Spying on Miss Muller (8 page)

And no wonder. Two mornings a week Greta saw a psychiatrist, the word always whispered among us behind our hands. After we found out, we pretty much stayed away from her.

Once when we went for a ramble by the river, Lizzie Mag asked Greta to be her walk partner. I was really hurt and mad, too, because Lizard and I were always partners in the crocodile when we walked two by two by two in a long, winding line. I ended up having to walk with Marion Kelleher, who was a swot, studying day and night. She spent the whole ramble telling me why Pythagoras was a genius and how numbers became for him the ultimate way to interpret the universe. As if I cared.

But I couldn't ever stay mad at Lizzie Mag for long. When we were friends again, she told me Greta hadn't said one word during the whole ramble. Lizzie Mag talked to her every time she saw her, though, even after the rest of us had given up trying. Lizard was always nice to everyone. I thought of her inside assembly now, saving a seat for me, defending Mean Jean Ross if Maureen and Ada were saying bad stuff about her.

Lizzie Mag defended everyone. It wasn't fair about her parents. How could they have a tug-of-war with poor little Lizard in between them? Bad enough having them so far away in India, but now this.

I glanced sideways at Greta sitting on her schoolbook, staring across the wet quad. What was she thinking? About her parents? Poland? What? It was so sad for her, all of it.

I gave a little cough to remind her I was there and said conversationally, “Well, I hope we won't have any more air raids.” Lizzie Mag would have been proud of me.

I wasn't expecting an answer, and I was startled when Greta said casually: “The Germans like to bomb.”

I nodded. I'd seen her in the shelter and I'd known she wasn't too impressed with our air raid.

Inside assembly hall they were now into another verse of the closing hymn. The cello was way off key, sounding like a seal barking. “Thanks for mercies past received,” the Alveara students sang with gusto.

Greta might be wondering what mercies she'd received. Well, she
did
get out of Poland. I was pleased that she'd said something to me. It was a kind of crack in her armor and probably a good sign. It would also be something else to tell the girls in the dorm later. Way down the list, after my other discoveries of the day. But maybe the air raid had brought Greta closer to us. After all, we all hated the Germans, and last night the war had come to our city, too.

“Listen.” I leaned toward her trying to open up the crack a little more. “We have reason to think Miss Müller might be a German spy.”

Greta turned her face toward me. Looking into her eyes was like looking into deep, still water. The depths made me nervous.

I shifted my gaze and stared across the quad.

“Squad... halt!” Mr. Guy bellowed, and I had a mysterious flash of a German school somewhere, a quad like this one. Linden trees maybe, German sixth formers training to fight us. Like a game, like checkers. Your move, my move. You bomb, we bomb. I shook my head. What a traitorous thought.

“You think she might be a
spy
?” Greta repeated. “Why?”

“She goes spy walking on the roof at night,” I said, “and we're going to find out more. Ada and Maureen and Lizzie Mag and I are planning to follow her when she leaves her room.”

Greta didn't speak. She watched me carefully.

It was a funny thing that I'd noticed before. When a person doesn't say anything, just waits, the other person has to jump in to fill the silence gap. It must be a law of physics, Pythagoras, or something like that. Silence is not always golden—sometimes it's creepy. “Miss Müller's father was a Nazi,” I added. “I saw his picture.”

“Most Germans are.” Greta's lips twisted. Was she laughing at me? There was something in her voice that made me think so. She talked the way some teachers talked to the little kindergartners.

“And if we do find out she is a spy...” I said, menacingly.

“Yes? Then what will you do?”

I was wishing I hadn't started this. It suddenly sounded so fake, like a story out of the
Girls' Crystal,
not real in the way Greta knew reality.

“Well, we'll tell Old Rose... or the police.”

“Will you kill her?”

“Kill
her?” I gave a high little laugh. “Of course we won't kill her. I mean—”

“When you follow Miss Müller, can I come with you?” Greta asked, her voice so urgent that it made me instinctively slide down the steps farther away from her.

“Well...” Oh, why,
why
had I brought this up? “You see it's really the whole dorm, Snow White dorm, not just me...” I stammered. “It's not my decision, and we don't know exactly when—”

“You can come and get me. I waken very easily. I know how to be quiet.”

“Yes, but—”

“They killed my father.” Greta's face never changed expression.

“Pardon?” I said, though I had heard perfectly well. Too well.

I pressed myself backward so hard against the railing that I felt it cut into my back. Oh no! Oh cripes! “You mean the Germans?” I asked. Goofy question. My stomach was starting to stab in that familiar way that shouts “Cramps coming.” The milk of magnesia wasn't strong enough to handle this. “How do you know they killed him? I thought you didn't know.”

“We have ways of finding out.” Greta stood up. “His name was on the last list that was smuggled through.” The textbook lay open, the pages crumpled where she'd sat. A robin zoomed down from a branch, grabbed a worm, and zoomed back into the tree. From assembly hall I heard the babble of voices, the scraping of feet. Assembly was over.

“I have to come with you when you follow her,” Greta said. She was holding my shoulder the way I'd held little Hillary's girdle at dispensary.

“All right,” I said, but I didn't mean it. Greta let go and I gave myself a shake. Lying was not something I did except maybe in a very big emergency. This was a very big emergency. When we followed Miss Müller, we definitely were not,
not
going to take Greta Ludowski with us. Goodness alone knew what
she'd,
do!

T
HE TEACHERS WERE
coming out of Assembly Hall, Old Rose sweeping along in front like Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, Mr. Atkinson behind her, his head tilted back on his skinny neck, his sharp nose poking in every direction. Miss Müller walked next to Mr. Bolton. He seemed to be her friend. Did the rest of the teachers like her, or did they hiss at her too, among themselves?

Beside me I felt Greta tense, and she muttered something I didn't understand. Maybe it was in Polish. I wished with all my heart that the world was the way it used to be when I'd never heard of Nazis, when Greta was safe in Poland with her parents, and Miss Müller was back in Germany. A time when Alveara was just a school, not great but okay. When nobody dreamed that bombs would fall on Belfast. And oh, how I wished that I hadn't blabbed to Greta today. She was on the track now... not the way we were, but in a more deadly way that frightened me. “Will you kill her?” she'd asked.
Kill her.

Swarms of girls came pouring out of assembly. Lizzie Mag rushed toward me. “Lots of girls are leaving Alveara,” she said. “Their parents are taking them home because Belfast is too dangerous. Betty Austin's going and Selina Brown.”

I looked at Lizard, her blond hair straight after the failure of last night's curls, the rest of her so pale and neat. And I wished another wish, that she could be in India with her parents and that they loved each other and loved her. “You're wishing your life away, Jess,” my mother always said in a sad sort of way.

“No, Mummy, just wishing some lives could be better,” I'd answer.

“Helen Payne's gone already,” Lizard went on. “Old Boots took her trunk.”

“Was that the sensation?” I asked.

“No. There was more. Things about Pearl Carson and Michael Moran. It's awful. Wait till you hear....” She stopped. “What's the matter, Jess? You look so... so jumpy. Was Nursie awful?”

Before I could answer, someone touched my arm. “Come for me,” Greta said.

I nodded.

Lizzie Mag stared. “She's talking to you? Come for her where?”

“I'll tell you later,” I whispered.

Ada and Maureen had arrived on my other side.

“Have you told her yet about Pearl Carson?” Maureen whispered. “It was too funny.”

“What?” I said.

“It wasn't funny at all,” Lizzie Mag said.

“Old Rose gave us a lecture as long as Paddy's leg about our disgraceful shenanigans last night.” Maureen giggled and tossed her hair. “And then she glared blazes right at Pearl Carson and said, ‘One girl in particular dishonored the school by her offensive behavior with a boy. Disciplinary action will be taken. We are seriously considering expulsion.' ”

Maureen could do a great takeoff on Old Rose's haughty voice.

“Expulsion!” We'd never had anybody expelled. Pearl's behavior must have been
really
offensive. “Do you think she will be expelled?” I breathed. “And what about the boy she was with? What disciplinary action is going to be taken against him?”

“Oh, none probably. It was Michael Moran. Head boy, captain of the cricket team.” Ada waved her fingers airily. “Nothing disgraceful shall touch the head boy.”

“Speaking of boys, here they come.” Maureen wet her finger and stroked under her lashes, which gave them a shiny, glistening effect till the hairs dried.

“Move along, move along, girls.” Miss Gaynor pressed on our shoulders to remove us quickly from the boys' contaminating presence. I looked back and saw Ian with Curly Pritchard. Ian was wearing his navy-blue V-neck regulation sweater. I loved it when he wore that instead of his blazer. I could see him better, or at least more of him.

Ian smiled at me and nodded, and a lock of his straight blond hair fell over his forehead. Oh, gee willikers! Had those nice masculine lips of his really pressed against mine last night? That seemed so far away. Too bad. The good things had gotten lost in all the horrible things that were happening. Tonight, though, I would write about him in my diary and... I stopped. No, not in my diary. What if the maids should read it?

We were crowding forward, sheep being nuzzled by the sheepdog that was Miss Gaynor.

“We're to go directly from our lockers to second-period class,” Lizzie Mag told me.

“Wait a second,” I said. She and Ada and Maureen slowed. There'd be no way to talk at our lockers, where Miss Hardcastle would be on sheepdog duty, nipping at us to hurry and get to class, and then at lunch we would be in our assigned seats with eavesdroppers all around. I spoke quickly. “Miss Müller's father was a Nazi soldier, and I think she went up on the roof in March, the night the munitions blew up.” The three of them were staring at me as if I'd gone mad. “A Nazi soldier?” Ada mouthed. “Munitions?” “Come to my room for a meeting, right after school,” I said.

“We have tennis,” Lizard reminded me.

“It'll be canceled. It's going to rain again.” I looked up at the sky, where clouds piled and jumbled, gray as geese. A few big raindrops fell, spotting the quad.

Miss Gaynor was heading toward us again, impatiently waving us forward.

“Miss Gaynor,” Ada said, “I have to tell Jessie about the phone calls home. She doesn't know.”

“What phone calls?” I asked.

“Well, don't take all day over it, Ada Sinclair,” Miss Gaynor said.

“No, Miss Gaynor.” Ada made a face at her departing back. “We're all to take turns calling home today from Old Rose's sitting room,” Ada said. “They've posted the times on the assembly door. You're three twenty, Jess. I'm three fifteen, right in front of you. They're so generous, giving us five minutes,” she said sarcastically.

“Only Lizzie Mag and Greta don't have to call,” she added. “You can't call India or Poland.” I nodded.

We rushed to our lockers, got our books, and banged the lockers closed again. The corridors were a muddle of girls' bodies and girls' voices. I automatically headed across to bungalow one for my first period, math, and stopped. This was second period, German, with Miss Müller.

I saw Dolly McConnell up ahead on the path. She has German too, so we always walk to class together. “Why do we take German anyway?” Dolly asked me. “It's a fearful waste of time. After we win the war, German will never be spoken again on the face of the earth.”

We'd had this conversation before, going down this same winding path.

I shrugged. “My daddy says there are wonderful German poets and writers and musicians. He says I should know about them. That's why, for me.”

“My parents say it's the language of commerce, that's why for me.” Dolly arranged her lips carefully again, the way she did each time she spoke. Dolly was the only girl in Alveara with wires on her teeth. They were supposed to straighten her bite, whatever that meant. She said she had them only because her dentist was very “avant-garde,” whatever that meant also. Poor Dolly! Thank heavens my dentist was just ordinary.

Miss Müller hadn't arrived when we got to the room. The map of Deutschland that used to hang on the wall had been rolled up and stored a couple of months back when someone drew Hitler's face on it, his mustache covering the whole of Westphalia. On the blackboard, still faintly visible though it had been erased a fortnight or so ago, were the outlines of the chalked words
TO HELL WITH HITLER.
Mr. Atkinson had lectured all Miss Müller's students very severely about defacing school property. In future, he said, such monkey business would be punished.

There'd been talk just after the war started of discontinuing German at Alveara, but the board of governors said academia must always rise above politics, and besides after the war there would be a need for German speakers to assist with Germany's reconstruction. Uh-uh, we decided. We were never going to reconstruct that old country. Let it perish.