The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (26 page)

“It's a hard thing to talk about. To explain. To begin.” She cleared her throat. “I went to school with Samuel's mother, Lacey Switzer. We were good friends.” She played with the locket that hung around her neck; Hazel wondered if it had a picture of Mr. Bowen in it. “Back then, people sometimes
judged other people by where they were from, what jobs their parents had, how much money. It wasn't right, but that's the way it was.”

Hazel didn't know why Miss Lerner was talking like that attitude was all in the past. It was still like that. She and Samuel were living proof.

“Lacey was, well, she's a Switzer. Samuel's father was Randy Butler.”

Hazel wondered if that was the same Randall who had picked Mrs. Buttersbee's blackberries.

“Randy's dad sometimes worked shifts at the factory, but mostly he sat around the house or the VFW. He'd been injured in World War I, folks said, and never recovered. So Randy never had much direction from home, you know. He was always getting into little scrapes. No one in the high school—no one in all of Maple Hill—understood what Lacey saw in him. She never talked about it, just got this kind of dewy glow in her eyes. Maybe she thought she could save him. Personally, I always thought she was doing it to make her parents mad.”

Hazel looked down at the patterned carpet. Miss Lerner was talking the same way she'd just said was wrong: judging Randy for his family situation.

“It all happened so fast. One thing after another. There's no easy way to say this. This is an adult conversation. Do you think you're ready?”

All her life she'd been longing for adult conversation, but now that she was on the brink, she didn't know if she wanted
to hear what Miss Lerner had to say. But she couldn't
not
hear it. Not after all the whispers and innuendos. It was her nature, the very core of it, to need to know everything that anyone else knew. She was still wearing her party dress, and it seemed to be constricting around her torso, making it hard to breathe. Hazel nodded.

“Lacey made a mistake. She did something nice girls don't normally do. Don't
ever
do.”

“She cursed?” Hazel asked.

Miss Lerner gave a quick smile, but then she shook her head. “Lacey was, well, she was with child. Samuel.” She hesitated. “Lacey and Randy weren't married, you see.”

Hazel rocked back. “Oh,” she said. It all made sense now. The secret. The way people talked about Samuel. How they looked at him. His mother had been unmarried when she had him. Unmarried and still in high school. She could practically hear the cackles and whispers of women like Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Logan.

“It was winter when she told me, right before Valentine's Day. By that point, Randy was already gone.”

“Gone?” Hazel asked. “Gone where?”

“Like a lot of boys, he enlisted after Pearl Harbor. School didn't hold much for him, so he dropped out and joined up. He figured it was the best way he could give a good life to Lacey. They planned to get married when he came back. Only he didn't come back.”

“He was killed?”

Miss Lerner nodded. “He never even knew she was pregnant.”

Hazel could picture a man-sized Samuel away in Europe or Japan, lonely in his bunker, missing Samuel's mother. And then he was gone. How different Samuel's life would have been had he come back. Hazel didn't have any words for the saddest story she had ever heard.

“The Switzers sent Lacey away. They said she was off to a finishing school down South, but everyone knew the truth. She came back with the baby. The Switzers didn't even bother to try to hide it. She didn't stick around for long. It's hard to say she was ever even here. I went over a few times to try to talk with her, to play with the baby. She was there, but she was—”

“Empty,” Hazel finished for her, thinking of how Samuel had described his mother.

“Yes. That's a good way to put it. Then she and the baby disappeared. People said she came back to Maple Hill from time to time. You'd sometimes see the light in her turret. But no one ever saw her in person. And now Samuel is here. You understand, don't you, how much he's been through?”

“Yes. He needs a friend.” Hazel felt low about how she'd been treating him. What happened with his parents, it was a tragedy—and it wasn't his fault. But everyone at school—everyone in town—was talking about him and making assumptions about what kind of boy he must be, just because of one mistake his parents made.

“Yes, definitely, but I can also tell you what he doesn't
need. He doesn't need to be going around graveyards digging up old stories. He doesn't need to be caught up in any silliness.”

Hazel felt her cheeks flush: Miss Lerner thought she was silly, that she and Samuel had just been playing a game. But there was more to it than that, and more to Hazel. She stood up. “Thank you, Miss Lerner,” she said. It was no use to try to explain that Samuel hadn't gotten the idea from her; poking around in graveyards was what he did. She heard what Miss Lerner was saying: Samuel needed a friend, but he didn't need her.

Hazel rolled her bike off the sidewalk and onto the street and hopped on. She had all these stories churning around in her head. There was Mr. Jones with his lost sister and Samuel with his lost father. She had never lost anyone and yet just thinking about it made her sad. Soon her stomach was roiling as much as her head and she wished she were back home under her covers never having learned the truth of any of this. The truth was just too heavy sometimes.

She'd only gone a block when she realized her tire was flat. Again. She got off the bike and started pushing it in the direction of Wall's Garage. As she walked, her shin hit the pedal and she said one of the words her mother told her never to say, and she got angrier and angrier at her dad and his promises to fix the tire. He would fix it, she thought, if it had flowers growing out of it. He would fix it if it had a Latin name.

Then, as if someone had come from behind and shoved her, she thought:
Samuel doesn't have anyone to get angry at
.

Instead of making her feel better, the thought made her feel small, and even angrier, though now the anger was directed at herself, which was an entirely uncomfortable emotion.

She staggered into Wall's Garage feeling as heavy as cement.

“Hello there!” Mr. Wall said. “Don't you look nice today!” He was sitting on a folding lawn chair just outside his office, toothpick jutting out from between his lips.

“Hey, Mr. Wall,” she replied, unable to keep the glum out of her voice. She was sure he was going to ask what was wrong. She would tell him that everything was fine, and he would say good, because adults often asked if things were all right, but really they just wanted to hear that you were okay.

Instead, though, he looked at her and looked at her bike. “You know, Hazel, not that I mind seeing you so often, but I could fix your tire if you'd like.”

“My dad's going to do it. Someday.”

Mr. Wall hesitated. “Of course. Then again, it's awfully quiet here today. I haven't practiced my tire-fixing skills in a while. You'd be doing me a favor.”

Hazel knew that Mr. Wall wasn't being entirely honest. But he also wasn't lying. “Okay,” she replied.

“Bring her on in.”

She pushed her bike into the place where the cars normally went. Mr. Wall came out with a toolbox and a small piece of black rubber. After removing the wheel, he used a screwdriver
to wedge her tire off the wheel frame. Hazel sat down on the little cart that Mr. Wall used to slide under cars to work on them.

“It's a slow leak,” she told him. This much her dad had explained to her.

“When I'm done, it will be a no-leak.” He grinned at her and she wanted to grin back, but she couldn't, what with all the churning and the roiling.

Hazel used her heels to roll herself back and forth, back and forth. She held her skirt up so it didn't brush against the grease- and oil-stained floor. “Mr. Wall, have you ever known someone and then found out something about them that made you think about them in a whole different way?”

Mr. Wall measured out a patch and cut it. “I guess we've all had that happen at some point in time.”

Hazel nodded. “I guess so.”

He put some sticky stuff on the tire, then laid the patch over it.

He held the screwdriver in his mouth, so when he spoke, his words sounded like they were bent at odd angles. “I guess the important thing to remember, though, is that you have to think about who they are to you, and who they might be, not who they were.”

Hazel thought on that for a little while. She spun the trolley in little circles. “And if you'd been mean to them because you didn't know the whole story? Like what if their past actually did matter and what you found out made you realize that you had them wrong all along?”

He held his hand on the patch so that it would set. “That is a trickier thing.”

“It is.”

He looked down at his patch, nodded, then started to put the tire back on the wheel. As he maneuvered it onto the frame he said, “It can never hurt to come clean.” He put the wheel back on the bike, making sure to tighten all the bolts. “There you go. Good as new. Just fill it up with air and away you'll go.”

“Thanks, Mr. Wall.”

“Thank you,” he replied.

She rolled the bike out to the air pump, filled up the tire, and was on her way.

Hazel got home before the party would have ended, so she looked for her parents in the office. Her mom was sitting in the desk chair eating an apple with one of her old textbooks on her knees. “Mr. Short drove me home,” Hazel announced.

“That was nice of him. Did you thank him?”

Hazel couldn't remember if she had or not, but she said yes, and then she went upstairs and changed out of her dress, making sure to hang it up in the closet, and put on dungarees and a T-shirt. She walked out through the graveyard past the Three Graces. “Not today, Abitha. I'm not in the mood.”

She kept going until she got to her favorite tree, and climbed up it, then nestled herself in the crook. The bark felt hard against her back and she kept shifting to try to get comfortable. She looked down at her house. There was a light on in
the office. Maybe her parents were meeting with a family and there would be another grave soon, another life tucked away into Memory's Garden.

She let her legs hang down and leaned forward so she was lying across the branch. She put her cheek down on the bark and let it press in.
What is wrong with me
, she wondered,
that Miss Lerner thinks I might damage Samuel? Is he so fragile, or am I so rough?

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught some movement. Lifting her head, she saw Mr. Jones in Pauper's Field. He stood by Alice's headstone holding a small stuffed animal. He looked up to the sky before bending over and placing it next to the grave.

When he was gone, Hazel dropped out of the tree, her canvas sneakers crunching the leaves. With a glance toward the house, she rushed over to the headstone. The stuffed animal was a mouse with pink ears, white whiskers, and shiny green eyes. Hazel knew that mice didn't have green eyes, no more than a rabbit would have one ear flopping down, but it didn't matter.

That's when Hazel knew what she had to do.

Hazel came right home from school on Monday and waited on the back stoop for Mr. Jones. When she saw him come over the rise with a shovel on his shoulder, she jumped to her feet. She began with confidence, but with every step her intensity waned. Just as she was about to turn back, Mr. Jones spotted her. His eyes narrowed as he regripped the shovel in his hand.

“I was wrong,” she said.

“You certainly were,” he replied.

“You must admit that Paul Jones is an entirely dubious name,” she told him.

“You'll have to take that up with my parents.”

This was not going as she had planned. She had expected him to be so grateful, so relieved that it was all a big misunderstanding, that he would clap her on the back and they would
laugh, and he would admire her for being so keenly aware of potential threats, even if she had been wrong about this particular one. “Plus you did arrive right before the investigations started.”

“Seems they caught on rather quick if that was the case,” Mr. Jones said. “You mustn't have thought I was much of a spy.”

Hazel reddened. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean any offense.”

Mr. Jones raised his eyebrows, but he let her comment drop. “I bet you dollars to doughnuts there ain't any spies working in a graveyard.”

Hazel was torn between wanting to ask what “dollars to doughnuts” meant, and telling him that “ain't” wasn't a proper way to speak.

“The point is, my conclusion flowed from available evidence.”

“Such as?” he demanded. He placed the tip of the shovel in the ground and leaned on the handle.