The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (5 page)

Miss Angus said that children were only welcome on the lower level, unless accompanied by a responsible adult, which Miss Lerner said was
not okay
and that they could go wherever they wanted as long as they were respectful. But all the other kids were too afraid of Miss Angus, and Miss Lerner made things so nice that most kids just stayed on the lower level. Except Hazel. She ranged all over the building.

The downstairs was carpeted in broad orange and brown stripes, and so Miss Lerner had adopted a tiger theme. Hazel patted the head of the stuffed tiger that lazed at the bottom of the stairs. “Hello, Miss Lerner,” she called as she crossed the room. You didn't need to whisper in the downstairs library.

“Why, hello there, Hazel, how are you?”

“Peachy,” she said. Her heart was still beating quickly after her run-in with Miss Angus.

“Did I see you riding through town over the weekend? That's one smart bike you have.”

“Thanks, Miss Lerner.”

Hazel found a chair in a secluded nook and slipped the newspaper onto her lap. She took a deep breath. Hazel was not afraid of much, but she was afraid of Communists. The Russians had been American allies in the Second World War, but after the war, things had soured and now the Russians were turning all the countries around them Communist, and they wanted to do the same thing to America. They were just waiting for the opportunity to come over and make all the people here exactly like them: no choices, no freedom, and no icecream floats from the soda fountain in the drugstore, even if you'd been on your best behavior all day. Samuel had been right that the Greeks had started democracy, which meant that the people got a say in how things worked. Americans had those rights, and the Communists wanted to take that away. And now there was a chance that there were Red spies right in her town!

She smoothed out the front page and began reading the story. Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose mission was to hunt out Communists, had sent a team of investigators to the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory. It seemed that the factory had been working on fabricating some sort of switch related to the launching of a guided missile. This was all very exciting to Hazel, and she wished she had known about it sooner, but she was rushing through the article to find out more about why
McCarthy thought Russian spies might be there. It turned out that several of the union bosses had at one time been members of the Communist Party, and so McCarthy wanted to make sure they weren't stealing secrets. He had people investigating at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, too.

Hazel leaned back in her seat. Communists. Right here in Maple Hill. This was worse than she could have imagined. Not only could someone she knew be telling secrets to the Russians, but also those secrets had to do with making weapons. Those spies could have bombs raining down right on her town.

“Hazel?”

Hazel jumped in her chair, but it was just Miss Lerner.

“What are you reading there?”

Hazel hesitated for a moment, but she knew that Miss Lerner was a good listener. “It's about Communists, Miss Lerner. Russian spies right here in Maple Hill, working at the Switzer plant and stealing all our secrets.”

“Says who?”

“Senator McCarthy.”

Miss Lerner gave a slight frown. “Far be it from me to question a US senator, but it seems to me that Senator McCarthy points fingers first and asks questions later, if at all.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means he makes a big fuss about other folks being un-American, but the way he goes about it, well, it's like Senator Margaret Chase Smith said, the way he's doing it goes against some of the basic freedoms of being an American.”

“But the article says they're building missiles there. Did you know they were building missiles? I sure didn't.”

“I had heard that,” Miss Lerner said.

Hazel remembered then that Fred Bowen, one of the foremen and the union boss at the factory, was courting Miss Lerner. “What does Mr. Bowen say about all this?”

“Hazel, I don't think you need to worry about spies. The folks that work at the factory, they're our neighbors.”

Hazel narrowed her eyes. She trusted Miss Lerner, but maybe she was blinded by love. Love could do that to you, and so Hazel had promised herself to never fall in love. Mr. Bowen could well be a Communist and maybe even a spy. “That's the thing about spies, Miss Lerner. They live among us. They hide. Anyone could be a spy. Why,” she said slowly, as if it were just occurring to her, “I suppose even Mr. Bowen could be a spy.”

Miss Lerner laughed at that. “Mr. Bowen is as American as apple pie. Don't let your imagination get the best of you, Hazel.”

Hazel folded the paper and smoothed the crease. “All right, Miss Lerner,” she said. But she didn't mean it. If there were spies in Maple Hill, Hazel wanted to be the first to know.

“Good. Now, how was school today?”

Hazel thought about telling Miss Lerner about Samuel, or about music class, but instead she said, “Okay. I need to bone up on Greek history, though. Starting a new unit in school.”

Miss Lerner's eyes lit up and she waved her hands like a little bird. “We just got a new series in. You take some home and read them and tell me if you think they're any good. If you don't like them, I'll send them back!”

Hazel beamed. Sometimes Miss Lerner called her “librarian-in-training” or her “unofficial assistant.”

Miss Lerner went behind her desk, the little gate swinging to and fro behind her. Hazel desperately wanted to get behind that desk and see all the secrets there, but Miss Lerner had never asked. Hazel figured it would happen when her assistantship moved from unofficial to official.

Hazel liked to imagine what Miss Lerner's house was like. She pictured it as just like the library, full of books with neat labels on the spines. If her parents were ever to die in a horrible, tragic accident, she hoped that Miss Lerner would adopt her, and they would catalog books all the time.

Miss Lerner lifted a stack of books:
Daily Life in Ancient Greece
,
Government in Ancient Greece, Warfare in Ancient Greece, Mythology in Ancient Greece
. Hazel felt pretty solid on mythology, but she took the other three.

“Thanks, Miss Lerner,” she said as she tucked them into her backpack.

Samuel Butler wouldn't know what hit him.

The books made her wobble a little as she pedaled up the Monument Street hill and then coasted the slight decline to her house. She had planned to go right inside and start studying ancient Greece, but as she rode up the circular drive in front of her house, she decided it was too nice out, and soon it would be cold and rainy, and then winter would come, so she ought to take advantage of all the nice, sunny days she had left. She shrugged off her heavy book bag and left it in the mudroom before heading back to the cemetery. She didn't bother to change from her school clothes into play clothes since she just planned to walk around the cemetery and take in the fresh air. The people in the books she liked to read were always taking strolls in the fresh country air to clear their heads and their lungs, and so it made her feel grown-up and European to do it.

When she stepped outside, Mr. Jones was leaning against a tree smoking one of his odd-smelling cigarettes. “Oh!” she said, surprised. “Good afternoon, Mr. Jones.”

Mr. Jones dropped his cigarette and squished it down with the heel of his work boot. Bending over, he scooped it up and dropped it into a tin can that he left by the tree. He looked her up and down. “I've seen what you do to those graves,” he said. “Hopping and skipping from one to one. That's not right.”

“Well, I …”

Hazel's heart beat as fast as a wind-up toy. Was Mr. Jones trying to tell her something? Was it a warning or a threat? He'd had a sneer across his lips like she was a skunk he'd found dead in the road. She thought of what Otis had said about Mr. Jones and the cart full of meat, and the gravedigger's words seemed all the more menacing. She almost ran inside to get her Mysteries Notebook so she could write down what he had said just as he had said it. But today she had a lot to contemplate—this new boy, Red spies in Maple Hill, ancient Greece—and as soon as Mr. Jones moved on, she was lost in her own head.

Most of the town worked at the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory, but she'd never given much thought to what they did there. As the name implied, there were two parts: safes and switches. The safes were famous. They were even advertised in
Life
magazine: “Your Secret's Secure with a Switzer Safe.” But if there were Red spies, they would probably be on the switch side trying to get secrets about the switches being made for the missiles. She supposed there was a slight possibility
there were safes on the missiles, or that secrets about the missiles were kept in a Switzer safe down in Washington, DC. This was a small possibility, but she knew that good detectives like Nancy Drew or Sherlock Holmes always considered all possibilities and she ought to do the same.

A little ways off, she could see Mr. Jones had begun work on a grave; a new cigarette dangled from his lips and sent smoke swirling around his head. She made sure to go in the other direction, back toward the Three Graces. “No, Babitha, I'm not in a bad mood. I've just got a lot to do.” Concentrating on the potential spies was difficult, as she couldn't get Samuel out of her head. Leaning over, she brushed some dirt off the base of their statue. She heard a clanging noise and looked up and saw the top half of Mr. Jones sticking out of the open grave. He lifted his shovel and jammed it into the earth. It must have hit a stone to make such an awful noise. She watched him work. He drove the shovel into the ground over and over again.

That there were spies in America was more or less a certainty. What else could explain how quickly the Soviets had developed their own atom bomb? They must have had someone passing them information. And just that summer Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed for passing information back to the Communists. But Maple Hill seemed so far removed from that sort of thing. Miss Lerner was right: the people at the factory were their neighbors. Hazel didn't like the idea of one of her neighbors spying on her or anyone else in town.
It
couldn't
be someone from the plant, someone from Maple Hill. If there were spies in the town, they had to have come from outside. She sat on the Graces' bench trying to make sense of it all.

From the pond came a sluicing sound. Hazel watched as a rat crept out of the Graces' pond like an old man from a bathtub. It stopped at the edge, turned its head right and then left, and then waddled onward. It was a fat rat with long whiskers and a tail that dragged behind it like a dead snake.

Hazel held still. These were the things Hazel knew about rats: they bit you with sharp teeth and they had rabies, which would make you froth at the mouth and go on a rampage, biting everyone you saw before collapsing in a trembling heap on the ground. Moving slowly, since she wasn't sure about a rat's eyesight or its sense of motion, she turned her head. No one. She looked the other direction. Coming over the rise was Mr. Jones carrying a shovel. She couldn't very well go and ask Mr. Jones for help.

The rat stopped its progress and lifted its nose up into the air. Hazel held her breath. Then, as if it had forgotten something, the rat turned around and began waddling in her direction. She lifted her feet off the ground, but as the rat got closer, she thought that if it lifted itself up on its hind legs, it could grab her shoelaces with its tiny claws and heft itself up onto her foot, then scurry up her leg. It would bite her, and the mouth frothing would commence.

She stood on the bench, but the bench seemed perfectly
climbable, so she stretched her leg over to the base of the statue of the Three Graces. She wrapped her arm around Babitha's waist, mumbling, “Sorry, ladies, desperate times call for desperate measures.” She shimmied up Babitha's torso, then hooked her leg up over Abitha's arm. Pushing on Babitha's head, she pulled herself up so she was sitting on top of them, looking as if Abitha and Babitha had hoisted her up on their shoulders after she scored a home run to win the World Series.

From her perch she could see the rat sitting at the base of the statue. It sniffed the air, but there was no way that fat rat could get to the top of the statue. Hazel stuck out her tongue.

“What are you doing up there?”

Hazel swallowed hard at the sound of Mr. Jones's voice. She looked down and saw his shiny hair glinting in the sun. She couldn't speak, and instead lifted her arm and pointed down at the old rat, who had curled up at the base of the statue, waiting for her to come down so it could infect her and then be on its way.

Mr. Jones bent down for a closer look. After a moment he stood up straight, raised the shovel above his head, and brought it down with a dull
thwack
.

The rat lay motionless on the ground. Easy as you please, Mr. Jones scooped up the carcass in his shovel and began walking toward the end of the property. It didn't bother him at all, as if killing rats and disposing of their bodies was an everyday occurrence for him, as common as digging. It took a certain kind of person to end a life so easily—even if the life belonged
to a rat. Cold. Calculating. Like an automaton, or Gort, the robot in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, which she had snuck in to see at the Strand Theater and then she hadn't been able to sleep for two days. That robot had been mission-minded. Shoot first and sort it all out later. She just knew that rat wasn't the first creature Mr. Jones had killed. Was that his secret? Was he a murderer on the lam?

As soon as Mr. Jones was out of sight, she scrambled down the statue and began running in the opposite direction. She kept running, up the hill and through a part of the graveyard where bodies were buried in tight, neat rows. With each footfall, the word pounded in her head:
robot, robot, robot
. She thought of Gort and how he didn't have a choice in what he did.
Robot, robot, robot
. It was just like what the Communists wanted to do to Americans: program them to be all the same.
Robot, robot, robot
. Program them so they couldn't think for themselves or make any choices or ever do anything fun like eat lollipops that turn your tongue green or skip over gravestones.
Robot, robot, robot
.