It was like we were on one of those TV shows where everybody falls out of the closet at the same time. Jake, Stinky and I burst through the revolving door carrying Eliza. But the squirrel had disappeared again. I looked left and right and even up. Nothing. It felt like third grade when I’d kicked the ball in the wrong direction during a soccer game. I thought I was clear for my first goal, but it turned out I was just helping the other team. This time I wasn’t helping anybody. Except maybe the squirrel.
“Boris?” Stinky yelled. I guess he thought it was okay to use our outside voices now that we were outside the museum. But everyone around us was still using their inside voices. They looked up when Stinky yelled, except for some lady who was staring at a video game. “Where are you? Boris? Boris!”
He came over with Howard, Yeti and the stroller.
“What did you find?” he asked.
“The squirrel,” Jake said. “But he got away. Did you see him?”
“I did not see your squirrel,” he said. “But I did find some mysterious dust.” Boris has lived in the U.S. since he was a little kid, but he was born in Jamaica so sometimes he has a leftover accent. Words like “mysterious” sound more musical when he says them.
“There was some under the missing picture in the museum,” I told him. “It was mysterious, too; not like regular sawdust.”
“Paper?” Boris asked. “Or perhaps canvas?”
We nodded.
“That means that painting did not disappear, like the headline said, eh?” said Boris.
“No,” Jake said. “It means it was destroyed.”
“And our No. 1 suspect?” he asked.
“Still Ursula,” I told him. “She’s our only suspect. Unless you count the squirrel.”
“Because she sculpts fish and smeared salmon pâté on our reviewer friend.”
“He’s not a friend,” Stinky reminded Boris.
“No,” Boris said. “Not of ours and not of Ursula’s.”
That made me remember something. “Wait a minute. Mr. Huffleberger said he’d seen her work before, a long time ago, at a fair. They may not be friends, but they must have met. At least once.”
Boris nodded, slowly, and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He punched in the names “Ursula” and “Bartholomew Huffleberger.”
Two articles flashed onto the screen. One was the review we’d already seen in Artsy Bartsy. The other was a 1974 article from the Calvert City Messenger. The article said that Ursula Marie Noodleman was the first-place winner in the county fair’s painting category for ages twelve and under. She also took first place in the electronics competition, and she won third place for her goat in the juniors division. Mr. Huffleberger was only listed once, in the twelve-and-under painting category. “Honorable mention,” it said.
Mr. Huffleberger and Ursula had known each other a long time ago because Ursula had beaten him.
“I’ll bet he couldn’t wait for the chance to give her a bad review,” I said.
Jake nodded. “It was revenge.”
“And now,” said Stinky, picking up the story, “it’s Ursula’s turn to strike back.”
“That’s what she’s been doing all day,” I said. “That’s what she’s still doing.” We just needed to figure out where she’d strike next.
Yeti barked at a squirrel running across the sidewalk. It was light gray instead of dark brown like our squirrel, so Yeti was the only one who wanted to chase it. Then we heard Howard’s “Eeee!”
He’d spotted a squirrel, too, with dark fur and sad eyes. And this time it was the squirrel we were looking for. That meant it wasn’t just a coincidence that he was hanging out at the sculpture garden when Montauban lost his thumb, or that we’d seen him at the museum when something had eaten half of a pitcher by Paul Revere. That squirrel and Ursula were working together. Jake’s Freaky Facts book was right: Squirrels could be trained for espionage. Or destruction.
“Let’s go!” I said.
“But Nanny X is still in the museum unchecking her bag,” Jake said.
“She’ll catch up,” Boris said, putting Eliza in the stroller. “She’s very spry.”
So was the squirrel. Soon we were passing my dad’s museum—Hooray, the squirrel had left it alone!—but we were heading for the Museum of American History, which was full of treasures, too. I didn’t know if any of them counted as tall, like the treasure The Angler threatened to attack next. But they were all in danger.
I was still holding onto Hop, Sweet Bunny, the book Nanny X had given me. It was my only weapon. I pulled back the book’s cover, which showed an angelic bunny dancing in a field of carrots. It screamed, twice as loud as Moo, Sweet Cow. It screamed like that bunny was being chased around the Beltway by a three-hundred-pound fox.
Everyone around us froze and covered their ears. Birds flew out of trees. A squirrel (not ours) dropped the french fry he was carrying.
But the squirrel we were chasing didn’t stop or flinch. The squirrel we were chasing kept running.
Jake pulled out his stink-bomb pacifier. He squeezed the nib and threw it. Hard-boiled-egg smoke poured out. People’s hands moved from their ears to their noses. But the stink bomb didn’t stop the squirrel, either.
Jake and Stinky were huffing from running. So was Yeti.
One person was not huffing. And that was Nanny X. She’d put on her pink bunny slippers again, and now she was gliding past us with her elbows out, like she was practicing for the roller derby. She sailed through the stinky smoke just in time to see the squirrel ignore the No Animals sign and sneak through the museum door with a family of six.
This time Nanny X ignored the No Animals sign, too. By the time we caught up with her, she’d already changed back into her black Pilgrim shoes, flashed our badges at the guard and motioned us to follow her inside.
“Why didn’t you just do that at the art gallery?” I asked.
“It didn’t feel like as much of an emergency,” she said.
“Mergenthee,” said Eliza. It was the longest word she’d ever said.
“Exactly,” said Stinky.
The squirrel had left the lobby, so we split up again to look for him.
“We meet back here in ten minutes,” Nanny X said, pointing to a circle in the floor design.
“What if we don’t find him by then?” asked Jake.
“Then another treasure,” said Nanny X, “will have bitten the dust.” The expression had a whole new meaning now.
Jake headed downstairs toward the trains, which are his favorite part of the museum. Nanny X and Eliza went with him, while Boris and a not-so-delicate Yeti headed for the Star-Spangled Banner. Maybe that counted as tall. Boris had Yeti’s leash wrapped tightly around his wrist. “Keep that tail under control,” Boris told Yeti. “No wagging until we’re back outside.”
Stinky and I took Howard and tried to decide between Lincoln’s hat (which might count as tall), the first ladies’ gowns (which could count as tall, too) and Dorothy’s ruby slippers (not tall but very popular). What would attract a squirrel most? What would attract The Angler?
Then we saw a sign with a woman holding an enormous fish. “That’s it,” I said. “Julia Child’s Kitchen.”
Julia Child was a famous TV chef back when my grandmother was learning to cook. She was at least six feet tall.
We hurried downstairs to the exhibit. There he was! Julia Child’s kitchen was mostly closed off by plastic, but a panel was missing, and the squirrel considered that an invitation to climb on top of Julia’s counter, right next to the sink. He was holding a fake grape.
“We could jump it,” Stinky said. Howard nodded. I’ll bet he wished he had Julia Child’s recipe for bananas flambé. I wished I had something—anything—to stop that squirrel.
And then I realized that I did. My pockets weren’t as deep as Boris’s and I didn’t have as many of them, but there was some fishing line and thread in there, from when I was tying flies. I had a tiny weight, too, the size of a pebble. I threaded the fishing line through the weight and twirled it for a second, like a bola.
Then I loosened my grip and let the weight fly. It wrapped around the squirrel’s tail. Maybe my true calling was being a cowgirl.
As the fishing line went tight, a couple of ladies who had been admiring Julia’s pots screamed. I thought the squirrel would break the line and run away, but that’s when Howard ran right into the exhibit. He took one of Julia Child’s copper sauté pans off of the wall and conked the squirrel over the head with it. He brought the squirrel over to us. It was still kicking. Stinky wrapped some more fishing line and my black thread around its arms and legs. I tied the knots.
“It could have rabies!” shouted one of the women.
“It’s a robot,” Stinky said, showing off the metal underneath the fur.
But how would a robot know its way around the Museum of American History?
I thought about the drone that had brought Howard to us. It worked two ways, according to Nanny X: Remote programming and remote control. Someone must be controlling the squirrel.
My mind flashed back to the woman who’d been playing the video game outside the museum. Only now I was pretty sure it wasn’t a video game. And I was pretty sure of something else, too: The woman was Ursula.
This time she hadn’t left us an almost decent rhyming note, but maybe that was because she hadn’t had the chance yet. The Angler was on the move. And so were we.