The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “I guess this means no stakeout,” Samuel said, not sounding sufficiently disappointed as far as Hazel was concerned.

  “Well, actually, I need to show you something. Then we can do another search for him,” Hazel said. She walked with him over to the mausoleum.

  “Is this part of the case?”

  “No.” She pushed open the door. “I’m making a fallout shelter here. See.”

  With her head, she gestured for him to peek in so he could see her stash of canned goods.

  “It’s not airtight,” he told her.

  “I know,” she replied. “But here’s what I’m thinking: If it’s airtight, that’s no good. We’d run out of oxygen. The stone and cracks allow for just enough air to go in and out. Sure, we might be exposed to a bit of radiation, but not enough to kill us.”

  Samuel scratched his elbow while he considered this. “Not a bad thought, actually,” he said.

  “My parents don’t know about it yet, but if the Russians do send us a warning—which I doubt they will—I’ll say, ‘Don’t worry, Mom and Dad. Just follow me. I have it all under control.’ And if we don’t have a warning and it’s just the flash of light, I’ll grab them both by the hands and say, ‘Forget Bert the Turtle, come this way!’ and we’ll run right to safety.” Hazel tugged the door closed.

  “You’ve thought it all through.”

  “Of course. This is serious business. I know it would be too far for you to come last minute, but if there is warning, you’d be welcome. There will be enough food. You just need to bring your own sleeping bag.”

  “What about my grandmother?” Samuel pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

  “Does she snore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hazel had a hard time picturing Mrs. Switzer sleeping on the cold floor of the mausoleum, but in the event of an atomic attack, she supposed anything was possible. “Okay. But then you guys should probably bring some extra food if you can.”

  Samuel nodded. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” She picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow. “We should get back to the matter at hand.”

  Eventually they found Mr. Jones fixing some slats in the wooden fence at the rear of the cemetery. They chose a place where they could see him but were somewhat protected by a large statue of an angel that Hazel had always called Rufus.

  “So what exactly are we hoping to see?” Samuel asked.

  Hazel pulled a dandelion. “Ideally we’d see someone from the plant do a drop-off at the grave, or a direct exchange with The Comrade. Admittedly, that’s not likely, especially now that the heat is on. So we should focus on building up a profile of him, so when we do go to the FBI and Senator McCarthy, we can give them a full report. We need to get an understanding of the subject, his patterns and habits, you know.”

  “I see,” Samuel said. He pulled out a few weeds and put them in the wheelbarrow. “Don’t you already know about his daily habits?”

  “We think we know, but we don’t. You never really know about someone.”

  “I know about you,” he said. “I mean, I know you aren’t a murderer or anything.”

  “As far as you know,” she said. “That’s the thing about spies. They live among us and only the truly wise can spot them.” She arched her eyebrows so he would know that she was among the truly wise, in case there was any doubt.

  “I see,” he said again. He made steady progress weeding his patch of the graveyard, approaching the task in his typical orderly manner. Hazel would have been faster than him, but spent more time peeking at Mr. Jones.

  With his bare hands, The Comrade was prying off the old, broken pieces of wood. Hazel took out her notebook and wrote: Very strong.

  He worked without rest, and so Hazel wrote: Focused.

  She put the notebook by her knees and began pulling weeds as she watched him keep working. It seemed a little strange that a spy would take a job that required so much physical labor. If she were a spy, especially one at the top level with a whole cell of other spies that she was in charge of, she certainly wouldn’t take this kind of a job. She’d be a nightclub singer, maybe. Though perhaps that would draw too much attention to herself. She would be a librarian, then. She could hide the secrets in books, ones that weren’t popular, and then the other spies could find them. She giggled at the thought of Miss Angus being a spy: her tall, lanky frame wrapped in a trench coat as she snuck down the one slightly darkish alleyway in Maple Hill, a book filled with secrets under her arm.

  “What?” Samuel asked.

  “Nothing. My mind just wandered. Won’t happen again.”

  Mr. Jones lifted up a new board and began hammering it in.

  Able to wield a blunt object with force and precision.

  “What are you writing down?” Samuel asked.

  “No cheating. Take your own notes.”

  “It’s not cheating if we’re partners.”

  Hazel sniffed. She didn’t want to share what she had written down, because it wasn’t terribly exciting. The Comrade hadn’t met anyone, and he hadn’t gone anywhere near the grave or the garden shed. Stakeouts, she was starting to think, were actually kind of boring.

  Mr. Jones worked at a steady pace, moving on to carefully putting new boards in the empty slots. There was a rhythmic thunking to his hammer that Hazel found soothing, and she thought she heard, however faintly, that he was humming.

  “My grandmother wasn’t sure about letting me go trick-or-treating with you. She said she wasn’t so sure about a boy and a girl being friends.”

  Hazel picked up a trowel and stabbed into the earth, then wedged out a deep-rooted weed. “Connie thinks we like each other, you know, like girl-boy stuff.”

  “Connie reads too many romance stories,” Samuel said.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Hazel said.

  “It’s a completely ridiculous idea.”

  “Not completely, completely ridiculous,” Hazel said. “I think I would be considered quite the catch. I’m smart and clever and I make good jokes. I’ve built a fallout shelter. My mom says that eventually I’ll grow out of this baby fat, not that it really matters. So I don’t think it’s completely ridiculous that you would have a crush on me.”

  “You forgot modest.”

  “What’s the point of modesty? I’ll be modest when other folks start to realize how remarkable I am.”

  Samuel shook his head and began gathering up the small pile of weeds that he had amassed. Then he dumped them into the wheelbarrow. “He’s leaving.”

  “What? We hardly have any notes.”

  “You can write that he’s careful about picking up his work site.”

  They both watched him walk the length of the graveyard back toward the garden shed.

  “I guess that’s it for today,” Samuel said.

  “Wait! He’s going into the shed. That’s where he stashes his deliveries from Mr. Short. Come on!”

  “Come on where?”

  “We need to get a closer look!”

  Before she could stand up, Mr. Jones emerged from the shed holding an ax. He strode right toward them. “Oh, no,” Hazel whispered. Samuel said nothing. They couldn’t run; they’d blow their cover. So she just kept weeding as fast as she could. She was digging her hands into the dirt like a groundhog, so fast and hard that her fingertips began to hurt.

  With a few long, quick strides, he was in front of her. He looked at her, the wheelbarrow, and then at her notebook.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Weeding,” she said. “And a school project on plant identification. Killing two birds with one stone, you know. Ha-ha.” She winced at her use of the word “killing.”

  He looked down at the ground. “I think you’ve done enough,” he said. His voice stayed the same: flat and low.

  “What?” She began recoiling.

  Mr. Jones swung the ax up onto his shoulder. The sun glinted off the clean blade. His gaze flicked from Hazel to Samuel
, then back to Hazel, as if deciding which of them to chop first.

  This was where it all ended, she thought, her heart beating fast. It didn’t matter that it was broad daylight, that her parents were in the house. This would be the exact moment that she ceased to exist. It was too soon. Everyone said that, of course. Everyone thinks their time is too short, probably, Hazel thought, even old people who can’t even get around or think straight. Probably even Mrs. Buttersbee, who Hazel sometimes saw in the grocery store walking around with just a head of cabbage in her hands, probably even she would say “It’s too soon! I’m not ready!” when the time came. But with Hazel, it really was. She had great things in her future. Great, spectacular, impressive things, like traveling to space, or maybe she would discover a cure for the common cold and cancer, or she would write a comic strip that was in every newspaper in the United States and Canada. Maybe she would do all these things. But not if it ended now. Not if Mr. Jones captured them and sent them to Siberia.

  “You’ve pulled that spot clean down to the dirt.”

  She looked: he was right. There was a round patch of dirt about a foot across in front of her. When she looked up, there was only blue sky dotted with cotton-ball clouds. He was gone, and her future, for now, was still possible.

  “Having a foot race?”

  Hazel and Samuel both jumped and turned to see Hazel’s father standing in the kitchen. He was making a cup of tea, dipping the tea bag up and down in the hot water.

  Hazel and Samuel breathed heavily. They had sprinted from the graveyard to the house after Mr. Jones left.

  “I’ve never seen two kids run so fast,” he said. He took the tea bag and tossed it into the compost, then picked up his book New Strategies for Cemetery Horticulture.

  Teacup in one hand, book in the other and held up in front of his face, he started for the kitchen door.

  “Dad?” she called after him.

  “Yes?” he replied, not lowering his book.

  “Is there some reason that Mr. Jones would have an ax?” Her voice cracked on the word “ax.”

  Hazel’s dad put his book down on the table. He looked first at Hazel and then at Samuel. “You two aren’t bothering Mr. Jones, are you?”

  “No, of course not,” Hazel said.

  Hazel’s dad looked at Samuel. “You sure?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied.

  “Because Mr. Jones has had a tough life and he works hard for us. The last thing he needs is for a couple of kids to be harassing him. And the last thing I need is to have to hire another gravedigger.”

  “We weren’t harassing him. He just came out of the middle of nowhere with an ax, and I was curious as to what task needed an ax.”

  “You’ve got a curiosity about axes?” her dad asked, eyebrows lifted.

  “Well, an ax does raise some suspicions.”

  Her dad picked up his book again. “Just leave him alone, okay?”

  “Okay,” Hazel said.

  “Good,” he replied. He walked through the doorway and down the hall toward the front room.

  “Maybe he’s right,” Samuel said.

  “What? Are you kidding me?”

  “I just mean maybe we’re in over our heads.”

  “We’re not even near our necks. We just need to investigate a little more. You’ll notice, by the way, that my dad never answered the question. Which means he probably doesn’t know why The Comrade had the ax. Which is suspicious, don’t you think?”

  “Your dad trusts Mr. Jones.”

  “My dad’s a trusting guy. After all, I told him all we wanted to do tonight was trick-or-treat. Speaking of which, we should get into our costumes!”

  “I never thought I’d see the day,” Samuel said.

  “What?”

  “That something would pull the relentless Hazel Kaplansky off a lead in the case.”

  “This isn’t just something, Samuel. This is Halloween!”

  24

  Trick-or-Treat

  It was true that the mission of the day was to spy on The Comrade and that mission had ended in failure and a near-death experience. Still, Hazel could not contain her excitement as she straightened out her scarf. She was about to go trick-or-treating for the first time in seven years.

  As they set off, the sun was still up, but starting to edge out of the sky. She hazarded a glance back to the graveyard. Getting into her costume had dissipated some of the fear she’d felt when The Comrade came striding toward them, but now she was worried that he’d be waiting for them, and Samuel, in his stupid ghost costume, would not be able to move well enough to run away.

  Her parents had given them strict instructions to stay in neighborhoods with sidewalks and to come back before it got truly dark. She led Samuel into a street with a cul-de-sac. It was a new neighborhood and all the houses looked the same. There were a number of other kids, mostly younger with their parents. They walked up the front walk and rang the doorbell of the first house. “Trick-or-treat!” Hazel yelled before the door was all the way open.

  “My, my,” said the young mother, baby on her hip. The mother was part of Pastor Logan’s family, though Hazel couldn’t recall exactly how. Second cousins, maybe. “A ghost. Scary! Do you see the scary ghost, honey? Do you?” The baby could not muster much interest. “And what are you, sweetie?”

  “I’m Amelia Earhart,” Hazel said.

  “Why, how creative of you.”

  She extended the bowl of candy and they each took one candy. “Go on, take two,” she prompted, and so they did.

  The next house played out almost the exact same, only this was Mrs. Redstone, who worked down at the post office and couldn’t hear very well. Hazel had to yell “Amelia Earhart!” three times before Mrs. Redstone understood her.

  “I can’t believe people don’t know who I am,” Hazel said as they moved on to the next house.

  “That’s why you should go with something simple and classic.”

  “Amelia Earhart is classic,” she said, adjusting her scarf, which was starting to droop.

  They finished the loop of the first neighborhood. The night had the faintest hint of cool, and a gentle wind rustled the remaining leaves in the trees. It was just about a storybook-perfect Halloween night. As they walked on to the next neighborhood, Hazel said, “You know what’s wrong with music class?”

  “We’re destroying a beautiful song?”

  “No. Mrs. Ferrigno undervalues the triangle. I think the triangle is a noble instrument.”

  “Noble?” Samuel asked.

  “Quiet yet firm. I mean, the glockenspiel, sure it’s pretty, but anyone can sound good on a glockenspiel. Working the triangle takes skill.”

  “Hazel, I have to elbow you to make sure you don’t miss our cue.”

  “That’s because I’m not being challenged enough.”

  They rang the doorbell on a large house. Almost before Samuel’s hand was down from the buzzer, Mrs. Logan threw open the door. She was dressed like the good witch in The Wizard of Oz. “Happy Halloween!” she called out. “Why, it’s a ghost and a, um, a— What are you, Hazel?”

  “Amelia Earhart,” Hazel said.

  “Oh, isn’t that, um, different?” She dropped a box of raisins into each of their bags. Raisins. That was even worse than bringing gum to a Halloween party.

  Hazel rang the next doorbell. Waited. No one came. This was Mr. Hood’s house, and she knew he was home because Mr. Hood only left the house on Tuesday mornings for grocery shopping. Otherwise the farthest he came was to his front door so he could yell at kids to scram off his front lawn. She pressed again. The door opened and an old man peered out. “Who’s there?”

  “Trick-or-treat!” Hazel called out.

  “Blast it!” Mr. Hood replied. “Is it time for those shenanigans again?” He dug around in his pocket. “Here’s a dime for the ghost and”—he looked down at his hand—“a nickel for the bandit.”

  “I’m not a bandit, I’m Amelia Earhart!”

  “
You’re off my front porch is what you are!”

  “Yes, sir,” Samuel said, and dragged her off the steps.

  “That was Mr. Hood. He’s cantankerous.”

  “Let’s just keep going.”

  A group of younger kids raced by Mr. Hood’s driveway, their fathers following along behind them.

  The next stop was Ellen Abbott’s house. Ellen’s mother, who was as mousy as Ellen herself, opened the door. “A ghost and a motorcycle racer!”

  “I’m Amelia Earhart.”

  “Amelia who?”

  “Earhart. Woman pilot.”

  “Oh. Well, here’s your candy.”

  Hazel shook her head as they were walking down the front steps. “As I was saying, I just think that if Mrs. Ferrigno gave me a chance, she could see that I could shine on that triangle, and I bet she’d even give me a solo.”

  “A triangle solo?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “I don’t think a triangle has enough notes.”

  “It’s not the instrument that’s the problem. It’s a lack of imagination. In the proper hands a triangle could be as impressive as a piano.”

  “A piano?”

  “Well, at least as impressive as a vibraslap.”

  The next house was Mrs. Buttersbee’s. Hazel rang the doorbell. Hazel loved Mrs. Buttersbee’s name. It made her think of the honey butter her grandmother made to spread over toast: so sweet it burned the back of her throat. She was a talker, though. “Hazel Kaplansky!” she cried out when she opened the door. “It’s been a few years.”

  “Seven,” Hazel said.

  Mrs. Buttersbee ushered them into the house. In the front hallway, there was a sideboard with a Crock-Pot full of hot apple cider. She began ladling out two paper cups’ worth. Year after year, Hazel had heard the other kids complain about Mrs. Buttersbee. Stopping at her house always took forever, they said, since she talked to you for ages while you drank her cider. “You were a, wait, don’t tell me. You were a pumpkin the last time you knocked on my door.”