The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (18 page)

“What?” Samuel asked. He was going to have to get better at lip reading if he was going to be any good as a spy.

Hazel leaned in closer. “Spy gear. He got that camera because he's a spy.”

Connie tugged at her bent rabbit ear. “Where's your mom, Maryann?”

Maryann pointed. “She's down the street with Mrs. O'Malley and Mrs. Logan.”

“I wonder why my mother isn't with them,” Connie said, chewing her lip, and for a second Hazel, who was eavesdropping as a matter of course—detectives don't get to take a break in the middle of a case—wondered why Connie sounded so concerned.

“My mom's probably jealous of that new camera. She likes to have everything new first and can't stand when someone else has something nicer than her.”

Hazel thought that seemed a lot like Maryann herself.

“Sure, I guess,” Connie said.

“Don't sweat it, Connie,” Maryann told her. “Jeez, I've never met anyone who worries as much as you do.”

Just then Hazel heard someone calling her name. “Hazel! Over here! Hazel!” Her dad was standing on the sidelines, in between Mrs. Short and the clump of other mothers. He was
waving like crazy, and of course dressed in his short-sleeved button-down shirt, even though it was cold and all the mothers had on winter coats. Hazel gave a small wave and her father responded with a thumbs-up.

“Is that your
dad
, Hazel?” Maryann asked. She and Connie laughed.

Now, Hazel knew that her father was a little odd, with his goofy grin and the dirt stains on his knees, but she didn't know what was so funny about it. “Sure is!” she replied, and plastered on a manufactured smile.

Mrs. Sinclair took her place at the front of the line and the parade began. Connie had her waddling walk and Samuel had trouble with his cut-out eyes, so they moved in sort of a jerking, lurching fashion, which Hazel thought was rather undignified. Still, the mothers—and Hazel's dad—clapped and waved and the kids all waved back. Except for the little first graders, who were terrified by the whole thing.

Samuel leaned a little closer to her. “My grandmother finally gave in,” he said. “We can go trick-or-treating tomorrow. And, you know, the other thing.”

Maryann looked over her shoulder and seemed ready to say something mean, but then Samuel stumbled on the edge of his sheet and nearly crashed into her. She screamed, then snickered and muttered, “Triangle people.”

Hazel patted Samuel on the back and said, “Maybe we should hem that sheet before we go trick-or-treating.”

They did a loop around the parking lot and then it was time to go inside for the Halloween party, after which they'd be let
out early for the day, which was another reason why Halloween was one of Hazel's favorite days of the year. Before she went inside, she rushed over to her father. “Look at you, Amelia Earhart!” he said. “Looks like a great day for a fly-around. Not a cloud in the sky!”

“What are you doing here?” Hazel demanded.

The smile on her father's face faltered. “I came to see the parade.”

“You've never come before.”

“Well, the truth is, Mom felt a little bad about the gum, so we decided I should just head on down to the parade. And I'm glad I did. What a sight!”

“Why didn't Mom come if she felt so bad?”

“The bulbs finally arrived, the right ones, and she's getting them in the ground. What's the big deal? Aren't you glad to see me?”

Hazel couldn't believe her dad didn't notice that he was the only father there. This wasn't a Dad Event, this was a Mom Event, not that her mom ever came to these sorts of things. She was always working. But even the moms who worked in the Switzer factory managed to switch shifts and come to at least some of the things at school. “Sure I am, Dad. I've got to go inside now.”

He ruffled her hair and sent her on her way.

As she walked to her classroom, she could hear Maryann's voice echoing all the way down the hall. “Gum? What kind of a square brought gum to the party?”

Samuel walked over to Hazel's house on Halloween, his costume in his satchel. She found him a pair of work gloves and they went out into the graveyard. She had her Mysteries Notebook tucked into the pocket of her overalls. She still hadn't been able to find a magnifying glass, and decided that binoculars would make her too obvious.

“We're going out to weed!” Hazel called to her father, who was pecking with his index fingers at the typewriter in the office. Hazel's mother usually did the typing.

“Make sure you get around all the sculptures,” he replied without looking up.

Hazel turned to Samuel and whispered, “Our cover story is set.” She looked at her watch. “Time is currently …” She paused to do some quick computations. “Fifteen hundred hours. Dusk is at approximately seventeen hundred hours, giving us nearly two hours to complete our mission.”

“I'm still not so sure about this,” Samuel said.

“You're the one who said we could find out about Alice by learning about The Comrade.”

“Mr. Jones,” he corrected. She decided not to argue, and together they went outside in search of their subject. There were no funerals scheduled, so Mr. Jones didn't have any graves to dig, but usually her parents found some odd jobs for him to do. She pushed the wheelbarrow and they stopped occasionally to pick weeds. They did a few loops around the cemetery, but didn't see him. Hazel glanced at the garden shed. Locked up tight.

“I guess this means no stakeout,” Samuel said, not sounding sufficiently disappointed as far as Hazel was concerned.

“Well, actually, I need to show you something. Then we can do another search for him,” Hazel said. She walked with him over to the mausoleum.

“Is this part of the case?”

“No.” She pushed open the door. “I'm making a fallout shelter here. See.”

With her head, she gestured for him to peek in so he could see her stash of canned goods.

“It's not airtight,” he told her.

“I know,” she replied. “But here's what I'm thinking: If it's airtight, that's no good. We'd run out of oxygen. The stone and cracks allow for just enough air to go in and out. Sure, we might be exposed to a bit of radiation, but not enough to kill us.”

Samuel scratched his elbow while he considered this. “Not a bad thought, actually,” he said.

“My parents don't know about it yet, but if the Russians
do
send us a warning—which I doubt they will—I'll say, ‘Don't worry, Mom and Dad. Just follow me. I have it all under control.' And if we don't have a warning and it's just the flash of light, I'll grab them both by the hands and say, ‘Forget Bert the Turtle, come this way!' and we'll run right to safety.” Hazel tugged the door closed.

“You've thought it all through.”

“Of course. This is serious business. I know it would be too far for you to come last minute, but if there is warning, you'd be welcome. There will be enough food. You just need to bring your own sleeping bag.”

“What about my grandmother?” Samuel pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“Does she snore?”

“I don't know.”

Hazel had a hard time picturing Mrs. Switzer sleeping on the cold floor of the mausoleum, but in the event of an atomic attack, she supposed anything was possible. “Okay. But then you guys should probably bring some extra food if you can.”

Samuel nodded. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” She picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow. “We should get back to the matter at hand.”

Eventually they found Mr. Jones fixing some slats in the wooden fence at the rear of the cemetery. They chose a place where they could see him but were somewhat protected by a large statue of an angel that Hazel had always called Rufus.

“So what exactly are we hoping to see?” Samuel asked.

Hazel pulled a dandelion. “Ideally we'd see someone from the plant do a drop-off at the grave, or a direct exchange with The Comrade. Admittedly, that's not likely, especially now that the heat is on. So we should focus on building up a profile of him, so when we do go to the FBI and Senator McCarthy, we can give them a full report. We need to get an understanding of the subject, his patterns and habits, you know.”

“I see,” Samuel said. He pulled out a few weeds and put them in the wheelbarrow. “Don't you already know about his daily habits?”

“We
think
we know, but we don't. You never really know about someone.”

“I know about you,” he said. “I mean, I know you aren't a murderer or anything.”

“As far as you know,” she said. “That's the thing about spies. They live among us and only the truly wise can spot them.” She arched her eyebrows so he would know that she was among the truly wise, in case there was any doubt.

“I see,” he said again. He made steady progress weeding his patch of the graveyard, approaching the task in his typical orderly manner. Hazel would have been faster than him, but spent more time peeking at Mr. Jones.

With his bare hands, The Comrade was prying off the old, broken pieces of wood. Hazel took out her notebook and wrote:
Very strong
.

He worked without rest, and so Hazel wrote:
Focused
.

She put the notebook by her knees and began pulling weeds as she watched him keep working. It seemed a little strange that a spy would take a job that required so much physical labor. If she were a spy, especially one at the top level with a whole cell of other spies that she was in charge of, she certainly wouldn't take this kind of a job. She'd be a nightclub singer, maybe. Though perhaps that would draw too much attention to herself. She would be a librarian, then. She could hide the secrets in books, ones that weren't popular, and then the other spies could find them. She giggled at the thought of Miss Angus being a spy: her tall, lanky frame wrapped in a trench coat as she snuck down the one slightly darkish alleyway in Maple Hill, a book filled with secrets under her arm.

“What?” Samuel asked.

“Nothing. My mind just wandered. Won't happen again.”

Mr. Jones lifted up a new board and began hammering it in.

Able to wield a blunt object with force and precision
.

“What are you writing down?” Samuel asked.

“No cheating. Take your own notes.”

“It's not cheating if we're partners.”

Hazel sniffed. She didn't want to share what she had written down, because it wasn't terribly exciting. The Comrade hadn't met anyone, and he hadn't gone anywhere near the grave or the garden shed. Stakeouts, she was starting to think, were actually kind of boring.

Mr. Jones worked at a steady pace, moving on to carefully putting new boards in the empty slots. There was a rhythmic
thunking to his hammer that Hazel found soothing, and she thought she heard, however faintly, that he was humming.

“My grandmother wasn't sure about letting me go trick-or-treating with you. She said she wasn't so sure about a boy and a girl being friends.”

Hazel picked up a trowel and stabbed into the earth, then wedged out a deep-rooted weed. “Connie thinks we like each other, you know, like girl-boy stuff.”

“Connie reads too many romance stories,” Samuel said.

“That's what I thought, too,” Hazel said.

“It's a completely ridiculous idea.”

“Not completely, completely ridiculous,” Hazel said. “I think I would be considered quite the catch. I'm smart and clever and I make good jokes. I've built a fallout shelter. My mom says that eventually I'll grow out of this baby fat, not that it really matters. So I don't think it's completely ridiculous that you would have a crush on me.”

“You forgot modest.”

“What's the point of modesty? I'll be modest when other folks start to realize how remarkable I am.”

Samuel shook his head and began gathering up the small pile of weeds that he had amassed. Then he dumped them into the wheelbarrow. “He's leaving.”

“What? We hardly have any notes.”

“You can write that he's careful about picking up his work site.”

They both watched him walk the length of the graveyard back toward the garden shed.

“I guess that's it for today,” Samuel said.

“Wait! He's going into the shed. That's where he stashes his deliveries from Mr. Short. Come on!”

“Come on where?”

“We need to get a closer look!”

Before she could stand up, Mr. Jones emerged from the shed holding an ax. He strode right toward them. “Oh, no,” Hazel whispered. Samuel said nothing. They couldn't run; they'd blow their cover. So she just kept weeding as fast as she could. She was digging her hands into the dirt like a groundhog, so fast and hard that her fingertips began to hurt.

With a few long, quick strides, he was in front of her. He looked at her, the wheelbarrow, and then at her notebook.

“What are you doing?”

“Weeding,” she said. “And a school project on plant identification. Killing two birds with one stone, you know. Ha-ha.” She winced at her use of the word “killing.”

He looked down at the ground. “I think you've done enough,” he said. His voice stayed the same: flat and low.

“What?” She began recoiling.

Mr. Jones swung the ax up onto his shoulder. The sun glinted off the clean blade. His gaze flicked from Hazel to Samuel, then back to Hazel, as if deciding which of them to chop first.

This was where it all ended, she thought, her heart beating fast. It didn't matter that it was broad daylight, that her parents were in the house. This would be the exact moment that she ceased to exist. It was too soon. Everyone said that, of course.
Everyone thinks their time is too short, probably, Hazel thought, even old people who can't even get around or think straight. Probably even Mrs. Buttersbee, who Hazel sometimes saw in the grocery store walking around with just a head of cabbage in her hands, probably even she would say “It's too soon! I'm not ready!” when the time came. But with Hazel, it really was. She had great things in her future. Great, spectacular, impressive things, like traveling to space, or maybe she would discover a cure for the common cold
and
cancer, or she would write a comic strip that was in every newspaper in the United States and Canada. Maybe she would do all these things. But not if it ended now. Not if Mr. Jones captured them and sent them to Siberia.