Be in control. Act. Be the one who chooses the time and place for action. Only retaliate if absolutely necessary. Know the difference between reacting and responding.
— Rule Number 15 from Rules for a Successful Life as an Undercover Secret Agent
Victoria sat next to me on the bus, allowing no one, especially Stanley, to come near. I couldn’t wait to get home so I could examine my stolen — liberated, I mean — documents in private. At that moment, in all honesty, I just wanted to peel the plastic baggie off of my sweaty stomach.
Of course, as soon as I walked through my front door, I wished I had stayed on the bus. Frankenstella were waiting for me.
“Get everything on the list,” Stella said, holding a piece of paper and a wad of crumpled-up dollar bills. I’d bet my last cinnamon bun (if I ever had another cinnamon bun, that is) the money had come from Dad’s “driving words” cookie jar, which had more than fifty-three dollars last time we counted. “Is that clear?” she asked.
I almost answered “yes” until I realized that Stella was trying to give the money and list to Victoria. I had to elbow my cousin, who was staring at her phone.
“Where am I supposed to go?” Victoria whined.
“The mini-mart is on the next block,” Frank said. He pointed to a seat at the kitchen table. “Mabel, sit.” Victoria walked out the front door without a second glance.
Though I really wanted to ignore Frank’s order, I figured that Rule Number 18 should guide my actions in this situation: If captured by the enemy, play along and be agreeable. Lie if you have to. You will not get in trouble. I was determined to be nice and would lie to protect my parents’ secrets.
Frank lowered himself into a chair across from me. “Mabel, do you know where the museum key is?”
“No.” If my prediction was correct, the New Orleans spoon collection buyer would be coming in two days — on Thursday, October thirtieth. They must be getting worried, I thought.
“Moppet,” Stella asked, “do you remember the alarm code or password?” She was standing next to Frank.
“Nope.” I stared at my aunt’s ears. She was now wearing Mom’s pearl and garnet drop earrings and a garnet pendant. For a thief, Stella had really good taste.
“Do you know how to contact PNW Security?” Frank asked.
“No.”
“You must remember the alarm code and find the missing key today,” Frank said. He clenched his hands. “Or you will be very, very, very sorry.” He thudded the table with each “very” in case I missed his threatening tone.
I laid my hands flat on the table and met his eyes. “I don’t know anything about an alarm.” I paused. I was pretty sure my common sense was yelling at me to stop and think about what I was going to say. I ignored it. Sometimes you have to say the truth, no matter the consequences. “But I do know who’s been stealing my mother’s jewelry.”
“How dare you!” Stella slapped the table. I guess no one liked the poor table today.
“The key is the first issue here.” Frank laid his hands flat on the table, just inches from mine. “What do you know about the key?”
“They’re used for opening locks.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck, Mabel,” Stella said. “The security alarm wasn’t there in June. When did your parents install it?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. Of course, they hadn’t installed it, but I could hardly tell Frankenstella that, could I?
“When’s your birthday?” Frank asked.
“Throwing me a party?”
“Using the wrong code is too risky,” Stella said to Frank before she stared at me, raw hatred distorting her face. “He warned us.”
Who? Who warned you? I wanted to ask.
“Look, Frank, if we can get in there soon, we can cut him out and keep everything for ourselves.”
“It’s his buyer — er, friend — who is interested,” Frank said. “And he hasn’t told us his friend’s name.”
Buyer? I thought. I knew it.
“We can make other friends,” Stella said. “Friends will come to us. What’s important now is that the code has to be correct the first time.” Her freaky smile returned. “And I know just how to jog poor little Moppet’s memory.”
Victoria, bless her bratty self, waltzed in the back door and said, “There is nothing I’d eat at that mini-mart.”
Frank and Stella glanced at each other.
“Moppet, you have one hour to find everything,” Stella said, looking around the kitchen. “How can you stand to live in such filth? Clean up this kitchen.” Shaking her head in dismay, she stormed out, fussing at “Vicky-girl” to hurry up if she wanted food. A minute later, Frankenstella and their offspring — who, I was pretty sure, had just saved me some unpleasantness — drove off in my mom’s car.
How did they expect me to find a key, find a code, and clean the kitchen in one hour?
The only important question on my mind was what was in the liberated documents? I peeled the baggie off my stomach, determined to find out.
A soft thunk at the back door startled me. I eased it open and was relieved to find Stanley, pinecone in hand, standing in my backyard. I wanted to hug him so badly, but I didn’t because I knew he wouldn’t like it.
“I saw Frankenstella leave. How much time do we have?”
“An hour, but it may be best if you went home. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Trouble is just another word for adventure.” Stanley brushed his wavy hair off of his face and smiled. “My dad used to say he learned the most when he figured out how to get out of trouble. Also he had the most fun.”
I was pretty sure Stanley’s mom didn’t share that view. “Getting caught is not fun.”
“No one saw today, Mabel. Don’t worry so much.”
I didn’t bother to correct him and tell him about all the many things there were to worry about. The less Stanley knew about Victoria and my family, the better for all of us.
“You might need this if you get into some sort of jam when I’m not around to help,” Stanley said, shuffling his feet as he took out his favorite pocketknife.
“Um,” I said. Get a grip, Sunflower. “Thanks, Stanley. That’s really thoughtful of you. But I have one.” I took out my pocketknife, and its wooden sides gleamed in the light.
“Oh, that is a good one.” Stanley started fiddling with my knife’s blades and gadgets. “What’s this skeleton key for?” He opened up his knife, but there wasn’t a key on it.
“A tiny lock,” I guessed. “I need to examine the documents and make a game plan.”
“And clean the kitchen. I’ve never seen your house like this before.” Stanley glanced at the pile of teetering dishes. “Tell you what. I’ll wipe down the counters and table, sweep the floor, and then dry for you if you wash those.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s really kind of you, Stanley.”
He shrugged off my thanks and started whistling as we worked. So, while I might have been cleaning the kitchen like Stella ordered me to, it didn’t feel that way. I was cleaning my house with help from a friend. I powered through the dishes in less than ten minutes.
On the newly cleaned kitchen table, I spread out the papers Aunt Gertie had hidden in Principal Baker’s office: the sketch of the big, empty room with a low ceiling, the blueprint, the paper with letters and numbers, another drawing — definitely inside the Spoon — and others. What did these items have to do with the museum or my parents? I pointed to what looked like swirls of various shades of green inside rectangles. In one of the rectangles, there were two orange dots. “This is a topographic map, right?”
“With no markings. That makes it useless. How strange,” Stanley said. “The U.S. Geographical Survey mapped every inch of the continental United States. If we only knew which quadrangle it represents, the locations marked by the dots would be easy to find.”
Stella had said something about the Baies women having the silver, the museum, and a map. Could this be the map she was talking about? I wondered. “How can we use it when there aren’t any names or landmarks on it?”
“It’s obviously a heavily forested area,” Stanley said, his eyebrows wiggling in thought.
“The darker the green, the denser the trees,” I guessed.
“I can compare it to a master map I have at home.”
Of course he has a “master map,” I thought. Stanley carefully recorded every hike we did. While I couldn’t tell him any family secrets, I knew I could trust him. Feeling calmer, I gave the map to Stanley for safekeeping.
The blueprint was of my house. Maybe those 1960s hippie contractors Dad complained about so often did know what they were doing. A blueprint is just a type of map detailing the construction of a house. Why Aunt Gertie felt the need to hide it, or a drawing of the Spoon’s interior, was beyond me. I twirled a curl behind my left ear as I paced around the kitchen.
“Mabel.” Stanley pointed to a tiny trail of dirt, running from the sink to me. It came from the cuff of my jeans.
“Ugh. You’d better go, Stanley.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed my jeans. “I have laundry to do, and Frankenstella will be back here soon.”
“See you tomorrow,” Stanley said as he grabbed a bag of chips from our pantry so he wouldn’t starve on the way home, then hustled out the back door. I carefully hid the liberated documents in the living room. Stella had ransacked it the very first day she arrived, so I figured the papers would be safe in The Definitive Northern Italian Cookbook. I changed into a pair of old pink sweatpants. After I gathered my dirty clothes from the bathroom hamper, I headed into the basement feeling like Cinderella.
A blast of cold air greeted me. The sole source of light — a bare light bulb that dangled from the ceiling — cast a lonely shadow on the washer and dryer.
I loaded up the washing machine, remembering to remove Aunt Gertie’s phone from my jeans pocket. Since I had nothing better to do, I dialed Ms. Bow Tie’s number. I let it ring ten or twenty times, but no one picked up. It never went to voicemail. How would voicemail sound for a top secret agency? I wondered. Something like, “Hello. Please leave a message and then forget all about it.” It would’ve been better than the endless ringing, at least.
As I waited for someone to answer the phone, I glanced around the basement. My cast-off dollhouse and discarded science experiments were piled in a corner on top of a blue tarp. Stacks of large Tupperware boxes covered the back wall. An old chair leaned against the side wall. The basement felt damp and chilly, but that wasn’t what caused the hair on my neck to stand up. I had that weird feeling — the one I get when someone is watching.
I hung up the phone and examined the room. No other living creatures except for spiders were there with me. There was something odd about the basement — it was tidy.
For a second, I imagined the basement totally empty. It was big and the ceiling was low, just like in the drawing. Suddenly it hit me: this was the room! This was the drawing that was so important Aunt Gertie had hid it at Bluewater-Silverton Unified Elementary School, after Frankenstella’s disastrous visit in June. What could be in here? I wondered.
The Cleaners equipment — of course! Somewhere in the piles of boxes were emergency supplies.
Each container was marked with its contents: Christmas decorations, Halloween, swim & summer, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, and camping. Everything looked normal, except I couldn’t remember my parents ever putting up decorations for Valentine’s Day. They’d never even given each other cards or flowers.
I moved the containers until I had the Valentine’s Day box open. To my surprise, the top layer was actually a bunch of valentines. All of the little lace hearts and red-foil creations I had made for my parents over the years were stored in it. Even a red and pink finger painting of a heart that I’d made in kindergarten was here, with “Love, MOP” smeared proudly on the side.
However, that layer wasn’t deep at all. Underneath were three portable lanterns, a pack of batteries, a flashlight, four bottles of water, two emergency freeze-dried food packets, a key (another key!) taped to the side, a blue blanket, and — surprise, surprise — a slim, silver cell phone. In all honesty, I’d been hoping for something more helpful, like an instruction manual entitled, So the Cleaners Are Out of Town and the Enemy Has Taken Over Your House.
I tugged at the blanket, but it was stuck inside the container. I dug my fingers into it and found that it was wedged around something hard. I put batteries into one of the lanterns to take a closer look. Peeling back the blue blanket, I saw red.
I tipped the plastic container onto its side and wiggled the red thing out, along with the blue blanket that was still partially wrapped around it. I realized at once what it was.
The red suitcase. The one from the photograph that Montgomery had showed me. The one Frank badgered everyone about. The one that sent my father’s tingly spy sense into overdrive. The one thing that made my parents decide to train me for the Great Reverse Heist.
My parents had found it. Obviously. They found it, hid it, and didn’t tell me. I couldn’t believe it. My rat fink parents had just left me here with it, along with Frankenstella and everyone else who wanted to get their grubby hands on it.
Whatever the red suitcase really was — whatever was inside of it — Montgomery wanted it. Frankenstella wanted it. And now I had it. A numerical combination lock was built into its top. I tried random numbers but nothing worked.
The Rules hadn’t prepared me for this. Actually Rule Number 21 sort of had: Assume every agent is a double agent. Could Mom and Dad be double agents? I wondered. But I refused to believe my parents were the bad guys, no matter what Montgomery said.
If only someone from the Agency would help me, I thought. I tried using Gertie’s phone and dialed Ms. Bow Tie once more for old time’s sake. Nada.
I picked up the shiny silver cell phone I’d just found in the box and dialed the same phone number. Nothing happened. Desperate, I tried Roy’s number. It rang twice before rumbling sounds, like traffic, filled my ear.
“Hello,” I whispered, since that seemed to be the right way to talk on a spy phone. “Can you hear me?”
I heard breathing.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
I thought I heard an “mmmm.”
I couldn’t start talking about the Agency because I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that this was a secure line, so I just asked, “Can you help me?”
No reply. Then the sound of breathing dropped off. I had been disconnected.
I dialed several more times, but it just rang and rang and rang.
What kind of Agency couldn’t answer their phones? No wonder they’d lost my parents.