The part of me that isn’t good at taking orders wanted to run out of the bathroom and chase after Nanny X. But it was tricky since I was supposed to be taking care of my little sister. Besides, Nanny X had left the building. The spinach stain, the squash stain, and the carrot stain were racing across the bib now. Purple light = map of Lovett. Right.
Eliza and I sat down on the tile floor of the men’s room and started sifting through the diaper bag. Teddy bear? No light and probably dangerous. Baby powder? Dangerous. Diapers? Lethal. Baby food? Disgusting.
I opened a book called Moo, Sweet Cow, and—
MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. It was the sort of sound a cow would make if it was about the size of Godzilla. Not “sweet”; scary. The walls of the bathroom shook. Eliza started to cry. I slammed the book shut, but no one came running in to catch us or help us. The building must have been deserted. Finally I found a bunch of pacifiers. The yellow ones were labeled Stinky Binky. But there was one purple pacifier marked Blazing Binky. That looked promising. Gently, I squeezed the sucky part. A soft purple light began to glow. I held it over the bib and found the stains, which were now moving across a map of Lovett. Somehow they’d gotten all the way over to Turner Street. We couldn’t catch them on foot.
I went back to the bag and got more of the crackers that Nanny X had allowed Eliza to eat earlier. We each ate one, after I took a tiny bite to make sure it wasn’t another listening device. Which made me think about the first one.
Nanny X had said “Wait here,” but “here” didn’t necessarily mean the bathroom, did it? “Here” could have just meant the building in general. And our teething biscuit was still sitting on the floor of Mr. Strathmore’s office. If Eliza and I got it back, we’d be doing something. And maybe we could use it again.
The hall was quiet. Mr. Strathmore’s door was open but the light was off. Still, the light from the hallway lit it up enough that I could see the teething biscuit. Someone had stomped on it. There were crumbs and, if you looked closely, wires. Even if I hadn’t seen the wires, I would have known it was a fake: Nothing can destroy a real teething biscuit. I didn’t need an eavesdropping device to hear the sound that came next, though: footsteps. I whisked Eliza the rest of the way into the office and kneeled down in a dark corner.
“Shh,” I said.
“Ssss,” she said back.
My knees hit something slimy and squishy that smelled like breakfast. Actually, they hit a whole pile of squishy stuff. I reached down and found myself holding the peel of a recently eaten banana, just as the footsteps went by the office. First one set, and then—another.
Nanny X hadn’t mentioned two operatives; she’d said there would be one. Maybe the food stains were wrong! Maybe Nanny X had grabbed Jake and the two of them had managed to escape! But I’d been hearing Jake’s footsteps most of my life; these didn’t sound like them. And whoever was running down the hall was wearing tennis shoes, not pilgrim shoes.
The footsteps stopped at what had to be the men’s bathroom. I heard the door open. Then close.
“Ssss?” Eliza asked me.
“Sneak attack,” I told her. “Let’s go.”
Quietly, so that our feet made barely any noise, Eliza and I made our way toward the bathroom. The door began to open. I pressed myself flat against the wall outside, just in case, as Eliza reached into the diaper bag for another cracker. She came out with a book. “Weed,” she said, which is her word for “read.”
“No, Eliza,” I whispered. “Remember what happened last time.” MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
The bathroom door opened the rest of the way, and a head poked out—a head I recognized. Only it didn’t belong to my brother or Nanny X or Yeti. It didn’t even belong to Big Adam. It belonged to—
“Stinky! You’re free!” I said.
“Ali! Are you okay?”
He turned back into the bathroom, and his voice echoed: “It’s okay, Boris, I found them.”
Boris came out of the bathroom, grinning. “Ah,” he said. “Moo, Sweet Cow. The times we had with that book. Remember, Daniel?”
Stinky put his hands over his ears and nodded.
Wait. They knew about Moo, Sweet Cow? That meant the Lentil Nanny must be Nanny X’s operative! Okay, I always thought that it was a little strange that Stinky had a male nanny, because he was pretty much the only male nanny I knew. But he’d always taken really good care of Stinky, even if he hadn’t fed him very well. He gave better piggyback rides than anyone we knew, and he sang a lot, mostly songs he had learned growing up in Jamaica. I just figured that Stinky’s mom had searched extra hard for a male role model, since Stinky’s dad wasn’t around. Parents do stuff like that.
But if Boris was in NAP, Stinky must have known. And even if he was sworn to secrecy and all of that, he was supposed to be my friend! I would almost have been mad at him, except that we didn’t have time if we were going to find my brother and my dog. And Nanny X.
Stinky ran up like he was going to hug me, but he stopped when he was about a foot away and put his hands in his pockets. But Boris grabbed my shoulders. “You are okay then, yes?” he said. He was tall, with wild hair and dark skin. He had a patch of beard just below his lower lip. He looked more like a rock star than a nanny. “You have not been alone long?”
“Not very,” I said. I looked at Stinky. “When did you get out?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” he said. “I’m on bail, just like on TV. I’m still supposed to appear in court and everything, but they couldn’t keep me overnight for—I forget exactly how your mother worded it—something like ‘a youth of good standing and tender age accused of committing a minor infraction with less than flimsy circumstantial evidence, no weapon, and no eyewitnesses, this is total bunk.’ I’m not supposed to leave town, but it’s not like my mom would let me go anywhere, anyway; we have school.”
School and Ms. Bertram seemed a zillion years away.
I looked at Boris. “You’re in NAP?” I asked, no doubt wowing everybody with those amazing powers of observation I was supposed to have.
“Since Daniel was very small,” he said. “Of course, it was much easier to carry the equipment when I had a diaper bag, like yours.” He reached toward it. “May I?”
“I guess so.”
I handed him the bag, and he began going through it the way Eliza and I had in the bathroom. “Baby powder, excellent. Diapers! How I miss them. I know you don’t, Daniel, but they were incredibly useful. In more ways than one.”
Boris sighed, the way grown-ups do when they’re talking about old memories. He handed back the bag and reached for Eliza. She’s usually a little shy about going to people she doesn’t know well, but Boris bounced her up and down and tickled her under the chin. She tried to grab his tuft of beard.
“So,” Boris said. “You two are safe. This is important, yes? But no one has come back? Not your brother? Your nanny? Not the dog?”
“No one.” My stomach got that same feeling it got when I was five and got lost at the state fair in Richmond.
Boris put a hand on my head. “Do not worry,” he said. “Your nanny is very smart and has excellent training. We will find them in no time. Do you have a tracking device? I’m not sure what is standard issue for nannies with young charges. When Daniel was small, it was a box of Goldfish crackers.”
I handed him the bib. The food stains were still in motion.
“Ingenious!” Boris said. “Come. My car’s outside.” Holding Eliza like she was some sort of golden trophy instead of a toddler with a little bit of drool on her face, he walked out of the building.
It’s a good thing there were only four of us, because Boris’s car was so small he probably could have given it a piggyback ride.
Boris reached into the diaper bag and pulled out the teddy bear. He squeezed its hand. It started to expand, like it was attached to an air pump or something. In seconds it inflated into a car seat for Eliza. He fitted it into the back, and Stinky and I squeezed in next to her.
Boris sat in the front, his long legs bent at an angle that didn’t seem good for driving.
“If we hold the bib under this light, we can see a map of Lovett,” I said, holding out the pacifier.
“That is one way,” Boris said. “Let me try something.”
He took the bib and crammed it into a slot just below the CD player. Suddenly colored dots, the same colors as the food stains, appeared on a purple screen in the dashboard.
“When we used Goldfish boxes, we just inserted them in here,” he said. “I hoped this might be compatible as well.” A monotone female voice called out: Turn right on Coleman Avenue. Turn left on Watts Street.
Boris followed the directions, glancing at the purple screen and making predictions. “It looks like they’re headed into the District,” he said. “No. Wait. Maybe Leesburg?”
Turn right on Wallace Street.
That reminded me of Howard Wallace, who is one of Jake’s favorite baseball players. I wondered if my brother was scared. He has the Pringle Stomach, which means he gets kind of nauseous when he’s nervous, like my dad. It was a good thing he hadn’t eaten anything but radishes.
