Nanny X didn’t look like she wanted any help, but my arms felt all noodle-y from paddling. If this kept up, I wouldn’t even be able to swing a bat at my baseball game against the Green Sox. If we were done being special agents in time to even go to my game, which was at six o’clock on the nose, as Nanny X would say.
“A tow would be arctic!” I told Boris.
But Nanny X did something even more arctic: She took another fishing lure from her hat and attached it to the back of our canoe. Bbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrttt. It might have been the world’s tiniest motor, but it zipped us across the water ahead of Boris and Stinky, who started their own motor and followed us. Our boats left a wake, which blurped some of the paddleboaters around. They looked angry, but I don’t think they were angry at us; mostly, I think, they were tired of pedaling.
“Government business,” Nanny X told them. She stood with one foot on the side of the boat and dipped her paddle in the water to help control our direction. She looked like that picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware, except Washington wore a different kind of hat.
We went through a tunnel under a bridge and pulled into a small marina, which is a parking lot for boats. There was even a spot with our name on it: NAP. Both boats fit in there, side by side. I helped tie the canoe to a post. Then we pulled out the stroller, the diaper bag, the coloring book and the bag with the mechanical fish parts, and went to explore the market.
It smelled worse than my lunch box the day Nanny X gave me the anchovy sandwich. But there were good smells, too; they were just hiding underneath the bad ones.
We walked by stalls with piles of scallops and shrimp and crabs and fish. Lots and lots of fish. They were the whole kind, with their heads still on and their mouths wide open. Ali was as googly-eyed as the fish were. I think the smell was getting to her.
“Our scallops pack a wallop,” said the man behind the counter of Fernando’s Fish Hut. He smiled like on a TV commercial, where people act very excited about insurance or Doritos or cars. “Our grouper is super. Our crab is fab.”
A lady walked up and took a photo of him standing behind the seafood. He kept smiling for the photo, but then he stopped smiling and shook his head.
“All people do is take pictures. Yesterday somebody stood here and actually drew one of my catfish.”
Drew? That could be a clue. “What did he look like?” I asked.
“Oh, about yay big and kind of slimy. He had a mustache like my Uncle Dusty.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean the catfish,” I said politely. “I meant what did the person drawing the catfish look like?”
“Hard to tell. He had a hat pulled down and he wore a rain slicker. I tried to sell him my scallops but all he cared about was that fish. I wish he’d cared enough to buy it.”
I think he knew that I was not going to buy a catfish, either. But then Nanny X came up and bought six bowls of Fernando’s Couldn’t-Be-Prouder Clam Chowder, which made him happy. There were saltine crackers, too. We ate them outside in this porch-y area that had tables but no chairs. Stinky ate his chowder, after going back to tell Fernando that it would be better for the environment if he didn’t serve the chowder in Styrofoam.
Boris ate, too, after saying what a shame it was that no one at the fish market sold lentil soup. (Boris liked lentils the way Nanny X liked fish.) He poured the bag of robot fish parts on the table.
“Look at the craftsmanship here, in the mouth,” he said. The fish had tiny spiky teeth, the size of lettuce seeds. Chunks of Eliza’s coloring-book page were still stuck between them.
Nanny X brushed away some cracker crumbs and pulled out a thin package of baby wipes. The soapy smell didn’t fool me. The mini baby wipes package was really her NAP computer, which gave us direct access to 149 different crime databases.
She clicked on a couple of keys.
“Type in ‘paper,’ ” Boris suggested. “And ‘herring.’ Is there anything for ‘paper-eating herring’?”
“I know what to type, thanks,” said Nanny X. Click, click, click went the keys. “Nothing.”
“Robot fish?” I suggested.
Click, click.
“No.”
Some seagulls came over to see if we had any more crackers, but we didn’t.
Then we heard a sound that was a cross between clicking and gargling. It didn’t come from the seagulls or Yeti or from Nanny X’s computer, either. The sound came from a squirrel. He was the darkest brown, with a fluffy tail and shining eyes. He looked a little sad. He ran up to Nanny X, who kept typing.
“I’m sorry,” Boris told the squirrel. “We don’t have any food for you.”
The squirrel scooted closer anyway. He climbed onto the table. His tail flicked up and down and he made that click-gargle sound again.
That’s when he opened his mouth. He grabbed Nanny X’s computer with his teeth, which were much bigger than the fish’s.
“Holy cats!” Nanny X said, even though it was a squirrel. He ran down the table and jumped off the end, heading through the market. Then he crossed a busy street and started running up the grassy hill on the other side.
Nanny X moved fast, but she did not move as fast as that squirrel. By the time we’d zigagged through the market and crossed the street, we could make out the squirrel climbing a tree in the distance. We caught up to him and then sproing. He jumped to the next tree. We followed the sound of rattling leaves.
“I can’t let that computer get into the wrong hands,” Nanny X said. “NAP would be . . . disappointed.”
I didn’t point out that squirrels had paws instead of hands, because actually? They look like hands. Here are some other things I know about squirrels, thanks to my Fantastically Freaky book.
One: Their front teeth grow forever, so they have to chew on things like walnuts to keep their teeth short. The book doesn’t mention chewing on computers.
Two: People have used squirrels as spies.
Nanny X must have read that book, too; that’s why she was so worried. Because if this squirrel was being used for spying, he could be taking Nanny X’s computer to the enemy.
Fortunately we had Yeti, who is a professional squirrel chaser. At home, all you have to do is say “Squirrel!” and he will run straight to our bird feeder, where there are always squirrels trying to steal birdseed.
But Yeti didn’t run. He sniffed the air and then walked over to Boris and sniffed his shoes.
“Squirrel!” I said again. Yeti looked at me like I was talking in pig latin.
The squirrel moved to a tree where the branches were low enough for me to grab. But as soon as I started climbing, the squirrel changed trees.
We needed someone who could move quicker than we could, someone who was extremely flexible and who was on our side. It would help if he was furry and could move from tree to tree like that squirrel.
“We need Howard,” I said.
7. Alison
Nanny X Grabs the Remote
Squirrel spies? Seriously?
I’d heard plenty of crazy things since Nanny X started taking care of us. And those things turned out to be true. But a squirrel guilty of espionage? Besides, we were supposed to be looking for fish, and for someone who liked fish enough to sculpt them. We didn’t have time for squirrels. But I knew we had to get Nanny X’s computer back, especially if NAP had any doubts about her skills as a special agent. She had something to prove. All of us did. And enlisting Howard actually seemed like a decent idea.
I should probably explain that Howard is a chimp. He helped us solve our last case. Jake got kind of attached to him, but we weren’t allowed to bring him home because A, we had Yeti, and B, Nanny X said chimps were meant to live in the wild. As a compromise, Howard went to live at the David T. Jones Primate Sanctuary.
“Can we get him here quickly?” Boris asked.
“Transportation can be arranged,” Nanny X said. She reached into the diaper bag and pulled out a diaper.
“Aha!” yelled Jake. He’d yelled that
almost every time Nanny X pulled out a diaper this week, thinking it was going to be a new diaper phone, but every time it was a regular diaper. This time she opened it up to reveal three rows of silver buttons. She dialed.
“X here,” she said. “Permission to use Operation Baseball.”
Jake’s ears pricked up when she said “baseball.”
“Right,” she said. “It’s the most efficient way. X out.”
She had started to dial again when Jake yelled, “Squirrel on the move!”
The tree rattled and the squirrel came down the trunk and started running, with Jake right behind him. Stinky and Boris started running, too, but I wasn’t sure if they were keeping track of the squirrel or keeping track of Jake.
I got stuck playing with Eliza near a cement circle by a sign that said L’Enfant Plaza while Nanny X talked to the primate sanctuary.
There was some concern at the other end of the phone, I could tell. Nanny X tried out a bunch of words like “government request,” “service to country,” “patriotism,” “important,” “matter of national security,” “hero chimpanzees.” She used another word, too: “please.” That one seemed to work.
“Oh, you see it now? Wonderful. Yes. It’s perfectly safe. Don’t forget the seat belt.”
A moment later she folded up the diaper and put it back in the bag.
“So how is Howard getting here?” I asked Nanny X.
“He’s flying.”
Nanny X pulled out a toy radio—the wind-up kind with pictures on it. Usually the pictures are of a cow jumping over the moon, but on this one there was a picture of a spaceship. Nanny X turned the knob. Then she opened the back to reveal a control panel. She punched in a few numbers.
“Nanny X?” I said.
“Our coordinates,” she explained. “He’ll be here soon.”
Meanwhile Jake, Boris and Stinky had disappeared down the hill. They must have followed the squirrel between some buildings. I paced around the cement circle with Eliza and Yeti. Nanny X paced with us.
After about ten minutes she gave us the countdown: five, four, three, two, one. We heard a whirring sound. “Ah,” said Nanny X as something that looked like a yellow crab with propellers on it appeared overhead. Its legs clutched a large, white ball that was way bigger than a baseball.
The flying crab thing was a drone. I’d seen an article about drones in the paper, when a company used one to deliver a pizza. But the white ball was way bigger than a pizza, too. I hoped it had lots of padding, because the pizza had ended up splatted in the middle of the Capital Beltway.
When the drone reached the ground, the legs released the ball, which was about the size of a Hippity Hop, and landed beside it. The ball rolled back and forth for a second before stopping. A panel opened. Nanny X reached inside and clicked a seat belt that was restraining something brown and furry.
“Eeeee, eeee,” said Howard. He was wearing a crash helmet, but as soon as Nanny X helped him take it off, he put on her old gardening hat, which he was holding carefully in two hairy hands.
“Very fashionable,” said Nanny X. She handed him a banana from the diaper bag. There were at least a dozen more in there.
I reached out my own not-hairy hand to shake Howard’s. But the chimp lifted his arms, the way Eliza does when she says “Up, up.” I lifted him and he gave me a big, wet chimpanzee kiss, right on the mouth. Yeti jumped up on both of us. I’m pretty sure he was just saying hello.
Just then, a couple of tourists wandered up the hill to take in the view of the river below. But none of them even glanced at the river. They were all staring at us. Nanny X punched in some more coordinates and the drone lifted off again. While the tourists looked up to watch it, Nanny X grabbed the stroller and Eliza. I offered Howard a piggyback ride, and we went down the hill in search of Jake.
If we found him, we’d find that stupid squirrel. And if we could find the squirrel, we could get on to our real assignment, which was finding The Angler before something besides Nanny X’s computer disappeared. I had another assignment, too, but that one wasn’t official: solving the case before Stinky and Boris did, so NAP would know the Pringles were meant to be special agents. And then they’d know our nanny was meant to be one, too.
8. Jake
Nanny X Gets Some Help from a Chimp
Squirrels can run twenty miles per hour.
Humans can run twenty-seven miles per hour, but only if they are Usain Bolt. We had an advantage, because we weren’t running around with computers in our mouths. But the squirrel could climb. He went up trees, and down them. He went up buildings and onto ledges.
We split up, with Boris on one side of a building, me in the middle and Stinky on the end. We looked like a SWAT team, except that we didn’t have black T-shirts and we didn’t have guns and one of us had really soggy shoes from falling into the Potomac River.
Boris pulled something from one of his pockets. He didn’t carry nearly as much as Nanny X did, maybe because Stinky didn’t wear diapers. But he had a hook. I wasn’t just a fish hook, either. It was a small grappling hook, like the one he’d used to hold our boats together, with a rope hanging from it like a tail. He attached it to a tree and tried to swing it toward the next tree after the squirrel. The squirrel was too fast; I almost expected him to stick out his tongue at us.
“Okay, then,” said Boris. He pulled out a small green disc and sent it whizzing through the air. It opened into a net, and caught a fire hydrant.
The squirrel went back to the sidewalk and ran jerkily down the hill again.
We heard footsteps as Ali and Nanny X and Eliza caught up with us. Ali had someone on her back, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that the someone was Howard!
He jumped down and hugged me around the legs. I guess he’d missed me, too.
“You should have seen it,” said Ali. “He came in a drone.”
It wasn’t surprising that NAP owned a drone. Plus, it made sense that they used it for Howard. Chimps and monkeys have a proven record of being excellent fliers. They were sent into space before humans.
“Where’s our squirrel friend?” asked Nanny X.
“Up there.” Boris pointed to a tree that was growing out of a space in the sidewalk.
Nanny X made a sign with both of her pointer fingers, like she was doing some sort of boogie-woogie dance. Then she held up a package of baby wipes—real ones. Howard took off his gardening hat and handed it to Nanny X like he understood her sign language perfectly. He went to the tree and started to climb. When he reached a high branch, he swung for a minute like he was hanging from a trapeze. Then he disappeared into the leaves. We heard a rattling sound as the squirrel moved to the next tree, but Howard was right behind him. They made a bunch of noise, like they were arguing with their mouths full of Listerine.
“Eeeeeee,” Howard said, getting in the last word. He climbed down the tree, one-handed. In his other hand he carried Nanny X’s baby-wipe computer.
“Good work, Howard!” said Nanny X, handing him a banana.
You too, Jake, I thought to myself. Because I was the one who thought of calling Howard in the first place. Though I guess a diaper bag full of bananas meant that Nanny X might have planned on calling him, too. What I said out loud was: “There is something weird about that squirrel.”
“You think?” said Ali. This is called sarcasm. Because duh, there were lots of weird things about that squirrel.
“Did you notice the way it moved?” I said. “It didn’t move like normal squirrels do.”
In real life, squirrels have ankles that rotate. That’s why they don’t come down trees backward, the way humans and chimps do; they come running down headfirst.
But this squirrel came down in reverse. Plus, it didn’t have the smooth, hoppy motion most squirrels have.
“Yeti didn’t do his squirrel trick, either,” I said. At first I’d thought that meant something was wrong with Yeti. Now I thought it meant there was something wrong with the squirrel. “We
should keep following him,” I added. “He’s suspicious.”
We were close to the bottom of the hill now. We were also close to people, and they seemed to be looking at us—at Howard, especially.
Eliza took off her sun bonnet and waved it around.
“Eliza, that’s a great idea,” I said.
We pulled some extra stuff out of Nanny X’s diaper bag. Soon Howard was wearing Eliza’s bonnet, an extra pair of her overalls and a pink shirt. I pointed to the stroller.
“Go ahead, Howard,” I said. “Get in.” Howard squeezed into the stroller next to Eliza. Nanny X pulled down the sun visor, and from a distance you couldn’t tell my sister’s seatmate was a chimpanzee. The squirrel came down the tree and ran the rest of the way down the hill, toward the Smithsonian Castle.
“That’s where my art exhibit is,” said Ali. But the squirrel switched directions again and turned right, toward the Hirshhorn Museum.
We followed him, past an ice-cream truck and about a bazillion people. Then the squirrel crossed another street and disappeared into the Hirshhorn’s outdoor sculpture garden.
Ali and I have spent a lot of time at the sculpture garden. We like to play hide-and-seek there, even though it’s supposed to be a spot for “quiet contemplation.” The squirrel was playing hide-and-seek now.
“Squirrel, Yeti,” I said. But he just looked in the stroller at Howard. Howard looked back like he was thinking Now what?
That’s what I wanted to know, too.
9. Alison
Nanny X Takes a Nap
I was happy about three things.
One: I didn’t have wet feet, like Jake.
Two: We were away from the water and officially on land in Washington, D.C., where we could get down to the business of catching The Angler and maybe, eventually, go see my painting.
Three: The sculpture garden seemed like the perfect place to solve a mystery about someone who wanted to put a sculpture on the White House lawn. It was one of my favorite places on the whole Mall. I liked it because instead of going inside a quiet museum to look at strange art, you could stay outside in the sunshine and look at it.
Nanny X Returns Page 3