The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (3 page)

“Fairy roses? The thorns aren't big enough. What about Othello?”

“We don't want anything too large. It might seem disrespectful.” Her mom patted her lips with a paper napkin. “Just who are you trying to keep out of the graveyard, anyway, George? I was thinking of rabbits and the occasional teenager. The prickers on the fairy rose should be fine for that. We could get them in a nice pale pink. They'd be subtle but lovely.”

“You never know who might want to come in. All sorts of new folks are moving to the area.”

“What kind of folks?” Hazel asked, looking up from her notebook.

Her father kept talking to her mother. “And I'm not sure the fairy roses would stop a rabbit, anyway. Maybe we should just keep the fence.”

“A fence won't stop the real threat, and neither will the biggest prickers you can find,” Hazel said.

“What's the real threat?” her dad asked.

“You know what I'm talking about. The Russians. No thorns are going to keep them back. We need a more secure place where we could weather a nuclear attack.” Hazel figured she should give her parents one more chance to build a proper fallout shelter. They didn't go for the bait.

“Don't worry, Hazel. If Senator McCarthy is to be believed, all the Communists are down in Washington and New Jersey.”

“New Jersey?” Hazel asked. New Jersey was far away, but
not stupendously far away. You could get there in a day's drive. She certainly didn't like the thought of danger being so near.

“Don't encourage her,” Hazel's mom said.

“At the Fort Monmouth Signal Corps,” her dad explained. “McCarthy says that the Rosenbergs were just the tip of the iceberg and there's a whole ring of spies down there. At least twenty.”

“George,” Hazel's mom said in a warning tone.

“Really?” Hazel asked.

“That's what they're reporting, but we don't know for sure because Senator McCarthy insists on holding all the hearings behind closed doors so no one can see what he's up to.”

Closed-door meetings made sense to Hazel. The investigators couldn't give away what they knew.

Her father reached out and tousled her hair, and she pulled back. “I've always loved the Othello rose,” he said to her mother.

“I just think if we go for those big flowers—lovely as they are—well, who would want big fat roses behind them as they say good-bye to their loved ones?” She leaned her head back, and the kerchief on her head fluttered in the breeze. With her sunglasses on, she could almost look glamorous, like Elizabeth Taylor or something. “Now, if we could have a proper English garden, that's where we should have the Othello and the mermaid roses. Wouldn't that be nice? But for a graveyard, nothing so big.”

Hazel sighed. This conversation was going round and round. “Why don't you just get small roses with big thorns?”

Her dad looked at her with a mix of excitement and surprise that she seemed to care about the flowers. “Well, Hazel, you can't get big thorns without a big flower.”

“Bigger flower, bigger thorns, stronger smell,” her mother explained.

“So the biggest, best-smelling roses are the most dangerous?” To Hazel, that sounded like it could be something from an Agatha Christie novel:
The Case of the Thorny Rose
. It would be about a beautiful woman and all the men who loved her. They would leave roses by her door, but she would ignore them. One day there would be the most beautiful rose she had ever seen, and even she couldn't ignore it, so she'd bend over and pick it up and be pricked by the huge thorn that the murderer had covered with poison. She'd drop dead, or maybe into a deep coma like Sleeping Beauty. It would take Miss Marple all of ten seconds to figure out it was one of the girls in town who was jealous of the woman's beauty. And smarts. The beautiful woman would be smart, too, and that's why she wouldn't have the time for the suitors.

Hazel was getting quite caught up in her own story when her father said, “Would you like to take a look at some of the catalogs? Perhaps you'd like to choose the rose for the back hedge.”

“Is there a type that has a thorn that could serve as a poisoned dart?”

Hazel's mother rolled her eyes, but her father said, “Well, now, I don't suppose I know just what it would take to make a poisoned dart. Why, is there someone you want to poison?”

He laughed, but in truth there was a whole list of people Hazel wouldn't mind giving a touch of poison to. Not enough to kill them, of course, or even to send them into Sleeping Beauty la-la land. Just enough to make them reflect on their actions. “I can think of a couple,” she said.

“Oh, Hazel.” Her mom sighed. “Are kids at school giving you trouble again?”

Parents always asked the most ridiculous questions. And even if she answered truthfully, what would her mother be able to do about it? Before she had a chance to answer, her mom said, “I'll just go ahead and order those fairy roses. I want to get them in before the frost.”

“So what about the Shorts, anyway?” Hazel asked.

“The Shorts?” her dad asked. “Now, why on earth do you think they'd be sneaking into the cemetery?”

“I asked if anyone in their family had died recently.”

“What would make you ask a question like that?”

Three crows in the pear tree started cawing at one another, and it was like a warning to Hazel to zip it. “Oh, something Connie said in class. I must have misunderstood her.”

“Connie's a nice girl,” her mom said. “Shame about the pigeon toes, though.”

Even her mom noticed the pigeon toes, and her mom didn't notice anything.

Monday morning meant music again. Surprise, surprise, Hazel was given the triangle, while Connie and Maryann played the glockenspiels.

After music, they all went back to class. Hazel sat down in her second-row seat and then arranged her pencils on her desk.

When she lifted her head, she was surprised to see a boy standing there. He had a shaggy haircut, poorly done, so his bangs fell down into his eyes. He wore old-fashioned glasses, perfectly round with wire frames. His clothes were not usual, either: brown pants, a button-down shirt, and suspenders. He looked like the pictures in their history textbooks of folks from the Civil War. His skin was so pale it was almost blue, and he had deep, dark circles under his eyes. He seemed to shimmer, he jittered so much, like he was wavering between this world
and the next. He looked for all the world like a ghost; that wasn't possible, of course, or so she had thought, but there he was, there but not. A ghost! She had lived all her life in a graveyard, and at school was where she saw her first ghost. It had to mean something. Something special. Something different.

Mrs. Sinclair cleared her throat. “Boys and girls, we have a new student. I'd like you all to welcome Samuel Butler.”

There were a few murmurs at the name, a ripple of excitement that washed over the class. Hazel, though, couldn't help but be disappointed. He was just a regular kid. Well, not regular regular. He stood with stooped shoulders next to Mrs. Sinclair. His hair was mussed and his glasses looked smudged.

His presence after music class raised a number of questions, though. Why, for example, had he not arrived at the beginning of the day? Or maybe he had arrived, but had spent the entire time meeting with the principal in the front office—a prospect that raised many more questions. She even allowed herself the fantasy that he had some condition that prevented him from being able to attend music class, and if he could get such an excuse, then, maybe, so could she.

He joined the row behind her, on the other side of the room. In fact, he took Becky's seat. She couldn't see him, but she glowered. How could Mrs. Sinclair give away Becky's seat? There was still a possibility that she would return, and then she would be faced with this small, strange boy sitting in her chair. That would not be much of a welcome. Becky would probably
cry—Becky was quite a crier—and then she'd run out of the room, maybe all the way back to Arizona.

“Why couldn't we get someone normal?” Maryann whispered from her seat behind Hazel.

“Seriously. Look at those glasses,” Connie replied. “So square.”

Hazel tried to look over her shoulder, but didn't want the other girls to notice that she was taking any interest in him. She just wondered how they had made their judgment so quickly. It was the clothes, she decided. His old-fashioned clothes were what made them shun him. In her case, she often wondered if it was because she lived in the cemetery. She feared, though, that it was something about her, something that emanated off her like sweat, and they would sense it even if she lived in one of the brick houses on the hill.

“Today we begin our study of ancient Greece,” Mrs. Sinclair announced. “Let's start by listing the things we know.”

Hazel waited a moment to raise her hand. This was something Mrs. Sinclair had asked her to do in order to give the other students a chance to process the question and come up with their own answers. Hazel was an awfully fast thinker, and it frustrated her to have to wait, but Mrs. Sinclair had explained that Hazel should have pity on her classmates and their pea-sized brains. She hadn't used those words, of course, but that was the gist. Hazel was excellent at picking up what adults really meant when they spoke to her.

“Yes, Samuel, how nice of you to volunteer on your first day.”

Samuel stood up next to his desk with his hands folded. “There are many interesting things about the ancient Greeks, but to my mind the most interesting part of their culture is their form of government. It is the predecessor to our own democracy.”

There were general rumblings around the room. “He talks like a grown-up,” she heard Anthony say to Timmy in a low voice.

“That's right,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Thank you.” She wrote “Democracy” on the board.

“At the same time,” he went on, “the civilization was grounded in war and had some of the most ruthless soldiers of the time. Most notably, the Spartans.”

“Soldiers?” Timmy asked. “Like the army and the navy?”

“Well, it was the Romans who had the first standing army,” Samuel said. “But the Spartans were highly trained and organized. Boys left the home early and trained all their lives to be soldiers.”

“I wish we could do that!” Anthony exclaimed. “I'd go right now and get trained and then the Commies wouldn't know what hit them.”

“Me, too!” came a chorus of boys.

“Gentlemen,” Mrs. Sinclair said, and waved her hands downward like she was calming a pack of wild dogs.

“The way the Spartans fought actually might appeal to the Russians,” Samuel said. “They did it in a group called a phalanx. All together as one.”

The boys grumbled at this. Hazel shifted in her seat. She
could feel Maryann and Connie staring at her. It was one thing to be an outcast, and quite another to be an outcast with something special about you. Hazel was an outcast, but at least she wasn't like Ellen Abbott, who sat in the back row and never spoke. The only thing Hazel knew about Ellen was that she liked horse books. Hazel hated horse books.

Hazel was smart. The smartest. This fact was acknowledged by the whole fifth grade. Now here was some new boy trying to challenge her place at the top. She shot her hand into the air, and before Mrs. Sinclair could call on her—or not—she began speaking. “They are also well known for their mythology. It was a complicated system, and the gods and goddesses weren't well behaved. They were always getting jealous of one another and interfering with the humans. My favorite goddess is Athena. She sprang fully grown from Zeus's head.”

Connie and Maryann made retching noises behind her.

“Yes, that's right, too,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “Anyone else?”

“Also,” Hazel added, unwilling to be outdone, “it wasn't just about politics. Their art was spectacular, especially the painting and sculpture, and it's still around today and is valuable and I once went to Boston and saw all these sculptures made out of white marble. They were beautiful, and people still learn from them today.”

“True, Hazel. Let's see what anyone else knows.”

No one moved. Then Samuel raised his hand. “In the time of the ancient Greeks, those sculptures were actually painted.
To our eyes today, they would seem gaudy, but that's how they liked them.”

Hazel looked down at her hands on her desk. They were shaking. This was a nightmare. It had to be a nightmare. She heard a titter, and then she raised her eyes. Maryann, in a singsongy voice, whispered, “Samuel's smarter than Hazel. Samuel's smarter than Hazel.” And she knew then that it wasn't a dream. Not at all. This was all too real.

Impossible
, Hazel thought, shaking her head. There was no way that any other fifth grader—or sixth grader for that matter—could be smarter than her. Maybe Samuel was just super super interested in ancient Greece. Like Ellen with her horse books, or Anthony with different kinds of cars.

Her stomach dropped as Samuel raised his hand again.

As she rode her bike to the library after school, Hazel listed all the ways that she was probably smarter than Samuel. True, he had shined in math and science and even knew the name of the painting that the art teacher held up, some strange portrait where the parts of the face were all misshapen and put together wrong, which turned out to be by a man named Pablo Picasso. Hazel had been thinking,
I could do that
, but then Maryann said, “It doesn't even look like a face. It looks like something a baby painted.” So she'd clamped her mouth shut. Out at recess he pulled a big book with a brown leather cover from a bag that could only be called a satchel and sat on the wall and read. Even Hazel didn't read at recess. She walked the perimeter of the playground and occasionally went on the swings.