The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “What is a dissertation anyway?” Hazel asked.

  Her mom jumped a little as if she hadn’t been expecting Hazel to be there. “After you finish college, you can keep studying for something called a PhD. It’s an advanced degree.”

  “Oh, Samuel wants to do that.”

  “He’ll make a good candidate, whatever he decides to study. So would you.”

  “Why do you have a list? Are you going to get one?”

  “I thought I was,” Hazel’s mom said. She put the sheet back down on a stack of papers.

  “Did you fail out?” Hazel tugged at the neck of her dress.

  Hazel’s mom sighed. “No, Hazel, I didn’t fail out. I got married.”

  Hazel wasn’t sure how to respond to this. “Because you got married, they wouldn’t let you get a PhD?”

  “It’s not that simple, Hazel.”

  “But I don’t understand what you mean. It’s not fair that they didn’t let you stay in school.”

  “It was my choice, Hazel. A PhD takes a long time, and your father and I wanted to start a family.”

  Hazel looked down at her shiny shoes.

  “Oh, Hazel,” her mom said. “Sometimes the world isn’t set up to give us everything we want. It’s changing, and I hope it will be better for you. I just couldn’t see a way to be a wife and a mother and an academic. But working here, it gives me a chance to do what I love. Not a lot of women get to do that. Do you understand?” Hazel’s mom tousled her short hair the way she had when Hazel was still toddling around spouting nonsense words. “Come on. You’re going to be late for the party.”

  Hazel’s mom drove her in the old Ford, but she didn’t say anything. She seemed to be looking at some faraway place instead of at the road.

  When they pulled into the driveway, her mother reminded her, “Be sure to say hello to Connie’s parents. Don’t just eat the junk food. Say thank you. Sing the right words to ‘Happy Birthday.’”

  “I know, Mom,” Hazel said.

  “I know you do. But reminding you is my job.”

  Hazel’s mom waited in the car until Hazel was inside. It was the fanciest-looking party Hazel had ever seen. Not that she’d seen all that many parties. There were balloons everywhere, and pink and white streamers twisted and hung around the living room. Dance music played on the record player, but no one was dancing.

  No one was dancing because the only other guest there was Ellen Abbott, who sat in an overstuffed armchair with her feet dangling off the edge. Her long hair was pulled into tight braids. Connie herself stood next to a table with chips, vegetables, and dips. She wore a sparkling pink dress, her hair neatly curled, and she was sucking on her lower lip.

  “Where is everybody?” Hazel asked.

  Connie sniffed, but didn’t say anything.

  “That’s a nice dress, Hazel,” Ellen said.

  Hazel sighed. “It’s not a nice dress. It’s a baby dress and it barely fits me. Anyone can see that.”

  At that, Connie ran out of the room, and a moment later a huge wail came echoing down the hall to them.

  Ellen said, “Why do you always have to be such a pill, Hazel Kaplansky?”

  Hazel couldn’t believe that horsey Ellen Abbott was calling her a pill. Everyone knew the reason they couldn’t go on any field trips that year was on account of Ellen Abbott and how she always threw up on the bus.

  A moment later, Mr. Short came into the room. His Hawaiian print shirt didn’t match the glum expression on his face. “Girls, it seems Connie isn’t feeling so well, and I think we’re going to cut this party a little short. I’ll drive you home.”

  “I need to use the restroom first,” Ellen said.

  That was the other thing about Ellen: she had a tiny bladder. She probably went to the bathroom six times a day.

  “Right down the hall on the left,” Mr. Short said, pointing.

  With Ellen gone, Hazel was alone with Mr. Short. She still had one big, nagging question, and she figured it was now or never. “Mr. Short, why’d you bring all those safes over to Mr. Jones?”

  Mr. Short didn’t look surprised or guilty. “He was unlocking them. When folks lose their keys, they can send the safes back to us. We’re supposed to keep duplicates and master keys on hand for all the different kinds of safes, but sometimes something’s gone wrong with the lock, or we’re missing the key. Mr. Jones can pick the lock.”

  Maybe she hadn’t been 100 percent wrong about Mr. Jones after all. “Because he’s a thief?” she asked.

  For the first time, Mr. Short lifted his sad eyes to look at her. “No, Hazel. He’s not a thief. He has locksmith training.”

  “It seems like you ought to have a locksmith on hand in the factory.”

  “We do. But Chuck’s getting older, and his hands don’t work so well.”

  “So fire him and hire Mr. Jones.”

  Mr. Short took a sip from his caramel-colored drink. “I don’t suppose your parents would like that much. Anyway, Chuck’s been there forever, and he’s in the union. You can’t get rid of a union man just because someone better comes along.”

  Hazel nodded. She didn’t know a lot about unions, only that the folks who worked at a place banded together to make sure the owners treated them right. “Aren’t you the head of the union?”

  “I am.”

  “And that’s why they’re investigating you, right, because of union ties with the Communists?”

  Mr. Short sputtered on his drink. “Well, now—”

  “It’s okay, you can tell me. I’m good at keeping secrets.”

  Mr. Short put his drink down and ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s no secret. All this talk about Communists in our plants—it’s not about finding threats to the United States, it’s about busting up the unions. Why, at the GE plant they’ve all jumped ship already. I haven’t done anything wrong, and neither has anyone else at the factory.”

  “You ought to just tell the investigators that.”

  Mr. Short sighed. “If I talk, then other guys who plead the Fifth, they look guilty for not talking.”

  “Why can’t you all just tell the truth?”

  “Times like this, the truth has a way of getting twisted.” He looked out at the empty living room. The balloons and streamers seemed a lot less festive. Hazel and Mr. Short were both so quiet, thinking their own thoughts, that Hazel could hear the ice in his drink cracking.

  Rumor, whisper, lie, Hazel thought. And she’d been just as bad as everyone else in town.

  34

  The Story of Samuel

  After Mr. Short steered his blue Packard into her driveway, Hazel waved good-bye and waited for him to pull out. Then she jumped on her bike. Her parents thought she was at the party, and she was going to use that time as best she could. She needed to find Samuel, to let him know about the safes. She couldn’t go to his house, though; they still weren’t supposed to spend too much time together. She hoped he might be at the library.

  Inside the library, she cruised by Miss Angus, who was putting The Catcher in the Rye on a display shelf. “Walking feet, Hazel!” Miss Angus called out. Hazel slowed down until she reached the stairs, which she took two at a time. There were a few families downstairs, and Timmy was sitting in a corner reading a book, which was strange because she had never, ever seen him read a book before.

  Breathless, she found Miss Lerner. “Have you seen Samuel?” she asked.

  “Good afternoon to you, too.”

  “I’m sorry. I just need to find Samuel. It’s about, it’s about a project we’ve been working on.”

  “I haven’t seen him all day. But I’m glad you stopped in. Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure,” Hazel replied.

  “Come with me.”

  Miss Lerner put her hand on Hazel’s back and led her around behind her desk to a little office. Hazel’s heart began to flutter. This was it. Her lowest moment was about to become her highest. Her exceptional intelligence was finally being recognized and she
was going to be honored with a position on the library staff. Miss Lerner shut the door. “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

  Hazel considered it. She thought it would be quite librarianish to drink a cup of tea in the afternoon, but she was far too excited. “No, thank you,” Hazel replied. She scanned the room. The office looked fairly normal: a desk, a chair, an electric teakettle, and stacks of magazines with pictures of book covers on them.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Miss Lerner said.

  “Oh, it doesn’t bother me,” Hazel told her. “In fact, I believe that a cluttered desk is the sign of a busy mind. My desk is quite cluttered, too. It drives my mom crazy, and it probably didn’t help when I told her this quote I read once: ‘Dull women keep immaculate houses.’”

  “Interesting.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So. How are you these days?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Hazel replied. “How are you?” She was truly perplexed now. Maybe this wasn’t the job offer she had expected. Had Miss Lerner called her back for some sort of social visit? Maybe she was being invited to a special reading club for the truly brilliant. Oh, Samuel would be jealous! Unless of course Samuel was already a part of the reading club. In which case, well, she would still want to join, but it did make it a little less special. She wondered what kind of books they read. The thick ones, she decided, the ones with the worn brown covers and the funny smell that were always in the stacks.

  “You haven’t been around the library much lately.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Hazel said. “Samuel and I have been to the library, actually. We’ve been up to the third floor. I’m quite adept on the microfilm machine.”

  “I’m glad you brought up Samuel,” Miss Lerner said. “He’s actually who I wanted to talk with you about today.”

  Hazel slumped a little. So he was in the secret club already, and she was just an afterthought. Perhaps he had even suggested that she be invited since he knew she was feeling bad about the whole Mr. Jones thing. Oh, that would be the worst—to be included out of sympathy!

  “It’s a hard thing to talk about. To explain. To begin.” She cleared her throat. “I went to school with Samuel’s mother, Lacey Switzer. We were good friends.” She played with the locket that hung around her neck; Hazel wondered if it had a picture of Mr. Bowen in it. “Back then, people sometimes judged other people by where they were from, what jobs their parents had, how much money. It wasn’t right, but that’s the way it was.”

  Hazel didn’t know why Miss Lerner was talking like that attitude was all in the past. It was still like that. She and Samuel were living proof.

  “Lacey was, well, she’s a Switzer. Samuel’s father was Randy Butler.”

  Hazel wondered if that was the same Randall who had picked Mrs. Buttersbee’s blackberries.

  “Randy’s dad sometimes worked shifts at the factory, but mostly he sat around the house or the VFW. He’d been injured in World War I, folks said, and never recovered. So Randy never had much direction from home, you know. He was always getting into little scrapes. No one in the high school—no one in all of Maple Hill—understood what Lacey saw in him. She never talked about it, just got this kind of dewy glow in her eyes. Maybe she thought she could save him. Personally, I always thought she was doing it to make her parents mad.”

  Hazel looked down at the patterned carpet. Miss Lerner was talking the same way she’d just said was wrong: judging Randy for his family situation.

  “It all happened so fast. One thing after another. There’s no easy way to say this. This is an adult conversation. Do you think you’re ready?”

  All her life she’d been longing for adult conversation, but now that she was on the brink, she didn’t know if she wanted to hear what Miss Lerner had to say. But she couldn’t not hear it. Not after all the whispers and innuendos. It was her nature, the very core of it, to need to know everything that anyone else knew. She was still wearing her party dress, and it seemed to be constricting around her torso, making it hard to breathe. Hazel nodded.

  “Lacey made a mistake. She did something nice girls don’t normally do. Don’t ever do.”

  “She cursed?” Hazel asked.

  Miss Lerner gave a quick smile, but then she shook her head. “Lacey was, well, she was with child. Samuel.” She hesitated. “Lacey and Randy weren’t married, you see.”

  Hazel rocked back. “Oh,” she said. It all made sense now. The secret. The way people talked about Samuel. How they looked at him. His mother had been unmarried when she had him. Unmarried and still in high school. She could practically hear the cackles and whispers of women like Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Logan.

  “It was winter when she told me, right before Valentine’s Day. By that point, Randy was already gone.”

  “Gone?” Hazel asked. “Gone where?”

  “Like a lot of boys, he enlisted after Pearl Harbor. School didn’t hold much for him, so he dropped out and joined up. He figured it was the best way he could give a good life to Lacey. They planned to get married when he came back. Only he didn’t come back.”

  “He was killed?”

  Miss Lerner nodded. “He never even knew she was pregnant.”

  Hazel could picture a man-sized Samuel away in Europe or Japan, lonely in his bunker, missing Samuel’s mother. And then he was gone. How different Samuel’s life would have been had he come back. Hazel didn’t have any words for the saddest story she had ever heard.

  “The Switzers sent Lacey away. They said she was off to a finishing school down South, but everyone knew the truth. She came back with the baby. The Switzers didn’t even bother to try to hide it. She didn’t stick around for long. It’s hard to say she was ever even here. I went over a few times to try to talk with her, to play with the baby. She was there, but she was—”

  “Empty,” Hazel finished for her, thinking of how Samuel had described his mother.

  “Yes. That’s a good way to put it. Then she and the baby disappeared. People said she came back to Maple Hill from time to time. You’d sometimes see the light in her turret. But no one ever saw her in person. And now Samuel is here. You understand, don’t you, how much he’s been through?”

  “Yes. He needs a friend.” Hazel felt low about how she’d been treating him. What happened with his parents, it was a tragedy—and it wasn’t his fault. But everyone at school—everyone in town—was talking about him and making assumptions about what kind of boy he must be, just because of one mistake his parents made.

  “Yes, definitely, but I can also tell you what he doesn’t need. He doesn’t need to be going around graveyards digging up old stories. He doesn’t need to be caught up in any silliness.”

  Hazel felt her cheeks flush: Miss Lerner thought she was silly, that she and Samuel had just been playing a game. But there was more to it than that, and more to Hazel. She stood up. “Thank you, Miss Lerner,” she said. It was no use to try to explain that Samuel hadn’t gotten the idea from her; poking around in graveyards was what he did. She heard what Miss Lerner was saying: Samuel needed a friend, but he didn’t need her.

  Hazel rolled her bike off the sidewalk and onto the street and hopped on. She had all these stories churning around in her head. There was Mr. Jones with his lost sister and Samuel with his lost father. She had never lost anyone and yet just thinking about it made her sad. Soon her stomach was roiling as much as her head and she wished she were back home under her covers never having learned the truth of any of this. The truth was just too heavy sometimes.

  She’d only gone a block when she realized her tire was flat. Again. She got off the bike and started pushing it in the direction of Wall’s Garage. As she walked, her shin hit the pedal and she said one of the words her mother told her never to say, and she got angrier and angrier at her dad and his promises to fix the tire. He would fix it, she thought, if it had flowers growing out of it. He would fix it if it had a Latin name.

  Then, as if someone had come from behind and shoved her, she thought
: Samuel doesn’t have anyone to get angry at.

  Instead of making her feel better, the thought made her feel small, and even angrier, though now the anger was directed at herself, which was an entirely uncomfortable emotion.

  She staggered into Wall’s Garage feeling as heavy as cement.

  “Hello there!” Mr. Wall said. “Don’t you look nice today!” He was sitting on a folding lawn chair just outside his office, toothpick jutting out from between his lips.

  “Hey, Mr. Wall,” she replied, unable to keep the glum out of her voice. She was sure he was going to ask what was wrong. She would tell him that everything was fine, and he would say good, because adults often asked if things were all right, but really they just wanted to hear that you were okay.

  Instead, though, he looked at her and looked at her bike. “You know, Hazel, not that I mind seeing you so often, but I could fix your tire if you’d like.”

  “My dad’s going to do it. Someday.”

  Mr. Wall hesitated. “Of course. Then again, it’s awfully quiet here today. I haven’t practiced my tire-fixing skills in a while. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  Hazel knew that Mr. Wall wasn’t being entirely honest. But he also wasn’t lying. “Okay,” she replied.

  “Bring her on in.”

  She pushed her bike into the place where the cars normally went. Mr. Wall came out with a toolbox and a small piece of black rubber. After removing the wheel, he used a screwdriver to wedge her tire off the wheel frame. Hazel sat down on the little cart that Mr. Wall used to slide under cars to work on them.

  “It’s a slow leak,” she told him. This much her dad had explained to her.

  “When I’m done, it will be a no-leak.” He grinned at her and she wanted to grin back, but she couldn’t, what with all the churning and the roiling.

  Hazel used her heels to roll herself back and forth, back and forth. She held her skirt up so it didn’t brush against the grease- and oil-stained floor. “Mr. Wall, have you ever known someone and then found out something about them that made you think about them in a whole different way?”