Chapter Thirteen

Ellie

Monday, October 9

If Ellie had stolen goods to hide, the baseball field dugouts were where she would hide them, which was why she’d spent the last few minutes of recess nosing around the home-team side. She could imagine taping Hatchet underneath one of the long benches, or digging a hole in the dirt and burying the three little ceramic kittens. As for the picture of Mrs. Herrera’s favorite teacher, well, Ellie didn’t know how you’d hide that in a dugout. Maybe you’d put it right out in the open, figuring that no one came out here in the fall anyway, so why bother hiding it? It wasn’t like anyone else was going to want it even if they did find it.

She figured whoever had taken the special things was pulling a prank and had hidden the booty until they could return it without being seen. She was hoping to get a peek into Henry’s locker later that afternoon, because he was the most obvious prankster in their class and the person with the least self-control, but for now she was running her hand under the dugout bench. Her hand touched something hard and bumpy, and when she leaned down to get a look, she found a humongous wad of dried gum under the bench. How did anyone fit that much gum in their mouth? It made Ellie’s jaw hurt just imagining it.

She was about to cross the field to the other dugout when a voice came from behind the dugout wall. “Quit!” somebody (a boy) hissed. This was followed by a thump—like someone stumbling into the dugout—and the sound of shushing.

Okay, so what should she do here? Run for the school building? Hide in the corner? Or just casually walk over to the other dugout like she hadn’t heard anything?

Ellie chose to walk. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, and if someone was thinking about beating her up or pushing her or—what? Spitting on her? Yelling at her? Tripping her?—it wasn’t like she couldn’t yell and one of the playground monitors wouldn’t hear her. The school building wasn’t that far away.

But no one jumped out or started chasing her as she walked across the pitcher’s mound toward the away-team dugout. She knew she’d heard at least two people outside the dugout wall; she wasn’t crazy. As a spy, Ellie could appreciate other spies, especially ones who apparently had no interest in beating her up. She smiled at the idea that someone might find her interesting enough to spy on.

But what if the other spies were doing the same thing Ellie was? What if they were looking for Mrs. Herrera’s special things? What if the spies thought Ellie was the thief and hoped she would lead them to the stolen items?

Now Ellie felt like every step she took looked suspicious. She started to zigzag to throw the potential spy off her path, but realized that if normal walking looked suspicious, then zigzagging would look crazy. Besides, she wasn’t in a crowded airport, where zigzagging to throw someone off your path made sense. She was crossing a baseball field.

Okay, but what if the spies didn’t consider her a suspect? What if they were smart enough to realize that Ellie was looking for Mrs. Herrera’s missing special objects and planned on swooping in when Ellie finally found them? She’d do all the hard work and the other spies would take the prize. Totally unfair!

She turned toward the main building and tried to walk as casually as she could, like, Hey, no big deal, just out taking my lunchtime walk. And then super-duper casually, she glanced behind her to see if she could get a glimpse of whoever was watching her. A dark-haired head ducked behind the dugout. So she really hadn’t been imagining things! But who did the head belong to? Bart? He had dark brown hair. But Bart never came outside at recess. He and Ben and Stefan always went to the computer lab.

When she reached the blacktop, she thought about standing there and waiting for the spies to reveal themselves. But Charlotte was hanging out by the swings with some other girls from her class, and when she saw Ellie she waved, and Ellie waved back, and then Ellie didn’t know what to do next, so she looked at her feet. She wondered if she should go over and say hi. Maybe invite Charlotte to her house after school? Could she do that? Back when Ellie’s dad was in the army, everybody invited everybody over whether you were new or just about to move, but civilian life was different. It had different rules.

By the time she looked up again, Charlotte and the other girls were walking toward the school building, and the playing fields were one big blank space. Mrs. Herrera was standing by the basketball hoop, talking to Mrs. Kafsky. Did Mrs. Kafsky know why Mrs. Herrera was on thin ice? Ellie definitely didn’t think Mrs. Herrera had been caught driving drunk like some people were saying. Not only wasn’t Mrs. Herrera the drunk-driving type, but Ellie had asked her dad about it and he’d looked up the state laws about grounds for dismissing a teacher and said Mrs. Herrera would have definitely been fired immediately if she’d been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol.

“Any sort of conviction, even a misdemeanor, would have probably gotten Mrs. Herrera terminated,” her dad told her when they’d talked about it at dinner a few nights ago. “So my guess is if she’s really on thin ice, it’s for a pattern of behavior that isn’t actually actionable.”

“English, please,” Ellie had told her dad, who tended to talk like a lawyer when it came to legal matters.

“She’s not breaking the rules, but she keeps doing something that really irritates the school administration.”

So really, there were two sixth-grade mysteries to figure out, but Ellie wasn’t making a dent in either of them. She decided to focus for now on who had taken the things from Mrs. Herrera’s special collection. Maybe if she could figure out who had followed her to the dugout, she’d come across an important clue. Use your brain, she told herself. Use your powers of deduction. Okay, okay, okay. Who would think of following me to see if I was the thief? Computer lab boys: probably not, because they probably didn’t care. Popular boys: nope, too cool to care. That left the nice boys who didn’t overlap with the computer lab boys: Rogan, Ethan, and Cole.

She looked over to the basketball court. No sign of any of those guys. They weren’t hanging around on the monkey bars either.

They were the ones outside the dugout, Ellie decided. And I bet they suspect I did it. But why?

She needed to write in her notebook to think this through, so she ran as fast as she could to Mrs. Herrera’s classroom, where she’d dropped her backpack before lunch. But when she got there, the door was locked. What was that about? Mrs. Herrera never locked her door!

But until today, no one had stolen any of her special things from her special collection, Ellie reminded herself. Until today, Mrs. Herrera trusted us.

She pressed her face against the door’s narrow window. Was Mrs. Herrera in there, grading papers? Had she locked herself in while she locked everyone else out? Ellie didn’t see her at her desk or wiping the morning’s lessons off the whiteboard. And then it occurred to her that—duh!—she’d just seen her teacher on the playground talking to Mrs. Kafsky.

But who was that boy sitting at the Editor’s Roundtable, scribbling away in a notebook? Sam Hawkins? What in the heck was Sam doing in Mrs. Herrera’s locked classroom? She tapped on the glass and called, “Sam! I thought you moved! Are you back?”

Sam looked up, quickly closed his notebook, and pushed his chair away from the table so that he was out of view. Ellie craned her neck, but it was no use. He’d disappeared.

Ellie stood another moment, wondering what she should do. Bang on the door and force Sam to let her in? Find Mrs. Herrera and ask her what Sam was doing back in their classroom? Mrs. Herrera had to know, right?

Wait a minute—maybe Sam was the thief!

No, Ellie thought, shaking her head. That didn’t make any sense. He wouldn’t be locked in Mrs. Herrera’s classroom without her knowing about it, and Mrs. Herrera wouldn’t leave him there alone if she suspected he’d taken her things.

Okay, question one: How long had Sam been hanging out in Mrs. Herrera’s classroom? Ellie had seen him a week ago, the day that Petra and Becca had cut their hair, walking into the school when everyone else was walking out. And a couple of other kids had seen him around as well. Carson, for one, and Ariana for another. Maybe Henry had spent most of Friday chanting, “I do not like green eggs and ham, Sam I am” because he’d seen Sam too. But no one had said they’d seen Sam in the middle of the day, in Mrs. Herrera’s classroom.

Ellie’s fingers itched, she needed a notebook so badly.

She scooched down the hall to her locker, where she had several spare notebooks stored, in case of emergency. Then she made her way to the library, found her favorite table by the far window, and plopped down. Where was her pen? Found it. Okay, she had several mysteries to work out, in no particular order.

(1) What was Sam Hawkins doing locked in Mrs. Herrera’s classroom? And why had he hidden when Ellie saw him?

(2) Why would Rogan and Ethan and Cole think she’d stolen Mrs. Herrera’s special objects? They’d have to rule out a lot of other people, including Henry. Poor Henry, Ellie thought. He really wasn’t a bad guy, he was just so hyper! The question was, if Henry had stolen Mrs. Herrera’s things, could he have gone all morning without blurting out a confession? Unlikely. So it was smart to rule him out.

She’d heard a lot of people whispering about Becca Hobbes, but Ellie had seen Becca’s face when Mrs. Herrera had made the announcement, and she’d looked genuinely surprised. Pleased, but surprised. She’d bet those guys had ruled Becca out too.

(3) So if she hadn’t stolen Mrs. Herrera’s special things, and none of those other people had stolen Mrs. Herrera’s special things, then who the heck had stolen Mrs. Herrera’s special things?

Ellie leaned back in her chair. Was this the hook for her novel? A theft in the classroom? A hidden boy?

She’d been studying the members of Mrs. Herrera’s homeroom class for two weeks now. She still didn’t have all the information she wanted for her book—Felicity remained a mystery to her, and Aadita was impossible to get to know—but she had a lot more than she used to. She knew, for instance, that Carson’s mom was in remission from cancer (she’d overheard him tell Stefan that his mom still had “chemo brain” even though she was done with chemotherapy). She knew that Ariana was in Girl Scouts and collected Disney figurines, and that Rogan’s dad was one-quarter Japanese and his mother was a professional organizer. Cole hated coleslaw, but he loved mashed potatoes, and his favorite books were comic books. Cammi loved scary stories and fantasy novels, and as far as Ellie could tell, she loved Carson, too. Or at least she liked him a lot. Interestingly, Carson sort of seemed like he liked Cammi back, although they were in different categories of people, categories (nice versus popular) that didn’t usually overlap.

So maybe Cammi was the thief? Maybe she was trying to impress Carson? But would Carson really care?

Maybe Lila did it! Maybe Lila did it because…

Ellie didn’t know why Lila would have stolen Mrs. Herrera’s special things. But that was okay, because she’d figure it out while she was writing her story.

But what about the Sam Hawkins mystery? How could she get to the bottom of that? She had no information, no leads, no theories. All she had was a series of observations—her own and a couple of other kids’—that Sam was back, but back in a sneaky, mysterious sort of way.

Well, observations were a start, Ellie decided. Now it was time to look for actual clues. And to start writing.

It was a dark and stormy morning, she wrote, and then crossed it out. The day started the way every day did, except this day was different. Nope, nope.

No one knew who did it, but Ellie Barker was going to find out.

No one knew why the boy was back, but Ellie Barker was going to find out.

Yes! That was it. That was her beginning.

Now all she had to find out was what happened next.