A Spy Among the Girls

  “Oh, brother!” said Eddie.

  “Sounds wonderful,” said Coach Malloy. “Would you consider making one for your dad, too? I could do with a double-chocolate frosted heart.” He grinned.

  Beth smiled. “I'll think about it.”

  “Just don't put it out on the porch to cool or the abaguchie might get it,” said Caroline.

  “It's back?” asked Beth.

  “Just once I'd like it to stick around long enough for somebody to get a really good look at the beast and tell what it is,” Coach Malloy said. “No one's seen more than its tail and a flash of color. The sheriff says his best guess is a bobcat.”

  “Whatever, I want you girls to stay out of the woods for a while,” said their mother.

  When Caroline went upstairs to brush her teeth, she imagined Wally Hatford rescuing her from the clutches of the abaguchie. Or even her rescuing Wally. She decided that if Wally was going to fall in love with her, perhaps she ought to give him a valentine—a really gorgeous valentine. If he gave her one in return, she decided, she could claim she'd experienced love. If he didn't, at least she would know what rejection felt like, and she could call it a tragedy.

  At school, however, Wally was proving more difficult than she had imagined. She hadn't even told him yet that she was going to fall in love with him, but he was leaning about as far forward, away from her, as he could get.

  When she tapped him, very gently, on the shoulder before class, he didn't even turn around.

  “What?” he said. Not very pleasantly, either.

  “I just wondered if you'd noticed my new sweater,” Caroline said sweetly. “I wore it just for you.”

  Wally's back seemed to stiffen and his ears turned pink.

  “Why?” was all he said, and he still didn't turn around.

  Caroline stood up and leaned way over her desk until her mouth was right by Wally's left ear. “Because I think I'm falling in love with you, Wally,” she whispered, as softly and sweetly as she knew how.

  Wally Hatford rose straight out of his seat and asked permission to use the rest room, and Miss Applebaum looked at Caroline strangely. Caroline just smiled innocently and tried to imagine how an actress would act out the part of someone dying because of a broken heart.

  That afternoon the class voted on whether or not to have a Valentine's party. The sixth-graders had already voted no. The fifth grade voted no just to be like the sixth grade, but when the fourth grade realized that there would be no punch and valentine cookies and chocolate hearts without a party, they voted yes.

  “There's one rule, however,” Miss Applebaum said. “You don't have to give out any valentines at all if you don't want to, but if you do, you can't leave anyone out. If you want to give valentines just to girls, you have to give one to every girl. If you want to give only to boys, you have to give one to all the boys. This isn't a popularity contest.”

  Great. Just great, thought Caroline. She had already planned to give some crazy valentines to the girls in her class, but she wanted to give a valentine to only one boy, namely Wally. Well, she'd just give her valentine to Wally after the party was over, that was all. There was no rule that said she couldn't hand a boy a valentine out in the hall. But Wally would get the biggest, most beautiful valentine she could find.

  After school she walked down to the business district to Oldakers’ Bookstore and looked over the rack of valentines. There were funny cards, serious cards, valentines for mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. But it wasn't until Caroline looked in the sweethearts’ section that she found just the right valentine for Wally, just the kind to get him to fall in love with her.

  It was the largest card on the rack, with a big red satin heart in the middle, surrounded by a ruffle of white lace.

  To the man of my dreams, it said on the card. And a verse on the inside read:

  My sun, my moon; my stars, my air; The music I hear everywhere. My summer, fall; my winter, spring; Darling, you're my everything.

  Four

  Tracks

  Wally decided to stay as far away from Caroline as possible because she was acting positively weird. Her walk was crazy, her talk was crazy, and her smile was craziest of all. She followed him around the playground at recess and tried to sit at his table at lunch. He simply surrounded himself with friends and didn't go anywhere if his buddies weren't with him.

  It was a relief each day to get home and away from her. A relief that it was February, and cold. He didn't have to go outside much, so he didn't risk running into her that way. The only cloud on the horizon was Valentine's Day. Valentine's parties always made him a little nervous, but he wasn't going to give valentines to anyone this year, not even the boys, so he told himself to quit worrying about it. All he had to do at the party was eat candy and cookies and watch the other kids go around dropping cards into homemade valentine boxes. Big deal.

  He was sitting on the couch with Peter one evening, eating a bag of corn chips, when Josh walked by and said, “Hey, Wally, I want to use your room for a while. Okay?”

  Wally popped another corn chip in his mouth, thought for a moment, and asked, “What for?”

  “Just something private. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Wally, but he couldn't imagine what. Josh and Jake had their own room, after all, and Josh had never asked to use Wally's room before. Wally and Peter went on watching TV and sharing the corn chips, and then Wally said what he was thinking: “I wonder what he wants it for?”

  “Probably to spy,” said Peter, thrusting one hand into the corn chips sack.

  Wally looked at Peter. “Why do you think that?”

  “It's what he said he was going to do, isn't it? Spy on the girls?”

  Wally frowned. It might make sense if Wally's bedroom were at the front of the house, where possibly, if you used binoculars, you could get a good view of the house across the river where the Malloys were staying. But Wally's bedroom faced the backyard, so that made no sense at all.

  A few minutes later Jake came by. “Have you seen Josh?” he asked.

  Wally couldn't think of what to say. If Josh had wanted Jake to know what he was doing, he would be doing whatever he was doing in their bedroom, not Wally's.

  “He's spying,” said Peter.

  “What?” said Jake.

  “Yeah, that's probably what he's doing—spying on the girls,” said Wally.

  “Well, heck! Why didn't he tell me?” Jake muttered, and went on out to the dining room.

  A half hour later, after Peter had gone out to the kitchen for ice cream, Wally went upstairs and tried to open the door to his room. The door wouldn't budge, even though there was no lock on it. It felt as though someone had his feet braced against it.

  “Who is it?” came Josh's voice softly.

  “It's me,” Wally whispered back.

  “What do you want?”

  Wally thought about it. To get into his room, of course. “To … to get my socks,” he blurted out.

  “What do you mean? You've already got your socks. Go away. I'll be through after a while,” Josh told him.

  Wally went back downstairs and wished he hadn't done that. He liked it when Josh confided in him. Usually Josh and Jake did everything together and had their own secrets. He wanted his brother to know he could trust him.

  He wandered through the downstairs. Peter was eating ice cream in the kitchen, Mr. Hatford was in the living room watching the news, Mrs. Hatford was working a crossword puzzle at one end of the dining room table, and Jake was doing homework at the other end.

  “As soon as Josh comes in, tell him to come out here and help me with our math assignment,” Jake said. “He must have done his already.”

  “Okay,” said Wally.

  “Where is Josh?” asked Mrs. Hatford.

  “Around somewhere,” Wally answered, wandering off again.

  He went upstairs and sat down on the top step, studying the wallpaper. It was a striped paper of gray and green
, a green rope twisting round and round a gray column, with skinnier lines on either side. All around the hall and down the stairs, columns and columns of gray with green rope twisting around them as far as Wally could see.

  He lay down and looked at the stripes from the floor. Now they were horizontal stripes, one on top of the other, all over the wall. Who designed wallpaper? Wally wondered. He liked to think about things like that. Were there factories where artists sat around at drawing boards, designing gray stripes with green ropes around them, and purple stripes with blue ropes around them, and brown stripes with yellow? Did they have to go on drawing the same pattern with every color you could think of before they could draw something new?

  How did you know you wanted to design wallpaper when you grew up? Wally tried to think of all his friends—the Benson boys in particular—and the things they had talked about being when they grew up. Policemen, doctors, forest rangers, football players…

  He couldn't ever remember hearing someone say he wanted to design wallpaper.

  The door to his room opened at last and Josh came out with an envelope under his arm. He looked surprised to see Wally waiting there on the stairs and went quickly into the room he shared with Jake.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Jake's looking for you,” Wally said.

  “Okay,” said Josh. He came out a moment later and went downstairs.

  Wally opened the door to his room and turned on the light. He looked around. He didn't see any binoculars. No false mustaches or other disguises. Nothing that looked like spy stuff. He peered all about—at the top of his bed, the top of his dresser—nothing.

  He got down on his stomach and looked under his bed. There were some small scraps of white paper, a little scrap of pink, and some tiny red sparkles, the kind you might find on a cupcake. What the heck had Josh been doing? Making cupcakes? Wally sniffed the air. Nothing smelled like cupcakes.

  “Wally!” came Mrs. Hatford's voice from downstairs. “You haven't done your chores yet. I wish I didn't have to remind you every night to empty the wastebaskets and take out the garbage.”

  Wally wished she didn't either. Jake and Josh usually remembered to do their chores because they did them right after dinner. One of them took the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and the other put the dirty ones in. You could hardly forget to do that with your mother watching you right there at the table.

  Peter didn't get a chance to forget his work either. He had to set the table for dinner every night. That was easy, because as soon as he got hungry, his stomach reminded him to set the table. But how could you remember to empty wastebaskets and take out the garbage when there were more important things to think about—like what was your brother doing in your room? Making cupcakes?

  Wally picked up his wastebasket and took it around to the baskets in all the other bedrooms, dumping their contents into his. He did the same with the bathroom wastebasket, then went downstairs and began emptying trash from all the baskets there.

  He went into the kitchen, pulled the garbage sack from under the sink, and took both the wastebasket and the garbage sack out the back door.

  The moon was full, and the backyard was bright in the one inch of snow that had fallen that evening. It looked to Wally as though the backyard had been covered with cream cheese.

  He went down the steps and started to open the lid of the garbage can, then paused, his hand in the air.

  “Hey!” he called. And then more loudly, “Hey, Josh! Jake! Hey, Dad! Come here!”

  A chair scraped against the floor inside the house, and there were footsteps. Then the back door swung open.

  “What is it?” asked Jake. Josh stuck his head out too; then Mr. Hatford came out on the porch, followed by Peter.

  “Look!” said Wally, pointing.

  There on the ground, around the garbage can, were large paw prints in the snow. They were larger than a cat's. Larger than a dog's. And they certainly weren't deer tracks. They looked like nothing Wally had ever seen before.

  “The abaguchie!” breathed Peter. “That's what it is.”

  Five

  The Plan

  Eddie was upset.

  “All the good ideas are already taken!” she complained, telling the family about the science fair that was coming up at school. Each of the sixth-graders was to think of an experiment. “I had a good idea about photosynthesis: taken. I had another idea for evaporation: taken. Someone is even going to do that experiment on magnetism I did back in Ohio last year.”

  Mrs. Malloy was framing a picture to put at the top of the stairs. “Well, maybe you've got to think in a new direction, Edith Ann,” she said. Eddie hated to be called by her full name. “Maybe you need to think of an experiment involving people instead of things.”

  “You mean, evaporate people ?” Caroline asked incredulously from the living room couch.

  “No, I mean…do a survey, maybe. Be creative! You'll think of something,” Mrs. Malloy said.

  “We're supposed to think up a hypothesis and then test it out,” said Eddie.

  “What's a hypothesis?” asked Caroline.

  “You figure out something you think might be true, and then you set up an experiment to test it,” Eddie explained. “I might say that plants always grow toward the light. That's what I think would happen, so that would be my hypothesis. Then I might put some plants in a box with a window on one side. I might keep them there for a week, and when I took the cover off the box, I'd expect all the plants to be leaning toward the window if my hypothesis was true.”

  “So, do that one,” said Beth. “Everyone knows that plants lean toward the light.”

  “That's why I can't do it. It's dumb,” said Eddie. “Even a survey would be better than that.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Malloy had a faculty dinner to attend that evening, so the girls were on their own. Eddie made spaghetti sauce, Beth boiled the spaghetti, and Caroline made the salad. As they were eating, Caroline said that all the boys wanted to talk about in her class that day was the abaguchie. Wally Hatford had told them he'd gone out to empty the garbage and there were strange tracks in the snow made by no creature known to man.

  “Ha!” said Eddie. “I wouldn't believe a thing those Hatfords say.”

  “Some of the boys claim the abaguchie is a prehistoric animal,” Caroline went on. “Boys are the most gullible creatures in the whole world. They'll believe anything.”

  “Some boys, maybe,” said Beth.

  “I'll bet if we said we had the abaguchie in our garage, every boy in school would be over to see it,” said Caroline.

  Eddie suddenly put down her fork and said, “Hypothesis: boys are more gullible than girls.”

  “True!” said Caroline.

  “But I have to prove it,” said Eddie, and Caroline could tell from the glint in her eye that Eddie's brain was racing on ahead of her. “What if we…I know! What if we spread the word on the playground that we've trapped the abaguchie in our garage, and if people want to see it, they should come by our house on Saturday or something.”

  “What you'd get would be huge crowds of kids coming together. You wouldn't know who really believed it and who didn't,” said Beth.

  Eddie sat twisting a long strand of spaghetti around and around on her fork, her blond head resting on one hand. “Okay,” she said at last, jerking upright. “Then the messages have to be secret. Each kid has to think he or she is the only one we invited and can't tell anyone else. We could put a note in the pocket of every coat hanging outside the classrooms from second to sixth grades. Any kid younger than seven probably wouldn't be able to read it.”

  “Yeah,” said Caroline, “but once kids get to our house and there isn't any abaguchie to see, then what? We'll have a riot.”

  “Hmmm,” said Eddie. She hadn't thought of that.

  Caroline considered her sisters pretty lucky to have such a precocious child as herself in the family.

  “We'll make up a picture of an abaguchie,” said Eddie. “W
e'll cut parts of animals out of magazine pictures and paste them all together and claim that's what it looks like. I mean, ‘abaguchie’ is just a made-up name, right? So our picture will just be a made-up animal, and that's what we'll show anyone who comes over.”

  Dumb, dumb, dumb, thought Caroline. Who was going to be satisfied with a picture of an abaguchie? And where did she fit into all this? Well, Caroline Lenore Malloy was going to play a part whether Eddie knew it or not. In fact, Caroline was going to save the day. She would be the abaguchie.

  Beth and Eddie were still discussing the plan as though Caroline weren't even there. “But there are three hundred kids in school, not counting kindergarten and first grade. Who's going to write out three hundred messages?” Beth was saying.

  “We'll do it on Dad's computer,” Eddie told her. “I'll type up a message, then we'll copy it all down the page, and print a whole bunch of pages till we get three hundred messages. Then we'll cut the pages in strips.”

  “And if a parent gets hold of one of the slips of paper and tells our folks?” asked Beth.

  “We'll just explain. It's a scientific experiment to see if boys are more gullible than girls. There's no harm in that.”

  Eddie didn't seem to care that kids would be disappointed, Caroline thought. As long as she got an experiment out of it, that was all that mattered. Well, Caroline would just have to see that no one went away disappointed.

  As soon as they'd finished eating, Eddie turned on the computer and typed out this message:

  Private: This is a secret message. If you want to

  see the abaguchie, come to 611 Island Avenue

  between 3 and 4 PM. tomorrow, Saturday. Free.

  Do not tell anyone about this message or you will

  not get in.

  She copied it again and again all down the page, then printed out page after page, until there was a message for every student in the second through sixth grades.

  Eddie and Beth took their scissors and cut the papers into strips, a message on each strip, then divided them up and stuck them in their book bags. After that, they spent the evening cutting parts of animals out of old magazines and pasting them together on a sheet of paper, until they had a weird animal that looked like no animal at all.