CHAPTER 6

SPY SNAIL

“SO. YOU HAVE COME to beg my forgiveness.” Mrs. Wintermacher sat smugly in her leather office chair.

“Yes, Mrs. Wintermacher,” Eugenia said through a plastered, clownish smile. “We realize how much we took this majestic institution for granted! We love you now!”

“I always loved you!” said Gertrude.

Dee-Dee merely smiled and fidgeted in her chair. She might have said more, had she not been the one holding the Spy Snail inside her Taffetteen overcoat.

Oh dear.

My darlingest reader—my pleasant, intelligent, perhaps redheaded reader, fine if you’re not—I have dropped in a detail that I should have explained before the chapter started.

Let us rewind fifteen minutes, to when the Porches were sitting in Millicent’s car, which was idling on the street in front of Mrs. Wintermacher’s school. They were trying to hide themselves from view, which was difficult in Millicent’s car because it was a Gerbilcar, and though a Gerbilcar may look like a regular car, it is in fact powered by hundreds of gerbils on wheels, and it sounds and smells as such.

“Great getaway car,” Eugenia said. “It blends right in.”

Millicent ignored Eugenia’s famous sarcasm as she reached into a secret compartment beneath the gas pedal. “Today’s mad science etiquette lesson is this: When you suspect foul play, you must be the final snail in the coffin.”

Eugenia sighed. “Don’t you mean ‘final nail in the coffin’?”

“No. I do not misspeak. Please stop insinuating that I do. I said snail.” And from the secret compartment she pulled a moist snail about the size of a football helmet. “This, my pupeels, is a Spy Snail. His name is Lou.”

Though Gertrude liked the look of Lou the snail, who reminded her of her own beloved Salvatore the slug, she was feeling overwhelmed and wondered if maybe there was a difference between having fun looking for holes in an alleyway and engaging in dangerous subterfuge with living equipment.

“Clearly,” said Millicent, “your former headmistress is somehow involved in the stealing of the Kyrgalops egg. What she is up to, we do not know. Thus, we need to gather evidence. Lou will serve as your eyes and ears. If you wear the shell as a helmet, you can see and hear everything that he sees and hears. His antennae can extend up to three feet and are thin enough to fit through a keyhole in a trunk.”

“Wow,” Gertrude whispered reverently. “How will Lou get inside?”

“Oh, you’ll bring him in. You’ll ask to be reinstated in the school, and then you’ll hide in a trunk and spy on Mrs. Wintermacher.”

“What if there is no trunk?” Gertrude asked.

“It is a headmistress’s office,” Millicent said. “Rest assured, there will be a trunk.”¹

Eugenia shook her head. “No. Not happening.”

But one learned quickly that with Millicent Quibb, things you thought weren’t happening were already very much underway.

And that is how the Porch Sisters found themselves groveling in the office of Mrs. Wintermacher, just a day after having been expelled.

“We have come to, um, beg of your sweet mercy, Mrs. Wintermacher,” said Gertrude.

Mrs. Wintermacher twirled a sharp letter opener on the tip of her finger, as though contemplating murder.

“Do you see this portrait of me, children? I just had this painted.”

Behind her hung a grand oil portrait in the classical style depicting Mrs. Wintermacher riding on horseback in traditional ladies’ hunting costume, surrounded by hounds, teeth bared. (Both hers and the hounds’.)

“Did you know that I grew up in squalor?” Mrs. Wintermacher mused. “Yes, I lived in a tiny log cabin in the Swiss coutry-side with my jolly old grandfather. ‘We don’t have much,’ he always said, ‘but we have one another! And isn’t that grand?’”

She stabbed the letter opener into the surface of the desk. “Well, I didn’t think so! I didn’t want pigeon guts for dinner, thank you very much! So I stole all his money and ran away to Frankfurt on my thirteenth birthday, where I became the leader of a gang of pickpockets.

“We were the toughest crew in the city. We started laundering the money through an etiquette school. Eventually I got sick of the life and opened my own chain of etiquette schools. Sold it for three million in ’89, and here I am today.”

She sighed contentedly. “So you see, my little nerds: Today I am the headmistress of a school of etiquette. But tomorrow… I will be so much more. Because Ursula Wintermacher gets everything.”

Gertrude cast a sideways glance at Dee-Dee and Eugenia. Was Mrs. Wintermacher… alright?

“So, sure, come back to my school. It doesn’t matter. Big things are underway, so the point is moot. I will go get your reinstatement forms. You three can scamper on back to class, but please stop at the nurse’s office on your way for a power-hosing and a de-licing. Gourd knows where you three have been.”

Mrs. Wintermacher clomped out of the office and let the door slam behind her.

Instead of wandering off to the nurse’s office for a power-hosing, the Porches located a trunk under Mrs. Wintermacher’s window² and climbed inside.

Gertrude’s heart thudded so hard that it rattled the trunk as she strapped the Spy Snail to the top of her head. I am the mayor of Anxiety City, she thought. I swore I would try to not draw attention to myself anymore and try to keep my sisters safe—and now I’m locked in a trunk in Mrs. Wintermacher’s office with a snail strapped to my head? Maybe I was just hallucinating that the feather was from her hat. Am I hallucinating now? Oh, help me!

Lou’s snail eyes wended their way through the keyhole of the trunk, and suddenly Gertrude could see and hear everything in the office.

It was her job to wear the snail because she was the most comfortable in the intimate presence of slimy creatures.

It was Dee-Dee’s job to spray perfume to cover up the smell of Lou, a smell that could best be described as “old yogurt in a hot car.”

It was Eugenia’s job to keep feeding Lou little bits of a chocolate bar. “Lou is soothed by chocolate,” Millicent had said. “If he doesn’t get his chocolate, he will make a sound. You’ll know the sound when you hear it. You don’t want him to make the sound.” Eugenia had rolled her eyes, but she certainly didn’t want Mrs. Wintermacher to hear Lou make the sound, whatever it was.

A moment later, Gertrude watched as Mrs. Wintermacher returned to her office, reinstatement forms in hand. She tossed the forms onto her desk and opened a large file drawer below. Then, to Gertrude’s surprise, instead of placing the forms into the drawer, Mrs. Wintermacher pulled out a large piece of granite.

“Snuggles, my priceless angel… are you ready for your snack? Mummy has your snack!”

Mrs. Wintermacher stood on her tiptoes and lifted the gargantuan hunting portrait from a hook on the wall behind her, then set the painting on the ground.

There, in the section of wall where the oil portait had hung a moment ago, was a rectangular hole about the size of a fireplace, cordoned off by steel bars—and beyond the steels bars was a dark void.

Suddenly, a creature emerged from the blackness—an enormous worm covered in sharp red scales, with four eyes and a round mouth lined with a circle of thick stone teeth, teeth that turned and gnashed like the stone gears of a prehistoric clock. Gertrude knew it instantly.

“It’s a Kyrgalops!” Gertrude whispered. “She has a Kyrgalops!”

Gertrude suddenly felt that her body was made of loose pudding. It was easy to imagine that Mrs. Wintermacher, the woman who had tortured them with napkin-folding lessons and salad-eating contests, was perhaps a wearer of fur coats or an eater of veal—but never did it cross the sisters’ minds that she might secretly be a dangerous mad science outlaw.

After much grunting and straining, Mrs. Wintermacher managed to shove the heavy rock through the bars of the Kyrgalops cage. The worm gnashed at the granite and pulverized it in an instant with its grinding teeth.

“Good boy, Snuggles! Soon, my darling, when you are big enough, you will serve your purpose. You will live out your destiny, and I will live out mine!”

Just then, the phone rang.

“Mrs. Wintermacher’s School of Etiquette for Girls, how may I direct your call?” she said. She looked around to make sure no one was listening, then began again. “Yes, ’tis I.… Yes, the worm has been contained.… There was minor damage, a few bricks, a bent lamppost, and the unfortunate matter of the marble dog’s decimated ponytail.… Yes, the cage has been reinforced, but the worm is ravenous, and it can eat through the bars.… I have been feeding it a granite block every fifteen minutes to keep it sated—I’ve barely slept.” She sighed, trying in vain to wrestle her desk lamp away from Snuggles. “But rest assured, I will contain the beast until Sunday, when it will reach full size, whereupon I will lure the worm to the desired location, and we will be off to the races!”

Gertrude stiffened. Today was Wednesday, which was very close to Sunday. What was Mrs. Wintermacher planning to do with the worm on Sunday?

“Thank you for checking in,” said Mrs. Wintermacher. Then she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead in a kind of salute. On her palm was a somewhat shoddy tattoo, a red circle with three letters in the center:

“In the name of our gracious leader, Talon Sharktūth—may he reign forever!”

Mrs. Wintermacher hung up the phone, sank back into her leather chair, and sighed a contented sigh. “Ursula Wintermacher, you brilliant woman,” she said to herself, kicking her feet up on her desk.

And that, my friends, is when the Porches ran out of chocolate.

Eugenia fumbled through the mess of foil wrappers looking for more chocolate, any chocolate—a square, a shard, even a smear—but found none. “I’m all out of snail snacks!” she hissed.

Gertrude pulled Lou the Snail from atop her head and bounced him in her lap, hoping that might soothe him. He jerked his snail head this way and that, searching every corner of the trunk for chocolate, poking the children with his wandering googly eyes. Then, unable to find even a morsel, the snail began… TO WHINE.

And oh, how he whined. He whined like a boy in a candy store being told he cannot have any more gummy peaches; he whined like a Lavinia at Christmas being told that there were no presents left to open; he whined a wailing whine, an insistent wine, a whine so piercing that the Porches had to cover their ears to survive it.

“Who is whining?” they heard Mrs. Wintermacher say. “Snuggles? No, not Snuggles…” She clomped around the office in her steel-toed boots. The sisters clung to one another as her footfalls drew closer.

“I have loved you all,” Dee-Dee said. “May our souls meet again one day for quiche.”

The sisters squeezed their eyes shut and listened to the sickening sounds of their own imminent demise: Mrs. Wintermacher’s steel-toed boots clicking ominously toward the trunk, her fingernails wedging themselves under the lid, the metal hinges creaking open. The end, it seemed, was nigh.

Then: another sound, a miraculous sound!

“Excuse me, Madam Wintermacher?” Someone was shouting from the hallway—and the Porches had a good idea of who it might be.

“Oh, what now?” Mrs. Wintermacher grumbled, dropping the lid of the trunk like a dead fish.

“My name is Professor Alsacia McAlistair Flemingbottom. I seek a position at the school.”

The girls peered out from the trunk. Mrs. Wintermacher had left the office and slammed the door behind her. Even from the confines of the trunk, the Porches could hear the unmistakable vocal stylings of Millicent Quibb reverberating through the hallway.

“I owned a chain of etiquette schools in my native town of… McScotland… shire. I am known as one of the hardest disciplinarians in the business.” Millicent’s accent was so thick and so fake that one couldn’t tell whether she was pretending to be from Scotland or Saturn.

“Hardest disciplinarian, you say?”

“Yes,” Millicent replied. “I… hit the children with rocks! Yes. In the head. With small rocks.”

“I see. Well, we don’t do that here,” Mrs. Wintermacher said, turning back toward her office. “Much as I would like to. Good day.”

Quickly, the Porches darted from the trunk and struggled to pry open the window behind Mrs. Wintermacher’s desk.

“Wait! I was kidding about the rocks!” Millicent said. “In reality, I am an expert in the areas of napkin folding, harpsichord cleaning, casually glancing at watches…”

While Mrs. Wintermacher listened impatiently, the girls managed to wedge the window open, then dropped into a nearby shrub and ran for their lives!

“… eating peas one at a time, folding the hands in the lap—”

“Thank you, Professor Flemingbottom, but we already cover those areas in our curriculum, and we won’t be needing help at this time.”

“Shame,” said Millicent, peering into the empty office. Satisfied that her pupils had gone, she spun on her heels and strutted away.

Mrs. Wintermacher hurried into her office and found everything as it was before, save for the trunk, which was now… open.

“Curious,” she murmured.

She hunched over the trunk to find it empty, as usual, save for… a mess of empty chocolate wrappers and the scent of perfume. “Curiouser.”

She riffled through the wrappers and found them empty, save for a few shards of chocolate and a faded sticker no bigger than a postage stamp: a label, of all things. It read:

“Well, I’ll be darned!” Mrs. Wintermacher said to the Kyrgalops, who had already crunched through two of the new steel bars over its den. She hurried over and lifted another granite block to the worm’s lips. “My, you are a hungry beast. There, there. Well, Snuggles—it may interest you to know that it looks like the legendary buzzkill Millicent Quibb may be still alive…

BUT NOT FOR LONG.”

Footnotes

1 “All headmistresses’ offices must contain at least one big, heavy trunk.” Town Codes of Antiquarium, Section 5.98B.

2 See? All headmistresses have trunks!