The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (2 page)

Anyway, Hazel needed to take matters into her own hands. There were three mausoleums in the cemetery. The first was grown over with vines. The second was still in regular use. She stood now in front of the door of the third. She pushed gently. Nothing happened. She blew the bangs of her pageboy haircut out of her eyes and wiped her clammy hands on her dungarees, then pressed harder against the cool, rough stone door. After looking over her shoulder to confirm the graveyard was deserted, she bent her knees and pushed again. The door started to slide with a creak, and a rush of cold air came out to meet her. Dead air. She peeked in: dry dirt floors and
stone walls, lined with doors that told who was stored inside. “This will do,” she said.

She had begun stockpiling canned goods in her closet, and today she had one can of tuna with her to leave inside as a test. If it remained undisturbed, she would bring out more of the food. Eventually she would even try to get some sleeping bags in there. She wasn't looking forward to being in that small, cold space for a week, or however long it took for nuclear radiation to subside, but she made herself feel better by thinking of how surprised her parents would be. Wouldn't she be the hero when they discovered that she'd made a safe place for them right in their own backyard?

Pleased with herself, she struggled to get the door shut, then skipped down the cemetery path and shimmied up a tree. From there she could see her parents. Becky Cornflower's parents had split up, and her mom had taken her to live in Tucson, approximately 2,601 miles away. No one else at school had parents who were divorced, and everyone was talking about it. Hazel knew nothing so exciting would ever happen to her. Her parents were working on a hedgerow of roses and arguing about the placement in the way that only her parents argued: merrily. They were horticulturalists by passion, cemetery minders by profession, and could have entire conversations in Latin that rolled past Hazel the way the train rolled through their town of Maple Hill: a whistle only, no stop.

Nearly half the leaves had fallen into a pile below the tree. She was supposed to be raking them up. The branch shook as
she shimmied farther along it. She would like the tree to work like it did in the
Loony Tunes
cartoons: she'd crawl out to the end, and the branch would droop down and deposit her gently on the ground. Instead she took the branch in her hands, swung down, then dropped to her feet with a crunch. Leaving the rake resting against the tree trunk, she made her way down into the knoll behind the tree.

Beyond the knoll was where the poorer people were buried. Her father said they were the more practical ones who recognized that the view didn't matter when you were dead. The graves were close together, and she liked to hop from one flat headstone to another. As she hopped she sung a tuneless song, since tunes were one of the few things that Hazel was not good at. Hazel was good at many things, and exceptional at others, so she figured it was only fair that there were some skills that eluded her. Though, she argued in her mind, she was not as pitiful as Mrs. Ferrigno made her out to be.

A sharp clang rang out, and Hazel looked behind her to see Mr. Jones digging a fresh grave. The muscles in his arms tensed like springs with each stab of the shovel into the hard Vermont ground. He dug each new grave into a perfect rectangle, all smooth angles and sides, no roots or stones sticking out. Mr. Jones had Brylcreemed hair that shone like black river rock. He kept a barbershop comb in his back pocket, and he took it out to smooth down his hair when he thought no one was looking. But Hazel was always looking and writing down her observations in her Mysteries Notebook. So far she hadn't
come across any real mysteries, but she figured it was only a matter of time and of being observant.

Mr. Jones was the closest thing Hazel had to a true investigation. He'd started working there only the month before. He just showed up on their doorstep with his hat in his giant hands asking if there was any work. He was tall, over six feet, but didn't stoop down in their small doorway. Hazel had peeked at him from around the stairs. Their old gravedigger had just gone to an early grave himself, so Hazel's parents were glad to have him. In fact, Mr. Jones's first duty was to dig Old Lou's grave. Hazel, of course, had watched him do it, and the whole time he'd had a small twist of a smile on his lips.

Each morning when Mr. Jones rumbled into work at the cemetery in his old blue truck, he wore a moth-eaten wool sweater. He shed this by midmorning, and he worked in a white T-shirt. His jeans had creases on the front, but Hazel just could not picture Mr. Jones standing above the ironing board each evening smoothing out the denim. By the end of the day his clothes had dirt and sometimes blood smeared across them. But each morning he came back in a snow-white shirt and pressed jeans.

He strode king-like through the graveyard and it sometimes seemed as if Memory's Garden was his, and not the Kaplanskys'. So comfortable was he in the cemetery that he would sit right down sometimes with his feet hanging into a freshly dug grave and eat his lunch. He cut slices of apple with a penknife and
pulled them into his mouth with his teeth. She had diligently written down all these observations in her Mysteries Notebook, but she couldn't make them amount to much of anything.

Her father, who liked to talk to anyone who wandered by about the weather or sports scores or the proper placement of Christmas decorations—small talk, he called it—even he never said much to Mr. Jones beyond “Good morning” and “Fourth plot in the third row for Wednesday.” Her mother rarely spoke to him at all.

At school she'd heard the other kids call him Grim Reaper Jones. They said the scar on his hand was from wrestling alligators in Florida. They said he ate raw squirrel every night for dinner. They said he slept with his eyes open. Hazel knew that all of these were implausible, but still she wrote them down in her Mysteries Notebook. She had her own theories about him. “Paul Jones” sounded like a made-up name to her, and she felt certain that he was an ex-convict, maybe even an
escaped
convict, and she steered clear of him.

So she continued to skip until the headstones stopped and the ground gave way to a large pond. She hopped up onto a bench and walked across it with her arms held out to the side as if it were a tightrope. As she neared the end of the bench, she pretended to wobble and drop.

She made her way around the pond to a cluster of three statues. They were the Three Graces, she knew, but she called them Tabitha, Abitha, and Babitha. “Why, hello there, ladies,
lovely day, isn't it?” she asked. “And Babitha, that is a glorious robe. Where'd you get it?”

The kids at school said that she talked to the dead people, that those were her only friends now that Becky was gone, but that wasn't true. She didn't talk to the bodies, only the sculptures. Hazel had long ago accepted that she would not ever be considered normal by her peers at school, but even for her, talking to dead people would be beyond the pale.

“Why, yes, Abitha, I did get a new pair of sneakers. You like them?” She held out her foot, which was clad in the same old pair of canvas sneakers she always wore. She brushed a bit of dirt off her dungarees. “I would love to chat, girls, but I've got quite a busy day ahead of me. Quite a busy day.”

She started up the hill toward the oldest part of the cemetery, and as she crested the rise, she heard voices and froze. A blue Packard automobile was idling on one of the roads that ran through the cemetery. Mr. Jones was talking to someone, but Hazel couldn't see who. She crept through the cemetery to try to get a better look. She found a tree and climbed right up, but she nearly fell out when she saw Connie Short's father hand a box to Mr. Jones. Mr. Short was a foreman over at the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory. What on earth could he be giving to Mr. Jones?

Mr. Jones nodded, took the box, and went toward an old gardening shed. He unlocked the padlock on the door—since when had the gardening shed been locked?—placed the box inside, and relocked the door. Mr. Short drove off, pulling his hat down low as if he didn't want anyone to see him.

What was in that box?

Hazel sat in the tree chewing on her lip. Something was not on the up-and-up. Last year she had read every single one of the Nancy Drew mysteries, and just like Nancy always did, she had a hunch, but you didn't need to be a young sleuth like Hazel and Nancy to know that when a person locked something up, he was hiding something. And just like that, Hazel had her first
real
mystery.

Hazel's mother made egg salad sandwiches for lunch, and they sat outside at an old picnic table that was out of sight of the cemetery. Hazel had her Mysteries Notebook open and balanced on her lap, and she chewed on the end of her pencil.

Her Mysteries Notebook was an old composition notebook of her mother's from college. She'd found it the previous spring in her parents' office, and only one page had any writing on it, so Hazel had figured it was okay to take. “Doctoral Dissertation Ideas” was the heading, followed by a list that made little sense to Hazel. She had torn out that page and tucked it into the bottom of a pile of her mother's work. Then she took the notebook back up to her bedroom, where she crossed out her mother's name on the front and wrote her own. In the place where it said “Subject” she wrote
Mysteries
.

Sometimes she thought it should be called her Questions Notebook, since she had a lot more questions than mysteries.
Why does Timmy only write on the bottom of his left sneaker, but not his right? Where does Miss Angus hide that pencil in her hair? Who has been drawing chalk outlines of people on the street outside the cemetery?
That last one she had an answer to: little Trudy West from up the road had received sidewalk chalk for her birthday and spent most of the month of July tracing all eight of her siblings. At Becky's insistence Hazel had also written:
Just what is Becky's cat trying to tell her with all those hairballs?
Hazel never planned to answer that one. She was being a good friend, just like Becky was a good friend and read all the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books with Hazel even though she preferred Louisa May Alcott. Really, though, Hazel thought that Becky got the better end of that deal. Nancy Drew taught real sleuthing techniques, and Trixie Belden taught you that you should always trust your hunches, but Hazel couldn't think of one single, solitary useful thing she had learned from
Little Women
.

The page with the most writing was the one that said
Who is Mr. Jones?
Really???
She had written:

Why does he iron his jeans?

Why does he eat the same thing every single day?

Today Mr. Jones sat by a fresh grave with his feet hanging in, whistling that song from Gone with the Wind, the one about the house. That's strange, isn't it? (Aside: Who names a house? Second aside: Why is the Strand Theater so intent on showing Gone with the Wind every Sunday? Can't they go ahead and show something new already?
)

Now she added:

What does Mr. Short have to do with Mr. Jones?

What's in that box?

“Eat your lunch, Hazel,” her mother said. “You don't want the egg salad to spoil.”

“Sure,” Hazel said, and took a bite. Her mother put pickles and onions in, both of which Hazel felt did not belong in egg salad. Becky Cornflower's mom made hers with Miracle Whip, and Hazel thought that was just perfect. One more thing to miss about Becky.

Her parents nattered on about what kind of roses would be best for a new hedgerow along the back end of the cemetery. “There's the mermaid rose, of course,” Hazel's father said as he chewed on his sandwich.

Hazel's mother shook her head. “But we'd have to put a fence up for that. I thought the point was to have a natural barrier. I was thinking fairy roses.”

Hazel realized she had not been very good about writing down all that she knew about Mr. Jones. She tried to remember more details. It wasn't much. Once Otis Logan had told a story about seeing Mr. Jones at the A&P filling his whole cart up with steaks and ground beef. “It was like he's a werewolf or something,” Otis had said. “There's no possible way one man could eat all that meat, not unless he wasn't really a man at all.” Hazel had thought that was very silly at the time—after all, there was no such thing as a werewolf—but Otis was right that someone filling a grocery cart with red meat likely had some unnatural tendencies. She wrote down:
Strange appetites
.

When her father had asked Mr. Jones where he was coming from, he'd hesitated and then said, “A bit of here, there, and everywhere.” Her mother had told him she was glad that he'd made it back to Maple Hill. His truck's license plates were from New York, so Hazel supposed that was the last place he had lived. It wasn't a for-certain, but it was an educated guess. He was a drifter; that was the best she could come up with. If she were a drifter, she wouldn't drift into Maple Hill, that's for sure. Still, she wrote down:
Drifter New York?

Hazel picked at a splinter of wood on the picnic table. The whole thing needed to be sanded down and repainted. She pictured both of the men in her head. Mr. Jones and Mr. Short. Try and try, she just could not bridge the gap.

She knew a little more about Mr. Short than she did about Mr. Jones. Hazel had met Connie's father once, two years before. Connie's grandmother had died, and her father had come to make arrangements. He was a handsome man, sort of like Spencer Tracy. He'd brought Connie along and suggested the two girls play together. They'd gone into the sitting room and sat on opposite ends of the couch while
Howdy Doody
was on television. Connie's father had been nice, though, even if he had been oblivious about how terrible his daughter was. He was well respected in town, jovial, always ready for a laugh. He was, in point of fact, the exact opposite of Mr. Jones. So what could they possibly have in common? “No one in the Shorts' family has died recently, have they?”