The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (29 page)

Now that Connie's family had to leave, she and Maryann were friends again, with Maryann declaring it a huge injustice that her best friend be taken from her. They cried daily, it seemed. For the concert they both had their hair pulled back with ribbons and wore brand-new dresses. Hazel was wearing last year's party dress again, and it pinched her under the arms. Timmy sat next to Maryann, pink and quiet, as Maryann babbled on. So even though the spirits hadn't spoken, Timmy had gotten the message. And even though Hazel had no interest in Timmy, she was jealous. Because Maryann got exactly what she wanted. Because everything with Maryann was easy. Because Maryann wasn't sitting next to her best friend paralyzed and afraid to say the wrong thing.

Timmy said something, and then Maryann turned and glared at them. “What are you staring at, triangle girl?” she hissed.

Connie added, “Ding, ding.”

Hazel tightened her grip on her triangle.

“Ignore them,” Samuel said. “They're stupid.”

She nodded. She wanted to say something else. She wanted to say anything, but the words all died on her tongue. Mrs. Ferrigno came back and began ushering them onto the stage, and it was the only time in her life that she would ever be grateful to see Mrs. Ferrigno.

The lights were on them, and there was a hush all around. Hazel hadn't realized how hot it would be, how the lights shimmered off the metal on the instruments, so it looked like camera flashes were going off all around her. She tried to see her parents, but couldn't find them among the blurry faces in the crowd.

Mrs. Ferrigno stood in front of them and began conducting. It was the best they'd ever played, even Hazel could tell that. Her heart beat faster as they got closer to her part. Samuel elbowed her, they dinged, and the song went on. She let out her breath. Just one more ding and this all would be over. No more triangle people.

Samuel's foot was twitching and he shifted in his seat. Hazel wondered if he had to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Ferrigno had warned them to go before they got up on the stage. Twice. “You never know how nerves might pluck your strings!”

Hazel tightened her grip on her rod. Their next ding was coming up. She counted the measures. One, two, three, four, then another measure, one, two, three, four, and—

Samuel stood up. “Triangle solo!” he yelled out, and began banging on his triangle.

Hazel, flabbergasted, stared up at him.
Come on
, he mouthed. So she stood up, too. There are only so many notes that you can play on a triangle, and Samuel and Hazel used them all, dancing around as they hit the different parts of their triangles. Hazel felt her mouth stretching into a grin so wide it hurt her lips. Together and in perfect sync, they dinged out the entire song. She wished she could see the crowd, their reactions. She looked at Samuel, and he was grinning, too. They probably looked like a couple of lunatics. He nodded at her, she nodded back, and they sat down.

The class stared at them, mouths agape. Mrs. Ferrigno, though, tapped her music stand, brought the eyes of the class back to her, and picked up where they'd left off, all the while glaring fire at Hazel and Samuel.

When the song was done, the crowd clapped and Hazel couldn't be sure, but it felt a little more enthusiastic than it had for the other groups.

As soon as they got off stage, Samuel grabbed her hand and pulled her into the hallway. They hid in a little nook under the stairs.

“We can hold off our execution until tomorrow,” he said.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she asked. “I could have prepared something.”

“I wasn't sure if I could go through with it. I didn't want to disappoint you again. But then Maryann said that triangle people thing, and I knew what I had to do.”

Hazel smiled and leaned back against the wall. “Triangle solo,” she said, shaking her head. “It really was more of a triangle duet.”

“It takes two to triangle,” Samuel said.

“Did you just make a joke, Samuel?” she asked.

“I mustard a joke,” he replied.

A silence fell over them, a tingly kind of silence that seemed to anticipate something that neither of them was quite aware of. Samuel still had his triangle and he twisted his fingers around it.

“I wanted to talk to you about the funeral,” Samuel said.

Hazel's stomach sank into the toes of her navy blue Mary Janes, which her mother had insisted she wear. “Samuel, I—”

“I just wanted to thank you.”

“Thank me?”

“It was the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me.”

“I thought you hated it. You were crying. I thought you had left town and you were never going to come back and that would mean that in less than two months I would have lost two best friends and, frankly, I just don't think that's a very good track record.”

Samuel was shaking his head. “It was just a lot all at once. I was sad. But I was happy, too, to hear how people thought of him, to see what he was really like. No one ever talked to me about him. He was just always gone.”

The lights turned on and people began coming out of the auditorium. Parents were congratulating one another over how their children had done.

Hazel heard a booming voice. “Lydia! George! Quite a little star you have there!”

“Oh, well, now—” her dad began.

“Indeed,” another voice said. “These things are normally a bore with a capital
B
. But your Hazel and that Switzer kid sure livened things up.”

“She is a little spitfire,” her dad said.

“That she is,” the first voice said. “That she is.”

Hazel and Samuel glanced at each other, which was all they could manage before they burst out laughing.

Samuel arrived at her house on Saturday morning holding a thin package wrapped in brown paper. She wondered what kind of present he had gotten her. She thought perhaps it was just the right size for a nice magnifying glass. Before she could reach out her hands to receive it, he said, “There's one last thing we need to do to close this case.”

“There is no case. It was a bust.”

His hair had fallen down between his glasses and his eyes, and he pushed it away with his fist. “
Your
case maybe. Not mine. I researched Alice Jones in the library and found out all I could about her. It wasn't much. She won the spelling bee one year, and had a pig in the county fair another. I gathered it all in a book for Mr. Jones.”

Hazel shoved her feet into her canvas sneakers. “Come on,” she said. “I know just the person we need to go see.”

She wouldn't tell him where they were going, because she liked to keep others in suspense, but Samuel figured it out when they started walking up Mrs. Buttersbee's street.

When they arrived at her house, Mrs. Buttersbee didn't seem confused or surprised. “Hazel! Samuel!” she said merrily. “You're right on time for lemonade. I just made it fresh. Folks think of lemonade as a summer drink, but I love it in the fall.”

“Sounds great,” Hazel said.

They followed Mrs. Buttersbee into her sitting room and sank into the floral couch. Mrs. Buttersbee tottered out, then tottered back in a moment later holding a tray with a pitcher and three glasses. She hummed as she poured. When she handed Samuel his lemonade she said, “You look just like him, you know. Spitting image, they say, though I for one have never cared for that phrase.”

Samuel held his glass in two hands and looked down at his lap. “Thanks,” he murmured.

Hazel took charge. “Mrs. Buttersbee, we're here on another investigation.”

“I figured as much,” Mrs. Buttersbee said.

“You did?”

“I was once quite the investigator myself, Hazel Kaplansky.” She put her lemonade glass back on the tray and wandered over to her bookshelf. “Why else do you think I would keep all of this?”

Mrs. Buttersbee was making more and more sense the more Hazel got to know her.

“So what is it today, kids? More about your mother, Hazel?”

Hazel shook her head. “No. We're here about Alice Jones.”

“Alice Jones?” Mrs. Buttersbee said. “That name isn't ringing any bells.” Her fingers hovered over the spines of several scrapbooks.

“She died during the Depression. The flu outbreak.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Buttersbee said. She used two hands to pull out a black bound book. “That's this volume. Tough few years.”

While Samuel flipped through the book, Hazel and Mrs. Buttersbee chatted about people in town. “Shame about that Short family,” Mrs. Buttersbee said. “I always thought that Mr. Short was good people.”

“He was just doing what he thought he needed to do in order to protect his family. Anyone could make that kind of mistake,” Hazel said, glancing at Samuel. “It's understandable. Now, as for his daughter …” Mrs. Buttersbee cocked her head to the side, but before she could speak, Hazel said, “And don't tell me she's probably nice underneath, because I've looked underneath, and there's no nice there.”

“Oh, I wouldn't dream of saying such a thing.” She turned to Samuel. “Take whatever you want out of there. It's doing me no good.” Then she turned back to Hazel. “I was a girl once, too, you know, and I knew my share of Connie Shorts.”

Samuel transferred several articles from Mrs. Buttersbee's book into the one he'd made for Mr. Jones. “This is a wonderful resource,” he told her. “It belongs in the library.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Buttersbee said. “Then why would anyone come to see me anymore?”

Hazel took a long drink of her lemonade. It was cool and light and tasted just like summer, which was perfect, she decided, for November. “I'd come, Mrs. Buttersbee.”

Mrs. Buttersbee smiled and then ruffled Hazel's hair, which normally Hazel hated, but she decided that Mrs. Buttersbee was so old and so nice that it was okay. “Come back anytime,” she said.

“Do you think she meant it?” Samuel asked as they walked down Mrs. Buttersbee's driveway.

“About the girls? Definitely. I bet there are girls like Maryann Wood and Connie Short going all the way back to ancient Greece. Aphrodite, for example. I bet she was all kinds of mean to Athena.”

“No, I meant about going back anytime.”

“Oh, sure. She loves company.” Hazel bent over and scooped up an acorn cap.

“I'm going to find out all their stories. All the people buried with Alice.”

“How are you going to do that?” She pressed the acorn cap onto her thumb, then wiggled it like it was a little person wearing a hat.

“At the library, with Mrs. Angus's help. And with Mrs.
Buttersbee's articles. Of course, I'll probably need someone to help me with interviews.”

It didn't seem like the most exciting of cases. Then again, she'd made a bit of a mess of her first big, exciting case, so she thought perhaps she should try something a little more boring. “I'd be honored,” she said. She reread the scrap of paper torn from her Mysteries Notebook. “This is his address.”

It was an older house, small and green, with three steps up to a rickety-looking front porch. The curtains were drawn in the windows and there was a week's worth of newspapers on the welcome mat. Still, Hazel reached up her hand and knocked on the door. They waited, Hazel bouncing from foot to foot, but no one came.

Hazel bit her lip. “Maybe this isn't the right address.” She flipped up the lid of the mailbox that was attached to the house next to the door. A Sears, Roebuck catalog was jammed inside. When she pulled it out, she saw that it was addressed to Mr. Paul Jones. “He has to be here. He's not at the cemetery.”

“Maybe we missed him,” Samuel said. “Maybe while we were at Mrs. Buttersbee's he left here and went to the graveyard.”

“Maybe,” Hazel said. But she wasn't really listening. She went down the stairs and around the back, where she finally saw a window without draperies. Standing on her tiptoes, she peered inside. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No people. No pets. No furniture. Nothing. She dropped down onto her heels. This had to be his house, and yet he'd vanished.