Be careful what you wish for.
That’s what my parents always say. I’d wished and wished that we could be on a new assignment with Nanny X. And now here we were in a canoe on the Potomac, way earlier than I ever wake up on Saturday morning, staring into a tangle of pink worms.
At least we had a case. But why did it take NAP so long to give it to us? Maybe they had decided, like the CIA, that Nanny X was getting too old for the special-agent business. Maybe they’d decided Nanny X wasn’t good enough. Or what if the problem wasn’t Nanny X? What if it was us?
I didn’t want to believe it, but the possibility stuck to me, like dog hair on a sweater. The only way to unstick it was to solve the case. Fast.
“Don’t you think The Angler will be watching the White House?” I said. “To see if the president installs the statue?”
“Possibly,” she said. “But let’s look at what we know. The Angler is an artist whose work features a fish. Artists like to be near the things that inspire them. You should know that, Alison.”
It was true. One of my paintings had just been chosen for an outdoor exhibit on the National Mall, which is not a place where people shop, by the way, but an open space in D.C. with lots of museums and monuments. I’d submitted a painting of Yeti for the exhibit. When I had to fill out the part about what inspired me, I wrote: “I am inspired by the people and animals that I see every day.” If The Angler was inspired by fish, maybe we were in the right place.
“My theory is that The Angler would want to stay close to the White House in order to carry out his threat,” Nanny X said. “The Potomac is a mile from the White House—and from museums that are stuffed with treasures. I believe The Angler is close by. Waiting.”
My mind was already making a list of treasures that could be at risk: The National Gallery of Art had paintings by loads of famous people. Abraham Lincoln’s hat and Kermit the Frog were in the Museum of American History. The books in the Library of Congress were treasures. So were the cherry trees near the Tidal Basin, and themselves the other monuments.
Nanny X pressed a night crawler onto her hook and cast her line into the water. She let it dangle there and handed the container to Jake, who baited his hook and handed the night crawlers to me.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“I know they’re not your cup of tea, Alison,” said Nanny X, which made me think about night crawlers squirming around in a teacup, which was disgusting. “Why don’t you try tying some flies?”
Flies sounded even worse than worms. But instead of handing me a tub of flies, Nanny X reached into a tackle box and handed me a book: Fly-Tying for Beginners by Buzz Bachelder. Then she handed me a bag of feathers, a hook, a gripper-thingy and a spool of thick black thread. The idea was to tie the feathers to the hook and make it look like a real insect. Only none of the flies in the book looked like insects I’d seen before. They were fun to tie, though. I started with yellow and orange feathers, and wound the thread around them. It was a great way to practice my knot-tying, which is something I do to keep from biting my fingernails. Also, the flies were kind of cute.
Jake and I took turns helping Nanny X paddle. We paused on the other side of the island, and she reached into the diaper bag and pulled out a bottle of baby powder. When she turned the end with the holes in it, no puffs of powder came out. Instead, the bottom of the bottle opened to reveal a lens. A baby-powder spyglass. She peered into the trees of Roosevelt Island. Then she passed the glass to me. It was crystal clear—not like regular binoculars, where you can never get the focus right. I didn’t see anything suspicious, though.
The sky was brighter as we moved the canoe downstream toward the Tidal Basin and into deeper water. White clouds floated like marshmallows, toasted by the sun.
Nanny X took one of my flies, a blue one, and added it to her hat. It was like when my parents put one of my drawings on the refrigerator. Eliza sat on the bottom of the boat, babbling and scribbling in a coloring book.
“When I go fishing with Ethan,” Jake said, “I catch something.”
He had a point. I hadn’t even seen many ripples in the water. Oh, the water moved, and you could see the current and feel it as it tugged our boat downstream. But those little ripples you’re supposed to see when a fish comes up for air or a turtle ducks his head underwater? Nothing.
We spotted some boaters upstream and Nanny X held the spyglass to her sunglasses. I could tell even without the spyglass that they didn’t look like the sort of people who had just threatened the president with a nine-foot fish sculpture. It made me wonder if the White House got other strange threats, like: Sign this law or I’ll hit you with a salami.
Then I heard a bloop, like the sound the water drops make when the sink is leaking. I saw a ripple.
“There!” I pointed. “A fish.”
“I don’t see anything.” Jake moved to the front of the boat, where Yeti was perched, and stood up to get a better view.
Yeti must have seen something in the water, too, because his nose was pointed right at the ripple.
The canoe rocked back and forth. Jake held up his fishing rod like he was on a tightrope and that was the pole he needed for balance.
Then the canoe hit a rush of water. We bounced, like we were going over a speed bump. The canoe turned sideways.
“Weeeee,” yelled Eliza.
My brother yelled, too. He dropped his fishing pole and tumbled over the side of the canoe, right into the Potomac.
“Jake!” My brother swims about as well as a copper sculpture of a fish. “Jake!”
Yeti jumped in after him, because he’s pretty much the best dog in the world. But the current snatched them both, and they drifted down the middle of the river.