The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (10 page)

“If she's a secretary, she's not ten years old.”

“It doesn't matter. Mr. Jones needed a place to have the secrets dropped off. He went through the cemetery and found that stone. ‘Leave it with Alice.' I bet that's what he says to all the spies he has working for him. Why, he could say it right out in the open. ‘Just leave it with Alice. She'll take care of it.'”

“It's not a bad theory,” he says.

“Better than a missing cat.”

“Most assuredly better than a missing cat,” he agreed.

“Plus Mr. Jones's license plates are from New York. Maybe that was his last assignment. He's moving around, blending in, and collecting secrets.”

Samuel looked up from the microfilm machine. “I have to admit that you're getting somewhere. I think you still need more proof, though.”

“You know who else was a secretary? Ethel Rosenberg!” That summer Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius, had been convicted of spying and sharing national secrets, and had been put to death. Hazel hadn't thought that was a good idea. She didn't suppose killing a criminal made you much better than the criminal himself. And anyway, who knew what other secrets those two might have been hiding.

“She wasn't a secretary exactly, was she?”

“Her husband got the insider information, and she typed up the secrets to be sent out.”

“A bit of a stretch.”

“What have
you
got?” Hazel said.

Samuel frowned. “Nothing yet.”

“Exactly,” Hazel said again.

The fly landed on her knee and she smacked it as hard as she could. She felt it crush beneath her hand, and a smile spread across her lips. They were making progress. She had a workable theory. She was feeling quite proud of herself until she looked down and saw the broken, crooked carcass in her hand.

Hazel dropped her backpack inside the front door of the cottage. “Mom! Dad!”

There was the sound of the typewriter coming from the office, and Hazel thought she heard someone yell “In here!” This was perfect: she wanted to add more canned goods to her mausoleum fallout shelter before it got dark.

From her room she retrieved a brown paper bag from the A&P grocery store that she had filled with cans of peas and mixed vegetables from the pantry. These were not her favorite foods, but she had to work with what she had. It wasn't like she could go out and buy her own. She wished she could get cans of tiny hot dogs. Becky Cornflower's dad had loved those and always shared with her when she went over. Anyway, the vegetables would be good because they would need their vitamins, locked away in the dark mausoleum.

Outside again the sky had clouded over and cast the cemetery in shadows that threatened to dampen her mood. True, research in the library was not her preferred means of investigation, but they had made a breakthrough. Even Samuel had to admit it. Alice, Ten Years Old didn't matter. It was just a front. It even explained why Mr. Jones had been taking such good care of that particular stone: so the spies could easily identify it. Though if she were Mr. Jones, she would put flowers on some of the other graves, too, as if it were part of one big project of flowering Pauper's Field. Then she would tell her spies, “Don't forget, Alice's favorite color is orange,” and they would know just where to go.

Making sure Mr. Jones wasn't near, she ducked around to the door of the mausoleum. The stone was wet, as if it were weeping water. It moved a little more easily this time. The can of tuna was just where she left it. She scooped it up as she stepped inside the mausoleum. The air inside was warmer than the outside and smelled as old as dry leaves. They would need some candles. Carefully, she placed her bag of canned vegetables next to the wall. She wasn't sure how much food they would need; they would be on rations for sure, like back during World War II when you could only buy certain things with stamps and everyone had a Victory Garden to grow their own vegetables instead of buying them at the store. Her grandmother had told her about those. It was too bad that her grandparents were all the way down in Florida. She hoped they had the sense to make their own fallout shelter.

Peeking outside to make sure the coast was clear, she reemerged.

With a shove that took her whole body, she closed the door to the mausoleum. She took a deep breath of the damp fall air, and it felt just like breathing in new life. She was so close to finding the proof she needed, she could taste it.

She followed the meandering paths to the edge of the cemetery far from Alice's stone. This was Soldier's Field, where those who had died in combat were buried. Her dad had told her that not every stone had a body under it; some people were buried overseas or their bodies had never been recovered. Hazel didn't understand why they had headstones, then, but her dad explained that people liked to have a place to go to still feel like they were with the person who was gone. Hazel knew this was true because people were always coming to the cemetery and sitting and talking and crying—in fact, the Wellehans were at the grave of their son at that very moment—but it still didn't make a lot of sense to her. The grave was just the grave. Still, she did like Soldier's Field and the way the graves were dotted with tiny American flags. She liked to see the flags all in rows, like the soldiers were still standing at attention. There were two newer graves, not even four months old, for two boys from town who had been in Korea and died just before the war ended and the troops were called back home.

One of the boys was Archie Winslow, whose sister Annabelle had been in Hazel's class the year before. She'd cried for three days. The other was Bobby Li, whose family had come to Vermont from China and had a Chinese restaurant in town.
Hazel had the menu memorized because they went there at least twice a month. People said it was funny that Bobby went back home to fight against the Koreans, but Hazel knew that was wrong, because China and Korea were different countries, and anyway, Bobby had been born here just like her. He used to give her chopsticks that he'd bind together with a rubber band so she could use them like pinchers when she ate. Hazel knew it was sad that the boys had died no matter what, but it seemed especially sad that if they had only made it a couple more weeks, they'd be home and probably working in the factory or in the restaurant instead of being buried in Memory's Garden.

Someday, Hazel realized, someone like Samuel might come along and try to find out their story. She ought to write down some more information so that whoever it was could get the whole story and get it right.

Just at the turn of the fence stood one of her favorite climbing trees, and she scrambled up the trunk, reaching for the familiar first branch and heaving herself up. She kept climbing until she got to the crook, a perfect place to sit and contemplate, sheltered by orange and red maple leaves. She could see out, but others couldn't see her.

Her mind wandered to school that day. Triangle people. Maryann and Connie didn't mean that she was well balanced or pointed or the base of a pyramid. No, they meant that she was not cut out to do anything more exciting than chime the triangle at the end of the song, and they all knew she couldn't even do that well. She didn't know the words to the skipping
rope songs, and on the one occasion when she'd been asked to join in—prompted by their third-grade teacher, Mrs. Messing—she'd tripped over the rope anyway. She'd asked her mom to buy her a rope, but with just her and Becky Cornflower, it hadn't worked so well. They'd tied one end to a tree, and Becky spun the other while Hazel tried to jump, but Becky got bored and Hazel never got any better.

The problem, Hazel knew, was that she was a remarkable person trapped in an unremarkable package.

If only I had a glockenspiel
, she thought.
I'd show them
.

When she solved the case, then they'd know just what she was capable of. In the stories, one clue led to another so easily. She and Samuel had a theory now, but finding hard evidence against The Comrade was proving far more difficult than she'd originally imagined, especially using Samuel's methods.

A breeze blew through the tree, rustling the leaves. They seemed so fragile, orange and ready to fall, but they held on.

A snapping sound came from below her. She leaned forward and peered through the branches. Mr. Jones was in Soldier's Field straightening the flags.

This was her chance to observe him without his knowing it.

He was carrying a shovel in one hand and was using it like a cane, swinging it out in front of him with each step. The point tapped into the dirt with each long, loping stride. Hazel knew there weren't any soldiers being buried, so once again he was in the wrong place with his shovel. He looked at his watch. Maybe he had a rendezvous with one of his associates.
She could watch the whole thing go down. They might be exchanging money, or information, or maybe the associate was coming to tell him that the investigators at the factory were getting too close and they would have to call off the whole mission. Hazel didn't want Mr. Jones to leave before she had a chance to expose him as a Russian spy.

He walked a few more steps, then stopped in front of a grave. Hazel counted the gravestones to remember where it was, but just as quickly he moved on.

She held on tightly to the branch, wondering what he would do if he found her spying on him. She wasn't spying, of course. He'd come into her space, and she'd just been minding her own business, in her own thoughts. But he wouldn't see it that way.

He crouched down like a wolf, ready to pounce. Maybe he sensed her in the tree. She tried to make herself as small as possible, pulling herself right back against the trunk. She took a deep breath, then pressed her lips together to hold it in.

Mr. Jones stood up, placed his hands on the small of his back, then tilted his head up toward the sky. Then he did the strangest thing. He walked a bit more into Soldier's Field, bent over, and picked up one of the flags. He tucked it into his back pocket and started on his way. Hazel was just about to let out her breath when he stopped and looked over his shoulder, right at the tree.

As soon as he was gone, Hazel rushed into her house and took out her Mysteries Notebook. She wrote:

Stole flag from cemetery
.

What, she wondered, could he be doing with it? She imagined him breaking the tiny flagpole, stomping on the flag. Maybe he would even burn it. A tiny pit of anger curdled in her stomach. He had to be stopped.

Anti-American activity observed
.

She turned the page back to her questions. Next to
Who is Alice?
she wrote:

Alice Winthrop, secretary. Headstone is potential drop point. Must prepare stakeout
.

“Hazel!”

Hazel's mom's voice boomeranged up the stairs and into her room, where she was flopped back onto her bed reading a Kay Tracey book. Knowing Hazel liked Nancy Drew, her grandmother had picked up one of the Kay Tracey books at a yard sale, but it just wasn't the same. Nancy was a far superior sleuth and had all-around better adventures.

“Hazel, put your school clothes back on! We're going to Li's!”

Hazel sat up straight in bed. Li's was her favorite. She had to take a minute, though, or her mom would know she hadn't ever changed out of her school clothes in the first place. She stood on one foot for as long as she could, then stood on the other. When she decided enough time had passed, she skipped down the stairs.

Her mother's hair was tied up in a loose, messy bun. As the family drove into town in their old Ford that made a clunking noise whenever they turned to the right, Hazel found out the reason for their trip: the seed company had mailed the wrong kind of bulbs and they needed to be planted this week. “We didn't have enough savers last year, and if we want to expand the line all along the front edge …” Her mom shook her head. Her mom had spent the whole afternoon trying to get it sorted and had forgotten all about dinner. Again.

Someday people would be able to just push a button and any kind of food would appear in their refrigerators. That would actually be too bad, Hazel thought, because she loved Li's. They had dark red velvet curtains with gold pom-poms as trim. Each table had a pink tablecloth and a little white china bottle for soy sauce and a little glass jar of the spiciest relish in the whole entire world. Plus Mr. and Mrs. Li were just about the nicest people you could ever meet. Mr. Li did most of the cooking, and Mrs. Li was out front, and she always seemed to have a pitcher of water so your glass was never empty. Maybe in the future they would still have restaurants. You'd just be able to get to them by teleporting.

They parked around back and walked to the front, and it was Hazel who saw the window first. She stopped. Instead of red curtains, the window was covered with a sheet of plywood.

“Hazel,” her mom said, annoyed, but then she saw the plywood, too. “What on earth is that about? There isn't a storm coming, is there?”

Hazel's father shook his head. “It's broken,” he said. “See, around the edges.”

They pushed open the door and Mrs. Li greeted them, but she wasn't as happy to see them as she usually was. She'd been sad since Bobby died, but this was different. This was like someone had soaked her with water, then wrung her out before throwing her on the floor still damp.

Neither of her parents said anything about the window, so Hazel spoke right up. “Who broke your window, Mrs. Li?”

“Hazel,” her dad said, his voice quiet but stern.

Mrs. Li shook her head. “Just a bunch of juvenile delinquents.”

Mr. Li stood by the kitchen wiping his hands on his apron. He said something to Mrs. Li in Chinese, and she shook her head again. Hazel didn't speak Chinese, but she felt pretty sure that Mr. Li thought it was something other than juvenile delinquents. His eyes sparked fire.