The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill Read online

  At school she’d heard the other kids call him Grim Reaper Jones. They said the scar on his hand was from wrestling alligators in Florida. They said he ate raw squirrel every night for dinner. They said he slept with his eyes open. Hazel knew that all of these were implausible, but still she wrote them down in her Mysteries Notebook. She had her own theories about him. “Paul Jones” sounded like a made-up name to her, and she felt certain that he was an ex-convict, maybe even an escaped convict, and she steered clear of him.

  So she continued to skip until the headstones stopped and the ground gave way to a large pond. She hopped up onto a bench and walked across it with her arms held out to the side as if it were a tightrope. As she neared the end of the bench, she pretended to wobble and drop.

  She made her way around the pond to a cluster of three statues. They were the Three Graces, she knew, but she called them Tabitha, Abitha, and Babitha. “Why, hello there, ladies, lovely day, isn’t it?” she asked. “And Babitha, that is a glorious robe. Where’d you get it?”

  The kids at school said that she talked to the dead people, that those were her only friends now that Becky was gone, but that wasn’t true. She didn’t talk to the bodies, only the sculptures. Hazel had long ago accepted that she would not ever be considered normal by her peers at school, but even for her, talking to dead people would be beyond the pale.

  “Why, yes, Abitha, I did get a new pair of sneakers. You like them?” She held out her foot, which was clad in the same old pair of canvas sneakers she always wore. She brushed a bit of dirt off her dungarees. “I would love to chat, girls, but I’ve got quite a busy day ahead of me. Quite a busy day.”

  She started up the hill toward the oldest part of the cemetery, and as she crested the rise, she heard voices and froze. A blue Packard automobile was idling on one of the roads that ran through the cemetery. Mr. Jones was talking to someone, but Hazel couldn’t see who. She crept through the cemetery to try to get a better look. She found a tree and climbed right up, but she nearly fell out when she saw Connie Short’s father hand a box to Mr. Jones. Mr. Short was a foreman over at the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory. What on earth could he be giving to Mr. Jones?

  Mr. Jones nodded, took the box, and went toward an old gardening shed. He unlocked the padlock on the door—since when had the gardening shed been locked?—placed the box inside, and relocked the door. Mr. Short drove off, pulling his hat down low as if he didn’t want anyone to see him.

  What was in that box?

  Hazel sat in the tree chewing on her lip. Something was not on the up-and-up. Last year she had read every single one of the Nancy Drew mysteries, and just like Nancy always did, she had a hunch, but you didn’t need to be a young sleuth like Hazel and Nancy to know that when a person locked something up, he was hiding something. And just like that, Hazel had her first real mystery.

  3

  Thorns

  Hazel’s mother made egg salad sandwiches for lunch, and they sat outside at an old picnic table that was out of sight of the cemetery. Hazel had her Mysteries Notebook open and balanced on her lap, and she chewed on the end of her pencil.

  Her Mysteries Notebook was an old composition notebook of her mother’s from college. She’d found it the previous spring in her parents’ office, and only one page had any writing on it, so Hazel had figured it was okay to take. “Doctoral Dissertation Ideas” was the heading, followed by a list that made little sense to Hazel. She had torn out that page and tucked it into the bottom of a pile of her mother’s work. Then she took the notebook back up to her bedroom, where she crossed out her mother’s name on the front and wrote her own. In the place where it said “Subject” she wrote Mysteries.

  Sometimes she thought it should be called her Questions Notebook, since she had a lot more questions than mysteries. Why does Timmy only write on the bottom of his left sneaker, but not his right? Where does Miss Angus hide that pencil in her hair? Who has been drawing chalk outlines of people on the street outside the cemetery? That last one she had an answer to: little Trudy West from up the road had received sidewalk chalk for her birthday and spent most of the month of July tracing all eight of her siblings. At Becky’s insistence Hazel had also written: Just what is Becky’s cat trying to tell her with all those hairballs? Hazel never planned to answer that one. She was being a good friend, just like Becky was a good friend and read all the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books with Hazel even though she preferred Louisa May Alcott. Really, though, Hazel thought that Becky got the better end of that deal. Nancy Drew taught real sleuthing techniques, and Trixie Belden taught you that you should always trust your hunches, but Hazel couldn’t think of one single, solitary useful thing she had learned from Little Women.

  The page with the most writing was the one that said Who is Mr. Jones? Really??? She had written:

  Why does he iron his jeans?

  Why does he eat the same thing every single day?

  Today Mr. Jones sat by a fresh grave with his feet hanging in, whistling that song from Gone with the Wind, the one about the house. That’s strange, isn’t it? (Aside: Who names a house? Second aside: Why is the Strand Theater so intent on showing Gone with the Wind every Sunday? Can’t they go ahead and show something new already?)

  Now she added:

  What does Mr. Short have to do with Mr. Jones?

  What’s in that box?

  “Eat your lunch, Hazel,” her mother said. “You don’t want the egg salad to spoil.”

  “Sure,” Hazel said, and took a bite. Her mother put pickles and onions in, both of which Hazel felt did not belong in egg salad. Becky Cornflower’s mom made hers with Miracle Whip, and Hazel thought that was just perfect. One more thing to miss about Becky.

  Her parents nattered on about what kind of roses would be best for a new hedgerow along the back end of the cemetery. “There’s the mermaid rose, of course,” Hazel’s father said as he chewed on his sandwich.

  Hazel’s mother shook her head. “But we’d have to put a fence up for that. I thought the point was to have a natural barrier. I was thinking fairy roses.”

  Hazel realized she had not been very good about writing down all that she knew about Mr. Jones. She tried to remember more details. It wasn’t much. Once Otis Logan had told a story about seeing Mr. Jones at the A&P filling his whole cart up with steaks and ground beef. “It was like he’s a werewolf or something,” Otis had said. “There’s no possible way one man could eat all that meat, not unless he wasn’t really a man at all.” Hazel had thought that was very silly at the time—after all, there was no such thing as a werewolf—but Otis was right that someone filling a grocery cart with red meat likely had some unnatural tendencies. She wrote down: Strange appetites.

  When her father had asked Mr. Jones where he was coming from, he’d hesitated and then said, “A bit of here, there, and everywhere.” Her mother had told him she was glad that he’d made it back to Maple Hill. His truck’s license plates were from New York, so Hazel supposed that was the last place he had lived. It wasn’t a for-certain, but it was an educated guess. He was a drifter; that was the best she could come up with. If she were a drifter, she wouldn’t drift into Maple Hill, that’s for sure. Still, she wrote down: Drifter New York?

  Hazel picked at a splinter of wood on the picnic table. The whole thing needed to be sanded down and repainted. She pictured both of the men in her head. Mr. Jones and Mr. Short. Try and try, she just could not bridge the gap.

  She knew a little more about Mr. Short than she did about Mr. Jones. Hazel had met Connie’s father once, two years before. Connie’s grandmother had died, and her father had come to make arrangements. He was a handsome man, sort of like Spencer Tracy. He’d brought Connie along and suggested the two girls play together. They’d gone into the sitting room and sat on opposite ends of the couch while Howdy Doody was on television. Connie’s father had been nice, though, even if he had been oblivious about how terrible his daughter was. He was well respected in town, jovial, always ready
for a laugh. He was, in point of fact, the exact opposite of Mr. Jones. So what could they possibly have in common? “No one in the Shorts’ family has died recently, have they?”

  “Fairy roses? The thorns aren’t big enough. What about Othello?”

  “We don’t want anything too large. It might seem disrespectful.” Her mom patted her lips with a paper napkin. “Just who are you trying to keep out of the graveyard, anyway, George? I was thinking of rabbits and the occasional teenager. The prickers on the fairy rose should be fine for that. We could get them in a nice pale pink. They’d be subtle but lovely.”

  “You never know who might want to come in. All sorts of new folks are moving to the area.”

  “What kind of folks?” Hazel asked, looking up from her notebook.

  Her father kept talking to her mother. “And I’m not sure the fairy roses would stop a rabbit, anyway. Maybe we should just keep the fence.”

  “A fence won’t stop the real threat, and neither will the biggest prickers you can find,” Hazel said.

  “What’s the real threat?” her dad asked.

  “You know what I’m talking about. The Russians. No thorns are going to keep them back. We need a more secure place where we could weather a nuclear attack.” Hazel figured she should give her parents one more chance to build a proper fallout shelter. They didn’t go for the bait.

  “Don’t worry, Hazel. If Senator McCarthy is to be believed, all the Communists are down in Washington and New Jersey.”

  “New Jersey?” Hazel asked. New Jersey was far away, but not stupendously far away. You could get there in a day’s drive. She certainly didn’t like the thought of danger being so near.

  “Don’t encourage her,” Hazel’s mom said.

  “At the Fort Monmouth Signal Corps,” her dad explained. “McCarthy says that the Rosenbergs were just the tip of the iceberg and there’s a whole ring of spies down there. At least twenty.”

  “George,” Hazel’s mom said in a warning tone.

  “Really?” Hazel asked.

  “That’s what they’re reporting, but we don’t know for sure because Senator McCarthy insists on holding all the hearings behind closed doors so no one can see what he’s up to.”

  Closed-door meetings made sense to Hazel. The investigators couldn’t give away what they knew.

  Her father reached out and tousled her hair, and she pulled back. “I’ve always loved the Othello rose,” he said to her mother.

  “I just think if we go for those big flowers—lovely as they are—well, who would want big fat roses behind them as they say good-bye to their loved ones?” She leaned her head back, and the kerchief on her head fluttered in the breeze. With her sunglasses on, she could almost look glamorous, like Elizabeth Taylor or something. “Now, if we could have a proper English garden, that’s where we should have the Othello and the mermaid roses. Wouldn’t that be nice? But for a graveyard, nothing so big.”

  Hazel sighed. This conversation was going round and round. “Why don’t you just get small roses with big thorns?”

  Her dad looked at her with a mix of excitement and surprise that she seemed to care about the flowers. “Well, Hazel, you can’t get big thorns without a big flower.”

  “Bigger flower, bigger thorns, stronger smell,” her mother explained.

  “So the biggest, best-smelling roses are the most dangerous?” To Hazel, that sounded like it could be something from an Agatha Christie novel: The Case of the Thorny Rose. It would be about a beautiful woman and all the men who loved her. They would leave roses by her door, but she would ignore them. One day there would be the most beautiful rose she had ever seen, and even she couldn’t ignore it, so she’d bend over and pick it up and be pricked by the huge thorn that the murderer had covered with poison. She’d drop dead, or maybe into a deep coma like Sleeping Beauty. It would take Miss Marple all of ten seconds to figure out it was one of the girls in town who was jealous of the woman’s beauty. And smarts. The beautiful woman would be smart, too, and that’s why she wouldn’t have the time for the suitors.

  Hazel was getting quite caught up in her own story when her father said, “Would you like to take a look at some of the catalogs? Perhaps you’d like to choose the rose for the back hedge.”

  “Is there a type that has a thorn that could serve as a poisoned dart?”

  Hazel’s mother rolled her eyes, but her father said, “Well, now, I don’t suppose I know just what it would take to make a poisoned dart. Why, is there someone you want to poison?”

  He laughed, but in truth there was a whole list of people Hazel wouldn’t mind giving a touch of poison to. Not enough to kill them, of course, or even to send them into Sleeping Beauty la-la land. Just enough to make them reflect on their actions. “I can think of a couple,” she said.

  “Oh, Hazel.” Her mom sighed. “Are kids at school giving you trouble again?”

  Parents always asked the most ridiculous questions. And even if she answered truthfully, what would her mother be able to do about it? Before she had a chance to answer, her mom said, “I’ll just go ahead and order those fairy roses. I want to get them in before the frost.”

  “So what about the Shorts, anyway?” Hazel asked.

  “The Shorts?” her dad asked. “Now, why on earth do you think they’d be sneaking into the cemetery?”

  “I asked if anyone in their family had died recently.”

  “What would make you ask a question like that?”

  Three crows in the pear tree started cawing at one another, and it was like a warning to Hazel to zip it. “Oh, something Connie said in class. I must have misunderstood her.”

  “Connie’s a nice girl,” her mom said. “Shame about the pigeon toes, though.”

  Even her mom noticed the pigeon toes, and her mom didn’t notice anything.

  4

  Ghost Boy

  Monday morning meant music again. Surprise, surprise, Hazel was given the triangle, while Connie and Maryann played the glockenspiels.

  After music, they all went back to class. Hazel sat down in her second-row seat and then arranged her pencils on her desk.

  When she lifted her head, she was surprised to see a boy standing there. He had a shaggy haircut, poorly done, so his bangs fell down into his eyes. He wore old-fashioned glasses, perfectly round with wire frames. His clothes were not usual, either: brown pants, a button-down shirt, and suspenders. He looked like the pictures in their history textbooks of folks from the Civil War. His skin was so pale it was almost blue, and he had deep, dark circles under his eyes. He seemed to shimmer, he jittered so much, like he was wavering between this world and the next. He looked for all the world like a ghost; that wasn’t possible, of course, or so she had thought, but there he was, there but not. A ghost! She had lived all her life in a graveyard, and at school was where she saw her first ghost. It had to mean something. Something special. Something different.

  Mrs. Sinclair cleared her throat. “Boys and girls, we have a new student. I’d like you all to welcome Samuel Butler.”

  There were a few murmurs at the name, a ripple of excitement that washed over the class. Hazel, though, couldn’t help but be disappointed. He was just a regular kid. Well, not regular regular. He stood with stooped shoulders next to Mrs. Sinclair. His hair was mussed and his glasses looked smudged.

  His presence after music class raised a number of questions, though. Why, for example, had he not arrived at the beginning of the day? Or maybe he had arrived, but had spent the entire time meeting with the principal in the front office—a prospect that raised many more questions. She even allowed herself the fantasy that he had some condition that prevented him from being able to attend music class, and if he could get such an excuse, then, maybe, so could she.

  He joined the row behind her, on the other side of the room. In fact, he took Becky’s seat. She couldn’t see him, but she glowered. How could Mrs. Sinclair give away Becky’s seat? There was still a possibility that she would return, and then s
he would be faced with this small, strange boy sitting in her chair. That would not be much of a welcome. Becky would probably cry—Becky was quite a crier—and then she’d run out of the room, maybe all the way back to Arizona.

  “Why couldn’t we get someone normal?” Maryann whispered from her seat behind Hazel.

  “Seriously. Look at those glasses,” Connie replied. “So square.”

  Hazel tried to look over her shoulder, but didn’t want the other girls to notice that she was taking any interest in him. She just wondered how they had made their judgment so quickly. It was the clothes, she decided. His old-fashioned clothes were what made them shun him. In her case, she often wondered if it was because she lived in the cemetery. She feared, though, that it was something about her, something that emanated off her like sweat, and they would sense it even if she lived in one of the brick houses on the hill.

  “Today we begin our study of ancient Greece,” Mrs. Sinclair announced. “Let’s start by listing the things we know.”

  Hazel waited a moment to raise her hand. This was something Mrs. Sinclair had asked her to do in order to give the other students a chance to process the question and come up with their own answers. Hazel was an awfully fast thinker, and it frustrated her to have to wait, but Mrs. Sinclair had explained that Hazel should have pity on her classmates and their pea-sized brains. She hadn’t used those words, of course, but that was the gist. Hazel was excellent at picking up what adults really meant when they spoke to her.

  “Yes, Samuel, how nice of you to volunteer on your first day.”

  Samuel stood up next to his desk with his hands folded. “There are many interesting things about the ancient Greeks, but to my mind the most interesting part of their culture is their form of government. It is the predecessor to our own democracy.”