Spying on Miss Muller (2 page)

“Tomorrow night we do it,” Ada said in a loud voice. “Tonight's not going to work.”

“No talking please, girls,” Miss Müller called.

The dorm was quiet. Usually we jabbered for hours after lights-out, always on the alert for the shouted word “Dicks” that echoed from dorm to dorm and was the signal that a teacher or a prefect was on her way down the corridor. We told ghost stories and played Truth or Dare with squirming worries about the boy boarders and kissing and other things we weren't too sure about, but loved to imagine. We talked about Pearl Carson, who had a reputation for being “fast,” and speculated on what exactly she did. After lights-out was always the best part of the day.

But not this day, since Miss Müller was staying around. Already Ada would be under her covers with her flashlight, reading.

Soon Maureen would start snoring. Her snoring was like a steamroller on a gravel path.

I lay watching the small lighted square of ceiling above Miss Müller's room. Our partition walls didn't go all the way to the ceiling, and hers didn't either. I used to be able to see the night sky, too, through the row of small, high windows that ran along the dorm. I'd think of my parents at home under the same moon and stars. The sky covered us all and brought us together. But now the blackout curtains were pulled tightly across the windows. A tram rattled past, bumping up the Lisburn Road on its metal tracks. Its windows would be painted black, too, the people inside like travelers in a dark ship on a dark sea.

I thought about the weekend at home, and a horrible rush of homesickness choked my chest. Why did my father promise me and promise me that he'd change and then break his word? Saturday had been awful. Remembering it, I couldn't sleep.

The mouse that came every night scampered across my floor. It rustled in the paper that had been around the chocolate.

Miss Müller's light went off.

The clock on the quad struck midnight. Its friendly face used to shine through my window, but now the window and the clock face were both dark.

I needed to go to the bathroom. It was awful to go to the bathroom at night all by myself, past the silent rooms. I was always scared. What if I met the ghost of Marjorie, the girl who had jumped from the Alveara roof years and years ago? People said her ghost slept up in the room we called the coffin room, or whispered itself along the corridors. But once I began thinking that I needed to go, there was no way to ignore it.

I got out of bed, took my flashlight, and went through the dorm. The bottoms of my slippers stuck to the floor at each step. The maids used polish on the linoleum and never rubbed it off. Maureen's snoring stopped for a moment when I tapped on her cubie wall, then started again full volume.

We shared the big bathroom with the girls from Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. It crouched in the middle of the three dorms with its row of stalls, its lines of washbasins, and the three claw-footed tubs filled with cold water in case an incendiary bomb fell in the night. Mr. Bolton, our Latin teacher, was our auxiliary fire-service officer. Two of the boy boarders helped, and Mr. Bolton had a mobile stirrup pump that he could wheel around in case of a fire. But the pump was kept outside the Latin room, and that was a long way from the girls' dormitories.

“You mean someone's supposed to grab one of those burning bombs and toss it in the bathtub?” Maureen had asked, raising her Arcs de Triomphe. “You're joking.”

“It probably wouldn't be a joke if it happened,” I said.

A blue light burned above the bathroom washbasins every night. If you peered into one of the mirrors you could scare yourself to death. Ada said you looked as if you'd been dead for a month already and the body snatchers had just dug you up.

I didn't flush when I was finished, because the tanks roared like Niagara Falls. I was out of the stall, padding under the blue light, my flashlight not on, when I saw Miss Müller. She was coming my way. Her head was bent and I knew she hadn't seen me.

For some reason I stepped back. It was daft to step back, because she had to be coming into the bathroom and she'd see me, hiding like an idiot behind the door.

But maybe she wouldn't see me.

She was carrying her flashlight, but she didn't have it switched on either.

I waited, trying to think of a strong story in case she did notice me. “I thought you were Marjorie's ghost, Miss Müller,” I'd say. But she didn't come into the bathroom after all.

I peered through the crack between the door and the wall and saw her leave the dorm and go up the two steps to Long Parlor. She still didn't switch on her light, though ahead of her Long Parlor would be dark as pitch. Her black robe and her mass of long black hair blended perfectly with the shadows around her. Where was she going in the middle of the night?

As if to agree with me, the quad clock struck one
A.M
.

My head buzzed with thoughts of spies and Nazis and short-wave radios. Should I follow her? Should I? Should I do it for the war effort, just in case?

I slipped from behind the bathroom door and moved silently behind her.

I
FOLLOWED MISS MÜLLER
through Long Parlor and along the corridor that passed the teachers' lounge and, farther on, the dining room. She was in the front hall of Alveara now, and I was hidden in the shadows behind her, listening to the faint creaks as she went up the main staircase. Where was she going? Blackness crowded in on me, hiding the gold-framed portraits of former headmistresses that lined the walls. Still I felt their cold eyes watching me.

“Who is this girl?” I imagined one of them asking. “What's she up to?”

“Please, ma'am,” I heard myself replying, “I'm following Miss Müller. I'm trying to find out if she's really a Nazi spy.”

At the top of the stairs was only Nursie's dispensary, her bedroom, and the sanitarium—the infirmary where we had to stay if we got mumps or measles or chicken pox. Nobody was sick right now, so both the san and the dispensary were locked at night. There was nothing else up there except the big stone archway with the narrow winding steps that led to the roof. This was the roof that Marjorie had jumped off long, long ago.

The steps wound past the coffin room that was locked to keep in Marjorie's ghost, we'd heard, as if a ghost can be kept anyplace it doesn't want to be kept. You could get expelled from Alveara if you as much as set foot on one of those steps. I expect they were afraid one of us would jump, too. And sometimes when we were mopey we threatened we would.

“It's me for the roof and the high jump,” we'd say.

I peered through the darkness. There was no sound at all. Nothing.

Carefully, putting my weight more on the wide wooden bannister than on the creaky stairs, I went up toward the second floor. The stairway carpet bristled under my feet. It was new carpeting, dark red, rough as horsehair.

“It makes the place look like a brothel,” Ada had said.

“What's a brothel?” I'd asked.

“A house of ill repute.”

“What's a house of ill repute?”

Ada didn't know for sure. None of us knew things like that for sure.

The landing above was dark as dark. The carpet changed there to cold linoleum. In Alveara if something couldn't be seen by visitors or parents, it was always done cheap. My teeth were rattling. Where was Miss Müller?

I felt along, past the dispensary and san doors, pressing myself against the bare whitewashed wall, hunching my shoulders, listening.

Was Miss Müller going to the roof? Why? She had that big flashlight with her. Dit-da-dit. Dit-da-dit. It would have a beam like a searchlight.

I went to the stone archway and looked up. The steps to the roof wound round and round, narrow on the inside, widening toward the wall. Ahead of me was a shaded gleam. Its white shadow lightened the wall, disappearing as the steps curved, then appearing again farther up. Miss Müller's flashlight.

My feet were ice. Shivers ran up and down my legs. I couldn't go after her. No. I couldn't go up those steps without putting on my flashlight. I'd fall, or I'd die of fright there, especially passing the coffin room.

I couldn't.

Soundlessly I turned back the way I'd come, knowing where Miss Müller had gone, hurrying, filled with panic. Expecting hands to reach for me. Expecting Marjorie. Not knowing what I expected.

Dit-da-dit. A spy. The rhythm tapped itself inside my skull.

The light from my flashlight jumped in front of my slippers.

A cockroach scuttled into a crack in the corridor wall.

Quick, quick. Through Long Parlor. I bumped the Ping-Pong table and the balls rattled off, bounced on the floor.

Snow White dorm. I'd never heard anything as wonderful as Maureen's snores. She even muttered something in her sleep, and her mattress creaked as she turned over.

I was back. I was safe.

I opened Lizzie Mag's door.

She lay tidily in the bed, her sheet not even rumpled. Lizzie Mag is the tidiest girl in the whole world.

I touched her shoulder. “Lizard. Wake up. It's Jess,” I added because my voice didn't sound like me.

She opened her eyes.

“Move over,” I whispered, and wriggled in next to her.

With my mouth close to her ear I told her about following Miss Müller. “Right now she's probably up there on the roof signaling to German planes,” I said.

“Oh, Jess. I can't believe it. Couldn't she have gone up for some other reason?”

“Marjorie went up there to jump,” I said, and Lizzie Mag's hand tightened on mine.

“No,” I whispered. “I was just joking. But something's not right.”

My frozen feet had found Lizzie Mag's hot-water bottle at the bottom of her bed. It was still beautifully warm. We filled our bottles from the big boiling urn that was left for us in the kitchen at night, and they stayed hot till morning if we didn't kick them out of bed.

“Should you tell?” Lizzie Mag asked.

“You mean tell Old Rose?” My heart quaked at the thought. Old Rose Hazelton, our headmistress, was beyond-belief scary. “Do you think I should?” I was quaking all over. “If I do, maybe Old Rose will fire her,” I said. “Even if there's a suspicion, Old Rose would probably fire her.”

I thought about the night Miss Müller had come into my room. I thought about her voice and how gentle she'd been with me. “I am so fortunate to work here. What would my mother and I have done otherwise?... Not too many schools would hire someone as a teacher who's half German.” No one would hire her if she were fired from Alveara. And what had she done, after all? Maybe she'd just gone up on the roof to get some air.

I nudged the hot-water bottle up and held it against my stomach.

“We could tell Maureen and Ada, and we could watch Miss Müller, the four of us,” Lizzie Mag said. “We could take it in turns, staying awake at night.”

“We could keep a record of where she goes and what she does,” I said. I felt better. “That's a great idea, Lizzie Mag.”

This way I'd be sharing what I knew, and it would be almost like a game—a spying game. If Miss Müller turned out to be innocent, there'd be no harm done. And if she wasn't... well, we'd face that if it happened.

L
IZZIE
MAG DROPPED OFF
to sleep and I crept back to my own cold bed. It was after two in the morning and I hadn't heard Miss Müller come back to her room. Some time later I fell asleep myself.

Morning bell wakened me. The sixth formers had to take turns staggering through the dorms every morning at half past six, swinging the bell on its long wooden handle. The noise was deafening. Immediately thoughts of Miss Müller crowded my mind. I remembered last night—the gleam of her flashlight moving up the stone steps toward the roof.

But why was the morning bell clanging like this? The bare-bulb dorm lights were on, and girls were screaming. And there was another sound, just as loud but different, a sound of wailing that came from outside.

Oh, no. That was the city air-raid siren, and I realized suddenly that the bell ringer was croaking at the top of her voice, “Air raid! Air raid!”

I fumbled out of bed. Next door Lizzie Mag was calling my name.

Doors banged and muddled voices called instructions. We'd never had an air raid before. Practices, but never the real thing.

Someone was yelling orders from the front of the dorm. It was Miss Hardcastle, the gym teacher, whose room was in Cinderella.

“Put on your coats and shoes. Bring your cases, flashlights, gas masks. You know the drill. Come on now, girls, move quickly, don't panic.”

The outside howling rose and fell like the cry of some sort of wounded beast. Every Friday at noon we heard this siren. We stuffed our ears and paid no attention. But we'd never heard it in the middle of the night before.

I had my coat on. I struggled into my shoes, found my case under the bed, pulled it out. Criminy. This case was filled with things that shouldn't be in it—movie magazines, my crystal-set radio, the photos of Ian McManus that Nancy Eden, a sixth former, had taken at a swimming meet. I was semi—in love with Ian McManus and I'd bought the pictures from Nancy for sixpence. To make room for all this I'd removed the emergency stuff from the suitcase, thinking I'd never need it. Now there was no use looking for clean underwear and socks and the things that were supposed to be in there. Maybe I could just...

There was a sudden whine like the whine of fireworks high in the sky. Then came an incredible bang that rattled the row of windows and made my brush and comb set jump from one side of the dresser to the other.

Everyone began screaming, “Bombs! Bombs!”

It was unbelievable. I had to be dreaming this. Were the Germans really bombing us?

A shrill, cutting
peep, peep
sliced through the uproar. Miss Hardcastle was blowing the gym whistle that she wore on a string around her neck. “Line up, now,” she called. “File quietly along the corridor to the basement stairs. Stay by the left wall.”