The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill Read online

  “I think you may be rushing to judgment.”

  Hazel frowned, but part of her knew that Samuel was right. She needed to make a report to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—the long name for Senator McCarthy’s group of Communist catchers—but she couldn’t go to them with just a gut feeling. She would need to find some hard evidence. That’s what detectives like Nancy Drew did. “Well, since you asked, I can tell you that I’m just beginning my investigation. But I’m already compiling quite a bit of information.”

  “Like what?” Samuel asked.

  “For starters, he just appeared out of nowhere. He’s got no family to speak of, and he wouldn’t even tell my parents where his hometown was. His diet consists solely of red meat. And apples that he eats with a knife. He just killed that rat like it was nothing. Practically cut its head clean off. I bet he learned how to do that in the Russian army.”

  “Go on.”

  Hazel didn’t have anything else to add. She scratched at a mosquito bite that was left over from the summer. “A radio transmitter! He has a radio transmitter so he can send the secrets back to Russia!” That, she knew, was the real reason he hadn’t wanted her watching him fix it. He knew she could be the one to figure out his dastardly secret.

  “It still seems like a bit of a stretch.”

  Hazel stood up and brushed the dirt off the knees of her tights: another pair ruined. It was clear that Samuel was going to be no help at all. “What are you even doing here?” she demanded.

  “I came to do some grave rubbings.”

  She jutted her hip out. “That’s illegal, you know, unless you have permission.”

  “I know,” he said. He opened up his bag and produced a piece of paper. It was from the town and had a raised notary seal and everything.

  She had never actually seen one of the permits before, as no one ever had them. Still, she read it over, nodding her head and squinting at parts as if she were examining it. “This looks legitimate,” she said.

  “It is,” he said. “I assure you.”

  “And why do you want to do the grave rubbings, anyway? I know it’s not for a school project.”

  “I like to think about the people’s stories. I have a book. I collect them and then I try to find out information if I can.”

  This, to Hazel, did not actually seem like such a bad answer. “All right, then. I suppose that’s okay.”

  “What would you have to say about it, anyway?” His question was challenging, but he kept his eyes on the headstone, as if he were afraid to look at her.

  “Only that my family runs this place, and even with a permit, if I don’t think what you’re doing is up to snuff, then I can kick you right off the property.”

  He nodded. “I see.”

  “You’re okay for now. So, what, this is your hobby?”

  “It’s a good way to get to know a new place. And if all your friends are dead, it’s not so hard to leave them behind.” He chuckled like he was making a joke, but Hazel didn’t get it.

  “How many places have you lived?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “My mom always said you know when you’re home, and she never felt it.”

  Hazel shook her head and said, “Seventeen places. I’ve always lived in the same one.”

  “You’re lucky,” he said.

  But Hazel didn’t feel lucky. Seventeen new places meant seventeen new chances. She looked up toward Pauper’s Field, an old part of the graveyard that wasn’t used anymore. Mr. Jones was there, crouched over a headstone just inside the gate. There was no reason for him to be up there; it was the place where people who couldn’t afford a plot were buried, and no one had been interred there since the Civil War. “Now, what’s he doing up there?” she asked more to herself than Samuel.

  “Up where?”

  “Mr. Jones is in Pauper’s Field, but he doesn’t have any work up there.”

  Hazel got a buzz of excitement. She wasn’t sure what he was doing there, but she felt certain it held a key to proving he was a spy. She had her first clue, and as soon as she could, she would investigate it, and Samuel was going to help her.

  Mr. Jones stood up and left Pauper’s Field, closing the gate carefully behind him. Samuel shifted his satchel on his shoulder. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to get back to my work.”

  “Hold your horses. I’ve got a stone for you.”

  “What do you—”

  “Just wait.”

  Mr. Jones got into his truck and drove out of the graveyard and back toward town, where he rented a house.

  “Okay, Sammy—”

  “Samuel,” he interrupted.

  “Sure,” she said. “Whatever you want. I have a proposition for you.”

  “A proposition?” he echoed.

  “How would you like a challenge?”

  She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like his ears actually pricked up a little bit, like a dog when you call its name. “I relish a challenge.”

  “I mustard a challenge,” she said back.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head. No one ever laughed at her mustard joke. “Are you in or out?”

  “I don’t even know what you want me to do yet.”

  “I need some help finding out a story behind a headstone.”

  This seemed to catch his interest, but he said, “Is this about the gravedigger?”

  “Yes, but you don’t need to worry about that. He was just up there looking at a headstone. I need you to look at it and tell me what you think. You’re my expert witness. You can stay out of the spy thing if you want. I can’t pay you right now,” she continued. “But I bet there’s some sort of a reward and I’ll give you, say, five percent. What do you say?”

  Samuel didn’t answer at first, just chewed on the inside of his cheek. “This isn’t the type of thing I normally get involved with.”

  “Well, me neither, but it’s not every day when the world drops a big fat mystery in your lap. And I for one believe that if you’re given a mystery, you should solve it, but if you’re not up for it, I can find another expert,” she said, though she wasn’t sure where or how.

  “Show me the grave.”

  “Follow me,” she said, and started to lead him up to Pauper’s Field. “Pauper’s Field is where all the people who didn’t have enough money to pay for a proper plot are buried. Most of the stones just have a name on them, and no dates or any message or anything. My dad says there are probably hundreds without stones at all.”

  “If there’s nothing on the headstone, what can I do to help you?”

  “I thought you were an expert.”

  “I am.”

  She stopped walking and raised her eyebrows. “Oh, okay, sure. Listen, I just thought that since you’re so good at this whole investigating the histories of people in graveyards, and it’s your passion, you might be the person to help me out here. But if you’re not up for it …” She let the words hang in the air.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t up for it.”

  “I’m just giving you a chance to get out now, honorably, I mean. I won’t tell anyone.”

  She wouldn’t tell anyone no matter what happened, as she had no one to tell, but if he hadn’t picked up on that already, she wasn’t about to point it out.

  “I’m in.”

  Hazel pulled open the gate with a loud creak. Even though she knew Mr. Jones was gone for the day, she still looked over her shoulder.

  She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to find the stone he had been crouched near, but it was clear as soon as they opened the gate. There were chrysanthemums freshly planted around the stone, the soil from the pot still visible above the dirt of the ground. Hazel brushed a stray leaf off the stone, which was cool and shiny. Unlike the other stones, it was a perfect square. The font was simple, but soft. All it said was:

  ALICE TEN YEARS OLD

  “Well, then, what I need you to do
is find out who Alice is.”

  “That’s more than a challenge,” he said, but he dropped to his knees and pulled out a piece of paper and a crayon. He laid the paper carefully over the square stone, lining up the sides.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Grave rubbing.”

  “Why are you bothering with that? It’s just a name and an age. Just write it down and let’s go.” She looked behind her, expecting Mr. Jones to return at any moment. With a shovel. She could still hear the sound it made as it came down on the rat. She wondered what kind of sausage she would be turned into: the sweet breakfast kind, or maybe the spicy kielbasa that her father liked.

  “It’s part of the process,” he said. “If we’re going to solve this mystery, we need to follow the process.”

  “I thought you said this wasn’t the type of thing you got involved in.” Hazel kicked at the ground. She regretted bringing him up here in the first place. If he was going to approach everything in this slowpoke sort of a way, they’d never get anywhere.

  “All I’m going to do is find out who she was,” he said. “We’re going to find out Alice’s story.”

  “We?”

  “This was your idea,” Samuel said. He pressed his hand down flat on top of the paper, holding it in place. “I’ll help you figure out who this Alice girl was, but you have yet to offer me any substantial proof to support your claim that he’s a spy,” he told her.

  Hazel frowned. She looked at some of the other stones, which were tilted at odd angles like something out of a Halloween greeting card. “Why else would he be up here?”

  Samuel shook his head. “He doesn’t look like a spy.”

  “He wouldn’t be a very good spy if he looked like one,” Hazel said. “If every spy looked like a spy, Senator McCarthy and his crew would just gather them all up off the street and we wouldn’t have to worry about a Commie invasion.”

  Samuel finished his rubbing and stood up. “You asked me to find out the story of one of these graves, and I’ll do it. If you want to help, I’ll be going to the library tomorrow. You can meet me there.”

  He hitched his satchel up over his shoulder and then left Pauper’s Field. The squeaking gate stayed open behind him.

  9

  A Regular Family

  The Kaplanskys’ kitchen table was shiny new Formica, but you couldn’t tell since it was piled with catalogs and magazines related to horticulture. Her parents would flip through the magazines during dinner, and typically left Hazel to her own thoughts, and that was okay with Hazel. That night in particular she had a lot to think about.

  She served herself peas and mashed potatoes. She liked to make a well in her potatoes and fill it with gravy, then float the peas in it, but her mother said that was uncouth, which was another way of saying no. So instead she swirled the gravy into the potatoes and thought about her mysteries. After dinner she would write everything down in her notebook, but in the meantime she could contemplate.

  If Mr. Jones was a spy—The Comrade, as she decided to call him—then what possible connection could he have to a ten-year-old girl? She puzzled over this as she lined up her peas and slid them onto her fork.

  “And how was school today?” her mom asked.

  “Fine,” Hazel replied before shoveling one forkful of potatoes into her mouth after another.

  “Manners,” her mother said. She snapped out her napkin, then spread it across her lap.

  In the detective stories she read, the detective always had someone to bounce ideas off. Hazel, though, didn’t have anyone. She told herself it wasn’t a problem. After all, Nancy Drew was alone for the first four books—her friends Bess and George didn’t show up until the fifth book, The Secret at Shadow Ranch—and she solved those first four mysteries just fine without them. Anyway, Bess and George weren’t as smart as Nancy—or Hazel for that matter—and they sometimes got in the way instead of helping.

  Becky would have been good at this mystery, Hazel knew, and she was sad to have to solve it without her. Maybe she could copy over her notes and send them to Becky, and Becky could write back with her ideas. Of course, that would take a long time, but she liked the idea of receiving a package with a mystery in it, and thought that Becky would, too.

  Anyway, she refocused herself, the most obvious option was that the person buried there was not in fact Alice, Ten Years Old, but perhaps someone who had figured out who Paul Jones was. She shivered; she didn’t want to end up buried in Pauper’s Field.

  On the other hand, by planting flowers by a headstone in Pauper’s Field, Mr. Jones was practically putting up a big sign saying that something was going on.

  Maybe there isn’t a body there at all, she thought. Maybe it is simply a hiding place.

  “Did you learn anything?” her dad asked.

  She knew she couldn’t just come out and tell them that she’d learned that their gravedigger was spying for the Russians. “We’re studying ancient Greece.”

  “Ah, ancient Greece,” her dad said, nodding, as if he had his own fond memories of the place. “I made a scale model of the Parthenon when I was your age. I bet I have it somewhere.”

  “Greek mythology!” her mom said, pleased as could be. Her parents stank at this talking-to-their-kid thing.

  “Yes,” Hazel said. Her parents’ sudden interest in traditional family dinner conversation seemed scripted to Hazel, as if by playing the parts they could become a different kind of family than they were. Hazel kept lining up her peas and spiking them onto the tines of her fork. She decided to throw them a bone. “Did you know that the Greeks were the founders of our modern form of democracy?”

  “Well, something like our modern form of democracy,” her dad said.

  “Sure.” Hazel pushed another large bite of potatoes into her mouth, and her mother raised an eyebrow, so the next time she took a smaller scoop. She was saving her chicken for last since she didn’t like it and hoped she could fill herself up with peas and potatoes.

  Her parents exchanged a glance and her father cleared his throat and then her mother gave him a pointed look, and finally he said, “We saw you by the pond today. With a boy.”

  “Oh, that’s the new boy,” she said.

  “That might have been the type of information you could have shared when we asked you what happened at school today,” her mom said.

  Hazel shrugged. “It’s no big deal.” Though, in fact, new students were pretty rare at Adelaide Switzer Elementary.

  “So what’s his name? Where’s he from?” her mom asked.

  “Samuel,” she said. “And I don’t know where he’s from. He said he’s lived seventeen different places.”

  “Samuel?” her mom asked, putting down her fork. “What’s his last name?”

  Hazel tried to remember if Mrs. Sinclair had said his last name. “I’m not sure—”

  “He’s not Samuel Butler, is he?”

  “Yes! That’s it!” Hazel looked from her mother to her father and then back again. They were communicating in the wordless way of parents: raised eyebrows, twitches of lips, and intense stares. “What?” Hazel asked.

  “Nothing,” her dad said. “His mother used to live in town, a long time ago.”

  Hazel shrugged. “Yeah, well, he’s in my class now and he’s smart and kind of strange.”

  “And what were you two doing by the pond?” her mom asked.

  Hazel bit her lip to keep herself from spilling the whole story about Mr. Jones and the spies in town and Alice. She’d already been warned more than once to just leave Mr. Jones alone. “He was doing some grave rubbings and I told him that he needed to have a permit, and he did. I’ve never actually seen one before. They’re pretty boring.”

  Hazel’s mom picked up her fork again. “Well, you be sure to be nice to him.”

  “Why?” Hazel asked.

  “You should always be nice to people, Hazel.”

  “I know that. So why did you specifically tell me to be nice to him?”
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  Her parents exchanged another look before her mother spoke. “Well, Hazel, because he’s new, that’s why. You don’t know what it’s like to be the new kid at school, and I imagine it’s difficult. It can be hard to make friends.”

  Hazel didn’t need to be told it could be hard to make friends. “He seems all right,” she said. “But strange.”

  “You mentioned that already,” her mom said.

  “If someone is a little different from the norm, that just means they’re more interesting. More going on upstairs,” her dad said, tapping his head. He leaned in and spoke in a stage whisper. “Some people think your mother and I are weird.”

  “You are weird,” she said.

  “Point proven,” her dad replied.

  “Just try to be a little kind,” her mother told her. “Some people are more fragile than others.”

  Hazel imagined Samuel shattering like a vase. Then she wondered how her mother would know if he was fragile or not.

  It was a little odd to think that he was actually from Maple Hill, or his mom was anyway, and that she’d never met him. He was like a mystery all to himself. True, a far more boring mystery than the gravestone they’d found in Pauper’s Field, but a mystery, nonetheless. Maybe he had a strange illness, and his mom had it, too, and that’s what made him fragile. Or maybe he was actually not from Maple Hill at all and it was a big charade that all the adults were in on, or at least some of them, because actually he was a prince from some small European country whose king (his father) had just been deposed and he needed a safe place to hide. That squared up with his clothes and his strange way of talking.

  “Kind, but no kissing,” her dad said.

  “Yuck,” she said.

  “Good,” he replied. Then he reached over to the counter and picked up a seed catalog. Family time, it seemed, was over. Now Hazel could get on with her investigation.

  As soon as she finished clearing the table, she raced up the stairs to her bedroom and took her Mysteries Notebook out from between her mattress and box spring. Now that she had a real mystery to solve, she had decided to keep it hidden. She began by writing down everything she knew about Mr. Jones, Communist spies, and Alice. For Alice all she had was that, if she was a real person, she was ten years old. For Communist spies, she knew that they were suspected to be at the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory, so she felt she could write down “In Maple Hill.” Mr. Jones was also in Maple Hill, so she wrote that under his name and then put a star next to each entry to indicate a connection. Samuel would probably call it a loose connection, but Maple Hill was a small town, and if spies were in the factory, it stood to reason that they would be elsewhere in town. That’s what Hazel thought, anyway.