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OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY
HARRIET THE SPY®, Louise Fitzhugh
SPORT, Louise Fitzhugh
THE LONG SECRET, Louise Fitzhugh
THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, Norton Juster
BUD, NOT BUDDY, Christopher Paul Curtis
ALL-OF-A-KIND FAMILY, Sydney Taylor
SAMMY KEYES AND THE SEARCH FOR SNAKE EYES
Wendelin Van Draanen
PURE DEAD WICKED, Debi Gliori
SKELLIG, David Almond
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful thanks to my agent, Phyllis Wender, and the wonderful staff at Rosenstone/Wender agency; to my editor, Beverly Horowitz, for her astute and gracious guidance; to Louise Fitzhugh for creating such marvelous characters; to Lois Morehead for her enthusiastic thumbs-up; to Susie and Ellen Cohen for reading every word with patient care; to Laura Shaine Cunningham and her writer daughters, Alexandra and Jasmine, for their ardent support; and to my parents and brothers for making my childhood such a joy. Finally, bottomless thanks to my daughter and first reader, Sophia, for her excellent writing advice and soul-warming smile, and to her circle of friends at Marbletown Elementary School and Rondout Valley Middle School for reminding me daily how children speak, think, and feel.
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Harriet M. Welsch took out the flashlight that always hung from her spy belt, snapped off the overhead light, and stepped into the bathtub. It was precisely 9:29 p.m. It felt strange to stand in the tub fully dressed (except for her sneakers, which would not do), but spies were accustomed to doing strange things. Harriet peered through the narrow exhaust window, set over a twin row of black and white checkered tiles, and hoped that her contact, the girl with four names, understood the importance of promptness.
A faint glow of peach-tinted streetlight shone through the pane. Harriet stared over the treetops of East Eighty-seventh Street at the carved marble cornices on the south side of the street. It was snowing again, and a light stripe of powder lined every bare twig. She wished they’d agreed on an earlier time. Nine-thirty was dangerously close to her bedtime, when one of her parents might venture up to the third floor to bid her a distracted goodnight. Revise, she informed herself. First thing tomorrow. She narrowed her eyes, squinting into the snowfall.
A circle of light snapped on in a dark window across the street. Could that be it?
The angle looked lower than Harriet had expected. She held her breath as the new light snapped off and on twice more. The signal!
Harriet lifted her flashlight and clicked her switch in the same pattern. A grin spread across her face. It works, she thought, already starting to dream up a message code far more complex than a simple flash-three for “I’m here.” Didn’t sailors have some kind of code alphabet, like those colorful flags that flapped over Long Island yacht clubs and showed up on beach towels? Semaphore, that was the name for it. She and the girl with four names could invent an East Eighty-seventh Street semaphore, with different flashlight patterns for every letter.
The phone rang in the hall. Harriet jumped from the tub, singing out, “It’s for me!” before her mother could pick up downstairs. She skidded into the hallway and grabbed the receiver, tucking it into her shoulder as she pulled the long cord through her bedroom door. “It worked!”
“What worked?” The voice was a boy’s.
“Sport?”
“Of course. What worked?”
“Nothing,” said Harriet, hoping she sounded blasé. “I thought you were Annie.”
“Oh,” said Sport. “Annie.” The crack in his voice, one note childlike and one newly husky, made him sound like a bad country singer. “How can her real name be Annie Smith? Annie Smith.”
5
“So?” Harriet twisted the phone cord around her left thumb. She didn’t approve of repeating oneself, aloud or in prose. Harriet was going to be a writer, and she knew that every word mattered. Her best friend, Sport, who dreamed about playing first base for the Mets, was not as precise. She had high hopes for Annie, however. The signal had flashed at exactly nine-thirty.
Annie had moved to their neighborhood back in September, under mysterious circumstances. The two-doctor couple across the street, Morris and Barbara Feigenbaum, who had houseplants and patients instead of children, had taken in Barbara’s twelve-year-old niece. This new neighbor had introduced herself to Harriet as Rosarita Sauvage, to her moony-eyed schoolmate Sport as Yolanda Montezuma, and to others as Zoe Carpaccio. It had come as a shock to discover, a few days before at Thanksgiving dinner, that all three of these remarkable names belonged to the same girl, whose birth name was duller than toast.
But Annie herself had potential. The girl had created not one but three new identities, each with a personality to match. There was also the unanswered question of why she’d been expelled from Sport’s school, and transferred to Harriet’s, just a few weeks before Christmas vacation. She must have done something outrageous, thought Harriet, and I’m going to find out what it was. That might have been a tall order for some seventh graders, but Harriet M. Welsch was an experienced spy. Ever since she could print, she had taken extensive notes in a series of green composition books, which she kept locked in a trunk at the foot of her bed. “A writer needs to know everything,” her former nanny, Ole Golly, had said many times. “It’s all grist for the mill.”
“I’m not sure I can love a plain Annie,” Sport sighed. “She’s such a Yolanda.”
“Get used to it,” Harriet snapped, trying to hide her impatience. Falling out of love over a name seemed as flimsy as Sport’s claim that he’d fallen in love with Yolanda’s green shoes. Harriet wondered if Sport knew what love really meant.
Not that she was an expert on love. Ole Golly had sidestepped Harriet’s questions in every phase of her courtship, estrangement, and joyous reunion with her husband, George Waldenstein, and Harriet’s parents restricted themselves to tossing off the occasional “Love you,” as if prefacing it with an “I” would take too much of an effort.
Maybe I ought to try spying on someone in love, Harriet thought, if it doesn’t involve too much kissing. She disliked long kisses in movies, which always made her wonder what the two actors had eaten for dinner.
“Listen,” she said, “I’m on an assignment from Grenville. I’m walking plain Annie to school in the morning. If you’d like to meet us, arrive at the corner of East End by eight-twenty-three. Let’s synchronize our watches.”
“What?”
Harriet sighed. Sport had known her since preschool, and it drove her crazy when he didn’t recognize everyday spy terminology. She felt this was part of his job as best friend. “Make sure we both have the same time. What does your watch say?”
“Nine-thirty-two,” said Sport.
“Two minutes slow. Fix it,” said Harriet, and hung up. She liked to hang up 6
without saying goodbye. It made her last words sound important. She went to the trunk and took out a green notebook, her twenty-first.
SPORT IS NO LONGER CONVINCED OF HIS FEELINGS FOR ANNIE. IF
HE STILL WENT TO MY SCHOOL AND HAD MR. GRENVILLE FOR ENGLISH, I’D REMIND HIM OF THE LIN
E IN ROMEO AND JULIET, ACT 2: “THAT WHICH
WE CALL A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET.” SURELY THE SAME MUST BE TRUE FOR A GIRL WITH GREEN SHOES.
Annie Smith wasn’t wearing the green shoes when Harriet crossed the street to escort her from Dr. and Dr. Feigenbaum’s snowy front stoop to the Gregory School.
Annie had put on black boots and a charcoal wool coat that Rosarita Sauvage would have shunned as too sensible. The only promising touches were a scarlet beret, worn a bit to one side, and a long chenille scarf.
“Where’d you get those weird mittens, H’spy?” was her greeting.
“They’re not mittens, they’re fingerless gloves,” answered Harriet, wiggling the tips of her fingers. “They give me the freedom to write without freezing my hands.”
“You look like Fagin,” said Annie, “from Oliver Twist.” She’s read Charles Dickens, thought Harriet, or at least seen the movie Oliver!
That’s another good sign. She remembered that Mr. Grenville had asked her to “take Annie under her wing” because they were both avid readers. We may have more in common than that, she thought, noting that Annie plowed straight through the puddles the same way she did, as if product-testing her waterproof boots.
There was always a lake of gray slush at the corner of East Eighty-seventh Street.
Some of the cars were still covered with soot-crusted snow. They must have been parked in those spots since the Thanksgiving blizzard. There were piles of heavyweight plastic bags next to most of the garbage cans set on the curb; the storm had delayed morning pickup. “I wonder how many turkey carcasses you could exhume on the East Side this morning?” said Annie.
“Scads,” replied Harriet, pleased with the verb exhume. “Next month there’ll be Christmas trees everywhere, fluttering tinsel.” A very large man with a very small dog in a red and white sweater bent down to lift the creature over the slush puddle.
“Look at that guy,” she whispered, angling her head toward the man and his candy-striped poodle.
“It’s Simon LaRocque,” Annie said, “from my ex-school.”
“Just Rocque. No La.” Harriet turned from the dog man to wave at Sport, whose hair, she noticed, was carefully parted and combed. Maybe he’d made his peace with Yolanda’s real name. “Hi, Sport.”
Sport nodded, tongue-tied. He seemed to be staring at Annie’s beret. Annie ignored him, turning to Harriet.
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“Hey, H’spy, why do you call Simon Sport?”
“Same reason you call me H’spy.”
“That’s your name.”
“Well, Sport is his name.”
“I used to like football,” Sport mumbled. “When I was a kid.”
“I’m glad you outgrew it,” said Annie. “Football’s for morons.” She stepped into the deepest part of the corner puddle, sending twin waves of slush into the crosswalk.
Harriet followed suit. Sport, who was wearing his usual black Converse hightops, looked embarrassed at having to step to one side. The three of them strode across East End Avenue. Buses and taxis were lined up at every red light.
“So tell me about this Gregory School,” Annie said as she sloshed through the half-frozen lake on the opposite corner. “Who do I need to look out for?”
“Our homeroom is mostly decent. It’s all girls this year, so you missed Pinky Whitehead and the Boy with the Purple Socks. But there’s still the Marion Hawthorne Experience.” Harriet shuddered. “A legend in her own mind. And her faithful sidekicks, Rachel the Bland and Carrie the Clone. They won’t pick on you unless Marion does.”
“Sounds like a pack of snobs.” Annie kicked the wrought-iron railing that skirted a sycamore tree.
“You’ll be fine,” said Harriet. “Just don’t act peculiar.”
“I’m never peculiar,” Annie said with a sniff. “You must mean Rosarita or Zoe.”
“I thought you were Zoe when you felt estranged.”
“When did I say that?”
“Thanksgiving,” said Sport. Annie glanced over her shoulder, as if she’d forgotten he was walking behind them. Sport blushed the color of Annie’s beret.
“I’m not estranged, Simon,” she said. “I’m actually feeling quite rakish.” She flung her scarf over one shoulder and swept ahead. Sport started after her with a lovestruck expression, but Harriet laid a firm hand on his arm.
“Your school is that way,” she said, pointing south down the avenue. Sport looked embarrassed again. He nodded, hefting his backpack, and trudged down the sidewalk without a word. This nonsense has got to stop, Harriet thought, with her hands on her hips. She was vastly relieved when Sport lifted a small chunk of ice with the toe of one sneaker and started to dribble it soccer style, bobbing and weaving through the pedestrians.
She caught up to Annie in just a few strides. “Did you see my signal last night?” she asked.
“It was excellent,” Annie said. “Silly, but excellent.” Harriet drew herself up at that “silly.” So much for making up semaphore signals together, she thought, feeling miffed. She was still searching for just the right dignified comeback when they reached the Gregory School. The wide steps in front had been 8
swept clear of snow, leaving big shapeless drifts on both sides and gray sprinkles of rock salt atop the wet granite. Students clustered in twos and threes, notebooks clutched to their chests, comparing Thanksgiving vacations. Several heads swiveled to see who was arriving with Harriet Welsch. Annie glanced around anxiously, lifting a hand to adjust her coat collar. “The bloody Bastille,” she muttered.
Marion Hawthorne turned toward them, swathed in a very expensive-looking white coat and silk scarf that her mother must have bought in Europe.
“Marion,” said Harriet, making her voice sound commanding. “This is my friend, and our new homeroom classmate—”
“Cassandra,” said Annie Smith, tossing her hair back from under her scarlet beret.
“I’m Cassandra D’Amore.”
“Why did you say that?” hissed Harriet. They were hanging up coats and stashing wet boots in the lockers just outside homeroom.
Annie shrugged, slipping her feet into loafers. “Free country, the last I heard.”
“Yes, but—”
“So mind your own business.” Annie walked through the door and stood there uncertainly, wondering which desk would be hers. See if I help you, thought Harriet, stung for the second time. She sat down at her desk, between Janie Gibbs and Beth Ellen Hansen. Mr. Grenville was already crossing the room to the new student, with a wide smile in place.
“There you are, so good to see you,” he burbled. “I’m Mr. Grenville, homeroom and English, and this’ll be your desk.” He pulled back a chair, catty-corner from Harriet’s. Annie sat down without looking her way.
Mr. Grenville went back to the head of the classroom and turned to address the group. “Everybody, I’d like you all to meet Annie Smith.” Marion Hawthorne swiveled to face her. “Annie?” she said. “You told me your name was—”
“Cassandra D’Amore. It is.”
Mr. Grenville frowned. “My attendance chart lists you as Annie Smith. Would that be … a nickname?”
Marion smirked and Beth Ellen Hansen leaned forward. Let’s see how she handles this one, thought Harriet.
“You might call it a nickname,” said Annie coolly. “In certain, er, federal circles.” Marion’s eyes widened. Beth Ellen looked frightened.
Mr. Grenville’s thick eyebrows rose high on his forehead. His voice sounded richly amused. “Or we might call it something else—for example, a genre of writing including novels, short stories, novellas, and experimental forms. Which is?” He looked 9
straight at Harriet.
“Fiction,” she answered.
Mr. Grenville smiled. He had kind eyes. “Would that be correct, Annie?” She didn’t blink. “Names have been changed to protect the innocent. That’s all I’m permitted to say on the matter.”
Mr. Grenville made a small bow from the waist
, and Harriet thought, as she often had, that he must have once yearned for a life on the stage. “All right, then, Cassandra D’Amore. We’re reading Romeo and Juliet. Are you familiar?”
“Montagues hate the Capulets, Capulets hate the Montagues, everyone dies.” Annie nodded.
There’s more to her than meets the eye, Harriet thought. She’s very well-read for an impolite person who lies a lot. Annie Smith was a woman of multiple mysteries: not just the reason for her expulsion from Sport’s public school, but the reason she’d come to live with her uncle and aunt in the first place. Where were her parents?
Harriet the Spy, Double Agent Page 1