Spy in the Alley

by Melanie Jackson

  Jack had lots of them, after the news footage of the spray-painted car and billboard. The head of GASP’s national organization had been interviewed, saying that the Vancouver branch of GASP would probably have to be shut down if the “mad spray-painter,” as she put it, continued defacing property.

  “Well, gasp,” the newscaster had punned with a perky smile — and then turned to the weatherperson (also perky) for the next day’s forecasts.

  Anyhow, balancing the casserole dish, I had to walk carefully. Since the dish was still hot, I was carrying it with oven mitts.

  “Do not, do not, let it drop,” Mother had warned me, “or I shall have one of my rare displays of temper.”

  Pantelli had found the hockey stick from last night. Pretending to be a Deathstalker, he waved it around like a sword. “Take that!” he shouted, aiming at my ankles.

  “Stop it, you idiot,” I shouted back. As I dodged him, the lid clattered dangerously against the casserole dish. Boys being the lamebrains they are, he responded by trying to swipe at me again.

  “You asked for it,” I said. I held the casserole dish aloft. “Do you realize, Pantelli Audia, that the sides of this are boiling hot? That I merely have to graze your skin to scald you for life?”

  That got him. He backed away, looking frightened.

  “It’s okay,” I assured him, mollified. “I will spare you this time.” I moved the dish farther away.

  “Oh no, Dinah, don’t — ”

  “I said I wasn’t going to,” I snapped. Talk about cowardly. “Here,” and, my eyes still on him, I shifted the dish even farther away.

  “Dinah, don’t — ”

  “YEEEOOWWW!!!”

  I turned toward this deafening yell, which was still going on — or was that my eardrum ringing? Buzz Bewford stood there, rubbing an angry red spot on his cheek, where dish had met skin.

  “Gosh, I’m really sorry … ” I stammered.

  “You stupid little — ”

  “Maybe some ice would help,” I suggested. “At home we have an ice pack you could borrow. Wait — dang, I forgot. I put it down Alicia Weatherwent’s back at my birthday party.” I smiled weakly at Buzz, whose face was transforming into the same color as the burn mark. “You know, to liven things up. Hmmm, I think Alicia cracked it, though. The ice pack,” I clarified, wondering why his face was growing even more mottled.

  “You stupid little — ”

  “Hey, what goes on?” demanded Jack. He emerged from the tomato stalks, interrupting what was getting to be a monotonous refrain by Buzz. “I heard yelling.”

  “Oh, sorry about the noise pollution,” Buzz said sarcastically. “It just so happens that this runt-sized menace here attacked me.”

  Jack regarded me curiously. I guess a chubby eleven-year-old with smudged glasses and a grimy T-shirt didn’t present that threatening a sight.

  “She attacked … you? Uh … okay,” he said.

  With obvious difficulty, Buzz swallowed his rage. “Heard about your robbery last night. Wondered if this might be your missing briefcase,” he said, thrusting a battered case at Jack. “I saw a guy lookin’ through it at the park. He tossed it aside after a while. Seemed disgusted. He must have decided it was worthless.”

  I found this remark vaguely insulting to Jack, but Jack didn’t seem to mind. “That’s great!” he exclaimed, opening the case. “And my laptop’s still in here — ” he pulled the laptop out — “in new, improved, flat format,” he finished dejectedly. The machine had been either smashed or stomped on so thoroughly that it resembled a piece of lasagna more than a computer.

  “You could always give it to your sister for a necklace,” I said, trying to be helpful. “It’d be funky.”

  Jack sighed. “I was pretty fond of this old thing. It got me through a lot of school projects.”

  “You saw some guy with it in the park?” I queried Buzz. “That had to be the thief! What did he look like? Was he buck-toothed, maybe?”

  The three of them stared at me. “I thought Buckteeth was the spy in the alley, not the thief,” Jack said.

  “I think they’re one and the same,” I declared. I waited for their shocked, awestruck reaction to my brilliant deduction. This was the kind of moment detectives craved.

  “After all,” I continued, “ Buckteeth was skulking in the alley last night, right after Jack’s burglary. Coincidence schmoincidence, I say.”

  Buzz leered at me. “You say wrong, kiddo. The guy I saw in the park wasn’t your nerdy spy. No way.”

  I was crushed. I’d been so sure! “What did he look like?” I demanded again. “C’mon, we can get Madge to sketch him, the way police artists do.”

  Buzz twisted his mouth again, except that now he was trying to think, not leer. “Brown hair. Yeah! A lock of it fallin’ over his forehead. Kinda sulky-lookin’, he was. A white — naw, a yellow shirt. Yeah, that’s it.”

  Much as I didn’t want to believe anything Buzz said, there was no doubt he was describing a real person. Buzz lacked the imagination to invent one.

  I needed to write all this down. I set the casserole dish on the ground, removed the oven mitts and gave them to Jack. “Here, you take this,” I told him unceremoniously. “It’s from Mom. Cheese and broccoli. Yech!” I made a face, then realized this wasn’t the most appetizing way to present a culinary creation. “It’s good, though,” I added over my shoulder, as Pantelli and I raced back to my house.

  Chapter Eleven

  Toast, bacon and — a clue

  The next morning Mother woke me up at seven. “No, no,” I muttered into my pillow. I was in the middle of a satisfying dream about a duel to the death with Pantelli. Well, a duel to the Deathstalkers. My red-blob creature had just tricked Pantelli’s green-blob creature into tumbling down a steep cliff toward some blob-eating sharks. Awesome.

  “Leave me alone,” I protested, eyes squeezed shut.

  “You’re going to camp today,” Mother said, her voice full of that evil-sounding patience that mothers have honed to perfection.

  I uttered a muffled but, I hoped, eloquent groan. Camp referred to the musical-arts day camp on Granville Island that she’d signed me up for.

  I realized that I wasn’t going to be allowed to drop back to sleep and see Pantelli’s green-blob creature devoured alive. Turning fuzzily toward Mother, I wailed, “You can’t do this to me! I have investigations to conduct! The spy in the alley!”

  “Darling, you are in good voice this morning,” Mother praised. “But perhaps you should save it for singing at the day camp.”

  Granted, this camp thing had been arranged weeks before, with my approval. I knew I was on weak ground. I also knew Mother had saved up to send me to this camp.

  “All right, all right.” I said grudgingly.

  Pulling on a robe, I floated down the hall with my eyes still only half-open. Meanwhile, the smell of sizzling bacon was floating up to me. I woke up some more, and noticed that a) I’d put my robe on inside out (no big deal), and, through Madge’s bedroom door, that b) she was sitting up beneath her yellow comforter, sketching on a pad with colored pencils. Debussy was tinkling from the portable CD player by her bed.

  “See how the sun’s flowing over my comforter, brightness on brightness?” she greeted me.

  There was no civilized response I could make to this. Artists! I was about to walk scornfully by when she called, “Hey, come here. I’ve done the sketch you wanted. You know, of the thief Buzz saw in the park.”

  Artists, I thought much more favorably. “Madge, you can be useful at times.”

  She ignored this. “Here,” she said, and held up a sketch of a young man with a lock of hair tumbling over his forehead. She’d made him sulky-looking and yellow-shirted, as Buzz had described. “The funny thing is, I feel I know this guy,” Madge remarked.

  “He does look familiar,” I agreed, puzzled. “Must be somebody in the neighborhood. Which means, being close to our alley he may strike again.”

  “And in
eptly,” remarked Madge, and we both laughed.

  Now, I’m not overly sensitive to people’s feelings this early in the morning — or at any other time, come to think of it — but it dimly occurred to me through my pre-breakfast grogginess that Madge was being surprisingly nice, after yesterday.

  “Madge, you’re not … ill, are you?”

  Cheerful smile. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Uh — well, the GASP demonstration. And Roderick’s car getting spray-painted. Then, last night, when the news report came on about your billboard, your reaction was pretty deadly. ‘That does it,’ you said.” I shuddered elaborately, and withdrew a couple of steps. She might decide to throw something.

  She laughed. “Oh, you. Well, that did do it.”

  “Um … ” Ill, nothing. This girl had lost her mind.

  Madge snuggled into the covers. She smiled a cat-like smile. “You see, from the way Jack feels about me, I know there’s no chance he would have authorized the spray-painting of that billboard. So, he’s probably not responsible for the damage to Rod’s car, either. When I said, ‘That does it,’ I meant I’m not angry with him anymore.

  “Well,” she qualified, narrowing those lupine-blue eyes, “not as angry, at any rate. There was still that rally. Hmmm. Okay, I’m half as angry.”

  She smiled again, suggesting to me she was actually feeling quite pleased with life.

  Huh. “This is too much for me on an empty stomach,” I informed her, and trudged off.

  The sun was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. Wilfred was in the middle of it, basking. I picked him up and snuggled him. Maybe he and I would just root there, in that pool of sun. Turn into flowers.

  Jack’s flowers were ahead of me, within the same patch of sunlight. Mother had rescued them from the floor and arranged them in a vase on the mantelpiece. We had to keep all plants fairly high up, because the white-and-pumpkin-colored bundle of fur I was cuddling liked chewing stalks.

  “I doubt you’d like thorny rose stalks,” I warned Wilfred, who was resting his head against my arm and purring in satisfaction. All this hugging and fussing was only his due, he believed.

  A moment later Madge came up behind me, took Wilfred and stared over my shoulder at the roses.

  “Beige roses,” she murmured.

  “Yeah? So?” I started into the kitchen, toward the bacon.

  “The ones Jack brought yesterday evening,” she continued dazedly.

  Ignoring her, I plopped down at the kitchen table and began to make a toast-and-bacon sandwich. Heavy on the bacon, heavy on the butter. After all, singers need their strength.

  Depositing Wilfred squarely back in the sun — he was very particular, and preferred basking right in the center — Madge slowly walked over to join me and Mother at the table.

  “The roses sure are lovely,” Madge admitted. “Their creamy beige tint is exquisite. I think I’ve decided that red roses are too garish for me.”

  “A shame you didn’t tell Jack that,” observed Mother, pouring tea.

  “Nice, single Jack,” I added. Never say die, that’s my motto.

  “I might get my watercolors out today and paint a close-up of one of the roses,” Madge mused. “They’re just so lovely.”

  She sighed, fighting off feelings of guilt about her behavior last night, I thought in satisfaction.

  “Jack, Dinah, Pantelli and their cast of thousands shouldn’t have sabotaged me yesterday,” Madge defended herself.

  “Rationalization. I love it,” I told her.

  When she sighed again, I helped myself to one of the slices of bacon on her plate. The lovelorn type, which she obviously was, with all this sighing, didn’t require food. That was my rationalization.

  “Okay, so maybe it was a cast of several dozen,” Madge conceded. “It seemed like thousands at the time.”

  A timid rapping at the door interrupted her. A slight, stooped form was silhouetted through the blind.

  “It must be one of the ladies from church,” Mother said. She set her teacup down.

  A rare twinge of guilt assailed me. After all, mothers deserved a few minutes’ peace. Licking butter off my fingers, I went to the door.

  “Mrs. Gumboldt,” I exclaimed, recognizing the petite old woman from church who’d been sick recently. She was the one we’d taken casseroles and baking to at Clark Rose Gardens. “Please come in. It’s too hot for you to be waiting outside.”

  “It’s quite all right, dear.” Mrs. Gumboldt waved a white-gloved hand toward the street, where a car was waiting. “My husband is here — we were just on our way to have breakfast out and shop, but I wanted to stop by.”

  “That’s nice of you,” I said politely.

  “I just had to tell you something,” Mrs. Gumboldt said, leaning forward confidingly. I took hold of one of her hands before she leaned any farther. I didn’t want her toppling over.

  “You see,” she murmured, “you were correct about the powder-blue sun hat.”

  Madge had come up behind me. “Oh, is that the ‘clue’ you were hunting down?” she asked me. “When you got hosed down by that woman you were trying to investigate?” She began to laugh.

  “It’s no joke,” Mrs. Gumboldt assured her. “My irascible neighbor, Mrs. Nickablock, would have kept dousing them all day if I hadn’t slipped round the other side of the pansy bed and switched off the water.”

  Then Mrs. Gumboldt giggled. “You should have seen my silly old neighbor, peering confusedly into the spout of the suddenly dried-up hose! Anyhow, I felt so sorry for Dinah and her little friend — I can’t quite remember his name … such a nice boy … ”

  “Are you referring to Pantelli?” Madge said doubtfully.

  “Please continue,” I urged Mrs. Gumboldt. I gave Madge a foul look. This was serious information we were unearthing.

  “Yes, yes,” twittered Mrs. Gumboldt. “Now where was I? Oh, how sorry I was about Mrs. Nickablock. Let me tell you, Madge, I felt so sorry for the two poor, wet children that I took them into my house and insisted they help themselves to chocolate cake and milk. Two helpings each: I was quite firm about it, after what they’d been through!”

  Madge’s pretty mouth dropped. Her eyes narrowed at me. “That wasn’t included in your sorrowful story about gross mistreatment.”

  “Oh, no?” I tried to sound blasé.

  “Yes, the story that made Mother and me feel so sorry for you that we took you out to Julio’s Gelati?”

  Mr. Gumboldt saved me. Growing impatient, he beeped the horn.

  “Back to the story of the spy in the alley,” Mrs. Gumboldt resumed, leaning even closer and obviously enjoying herself immensely. “Dinah and Pantelli explained to me that they’d traced a powder-blue sun hat to Rosalie Nickablock. After they left, I thought and thought about that and then I realized they were right. I have seen Rosalie sporting such a sun hat.”

  “You can’t think old Mrs. Nickablock is the spy,” I said. I was beginning to wonder if Mrs. Gumboldt’s recent illness had taken a heavier toll on her than we’d thought.

  “Rosalie — a spy? The woman hasn’t the necessary stealth. Always loudly complaining about something or other,” scoffed Mrs. Gumboldt. Her husband blared the horn a second time.

  “No, dear,” Mrs. Gumboldt continued. She didn’t even bother glancing round at her husband. I had a feeling he was often kept waiting like this while his wife gossiped. “The bucktoothed boy you described. I’ve seen him wearing the sun hat, too. He borrows it when Rosalie’s not about. You can’t blame him. The sun beating down on you all day would be dreadful, especially with that pale skin. Though why he doesn’t buy a hat for himself is beyond me. Some people are so cheap!”

  Mrs. Gumboldt removed her own floppy white straw hat and fanned herself, whether from the heat or out of indignation, I couldn’t tell.

  “Um,” I said, confused. “You mean Buckteeth lives at Clark Rose Gardens? Is he Mrs. Nickablock’s son? Or grandson, maybe,” I amended. “But I tho
ught it was a seniors-only development.”

  A further blast from the long-suffering Mr. Gumboldt. Cramming her hat back on, Mrs. Gumboldt answered, slightly impatiently, “Wrong again, Dinah. My goodness, and I’ve been setting things out so clearly for you!” She gave my hand a rather sharp squeeze.

  She began backing down the front walk, waving at her husband and calling to Madge and me in a hoarse, melodramatic whisper: “Buckteeth is the gardener at Clark Rose Gardens, silly!”

  Chapter Twelve

  And now, a musical interlude

  Talk about a cliffhanger. Mother, however, was totally unsympathetic to my protests about the need for immediate follow-up investigation. She bundled me into the car.

  “So babyish,” I fumed a short while later, as, along with kids of varying ages, I lined up at the arts camp’s registration desk to receive an official T-shirt. “I don’t even want one of their stupid shirts.”

  A tall, reedy young man behind the registration table arched his long neck over the kids ahead of me and glared. “These shirts,” he informed me, “were designed by last year’s senior arts class. They put their hearts and souls into the design. You might show a bit of appreciation.”

  He held up one of the shirts. It depicted the Granville Street Bridge, which soared up and away from Granville Island. But whereas in real life the bridge looked solid and reliable, the bridge on the T-shirt flung itself about in several directions, a colorful serpent against the downtown skyscraper landscape.

  “It makes me feel dizzy,” I said.

  Everyone else in the line turned and looked at me with mingled shock and disapproval. I didn’t mind, but Mother had grown pink with embarrassment. “Dinah’s pleased to be here,” she assured the tall, long-necked young man.

  “I should hope so, madam.” He withdrew, pale and hurt, behind the desk.

  Mother did convince me to put on one of the T-shirts — oh, not through behavior modification or anything like that. She simply threatened to remove the brownie from my lunchbox unless I gave in.