The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill Read online

  “I am well, my dear, and how are you?”

  “Very well,” she replied. “Actually, I’m working on a project, and I thought maybe you could help.”

  “A school project?”

  She didn’t think it was a good idea to lie to a priest. “More like a personal project. I’m researching some of the graves in the old paupers’ graveyard. With Samuel Butler. He’s interested in that sort of thing.”

  Father Paul made a tut-tutting noise, but then he said, “It’s good of you to befriend that boy.”

  What was it about Samuel that made people think he was so fragile? He was odd, that was for certain, but he seemed more or less sturdy. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Oh, Hazel, it’s a very long story.”

  Hazel looked at him and waited. She had plenty of time.

  “What’s this project you’re working on?”

  “Well, it’s a bit hard to explain. I’m just wondering if you might know of anyone buried up there who maybe didn’t belong here.”

  “Everyone is welcome here.”

  Hazel sighed. “I don’t just mean the church. I mean the whole town.” She didn’t think she could come right out and ask about Alice. She didn’t want to give too much away.

  “Well, sure, there have been people who have drifted through, if you know what I mean.”

  She sure did, but for once her line of questioning wasn’t about Mr. Jones. She wanted to know more about Alice. “Any girls, maybe? About my age. Maybe some who were lost under mysterious circumstances?”

  “Is there something specific you’re getting at, Hazel?”

  She didn’t want to tip her hand too soon. “I just think it can be interesting to research people who are like you but who lived in a different time. Sometimes I wish I lived in a different time.”

  Smiling, Father Paul sat down and patted the space next to him. So Hazel sat down, too. “Is something troubling you, Hazel?”

  Hazel knew that anything you told a priest was a secret if it was part of a confession. But she wasn’t sure it counted if you told a priest someone else’s secret. “Imagine there was somebody you knew, and you found out they weren’t who you thought they were at all.”

  “We all have secrets, Hazel. Even me.”

  Hazel tried to imagine what sort of secrets Father Paul could have. Maybe he wore a bright red T-shirt under his priest shirt or sang along with Frank Sinatra on the radio. “Me, too,” she said. “The thing is, this is a really, really big secret.”

  “How big?”

  “Huge.” Hazel held her hands out as wide as she could.

  “I’ve heard a lot of secrets in my day, and the one thing I can tell you is that people always feel better when they share them.”

  “The problem is, it’s not my secret.”

  “Ah, that’s a different matter entirely. How did you come to uncover this secret?”

  “I deduced it.”

  “Deduced it? I see. And you are certain of your deduction?”

  “Ninety-nine, well, maybe ninety-eight point nine nine nine percent sure.”

  “That’s still more than a percent of uncertainty.”

  Hazel nodded.

  “I suggest, then, that you find out one hundred percent before you start deciding what to do about it. But always remember, if it’s not your secret, it may not be yours to tell.”

  Hazel knew he was right in the general sense, but the identity of the spies in town was a secret that had to be told. Father Paul had a point, though—she needed one hundred percent indisputable proof before she could tell anyone what she knew. “Thanks, Father Paul. You helped a lot.”

  “That’s my job,” he replied.

  Hazel stood up, ready to go, but then she looked back at Father Paul. “Have you heard they’re investigating Communists at the factory?”

  Father Paul’s face darkened. “That’s nothing you need to worry yourself about, Hazel.”

  “But, Father Paul, if there are Reds in the plant, they could be everywhere. They could be anyone.”

  “You listen to me, Hazel. These are tough times in our country. We face a real threat. But there are those who would use that threat as a way to instill fear in our communities.”

  Hazel wasn’t sure what Father Paul was getting at. It’s not like folks would just go around calling people Communists for no reason. She kicked her saddle shoe against the stone step.

  “Maple Hill is made up of good people. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  “You’re right,” she said. But then again, Mr. Jones wasn’t from Maple Hill. “Thanks, Father Paul. This was a good talk.”

  “You’re welcome, Hazel. We’ll be sure to do it again sometime.”

  “Sure thing, Father Paul.” Hazel trotted down the stairs, ready to meet Samuel and keep investigating.

  12

  The Third Floor

  “Come on,” Samuel said, standing by the stairway on the main floor of the library. The up staircase. No one went upstairs. It was where all the microfilm and microforms and old newspapers were. Only the librarians were allowed up there, and a select few adults who had been specially trained on the machines.

  “We can’t go up there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Miss Angus wouldn’t like it,” Hazel told him.

  “Miss Angus? She’s the one who sent me up here.”

  Hazel opened her mouth but could think of nothing to say, so she shut it quickly. “Oh, well, you didn’t say that,” Hazel said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d been given permission yet. But since you have, let’s go right on up.”

  Samuel gave her a funny look and started up the stairs.

  The third floor of the library was hot and dusty and had a funny smell, like old wood and chemicals. Hazel sat down on a wooden stool. “Smart move, coming up here. It’s very private, so we can talk freely about the case. We don’t need to use code words or anything.” In truth, Hazel rather liked using code words.

  Samuel looked around before dropping his satchel on an old table with a broken lamp built right into it. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “I brought supplies,” she said. She slipped off her backpack and pulled out her Mysteries Notebook. She had searched her house for a magnifying glass, but there hadn’t seemed to be any. She had found a compass, and even though she knew every inch of Maple Hill and could never get lost, she had brought it along with her just to have something. “I also have our cover story, for when we do interviews.”

  Samuel took out his big leather book and turned to a page with the grave rubbing taped to it. There were no lines on the paper, but his writing was perfectly straight. “Typically I start with newspapers, to get an obituary. That’s the most straightforward path.”

  “The most boring path, you mean.” A fly buzzed around her head and she swatted at it.

  Samuel ignored her. “We only know her first name and how old she was, which means we will need to be better detectives.”

  Hazel perked up at the mention of being a detective. “Exactly. So we’ll need to come up with a list of people to question who might know something about a girl named Alice who died when she was ten years old. Like I said, I’ve got our cover story for that all set. We’re doing a school project on the history of Maple Hill. Once we’ve done our interviewing, then we can plan our stakeout. I’ve already started by interviewing Father Paul.”

  “Not that kind of detective,” he said, tapping the grave rubbing. “Research. Background. Finding the story in history.”

  Hazel didn’t know what other kind of detective there was than a sleuth like Nancy Drew. She looked up. The ceiling was open to its pointy top, and she could see the rafters, the fly dancing around them. “We already know that Paul Jones is a Communist.” She opened her own notebook to show him the list of qualities that Mr. Jones shared with Red spies. “We just need a little more proof. We need to find out what he’s doing in Maple Hill, and how he’s getting his information back to the bigw
igs in Russia. This Alice girl must be the key. Or at least a major clue.”

  Samuel wrote something down in his book. “We don’t need to find out what a spy is doing in Maple Hill until we know that he’s actually a spy. Right now we need to figure out who Alice is. If you’re right and he is a spy, then figuring out Alice will give you more evidence.”

  The fly had swung back down and was circling her ankle. She kicked out her foot. “We’re dealing with a matter of national security here. We have to be people of action.” It wasn’t just the country she was worried about. If someone else discovered that Mr. Jones was a spy, they might think her family had harbored him and send them all off to prison with him.

  “That’s your assumption,” he said.

  Hazel slumped onto the table, burying her head in her arms. This was not how she had expected to spend her afternoon. She’d imagined herself on the trail of a dangerous villain, and that would show Connie and Maryann, wouldn’t it? They wouldn’t be able to call her a triangle person anymore if she single-handedly caught a Russian spy. Well, single-handedly with Samuel’s help. She lifted up her head just in time to see the fly land on the table. She slapped her hand down but missed, and it buzzed away.

  “I’m not a triangle person,” she announced.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a triangle person,” he replied. “We play an important role in the overall composition.”

  “The song would sound better without it,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” he said, without giving it too much consideration. “What we need to do is to estimate the age of the headstone, and then we can start surveying a range of newspapers, looking for stories that might be related. Surely a ten-year-old girl dying would be in the paper.”

  “Indomitably,” Hazel replied. When Samuel looked confused, Hazel tried to give him a benevolent smile, but really she was soaring inside: she knew something he did not. “It means definitely, without a doubt.”

  “I think the word you mean is ‘indubitably.’ ‘Indomitable’ means that it can’t be defeated or even stopped.” Hazel was deflating like a balloon with a pinprick, but then Samuel added, “As in, you are indubitably indomitable.”

  Indubitably indomitable, Hazel thought. Relentless. Too bad the rest of the world didn’t see her that way. “I just don’t know why they think they’re so much better than me. You know, they’re the reason I got a tardy today. They stole that office slip and put it in my cubby. I’ve gotten the perfect attendance award the past three years and now I won’t get it this year and it’s all because of them.”

  “I’ve never gotten a perfect attendance record.” Samuel wrote some figures down in the margin of his book.

  “That’s because you’ve gotten to live in seventeen different places. You really think I’m a triangle person?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said being a triangle person might not be so bad. I’m not sure I even know what it means to be a triangle person.” He leaned his face in close to the grave rubbing to examine it.

  “It means being a dud. A square.”

  “Oh, then you’re definitely not a triangle person. So how old do you think the stone is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’re the cemetery expert,” he said.

  The sun was filtering in through the octagon-shaped window at the end of the floor. It left an elongated shaft of light on the floor that was edging toward her toes. “Well, no one’s been buried there since Civil War times.”

  “The Civil War started in 1861 and ended—”

  “In 1865,” Hazel finished for him. “Almost ninety years ago.”

  Hazel sighed again. The adventure of the enterprise was rapidly seeping away. Even the fly was bored. It perched on the edge of a chair, just out of reach.

  Samuel got up and began reading the labels on the cabinets. “Here we are. Do you know when Pauper’s Field started?”

  “It’s always been there.”

  “Well, then I suggest we start in 1865 and work our way forward in time.”

  “This seems like an awful lot of work,” she told him.

  His face, previously animated, fell. “Oh. I thought you wanted to figure out the mystery.”

  “I do. I want to know what The Comrade is doing in my graveyard.”

  “Who?”

  “The Comrade. Mr. Jones. That’s my code name for him.”

  “It’s not a very coded code name.”

  Hazel pursed her lips. “What I’m trying to say is that an investigation is about—”

  “Interviews and stakeouts, I know. First we need to get our foundation. We need to know who to interview and who to stake out.” He opened one of the drawers and ran his fingers over the rolls of film. “Do you know how to use microfilm?”

  “Sure,” Hazel lied. All she knew about microfilm was that Adelaide Switzer had donated the machine and all the archived newspapers to the library because she wanted to preserve the town’s history. It was a big honking deal, and it was just about the most excited Hazel had ever seen Miss Angus.

  Samuel walked over to one of the huge books that indexed the chests of small drawers, but Hazel stayed in her seat. She spread open the latest copy of the Burlington Free Press, which she had grabbed on their way into the library. Below the fold was a story on the spies in the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory:

  NO NAMES RELEASED YET IN MAPLE HILL FACTORY SPY INVESTIGATION

  The article explained that though the investigators had unearthed several leads, they were not yet ready to go public with what they had found.

  “Who could it be?” Hazel murmured.

  “Who could what be?” Samuel asked.

  “They’ve found spies in the plant, but they won’t release the list yet. I know The Comrade has a contact in there. At least one. It could be anybody!”

  “Oh, here’s something!” Samuel rushed to a drawer to get the film. He put it in the machine, which started with a whirring sound.

  Hazel kept reading. “Listen to this. ‘McCarthy believes that the Switzer Switch and Safe Factory is one of many companies to have been infiltrated by spies. Investigators are currently trying to determine if these groups are linked, or perhaps operating as individuals who report to an individual higher up the chain.’ Did you hear that? ‘An individual higher up the chain,’” she repeated. “Mr. Jones could be that individual. That could explain how he just showed up. Maybe he’s going from factory to factory, collecting what information the spies there have gathered.”

  Samuel moved the finder around to locate the article he wanted. “You might be on to something there. Some spies might be embedded in their factories, while others are rovers, gathering information to send back.”

  “Exactly!” Hazel said. The fly landed on her paper and she swatted at it.

  “Still, I’m not quite ready to believe that Mr. Jones is that person.” Samuel pushed his glasses up and squinted at the screen. “Drat.”

  “What?”

  “I thought I found something, but it’s about a cat. She was ten years old and missing. Reward offered.”

  Hazel flipped forward three pages to read the rest of the newspaper article. “Samuel, you are not going to believe this!”

  “What now?”

  Hazel cleared her throat and read from the newspaper. “‘So far, only one arrest has been made in all the investigations. Alice Winthrop, who worked in the secretary pool at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, was brought in for questioning late last week. She was charged with conspiracy.’” Hazel put the paper down. “Alice! There’s our Alice!”

  “If she’s a secretary, she’s not ten years old.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Mr. Jones needed a place to have the secrets dropped off. He went through the cemetery and found that stone. ‘Leave it with Alice.’ I bet that’s what he says to all the spies he has working for him. Why, he could say it right out in the open. ‘Just leave it with Alice. She’ll take care of it.’”

  �
��It’s not a bad theory,” he says.

  “Better than a missing cat.”

  “Most assuredly better than a missing cat,” he agreed.

  “Plus Mr. Jones’s license plates are from New York. Maybe that was his last assignment. He’s moving around, blending in, and collecting secrets.”

  Samuel looked up from the microfilm machine. “I have to admit that you’re getting somewhere. I think you still need more proof, though.”

  “You know who else was a secretary? Ethel Rosenberg!” That summer Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius, had been convicted of spying and sharing national secrets, and had been put to death. Hazel hadn’t thought that was a good idea. She didn’t suppose killing a criminal made you much better than the criminal himself. And anyway, who knew what other secrets those two might have been hiding.

  “She wasn’t a secretary exactly, was she?”

  “Her husband got the insider information, and she typed up the secrets to be sent out.”

  “A bit of a stretch.”

  “What have you got?” Hazel said.

  Samuel frowned. “Nothing yet.”

  “Exactly,” Hazel said again.

  The fly landed on her knee and she smacked it as hard as she could. She felt it crush beneath her hand, and a smile spread across her lips. They were making progress. She had a workable theory. She was feeling quite proud of herself until she looked down and saw the broken, crooked carcass in her hand.

  13

  Remarkable

  Hazel dropped her backpack inside the front door of the cottage. “Mom! Dad!”

  There was the sound of the typewriter coming from the office, and Hazel thought she heard someone yell “In here!” This was perfect: she wanted to add more canned goods to her mausoleum fallout shelter before it got dark.

  From her room she retrieved a brown paper bag from the A&P grocery store that she had filled with cans of peas and mixed vegetables from the pantry. These were not her favorite foods, but she had to work with what she had. It wasn’t like she could go out and buy her own. She wished she could get cans of tiny hot dogs. Becky Cornflower’s dad had loved those and always shared with her when she went over. Anyway, the vegetables would be good because they would need their vitamins, locked away in the dark mausoleum.