The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (7 page)

She served herself peas and mashed potatoes. She liked to make a well in her potatoes and fill it with gravy, then float the peas in it, but her mother said that was uncouth, which was another way of saying no. So instead she swirled the gravy into the potatoes and thought about her mysteries. After dinner she would write everything down in her notebook, but in the meantime she could contemplate.

If Mr. Jones was a spy—The Comrade, as she decided to call him—then what possible connection could he have to a
ten-year-old girl? She puzzled over this as she lined up her peas and slid them onto her fork.

“And how was school today?” her mom asked.

“Fine,” Hazel replied before shoveling one forkful of potatoes into her mouth after another.

“Manners,” her mother said. She snapped out her napkin, then spread it across her lap.

In the detective stories she read, the detective always had someone to bounce ideas off. Hazel, though, didn't have anyone. She told herself it wasn't a problem. After all, Nancy Drew was alone for the first four books—her friends Bess and George didn't show up until the fifth book,
The Secret at Shadow Ranch
—and she solved those first four mysteries just fine without them. Anyway, Bess and George weren't as smart as Nancy—or Hazel for that matter—and they sometimes got in the way instead of helping.

Becky would have been good at this mystery, Hazel knew, and she was sad to have to solve it without her. Maybe she could copy over her notes and send them to Becky, and Becky could write back with her ideas. Of course, that would take a long time, but she liked the idea of receiving a package with a mystery in it, and thought that Becky would, too.

Anyway, she refocused herself, the most obvious option was that the person buried there was not in fact Alice, Ten Years Old, but perhaps someone who had figured out who Paul Jones was. She shivered; she didn't want to end up buried in Pauper's Field.

On the other hand, by planting flowers by a headstone in Pauper's Field, Mr. Jones was practically putting up a big sign saying that something was going on.

Maybe there isn't a body there at all
, she thought.
Maybe it is simply a hiding place
.

“Did you learn anything?” her dad asked.

She knew she couldn't just come out and tell them that she'd learned that their gravedigger was spying for the Russians. “We're studying ancient Greece.”

“Ah, ancient Greece,” her dad said, nodding, as if he had his own fond memories of the place. “I made a scale model of the Parthenon when I was your age. I bet I have it somewhere.”

“Greek mythology!” her mom said, pleased as could be. Her parents stank at this talking-to-their-kid thing.

“Yes,” Hazel said. Her parents' sudden interest in traditional family dinner conversation seemed scripted to Hazel, as if by playing the parts they could become a different kind of family than they were. Hazel kept lining up her peas and spiking them onto the tines of her fork. She decided to throw them a bone. “Did you know that the Greeks were the founders of our modern form of democracy?”

“Well, something
like
our modern form of democracy,” her dad said.

“Sure.” Hazel pushed another large bite of potatoes into her mouth, and her mother raised an eyebrow, so the next time she took a smaller scoop. She was saving her chicken for
last since she didn't like it and hoped she could fill herself up with peas and potatoes.

Her parents exchanged a glance and her father cleared his throat and then her mother gave him a pointed look, and finally he said, “We saw you by the pond today. With a boy.”

“Oh, that's the new boy,” she said.

“That might have been the type of information you could have shared when we asked you what happened at school today,” her mom said.

Hazel shrugged. “It's no big deal.” Though, in fact, new students were pretty rare at Adelaide Switzer Elementary.

“So what's his name? Where's he from?” her mom asked.

“Samuel,” she said. “And I don't know where he's from. He said he's lived seventeen different places.”

“Samuel?” her mom asked, putting down her fork. “What's his last name?”

Hazel tried to remember if Mrs. Sinclair had said his last name. “I'm not sure—”

“He's not Samuel Butler, is he?”

“Yes! That's it!” Hazel looked from her mother to her father and then back again. They were communicating in the wordless way of parents: raised eyebrows, twitches of lips, and intense stares. “What?” Hazel asked.

“Nothing,” her dad said. “His mother used to live in town, a long time ago.”

Hazel shrugged. “Yeah, well, he's in my class now and he's smart and kind of strange.”

“And what were you two doing by the pond?” her mom asked.

Hazel bit her lip to keep herself from spilling the whole story about Mr. Jones and the spies in town and Alice. She'd already been warned more than once to just leave Mr. Jones alone. “He was doing some grave rubbings and I told him that he needed to have a permit, and he did. I've never actually seen one before. They're pretty boring.”

Hazel's mom picked up her fork again. “Well, you be sure to be nice to him.”

“Why?” Hazel asked.

“You should always be nice to people, Hazel.”

“I know that. So why did you specifically tell me to be nice to him?”

Her parents exchanged another look before her mother spoke. “Well, Hazel, because he's new, that's why. You don't know what it's like to be the new kid at school, and I imagine it's difficult. It can be hard to make friends.”

Hazel didn't need to be told it could be hard to make friends. “He seems all right,” she said. “But strange.”

“You mentioned that already,” her mom said.

“If someone is a little different from the norm, that just means they're more interesting. More going on upstairs,” her dad said, tapping his head. He leaned in and spoke in a stage whisper. “Some people think your mother and I are weird.”

“You
are
weird,” she said.

“Point proven,” her dad replied.

“Just try to be a little kind,” her mother told her. “Some people are more fragile than others.”

Hazel imagined Samuel shattering like a vase. Then she wondered how her mother would know if he was fragile or not.

It was a little odd to think that he was actually from Maple Hill, or his mom was anyway, and that she'd never met him. He was like a mystery all to himself. True, a far more boring mystery than the gravestone they'd found in Pauper's Field, but a mystery, nonetheless. Maybe he had a strange illness, and his mom had it, too, and that's what made him fragile. Or maybe he was actually not from Maple Hill at all and it was a big charade that all the adults were in on, or at least some of them, because actually he was a prince from some small European country whose king (his father) had just been deposed and he needed a safe place to hide. That squared up with his clothes and his strange way of talking.

“Kind, but no kissing,” her dad said.

“Yuck,” she said.

“Good,” he replied. Then he reached over to the counter and picked up a seed catalog. Family time, it seemed, was over. Now Hazel could get on with her investigation.

As soon as she finished clearing the table, she raced up the stairs to her bedroom and took her Mysteries Notebook out from between her mattress and box spring. Now that she had a real mystery to solve, she had decided to keep it hidden. She began by writing down everything she knew about Mr. Jones, Communist spies, and Alice. For Alice all she had was that,
if she was a real person, she was ten years old. For Communist spies, she knew that they were suspected to be at the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory, so she felt she could write down “In Maple Hill.” Mr. Jones was also in Maple Hill, so she wrote that under his name and then put a star next to each entry to indicate a connection. Samuel would probably call it a loose connection, but Maple Hill was a small town, and if spies were in the factory, it stood to reason that they would be elsewhere in town. That's what Hazel thought, anyway.

There were a number of other facts she could write under both “Mr. Jones” and “Communist spies”: secretive, potentially violent, keep to themselves.

Next she decided to make a list of all the questions for which she needed an answer:

What is Mr. Jones's real name?

Is Mr. Jones from Russia?

Did Mr. Jones have previous experience as a gravedigger? What did he do before coming here?

When Communists infiltrate, do they all go to work in the same place? Wouldn't it make sense for them to have a leader outside the company that they reported to?

How do spies get their secrets back to Mother Russia anyway?

Who is Alice?

She looked over her list. She wasn't sure how she was going to find out all these things. She supposed there might be information about Communists in the books and magazines
in the library. Hazel wished she had a little blue sports car like Nancy Drew. Then she could drive herself to the library to do more research, though the library was probably closed. While it was true that Nancy Drew had managed just fine on her own for four mysteries, Hazel wasn't sure if she was ready for this one. She was smart, smarter than anyone, but for this case she was going to need backup. After all, even the great Sherlock Holmes needed Watson. Though she didn't want to admit it, she needed Samuel.

Hazel crouched at the bottom of the stairs like the gargoyles in the graveyard. She listened to her parents in the living room.

“‘In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line,'” her father intoned.

They were reading Thoreau to each other, something they did like normal parents played bridge or swirled cocktails in a glass. Of all the people in history, Thoreau was the person Hazel would least like to spend time with. The whole world was open to him, and he had chosen to lock himself away in a little cabin in the woods.

The living room was off the hall that led to the kitchen. The kitchen was where she needed to go to get the lemon
juice and toothpick in order to write her secret message to Samuel.

When she was a grown-up, and a real detective, she would probably have a special watch that also served as a communicator, and she could send information to the other detectives that way, but for now she had to use another method to let Samuel know what she had found out. She had begged and begged her parents for a Super Spy Kit that she had seen advertised in the back of an
Amazing Detective
comic book. It had a special notebook, and a pen that wrote with invisible ink, and a magnifying glass, which is what she wanted most of all. Her parents had told her no, of course, so she was going to have to make her own invisible ink to send a note to Samuel.

“Read the bit about simplicity, about the marrow of life,” her mother said.

Hazel heard a shifting as her father moved in his chair. Her mother would be sitting at his feet, perhaps with her eyes closed, while he read. If Hazel timed it right, to move while her father was speaking, perhaps both would be too distracted to hear her go by.

“Here we are,” her father said.

Hazel started moving catlike down the hall. She closed her eyes as she passed the living room, as if this could somehow ward off their seeing her. Three more steps and her hands were on the door to the kitchen, pushing it open. She held it by the knob and let it slowly shut, with not even a click as it fell back into place.

She let out her breath like the slow leak from her bike tire. Her heart was racing. She liked adventure, might even say that she lived for it, yet in the moment, it made her feel rather ill.

The lemon juice was easy. She took a small, chipped cup from the back of the cupboard and filled it from the glass bottle in their refrigerator. The toothpick was harder to locate. They were not much of a toothpick family. Her father did not drink martinis with olives when he got home from work. They didn't have people over for hors d'oeuvres that needed to be spiked on sticks. Once Hazel had been to a party at Becky's, and they'd had tiny hot dogs wrapped in dough that Hazel thought were the most astounding things ever, but the only people Hazel's parents ever had over were other horticulturalists, and she guessed they weren't the tiny hot dog kind of crowd.

So the toothpicks were kept on a high shelf of the pantry. She went to the table and lifted a large, heavy chair and carried it over to the pantry. Normally she just dragged the chair, which her mother hated because she said it would scratch the linoleum, but that night she couldn't risk the scraping sound on the floor.

When she climbed onto the chair, her knee hit the bag of King Arthur flour, tipping it forward. As she reached down to catch it, a small white cloud emerged, dropping tiny snow-flakes onto her nightgown. She carefully righted it, imagining the flour spilled all over the floor and the absolute disaster that had just been averted.