By the time we had finished planning the mission, the butcher paper looked like a giant comic book panel.
It started with a diagram of Mrs. White’s house, arrows pointing to the front door, the garage door, and the keypad for the security code.
We knew that Crowley didn’t bring the dogs inside his house, but because the processes and procedures document said WITHE held them for seventy-two hours, we decided the dogs must be somewhere in Mrs. White’s house.
She had hired me to do lots of odd jobs inside over the last two years. I once swept the cobwebs from the ceiling corners in her basement. I had painted a spare room upstairs. And I had cleaned out all her kitchen cabinets, emptying each drawer and wiping it down before applying new contact paper. I knew the inside of her house, and the only place she could hide dogs for longer periods of time without anyone noticing would be the basement: our target location.
Next to the picture of her house was a square labeled Step One with a close-up of the garage keypad and the code I had been entering myself for two years: 1065. We would enter through the garage to the side door.
Step’s Two and Three were in the same square. In CindeeRae’s swirly handwriting was a close-up of the side door with another keypad beneath a doorbell. We would run to the keypad and shut the door before Mrs. White could hear anything. Step Three: Open the door with the house key hidden above the door frame. If that didn’t work, we had learned how to pick a lock for the failed mission in Crowley’s garage.
I had drawn the square for Step Four, which included a map of the house’s main floor, with a dotted line traveling from the garage through the kitchen, past the back door, and down the stairs. At the top of the landing, Madeleine would stand watch.
On Step Five, March, CindeeRae, and I would stop any potential barking by giving the dogs peanut-butter tortilla wraps—we couldn’t afford to have yapping dogs foil another mission.
Step Six also took place in the basement, where we would retrieve the dogs and escape through the back door of Mrs. White’s house, which Madeleine would open for us as she waited on the landing. We’d cut through the backyard to a gate at the side that opened onto my street. If we were being chased, we would run to my house, where the front door would be unlocked. If we left undetected, we would get our bikes from my backyard and go back to our homes before our parents even realized we were missing.
Like a signature, CindeeRae, Madeleine, and I had each drawn a small picture of our dogs in the bottom right-hand corner of the butcher paper.
“That looks good.” I stepped back to take in the big picture and then scribbled the steps in my Sleuth Chronicle.
“We are breaking and entering.” March filed his markers back into the box with a sigh.
CindeeRae patted his arm. “Think of it as hacking into her house.”
I handed them their Zoo Crew packs. “It has everything from before, including a few extras.”
“Extras?” March asked.
“The peanut-butter wraps, and either a lightsaber or a wand.”
“Lightsaber or wand. For what?”
“Protection?” I shrugged. “I was just jamming stuff in there at the end.”
March rolled up the butcher paper and folded it to the size of a newspaper, cramming it into his pack. We all watched until he was finally able to work the zipper closed, sighing loudly before realizing we had been watching him the whole time. He blushed.
“So we meet at my place, midnight,” I said.
They all nodded like everything we had just planned was perfectly reasonable.