“Why won’t you let us stay?” I gestured at the empty tables throughout the diner and the customers sitting here and there on either side of us. “There are plenty of seats. Nobody else is waiting. And you serve exactly what we’re here to eat—pie.”
The manager folded his meaty arms across his chest and shook his head. “Sure, kid, we serve excellent pie. But what we don’t serve here is their kind. Now, goodbye.”
I stumbled back out onto the sidewalk with Mae and Akiko, hot with anger. Why did he think it was okay to treat us that way? When all we wanted was a place to sit down and talk? I looked over at Mae, whose expression was hard as stone. Akiko’s too. Any outrage I was feeling must have been multiplied a hundred times for them.
“I can’t believe this,” I said, my hands shaking. “He was so unfair. I didn’t know people could act like—”
“Well, they can,” Akiko seethed. “And they do.”
Mae didn’t speak. But I could see her chest heave as she took a breath.
I scratched my arm, not sure what to do with myself. In the bright sunshine, my freckles stood out on the pale skin at my wrists. Even though I was always complaining about it, this sunburn-prone skin let me go places my new friends couldn’t. I peeked over at Mae again, and in my mind I pictured her trying to get pie with her daddy once he was back from the war. And I cringed just imagining another diner turning them away. How was this fair? Mae’s dad and Akiko’s brother could risk their lives—risk bullets and bombs defending our country in the war—but they couldn’t sit down in some restaurants for a slice of pie?
As we set off walking, Akiko and Mae were quiet.
“It’s like there’re two wars,” I said softly, glancing at the manager through the diner window. “One fighting against the Nazis and the other against people like him.” I turned to face them both. “I’m so sorry.”
Fourteen
WHAT ARE YOU DOING BACK here, Schätzchen?” called Gerda from the kitchen as we walked into her diner. She and Harry were always giving me pet names like “honey” and “sweetheart.” And they taught me lots of other German words too. “I thought you were going off to solve the puzzles!”
I blinked a moment or two. Even if I could tell them about my day, they wouldn’t believe it. I hardly did myself.
“The tryout?” I said. “It didn’t exactly work out.”
“There’ll be other opportunities, pal,” said Harry. “Don’t you worry.”
I spotted an empty booth along the front windows, so I dove into the seat on one side and signaled for Mae and Akiko to join me. They took their seats stiffly on the other side of the booth, their faces tense as they seemed to brace for another terrible insult from a manager.
“That’s a shame, Josie,” said Gerda in her thick accent, pouring more coffee for the regular customers at the tables beside us. “You’re a hard worker. And so good with the words and the numbers. They made a mistake passing on you, Schätzchen. How about I bring you something to eat? You want the usual? Blueberry pie and a brown cow?”
In the year or so that I’d been working at Gerda’s Diner, I had never ever changed my order. Gerda and Harry gave up trying to get me to eat something different ages ago.
“Thanks. Only this time with three forks and three straws, please,” I said, pointing across the table. “My friends Akiko and Mae here, they got cut from the puzzler tryout just like me.”
“It’s okay, Schätzchen,” Gerda said, consoling me with a gentle pat on the arm. And with a friendly nod to Akiko and Mae, she added, “Theirs is on the house too. You’ll work it off tomorrow. What’ll it be, girls?”
Mae was all manners and polite thank-yous, but Akiko started bouncing in her seat like it was Christmas morning. She ordered an egg cream and a slice of apple pie.
“And I’ll have a chocolate malted, please,” Mae said, her hands folded neatly over her menu. “And if you have cherry pie, that would be lovely.”
“We do,” Gerda replied with a wink. “And it’s very lovely.”
We settled in talking, and before long Harry appeared with our milkshakes and a plate stacked with waffles. After introductions all around, he set everything down with a flourish. “We had an extra stack today,” he announced, pulling a bottle of warm maple syrup from his apron pocket. Then, with a bow, he moved on to the table across from us to visit with some of the regulars. I pointed out Harry’s friends to Akiko and Mae, and how everybody called the noisiest one by his nickname—“the Duke.”
“The people here are so nice,” whispered Mae, as if she were sitting at a table in a library instead of at a red leather booth in a busy diner. “How come they let you work here? When you’re just a child, I mean.”
“Same reason they let anybody work anywhere these days,” I answered, trying hard not to slurp my brown cow. I knew slurping wouldn’t go over so great with well-mannered Mae. Or her granny. So I wiped at my lips and tried to remember to swallow my chocolate drink before launching into my response. “Most all the men are off fighting the war. So who’s going to clear the tables and wash the dishes? Gerda was desperate for help before I showed up.”
“Do you need any more help?” wondered Akiko, just as Gerda arrived with our pie slices. The warm, fruity smells were like heaven. “Since I can’t be a puzzler, maybe I can be a pie server!” Gerda laughed and promised to keep Akiko in mind.
We started in on our pies and went over our day one more time. “First there’s this morning,” began Mae with a shudder, “and that awful Hank Hissler in the fedora—”
“He made me think of a snake,” Akiko cut in, poking the straw around her drink. “Like there was something dangerous about him.”
“I wonder why he asked about your friend Emmett,” Mae said. “What do you think he’s up to?”
“Well,” I said, taking my time, “Emmett is really smart. He’s probably the cleverest person I’ve ever met, besides my cousin Kay. He’d make a great puzzler.”
“I worry that we could be getting ourselves tangled up in some dangerous things,” said Mae, her expression pained. “Think about the Stretcher.” And lowering her voice, she whispered, “What does it even mean to be vaporized?”
Akiko stopped her fork midbite. I pushed my drink away.
A wave of guilt washed over me. What would my mom think if she knew about all the risks I’d taken today? The only thing she’d asked of me was to stay out of trouble, to be safe, to take care of my brothers. I swallowed hard. There were rules about superheroes keeping their identities secret. Maybe that was because they all had mothers who worried as much as mine.
Akiko looked around the diner, and when she spoke, her voice was somber.
“If we’re going to help people like we did today as superheroes, we’ll have to pay closer attention to what’s going on around us. Hauntima watches out for all sorts of things in her comic books—villains, thieves, even crashing meteors.”
I took an especially big bite of pie and looked out the window into the blue summer sky. No meteors that I could see. I thought for a bit as I chewed.
“Emmett is really good at that—noticing important things in what seems like the everyday, ordinary stuff,” I told them. “One time he wrote me a secret message in laundry!”
Akiko and Mae said they didn’t believe me.
“Honest! It was washing day, and he told his mom he would hang the wet clothes out to dry on the clothesline that was tied on their balcony. They lived on the second floor of their building, and I could see their back porch from the sidewalk. So Emmett hung this from left to right:
“Dress.
“Raincoat.
“Pants.
“Evening gown.
“Pajamas.
“Purse.
“Earmuffs—”
“Earmuffs?” interrupted Akiko. “That’s not something you hang out to dry on your wash line!”
“Neither is a purse, smarty-pants,” I continued, ignoring her constant interruptions. I thought for a moment
, then remembered the last item:
“Robe.”
Akiko and Mae looked perplexed. I couldn’t tell whether they were trying to figure out Emmett’s coded message or if they thought Emmett and I sounded crazy. I went on before I lost them.
“ ‘What’s my favorite soda pop?’ That’s what Emmett asked me on the sidewalk. When I said I thought it was Coca-Cola, he shook his head and told me the answer was staring me straight in the face. I looked for clues everywhere—in wrappers lying on the ground, in his eyes in case he was blinking a coded signal at me, in a nearby tree in case he’d slipped a note there the way spies did in my comic books. Finally he just laughed and told me to read his laundry line!”
“P-E-P-P-E-R?” asked Mae. “I thought maybe each of those items began with the letters that spelled out—”
“Dr Pepper!” shouted Akiko. And she was pointing excitedly at a Dr Pepper sign that hung on the wall above the soda fountain. “That’s really clever. But also a little weird. Didn’t you guys have better things to do?”
I laughed, and Mae did too. Akiko certainly could be annoying, with the nonstop interrupting and the way she was always practically wheezing. But Akiko was quick and smart, and when she spoke, you knew you were going to hear the honest-to-goodness truth. While I liked Mae’s gentleness, I appreciated how Akiko was so direct.
I shoveled another bite of blueberry pie into my mouth and glanced over at Harry at the table beside us. His face was tense, and he didn’t look at all happy. It made me wonder what he saw in his friends—the Duke and those other thick-necked men. They reminded me of Toby’s gang of mean kids. Did Harry’s friends make him laugh? Did they make him want to be a better person?
Emmett did that for me. And now maybe Akiko and Mae would too.
I stretched my ear into the aisle, trying to pick up on what Harry’s table was talking about so secretively. Was it about the best baseball players? Or horse racing? Where to get a bargain on suits? Or were they talking about politics and the war?
And that’s when I caught it—just a single word. But it burst in the air between us like a firecracker.
Spion.
I coughed, choking noisily on my pie crust. Because I knew exactly what that word meant in English:
Spy!
Fifteen
MY BODY WENT RIGID. I kept my face pointed at Mae and Akiko across the table from me, and I moved my jaw in a steady motion, like I was focused on chewing that delicious dessert. But I was so absorbed in Harry and his friends’ table that I could have fallen out of my seat and into the aisle. I allowed only my eyes to move. And they stared over at the loudest of Harry’s friends, the Duke, as if seeing him for the first time.
The Duke was old—maybe in his sixties. His eyes were pale blue, and his wavy hair was always slicked back with an oil of some sort. He was nice enough to me, though we didn’t laugh and talk the way Harry and I did. Harry let me walk his dog and showed me photographs of his mother back in Germany, whom he missed so much. Harry and Gerda taught me German songs and German words, too, like Schätzchen, which meant “sweetie,” and stinkend, which meant “smelly.” And they fed me delicious German food like bratwurst and sauerkraut and spaetzle.
Spion.
The Duke said it again, more forcefully this time. And I watched him push something on the table for the other men to read. I looked all around for Harry, but he wasn’t there among them now. Scanning across the restaurant, I caught sight of him walking back to his usual spot at the stove to flip pancakes again.
I had to turn my head an inch or so to catch what the Duke was doing. His usually boisterous voice was hushed now, and the others seated around his table leaned in close to examine the document. Their expressions were serious as they nodded, a few letting out hmph and tsk-tsk sounds as they followed along with the Duke’s quiet directions.
As I stretched even farther toward the table now to hear, I practically fell out of the booth. Suddenly the Duke turned his meaty head and looked my way. My heart seemed to stop beating. Did the Duke know I was eavesdropping? That I understood a few German words? Was he going to come after me?
He put the cap on his pen, then pushed his chair back and got to his feet, saying something to the four or five others in rapid German that I couldn’t understand. Then the Duke rushed out of the diner without so much as a goodbye to Gerda or Harry.
“Flying is the best superpower of all,” Mae was saying as she delicately nibbled another bite of her cherry pie. “You can say all you want about invisibility or X-ray vision—”
“Seriously? What about my power, shape-shifting? Or—” Akiko’s sandpaper voice was growing louder with outrage. Her thoughts seemed to come too quickly for her to wait her turn in a conversation. Sometimes she even wound up interrupting herself. “You can call storms, Mae! Isn’t atmokinesis better than flying?”
One by one, the other men rose and left the diner. “It’s already five o’clock,” I heard one of them say to his buddy as he ran a comb through his slick curls. “I’ve got to swing by for a haircut before that barber closes for the day.”
“You should stop thinking so much about your hair and more about your neck,” warned the other, running a thick finger across his throat like a knife.
And then they were gone. Slowly, I stepped over to their empty table and peered past the coffee mugs and plates of toast, hoping to catch sight of whatever it was the Duke had shown the others—a map or blueprints, maybe a list of directions. But all I saw were a few of the evening newspapers with the latest headlines. I picked them up and slid back into the booth with Akiko and Mae, a little shocked.
“Take a look at this,” I said, my voice nearly squeaking. “We’re on the front page of the evening newspaper! Flying!”
“But look at that headline,” complained Akiko. “What kind of horrible name did they give us?”
“WEE THREE” SAVE THE DAY IN OFFICE BLAZE
Mae seemed to turn away in embarrassment.
“I don’t mind that name,” she said, unfolding another paper. “It’s better than the Super Sprites, which is what they’re calling us in this one.”
“Or the Caped Kiddies,” I offered, pointing at another paper. “That’s pretty dreadful.”
Akiko’s face grew serious, and she ran her finger down the news column on the front page of the Inquirer. “Look at this,” she began, leaning in closer so she could read the small print. “This story says a kid with a knack for puzzles was kidnapped this morning. Says he was tops in his math class at school. And that he played the violin like a symphony star.”
“That’s strange,” said Mae, sitting up straighter and reading her evening paper. “It says here on page two that another boy was kidnapped just before lunchtime today. His parents report that he was walking home from an appointment at the Carson Building when witnesses saw him pushed into a car.”
“The Carson Building?” I said, nearly knocking over my milkshake. “That’s where we were today!”
Akiko shook her head and fumbled with her barrette, her bobbed hair swinging. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Hank Hissler calls for the puzzlers to gather at the Carson Building this morning. Mrs. B catches him giving us a test, so he shuts it down. Then boy puzzlers go missing.”
We sat in silence, turning this newest development around and around in our heads. Akiko folded up the papers and shoved them deep into her Hauntima bag.
“Hank Hissler,” I said with a shudder. “You don’t think he’d vaporize those puzzlers, do you? That he saw how smart the top puzzlers were and felt threatened by them? So he decided to . . .”
Akiko and Mae shook their heads.
“He was excited about them,” Mae suggested, trying to connect the dots. “Mr. Hissler wanted to use their smarts.”
“But not for Room Twelve business,” said Akiko. “I bet he wanted those puzzlers to work for him—doing something dark.”
We sat staring at the table in stunned silence for a moment or two.
“What’s the third?” asked Akiko impatiently, her breathing fast. And loud.
“The third has to do with a Spion,” I said, glancing around to make sure nobody could hear me. “That’s a German word. For spy. I think Harry’s friends might be up to something!”
Sixteen
THE JANGLY BELLS ABOVE THE door sounded, and they were quickly followed by footsteps racing deep into the diner, all the way to our table.
“It’s Emmett! Help!”
I jumped out of the booth just as Emmett’s little sister, Audrey, stumbled into me, her words coming in anguished gulps. “He was right out front when a car pulled up. They threw him inside, Josie! They slammed the door and took Emmett away!”
I grabbed Audrey’s shoulders and turned her to face me. “Slowly, Audrey. Now explain it to me. Who were they? Did you see their faces? Did you recognize the car?”
“Did Emmett try to escape?” asked Akiko, who suddenly was right beside us with Mae tight on her heels. “Did he struggle?”
Audrey chewed on her lip, looking like she was trying hard not to cry. “It happened so fast,” she said, catching her breath. “He was up ahead of me, on the sidewalk. I’d been at my tap-dancing class after school, and I knew he’d be coming here for milkshakes with you, like he always does. At the corner, he stopped to let an old lady cross the street. That’s when two men, they pressed in on either side of Emmett. And they pushed him into a car. . . .”
Audrey’s voice caught in her throat.
“Did you see what they looked like?” asked Mae gently. “Something that could help identify them? The color of their clothing or maybe a scar on a cheek?”
Audrey shrugged. “They looked like any other goons you can imagine: thick necks holding up meaty heads. Fingers like sausages. But the third guy, he was somebody I’ll never forget.”
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