“No problem,” I replied. “I would love to watch old movies, and I’m good with kids. I baby-sit all the time.”
“Great. We’ll have a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers festival.”
“I’ll be right there.”
When we got off the phone, I looked at the paper on which I’d written Quint’s address. I didn’t think Quint lived too far away. Still, I wasn’t allowed to walk around the city by myself.
“Laine?” I said. I stood in the doorway to her room.
“Yeah?” Laine’s reply was muffled. It came from deep within her closet. On the floor around the closet were mounds of clothes, papers, books, stuffed animals, boxes, and crumpled shopping bags. Her parents had told her to clean out her closet before it exploded.
“I need some help.”
Laine emerged from her closet, looking dusty and rumpled. “What’s wrong?”
I explained to her about Quint.
Suddenly Laine began to sound like my parents. “Gosh, I don’t know,” she said. “You’re going over to this guy’s apartment, and you’ve only met him once?”
“Well … yes. But he’s really nice. And it’s not like we’ll be there alone. His mother and brother and sister will be there, too.”
In the end, Laine agreed to walk me to Quint’s, but only if she could come upstairs and meet Quint’s family. She made certain to write his name, address, and phone number on a piece of paper.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s just safer, Jessi. Trust me. Someone should always know where you are.”
“Because I’m eleven?”
“No!” Laine looked exasperated. “It doesn’t have anything to do with your age. If I visit a new friend, my mom or dad does exactly what I’m doing now.”
“Okay.” I wanted to feel grown-up, but I felt like a little kid. Still, I could understand why Laine was being cautious. It was the responsible thing to do.
* * *
Laine and I stood outside the door to Quint’s apartment. The nameplate under the peephole read Walter. Quint Walter. I liked that name.
I pressed the bell and immediately the door was flung open.
“Hi, I’m Morgan,” said a little girl. “Are you Quint’s new girlfriend?”
His new girlfriend? How many girlfriends did Quint have? I managed a smile, though. “I’m Jessi,” I said. “And this is my friend Laine. She’s leaving.”
“I’m leaving after I meet your mother, Morgan. Is she home?” asked Laine.
Five minutes later, Laine was gone. I could tell that she liked Quint and his family. But that didn’t prevent her from calling over her shoulder as she waited for the elevator, “I’ll be back at five to walk you home!”
Goody, I thought. “Okay,” I said.
The elevator arrived, and Laine disappeared behind the door.
I turned to face the Walters. There was Quint’s mom, who reminded me a little of my own mother, except that she was very soft-spoken, almost shy. There was Morgan, an imp who liked to play tricks. She was six. And there was Tyler, nine years old. “He’s usually lost to the world of computers,” Quint told me. “I wish he were today. But he and Morgan are being pills.” Mr. Walter was at work. “He’s a chemical engineer,” said Quint.
“Are we going to have a movie festival, Quint?” asked Morgan. “Are we? Is your girlfriend staying?”
Quint looked pained. “Mom,” he complained.
“Mom,” said Tyler, imitating his brother.
“Kids,” said Mrs. Walter.
“I like his girlfriend,” announced Morgan. “Hey, Jessi. Want some ABC gum — ?”
“No, she doesn’t want any Already Been Chewed gum,” Quint answered for me.
“Morgan, are you and your brother going to be pests today?” asked Mrs. Walter. Tyler answered for Morgan. “No, we’re going to be pests tomorrow. Today we plan to be pains. Is that okay?”
“Absolutely not,” said Mrs. Walter firmly.
In the end, Tyler and Morgan were banned from the TV room. Quint and I got to watch the videos by ourselves. Quint had rented Top Hat and another old movie starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. We were mesmerized by the dancing, though most of it was tap. Very little was ballet.
“Okay. Who do you like better?” Quint asked as he rewound the second tape. “Ginger Rogers or Eleanor Powell?” (Eleanor Powell was another of Fred Astaire’s dance partners.)
“Eleanor, I guess,” I replied. “Ginger Rogers usually danced in those long dresses or skirts, so you couldn’t see what she was doing. If you wanted to see tapping, you had to watch Fred. But Eleanor didn’t hide her legs.”
“I like Eleanor better, too,” said Quint. “But as far as I’m concerned, nobody beats Fred.”
“Male chauvinist!” I exclaimed. “What about Ann Miller?”
Quint grinned. “You win. Want to take a walk? We can return the videos.”
“Sure,” I replied.
Quint told his mother where we were going. Then we tiptoed out of the apartment before Tyler and Morgan could figure out what we were up to.
“Ah, freedom,” said Quint, breathing in deeply, as we left his building.
We started down the sidewalk, past a row of old brownstones. Kids were sitting around on the stoops. “What a nice New York scene,” I started to say.
But I was cut off. “Whoo! There he goes! The sissy!” cried a boy.
“Yeah! Look. Up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s … sissy-boy!”
“Hey, where are your tights? Where are your pink slippers?”
All around us, kids were taunting Quint.
“Say something,” I muttered, elbowing him.
“Shut up!” Quint shouted.
“He can speak,” retorted a tall, skinny boy. “Hey, look! Sissy-boy has a girlfriend. She’s probably —”
“Leave her alone!” yelled Quint. He dove for the boy.
“Quint, stop!” I cried. I caught him by the back of his shirt.
“Yeah, Quint. Stop! Stop it!” mimicked the boy.
“Come on.” I tugged at Quint. We walked to the end of the block and turned the corner. The taunting stopped. We had left the kids behind.
“See?” Quint exclaimed angrily. “See why I can’t go to Juilliard, Jessi? Going to Saturday dance classes is bad enough. I try to sneak my stuff by those kids in a bowling-ball bag. But they know there’s no bowling ball inside.”
I sighed. “The kids are cruel, Quint. They really are. But sometimes you have to put up with people like them. I mean, are you going to let a bunch of jerks like them keep you from becoming a dancer? I wouldn’t let them. Think of them as sore muscles. Something you have to endure. But don’t let them stand in your way.”
“Those are nice thoughts, Jessi,” Quint replied. “But you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t have to walk down my street every day.”
Okay. So maybe I didn’t know what it was like. But I knew how it felt to dance.
The island of Manhattan. That sounds so odd. When I think of islands, I imagine desert islands, with palm trees and coconuts and bananas. But Manhattan is an island, long and skinny and surrounded by the Hudson River, the East River, the Harlem River, and New York Bay. And climbing aboard a boat and traveling around Manhattan is a terrific way to see the city and other sights. It’s fun, too.
Once I got over the shock of my father’s announcement (“I think I’ll take the afternoon off”), I started organizing our trip.
“You mean,” I said to Dad, “that you’re going to take all of my friends and me on the Circle Line today?”
“Yup. I can’t think of a better way to see Manhattan.”
“Can Laine come, too?”
“Sure. Oh, what about Claudia and Mallory? Do they —”
“They’re free on Friday afternoons.”
“Perfect.”
“Wait a sec. What am I thinking? Mary Anne and I are supposed to baby-sit today. We can’t abandon Alistaire and Rowena.”
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“Bring them along.”
So we did. While Dad was at his office in the morning, Mary Anne and I went to the Harringtons’. We asked permission to take the children on the sightseeing tour. Mr. and Mrs. Harrington thought that was a terrific idea. So did the kids.
“Oh, brilliant!” cried Alistaire. “A boat tour!”
“Brilliant!” echoed Rowena.
After lunch, Mary Anne and I helped the kids to dress in the outfits their parents had requested they wear on the boat: Alistaire in gray pants, red suspenders, a red bow tie, and a white shirt; Rowena in a gray skirt, red suspenders, a red headband, and a white blouse.
“I hope they don’t get seasick,” Mary Anne whispered to me, looking at the newly cleaned and pressed outfits.
“Don’t even think about that,” I replied.
“What can I think about? You told me not to think about the kidnapper, either.” (Mary Anne had decided that the man in the sunglasses and rain hat was on a mission to kidnap Alistaire and Rowena and create an international incident which, among other things, would destroy the reputation of the BSC. That, I had said, was ridiculous. We didn’t know he was after Alistaire and Rowena. We didn’t even know if there was just one man, and since Mary Anne’s scare at the library, we’d only seen men in rain hats and sunglasses four more times. They were all wearing different jackets.)
“You can think about three hours of nothing but New York sights,” I replied. “You’ll have a jam-packed afternoon: the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, Gracie Mansion, where —”
“I know! Where the mayor lives!” Mary Anne was excited. She’d forgotten about seasickness and kidnappers.
* * *
At one o’clock that afternoon, Mary Anne, the Harrington children, and I met Dad and my friends at the pier on the Hudson River at 42nd Street. Everyone except Alistaire and Rowena was wearing jeans.
“Well, you guys, get ready for thirty-five miles of sightseeing,” said Mary Anne.
“She read the Circle Line pamphlet,” Kristy whispered to me. “I think she knows it by heart. Listen to her.”
“The scenery comes to you,” quoted Mary Anne. “Plus prize photo opportunities. Spacious decks. Informative commentators.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Come on, everybody,” said Dad. “The tour starts at one-thirty.”
“Ooh, there’s our boat,” Alistaire said softly, a few moments later. “It says ‘America’s Favorite Boat Ride.’ Brilliant! And we get to go on it.”
We paid our entrance fee and boarded the boat. Alistaire and Rowena walked slowly around the deck, trying to figure out the best place from which to sightsee.
“Over here,” Rowena would say.
“No, here I think,” Alistaire would reply.
Then they discovered that food was available — snacks and sandwiches and sodas. They’d just eaten lunch, but that didn’t seem to matter. I guess buying food almost anywhere is more interesting than eating what comes out of your own refrigerator.
“Let’s get them something,” I said to Mary Anne. “This is a special treat.”
“What if they get seasick?”
“All right. No snacks. How about sodas?”
Mary Anne agreed to that, so we bought sodas and then found an empty area by the deck railing, and stood there with Dad and my friends.
A few minutes later we were breezing down the Hudson River.
“Now, everyone,” said Mary Anne, “ahead of us you see the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It takes up twenty-two acres, five blocks —”
“Mary Anne! We have a tour guide,” I hissed. “And I can’t hear him.”
Mary Anne closed her mouth.
I listened to the guide. So did Dad and Laine. I don’t know why, since we were the three native New Yorkers in our group, and no one else was paying attention.
Mary Anne was giving herself her own tour. “The World Trade Center,” I heard her murmur. “Two towers, one hundred and ten stories each …”
Kristy was whispering to Claudia, “I can’t believe we’re leaving him completely alone this afternoon.” (She meant the dog, which she’d named Sonny.) “Mrs. Cummings is bound to find him. We’ve just been lucky so far.”
Claudia was listening to Kristy — but giving the evil eyeball to Mallory.
Mallory and Jessi were looking in the opposite direction from everyone else, and Jessi was pointing and saying, “There’s New Jersey, Mal. My home state. Hello, Oakley!”
Dawn, sandwiched between Kristy and Mary Anne, was staring dreamily into space.
Rowena and Alistaire were alternately concentrating on their sodas and hoping to be sprayed in their faces as the boat chugged through the choppy water.
The man in the hat was reading a newspaper.
Wait a second! I froze. The man in the hat? What was he doing here? Was it the same man in the hat? The breeze whipped his newspaper, and as he struggled to hold onto the fluttering pages, I saw the sunglasses. It was the same man!
“Mary Anne!” I hissed. I pulled her away from the others. “Don’t panic. And keep quiet, okay? Now, don’t panic — but there’s the guy with the hat and glasses.”
Mary Anne turned pale. I wondered if her heart was pounding as fast as mine was. We were passing the Statue of Liberty, and everyone was gazing at it. Even the man.
“He’s after the children!” Mary Anne whispered. “I know he wants to kidnap them. Remember when we learned about the Lindbergh kidnapping? Remember that guy who took Anne and Charles Lindbergh’s baby? A long time ago? Well, after that, a lot of famous people became afraid their children would be kidnapped, too. You know, for ransom money. And they tried to protect their kids by changing their last names and stuff. I just know this guy is after Alistaire and Rowena. Think how important their parents are.”
“And think of the ransom the Harringtons could afford to pay,” I added.
“Oh, what are we going to do? Disguise the children?”
“Disguise them? How? With mustaches and wigs? Come on, Mary Anne.”
“Well, do you have a better idea?”
“No. But we are not going to disguise Rowena and Alistaire. We’ll just have to watch them every second. Never let them out of our sight. We should probably be holding them in our laps right now,” I added.
“Shouldn’t we tell the Harringtons about this man?”
“Tell them what? That we’re being followed by a bad dresser and that they should alert the fashion police? The man hasn’t done a thing. He barely even looks at the kids. We just see him everywhere. That’s all.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Mary Anne nervously. “Okay. Never let the kids out of our arms. That’s our motto.”
“I think ‘Never let the kids out of our sight’ will work just fine.”
Nevertheless, Mary Anne grabbed Rowena’s hand and I grabbed Alistaire’s. We held onto the children as we passed South Street Seaport, sailed under the Brooklyn Bridge and the Triboro Bridge, and gawked at Yankee Stadium. We held onto them as we plowed through the water under the George Washington Bridge.
“The George Washington Bridge?” said Claud. “I thought it was called the Abraham Lincoln Bridge. Isn’t —”
“You’re thinking of the Lincoln Tunnel,” I told her, eyeing the man.
The man had put his paper away. He seemed to be listening to our guide, who was soon directing our attention to Riverside Drive.
The tour was almost over. (In my opinion, it couldn’t be over fast enough.)
Mary Anne and I would have to stay on our toes for the next week.
I bet you think hiding a dog isn’t easy.
Well, you’re right.
We got away with it for three days, which may have been a miracle, although a few things were working in our favor: 1. Mr. and Mrs. Cummings are very busy and not home a lot. 2. We were able to keep Sonny in the guest bedroom behind closed doors by allowing Laine’s parents to think that Mallory has some sort of privacy complex. 3. S
onny was an incredibly well-behaved and well-trained dog.
On Tuesday, when we first found Sonny and spirited him into the apartment, I stayed with him while Laine and Jessi bought dog supplies at the pet store and supermarket. During that time, Sonny got his name. I was lying on Jessi’s bed, looking down at Sonny, who was sniffing around the room, and I whispered, “You look so much like Louie. It’s really amazing. I think I’ll call you Son of Louie.” But Son of Louie was much too long a name, so I shortened it to Sonny.
That night, my friends and I closed ourselves in the bedroom with Sonny. We had told Mr. Cummings (Mrs. Cummings was out) that we were holding a secret BSC meeting. This seemed possible, since Stacey, Claud, and even Dawn were visiting Laine that evening. Mr. Cummings smiled and said he would leave us to our own devices (whatever they are). Then I guess we really did hold a sort of BSC meeting, except that Laine isn’t a member of the club. For more than an hour we fussed over Sonny. We tossed his new toys to him. We fed him dog treats. And we talked about what we were going to do with him. Since I thought I could soften up Watson by the time we left New York, I wasn’t worried about finding a home for Sonny. I was just concerned about hiding him until I could bring him back to Stoneybrook with me, where he would live like a king in our house.
“How are you going to take him out for walks?” asked Jessi. “I can only ask so many stupid questions to distract the guard.”
“You probably just need to get him out of the apartment about three times a day, don’t you?” said Laine. “Mom and Dad are out pretty often. That’ll make things easier.”
“I guess,” said Jessi.
“And we’ve got a food supply, and papers on the floor in case of an accident. All we have to do is keep Sonny quiet — and he’s already quiet — keep him hidden, and keep his food dishes clean. You know, so they don’t smell.”
“Uh-oh,” said Stacey. “Laine, what about Sallie?”
“Who’s Sallie?” asked Dawn.
“She comes in to clean our apartment,” replied Laine. “Boy, you guys are really in luck. Sallie’s on vacation for a few weeks and Mom and Dad never bother to replace her while she’s away. They just let the dust build up.”