy. It made me feel special.

“Maybe tonight will be the night Miss Müller goes,” Lizzie Mag said as we walked along the second half of the corridor.

I nodded.

“Well, thank heaven we're not going to have to watch the Fräulein and Greta, too,” Ada said. “That would have been a muck-up.” She wrinkled her nose and stopped. “What is that smell?”

Afterward we decided we'd smelled the smell the second we entered Long Parlor, but we were so busy thinking of Greta and Miss Müller that nobody had said anything about it.

“It must be Maureen's stuff.” Lizzie was trying to wriggle her nose into the collar of her dressing gown.

“That is just about the worst smell I ever smelled,” Ada said. “Except once when a rat died in our storeroom behind a bag of meal and we didn't find it for three weeks.”

“Don't make it worse,” I begged.

We dropped our books and gas masks on the dorm floor and Ada bellowed for Maureen. She came out of her cubie looking guilty. Under each eye was a thick plaster of sticky, shiny black.

“Heaven preserve us!” Ada clamped her fingers around her nose.

“It's just sulfur and molasses and oils... and Phyllis said she added a little bit of butter because the mixture wouldn't spread and—”

“The butter's spoiled, Mo,” Lizard croaked. Her face had turned a pretty shade of leaf green.

Ada pushed past Maureen. “Where is the stuff?”

Maureen rushed after her. “It's in my soap dish, but don't you dare touch it. I paid Phyllis two shillings for it.”

“You what?” I said. “That was supposed to be your contribution for this week's war bonds.”

Ada came out of Mo's cubie holding the soap dish at arm's length.

“I promise I'll get a jar for it tomorrow,” Maureen said. “Phyllis had hers in a jar. It's probably smelly because the air has some chemical effect.”

“It's
steaming
,” Lizard whispered.

“It's
bubbling
,” I said, trying not to breathe.

Ada dashed to the bathroom with Maureen on her heels. We heard the lavatory flush and then the tap running full tilt.

Lizard groaned. “But the smell's still here. It's awful.”

“No windows to open,” I moaned.

“Well, it's not on Maureen anymore,” Ada said, pushing Mo in front of her. Maureen's face had been washed clean. “I told her we'll pay back her two shillings among us, not that she deserves it.”

Lizzie Mag had picked up her lesson book and fanned it hard in front of her face.

“I know,” I said. “Let's put on our gas masks.”

We pulled them out of their cases and wiggled them on, breathing in their rubbery stuffiness, pointing at each other and laughing smothered laughs. We looked like a bunch of black, long-snouted pigs.