She shivered like it was thirty degrees outside and not a summer evening. “That man, he jumped out and held open his car door. Even though he never took his hat off, I could tell that his head underneath was bald. He wore a gray fedora hat with a black band, and the rim was stiff and sharp—it looked deadly as a blade. His mustache was a straight line, and his glasses were wire circles.
“But those eyes are what scared me,” Audrey said, pausing. “They glowed yellow like a snake’s.”
“Hank Hissler,” croaked Akiko.
“It does sound like Mr. Hissler,” cautioned Mae, “but how would he even know where to find Emmett?”
A panicky feeling flooded my mind as I replayed the conversation I’d had back in Room Twelve this morning. When Mr. Hissler had asked me about Emmett, I’d bragged that he was my best friend.
I know where and when anybody can find Emmett. We have milkshakes together at five o’clock every afternoon—root beer floats with chocolate ice cream, to be exact. I know because I make them myself.
I may have been salty with Mr. Hissler, but I hadn’t given away where he could find Emmett. I was much too smart to do that.
Gerda’s cuckoo clock began its noisy routine. We paused, all of us stopping for a moment to listen as the bell chimed five times.
“So, if that was Mr. Hissler who took Emmett,” I said, my throat dry as a cotton sock, “how did he know where to find him?”
Little Audrey pointed toward my heart, where GERDA’S DINER was embroidered in green on my crisp white blouse.
“Maybe he read your shirt,” she said. “Because the clue is right there for any dumbbell to see.”
Seventeen
WHERE ARE WE GOING?” MAE puffed as she and Akiko tried to keep up. “And why are we walking so fast? I’m breaking a sweat here, Josie.”
My knees trembled as I pushed through the intersection, desperate to spot any sign that Emmett was somehow still around.
“Mae’s right, Josie,” heaved Akiko, gulping air. “What gives?”
We were walking south on Thirty-Sixth Street, and I was scanning in all directions for the car that took Emmett. How could I have let this happen? It was my fault Emmett had been kidnapped. So it was my job to find him and bring him back safely.
But amid the crush of cars and people, there seemed little hope of spotting him now. By this point, the car that took him was probably speeding through the city. “Emmett!” I shouted desperately into the crowd. “Emmett, where are you?”
I was just turning back toward Gerda’s when Mae tugged on my arm.
“Hey, wait a second. Isn’t that the Duke?” she whispered, gesturing toward a man getting into a black sedan up ahead of us. “He was at the diner just before Emmett went missing.”
“He’s the one you said mentioned something about a spy, right?” asked Akiko. “Should we follow him?”
Mae didn’t hesitate, not even for a second.
“Of course we should follow him,” she declared. “Come on, Josie. Let’s go!”
And as the black car drove away, we grabbed one another’s hands and raced toward the nearest trolley.
While the worry for Emmett put me in a dark mood, a small glimmer of hope began to burn inside me. Because without even hesitating, Akiko and Mae were ready to jump into action. It was as if leaping onto trolleys and chasing down bad guys were the most natural thing in the world for the three of us to be doing just then.
I gave their hands a quick squeeze, and they squeezed right back.
The Duke’s car roared out ahead of the trolley in a puff of gray fumes. Akiko held her nose as I hung off the side and kept an eye on the black sedan’s shiny chrome bumper up ahead, the wind whipping my hair.
When another trolley clanged past in the opposite direction, Mae grabbed my waist and yanked me back inside.
“Following that car is great,” she huffed. “Getting chopped in half is not!”
Suddenly the traffic backed up, and the trolley pulled up right beside the Duke’s car—so close we could reach out and touch it. A bull-nosed driver wearing a chauffeur’s cap sat behind the steering wheel and kept his eyes on the road. But in the back seat I could see the Duke. And beside him was a woman who looked to be about the same age as my cousin Kay, early twenties or so. She was blond, and from what I could tell, her hair was pulled back in a modest bun at the nape of her neck. The jacket over her shoulders was green, but that was all I could glimpse of her clothing.
“What if he sees us?” I said, turning my face away. “He might get suspicious.”
Akiko plunged her hand into her canvas pouch and rooted around. When she pulled it out, she was holding one of the newspapers from the diner.
“Here, let’s hide behind this,” she said, unfurling the paper. Mae and I pressed in close, the newspaper shielding us like a curtain. Slowly the three of us peeked over the top edge.
“I wish their windows were rolled down,” whispered Mae. “Can anybody read lips?”
Suddenly the light turned green, and the trolley proceeded up the avenue. Only instead of traveling beside us, now the Duke’s black car turned right onto Walnut Street. We were losing him!
“Everybody off!” shouted Mae. “Jump!”
And together we leapt off the moving trolley, landing right in the path of an oncoming trash truck. Its horn blew as the silver grille barreled toward us!
“Run!” shrieked Akiko.
And we did.
Tearing down the block after the black car, we nearly toppled an elderly couple strolling arm in arm. Akiko jumped over a red tricycle pedaled by a toddler, and I barely missed colliding with a baby carriage. Only Mae seemed to be able to navigate the busy street without crashing into anyone. She even managed to pet the head of a Great Dane as she raced past.
“Can’t we just transform into superheroes again?” asked Akiko between puffs of air. “Flying would be easier than running!”
“We don’t have time to transform,” I answered. “Plus, I’m not sure how we did it in the first place!” Not to mention whether we even should. What would it do to Mam if I were to get vaporized? Stay safe. No trouble.
“He’s turning left at that next corner,” Mae called over her shoulder. “Cut through the park!”
We veered left into a leafy park and careened down the gravelly path, Mae at the front, me barely holding steady on her heels, and poor Akiko heaving and wheezing somewhere behind us.
When we finally reached the sidewalk at the other end of the gardens, we collapsed onto a wooden bench just steps away from the shiny black sedan and the bull-nosed driver. He had parked along the street across from a low-slung redbrick building.
“Does anybody even know where we are?” asked Mae, who seemed to be too polite to break a sweat.
“Walnut Street,” I said, tilting my head to look up at the post that was just a few feet away on the corner. The sign on top was easy to read. “And Thirty-Third Street.”
Huffing and heaving and trying to catch our breath, the three of us watched as the blond lady climbed out of the car and the Duke rolled down his window to speak with her.
“What’s he saying?” Akiko asked, still panting openmouthed. “Can you hear him?”
“Not with you breathing so loud in my ear,” answered Mae. “But look, I think that’s a clue.”
The Duke, who had never seemed too bright to me, was counting on his fingers—one, two, three, four, five, six. Then he pointed over at the redbrick building. The blond woman nodded, adjusted the collar of her green jacket, then headed for the building. Once she stepped inside, the Duke’s car rolled away, slinking like a shark down the street.
“Six,” I whispered. “You’re right, Mae. The Duke is interested in six of something inside that building.”
“There’s a sign near the door,” Akiko said, pointing. “Let’s go see what this place is. Maybe we can start piecing clues together.”
Crossing the street and heading toward the big wooden doors, we tried not
to draw attention to ourselves. When the building’s sign came into view, all three of us stopped and stared:
MOORE SCHOOL OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
We were turning away to race back toward the bench again when a slim figure up ahead caught my eye. It was a woman wearing a red beret and carrying a red pocketbook, and she was approaching the Moore School on the sidewalk just steps from us. A broken tree branch was blocking her path, but she leapt over it, graceful as a doe.
“Wait a minute! I’d know that hat and that jump anywhere! She looks like . . .”
I slipped behind a tree, and Akiko and Mae followed. Peeking our three heads around the grainy bark, we studied her. She’d stopped near the front step and was chatting with a few friends. Then one of them pulled open the heavy wooden door and they all stepped inside, comfortable rather than cautious, like they were familiar with the place.
“That’s Kay,” I whispered. “That’s my cousin!”
My hands trembled as I clutched Mae’s arm on one side, Akiko’s on the other.
“Does Kay know the Duke?” asked Mae urgently.
“Does she know that blond lady?” added Akiko. “The Duke’s spy?”
My mind was a spinning record player. Was Kay in danger too, like Emmett? I had to keep her safe, but what was she doing here? What if she crossed paths with the Duke or one of his thick-necked bullies? Or that horrible Mr. Hissler?
Kay was supposed to be working at the market this time of day. She was supposed to be running the cash register and giving people change for a quarter. She wasn’t supposed to be hanging around a place like this, not when the Duke was up to something here.
“The Moore School? Engineering?” I whispered, barely keeping up. “I have no idea what’s going on. But I can say this confirms my suspicion: I don’t think Cousin Kay is ringing up groceries!”
Eighteen
WE STARED AT THE ENGINEERING school. Now that we knew what Mr. Hissler had done to the Stretcher, Emmett almost certainly was in grave danger. And now what about Kay?
Thoughts of Emmett ricocheted through my mind like a bouncy ball. Should we scour the city and call his name? Should we race back to the Carson Building in search of Mr. Hissler for answers? Should we contact Mrs. B and Astra for help?
Images from my comic books played through my mind—scenes where the evildoers were vanquished. That might happen with Hauntima, Hopscotch, and Nova the Sunchaser. But with Cousin Kay?
“You two wait over there,” I said, pointing back across the street at our bench. “I’ll go poke around inside and talk to Kay, and then I’ll come right back. It won’t take very long.”
I tiptoed out from behind the cottonwood and headed for the engineering school’s doors. But I wasn’t moving alone. I could feel Akiko and Mae right with me. I didn’t protest, though, since I was just as nosy as they were. I would have done exactly the same thing. And having them beside me made my steps a little sturdier.
The first floor was silent as we edged around the empty foyer. Suddenly a door opened at the end of a long hallway, and a man in a dark suit stepped out. The last thing I wanted was to explain what we were doing sneaking around an engineering school, so I bolted up the nearest staircase. Mae and Akiko took the stairs two at a time beside me.
On the second floor, the sounds of a busy office drifted out to us from behind the closed doors. Wasn’t it time to go home for the day? I caught women’s voices chatting here and there, but mostly what we heard was a constant clicking noise, like hundreds of forks tapping on hundreds of plates.
Suddenly one of the doors swung open, and the clicking grew louder as a woman swept into the hallway and nearly crashed right into us.
“Children? Good golly, what are y’all doing here?” she asked, not unfriendly but not particularly welcoming either. “This isn’t exactly a place I’d expect to see kids.”
She seemed maybe twenty years old or so, with fire-engine-red hair that was probably wild like mine but instead appeared tamed, pinned back in a neat style. A pencil stuck out from behind her left ear, and I noticed one of her hands was smudged with ink.
“Josie is looking for her cousin,” announced Akiko, prodding me in the ribs with her bony elbow. “Kay is her name. Know her?”
Mae looked as if she wanted to pop a cork in Akiko’s mouth and bottle up all her words. She stepped forward, shouldering Akiko out of the way ever so slightly, and gave the Southern-sounding lady a polite nod.
“What my friend meant to say, ma’am,” she began in a voice that was wrapped in pretty paper and tied up with a neat bow, “is Josie here missed her chance to wish Kay a happy birthday. And to make up for it, she wanted to stop by and let her know what a wonderful cousin she’s been to Josie and her baby brothers.”
For as proper as she looked, Mae was surprisingly good at being sneaky.
“Well, sakes alive! Kay McNulty’s cousin? And a birthday?” the lady said, pushing past us with a quick step and proceeding down another hallway. “Follow me, y’all, and I’ll settle you into one of the offices. My name is Jean Jennings, and I happen to work with Kay. We’re in the basement now, doing what we can for a new project. But I can’t let you children down there. I’ll bring Kay upstairs to you.”
Jean opened a door and waved us in. Her hands gesturing toward a desk at the back of the room, she told us to make ourselves at home. Then she headed for the door again, promising to track down Kay.
This room was filled with that same clicking sound, only louder now that we were so close. I stared all around to figure out what it was. Rows and rows of women were seated at desks, their hands and fingers flying over calculating machines. The clicking must have been coming from all the buttons being punched.
“What are they doing?” whispered Akiko, clearly baffled. “It looks like they’re typing.”
I paused, watching the women closely. Is this what Kay was up to? Ringing up numbers, only not at our neighborhood grocery store? I couldn’t make sense of it all.
On chalkboards around the room were written complicated math equations and charts. And at every wooden desk were small adding machines with loads of buttons. So many women tapping on so many buttons created the odd-sounding symphony we’d heard all the way downstairs.
“Calculators!” I whispered, a little too noisily. “All these women must be busy computing math problems.”
As I gazed around the room, my eyes were suddenly drawn to something other than the calculating machines. They were fixed on a blond head and a green jacket seated two rows over. The Duke’s friend!
Could she really be the spy he was talking about? What about his counting up to six? Six spies? There were so many numbers written on chalkboards around this room. What was the significance of the number six?
Moments later the door opened, and my cousin marched in, with Jean following close behind her.
“Josie,” Kay said, not really scolding but not exactly happy to see me. “What are you doing here? You know my birthday is February twelfth, not today.”
“I—I forgot,” I stammered. Now that we were inside the Moore School, I had no idea what we should do. “D-d-do you want to go for cake anyway?”
Kay looked at me like I was crazy.
Thoughts began playing bumper cars in my mind. I didn’t know where to even start. What could I say to Kay? That we thought a spy had sneaked into her office? That we were looking for my best friend, Emmett, who seemed to have been kidnapped? That we wanted to know what exactly she was doing in this office to begin with, since it wasn’t Caruso’s Market and there were no apples or cucumbers or milk pints to be seen anywhere? Not to mention the little detail that I had superpowers and so did my two new friends?
I rattled my head back and forth, hoping to dislodge some sort of decent-sounding idea. “We just wanted to s-say hello,” I stammered, staring up into her steady eyes. “We were in the neighborhood—”
Akiko interrupted, too impatient to wait her turn.
> “What is this place?” she said, looking all around the room. “I mean, what are all these women doing with the adding machines?”
Kay stared at me for a beat or two, silence hanging heavy in the air. She had no idea how I had found her, but she was too polite to press me on it in front of everyone. I was relieved when she finally spoke.
“I guess it won’t hurt for you to know,” Kay began, her eyes sweeping the room from one side to the other. “I didn’t want you and your brothers trumpeting it to the neighborhood, so I never told you when I stopped working at the market. But I work here now.
“The women you see around us, we’re mathematicians—some of us with degrees from colleges and others who came on board just because they love math and are good at it.” I thought I noticed a glimmer of pride as she spoke. “We use these machines to calculate complicated math problems.
“We’re computers.”
Then Jean stepped closer, adding to Kay’s explanation with her Southern twang. “The problems y’all see these ladies solving right here,” she said, pointing at a row of women computers near us, “are what soldiers will use in the field to fire their guns and drop their bombs on the enemy.”
I eyed the pens and pencils on the desks nearby. I recognized the long slide rules and sharp-tipped mathematics compasses used for working out complicated equations. I picked up a sheet of paper and a pencil from an empty desk and held it up for Mae and Akiko to read too. “I don’t understand. You’re doing math—to help fight the Nazis?” I asked, keeping half an eye on Kay to make sure she didn’t show signs of wanting to strangle me.
While I knew Kay loved me, I also knew I could drive her crazy now and then with all my nosiness, eavesdropping, and general butting-into-her-business.
“A shell can get knocked off course by wind, cloudy weather—lots of things,” Kay explained patiently. “The computers—these women you see right here—change up the math equations and figure out how the soldiers should set their weapons if it’s rainy or stormy.
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