by Kate Messner
“Wait!” Anna held up a hand. Her fingernails were black with pink polka dots today. “Your dad squeezed the ear? And felt something in there?”
Mia nodded. “Just a broken speaker. The same thing happened with Gram’s moose.”
“Your grandma got a creepy moose, too?” Clover asked.
“Yeah.” Mia’s head was spinning. “And her moose had a broken speaker, too.”
“What if those aren’t broken speakers?” Anna said. “What if they’re listening devices?”
“Somebody put a bug under a desk in a book I read once,” Clover said. “It’s totally a thing criminals do.”
“Where’d you get that moose again?” Anna asked.
Mia told her more about Mr. Jacobson. “But he’s always helping Gram,” she said. “And why would he want her farm to fail? He hasn’t tried to buy it or anything.”
“Maybe he’s working with Potsworth,” Clover said. “Just because somebody acts friendly doesn’t mean he’s a good guy,”
“Yeah.” Mia knew that.
“Where are those moose right now?” Anna asked.
“Mine’s in our kitchen. Gram gave hers away to a preschool a while ago.”
“Good,” Anna said. “If somebody’s listening to that one, all they’re hearing is ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and the alphabet song. But can you bring yours to camp tomorrow?”
“I guess.” That felt creepy to Mia if the moose was really listening to things. But it couldn’t be, right? If an eavesdropping moose showed up in some TV spy movie, she’d laugh at how dumb it was. Even Clover’s weirdest mystery-novel villains had more sensible ideas than that. “Do you really think this is possible?”
“Maybe,” Anna said. “Bring it in and I can tell you for sure.”
Mia felt creeped out again. “But if it might be a bug, shouldn’t I smash its ear with a rock or something and break it so it doesn’t work anymore?”
“No!” Clover said. “If you do that, whoever planted it will know that you know, and he’ll be able to destroy whatever other evidence is out there to tie him to the crime.”
“She’s right,” Anna said. “If this turns out to be a bug, we can use that to our advantage to figure out what’s really going on. But we can only do that if the person who planted it thinks everything is fine.” She turned to Mia. “You understand what this means, right?”
Mia’s skin crawled. “My moose is a double agent now, so I have to let it keep listening to us in the kitchen?”
“Just for tonight,” Anna said. “Then bring it in tomorrow and we’ll figure out what’s up.”
“Be careful,” Clover added. “Don’t say anything about anything in front of the moose.”
CHAPTER 19
The Moose Has Ears
Everybody got home late that night, so dinner was sandwiches on the couch. Mia was relieved she didn’t have to deal with the eavesdropping moose until it was time to do dishes.
“You had a busy day,” Mom said. “How was that speaker you went to see this morning?”
“Good,” Mia said. “She talked about her businesses and everything.” That wasn’t what Mia would remember most about Anne Marie, but she wasn’t ready to talk to Mom about that. And she sure didn’t want to talk about it in front of the moose. “How was your preliminary hearing today?” That seemed like a safer conversation. Maybe they could bore the moose to death.
“Well, it was complicated,” Mom said, and went on about some motion for something to be dismissed and why it might not be. Mia nodded and dried the plates. When she was finished, she took the moose up to her room.
She didn’t want the moose up there, but she also didn’t want Mom or Dad to say something important in front of it, so she shoved it deep into one of the boxes in her closet and got ready for bed. She didn’t get much sleep. She was too creeped out about the moose maybe listening to her breathe.
“Bringing a friend today?” Mom asked when Mia plopped the moose down beside her in the car the next morning.
“I thought I’d share it as an example of a successful product.” That was the plan if anybody asked about the moose at Launch Camp, too. It was easier than trying to explain that they thought it might be a spy.
“Have fun!” Mom said when she dropped Mia off. Clover and Anna were waiting at the door.
“That’s it, huh?” Anna said.
“Yep.” Mia held out the moose.
“That’s super cute,” Clover said. “No wonder they’ve been so successful.” She gave Mia a look that said “obviously-the-moose-is-terrible-but-don’t-forget-to-play-along-with-this-because-it-might-be-listening.”
“Right,” Mia said.
They took the moose inside and got set up at a maker-space table. Anna scribbled a note and slid it across the table.
Keep talking about how cool the moose is while I work on this.
Mia and Clover nodded. Anna picked up a tiny pair of scissors and started snipping stitches on the moose’s ear.
“So,” Mia said. “It’s a pretty great moose, right?” She was a terrible moose faker.
“It’s neat that they talk.” Clover reached out and squeezed the ear Anna wasn’t cutting open.
“Hello from Vermont!” the moose called out, just as Anna pulled a half-dollar-size electronic-looking thing out of its other ear.
Mia grabbed the pen.
Can you tell what it is?
Anna turned the round thing over in her hands for a few seconds and then nodded. Mia handed her the pen.
Definitely a small listening/transmitting device. I’ve seen this kind before.
Keep talking while I take out the SD card.
“So,” Mia said. “What do you think you’ll try at Warrior Camp tomorrow?”
Clover said something about the spider wall, but Mia wasn’t paying attention because her eyes were glued to the tiny rectangle Anna had just ejected from the moose’s ear recorder. Anna popped the card into her laptop and put the rest of the recorder back in the moose’s ear.
“Hey, Mia!” Anna said. “Could I take your moose home to show my mom? I think she’d like to order one for my cousin’s birthday.”
“Uh … sure,” Mia said.
“Thanks,” Anna said. “I’ll put it with my stuff in the other room so I don’t forget.” She held up an I’ll-be-right-back finger and left with the moose.
“Okay, now we can talk,” Anna said when she returned, mooseless. “The actual listening device is back in the moose, and it’s probably still transmitting to … wherever it’s transmitting. But I have the recording card here. Check this out.” She clicked a play button on the laptop screen, and Mia heard her father’s voice.
“She’s thankful it wasn’t some other insect that carries cricket diseases.”
Then Mia heard herself. “There are cricket diseases?”
And Dad again. “Apparently. She was telling me about this virus called … what was it?”
Then Mom. “CPV.”
Mia stared at the laptop. She looked up at Anna and Clover. “This is all from our kitchen!”
They listened while Dad-on-the-recorder explained how devastating that virus could be to a cricket farm and how that had just happened to a farm in Quebec.
Anna fast-forwarded to another spot on the recording, and Mia heard Gram’s voice.
“As long as we keep our temperature and humidity steady and don’t have any freezer issues, we’ll be in good shape.”
“Both of those things went wrong the very next day!” Mia’s head was spinning. “And you said this thing hasn’t just been recording? There’s been somebody listening to us in our house whenever we talk?”
“Not every second, probably, but yeah,” Anna said. “My guess is that they’re also recording at the remote location. So this card would just be a backup.”
Mia wanted to throw up. But then she thought about Mr. Jacobson, giving her that moose, saying he had it made especially for her. She thought about how he was always showing up to “h
elp” Gram, when really he’d been working with Chet Potsworth the whole time. And the queasiness in her stomach hardened into something else. What kind of terrible person would do that? She wanted to rip that stupid moose’s ear right off and smash the recorder into a million pieces. But she couldn’t. “So what am I supposed to do now? Take that thing home and pretend there’s not some creep spying on my family?”
“Not yet,” Anna said. “I’ll take it home tonight because I have an idea. But then, yeah … you need to take it back and pretend everything’s fine. In order for this to work, this Jacobson guy can’t find out that we know. But trust me. If we do this right, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”
Anna brought the moose back to camp on Thursday. She left it in the hallway so they could talk about it.
“Is the listening device still in there?” Mia asked.
“Yep,” Anna said, “but I also added my own recorder. Prima helped me set it up so—”
“Wait—so now you’re going to spy on me, too? How’s that supposed to help?”
“It’ll help because the moose isn’t going to stay with you,” Anna said. “It’s going back where it came from. You said Mr. Jacobson has an office with a shelf full of moose, right? Do you think you can get in there and swap out your moose for one of the others?”
“You want me to break in to the moose office now?” Mia had practically had a heart attack when they almost got caught in the food-processing plant. She shook her head. “No way.”
“You won’t have to break in,” Clover said.
“I’m not doing that again,” Mia said. “We could have gotten arrested!”
“I know, I know,” Clover said. “But this time, we won’t enter without permission, either. We’ll just stop by to visit. He likes you, right?”
“He pretends to.”
“So we can all go together.” Clover looked over at Anna, who nodded. “We’ll tell him we need advice from a successful entrepreneur. Then two of us can distract him while the other one swaps out the moose.”
Mia ran through that scenario in her head. It seemed slightly less terrifying than the processing plant ordeal. It also seemed like it might work. And there was nothing Mia wanted more than to see Mr. Jacobson and Mr. Potsworth get caught. “Okay.”
“Good,” Clover said. “We’ll do it this weekend.” She pulled out her laptop. “And now we need to get ready for Vermont Launch Junior.”
The maker space was a flurry of activity. Eli and Nick were trying to get KicksFinder into the app store before they had to present. Quan and Bella still had to edit their business plan. Aidan was writing up Cookies for a Cause recipe cards. Dylan and Julia were working on the display board for their jewelry.
Anna’s cricket-harvesting robot was mostly ready, but she was working on a few last-minute changes. Mia had brought in a tub of crickets for testing, and sometimes the arm got glitchy and pivoted back and forth, flinging crickets around. Anna thought she could get that fixed, but she said it was fine even if it was still a little wonky. Prototypes were always like that, and as long as the basic idea was there, they’d be okay.
Mia and Clover had finished most of the competition requirements but had to race through the rest. They’d done pretty well for starting so late, though. Mia was in a great mood by the time Launch Camp wrapped up.
Then she went out to the hallway and remembered the moose.
CHAPTER 20
The Truth about Tumblers
Mia left the moose in her gym bag during Warrior Camp. She did the rings again and tried the warped wall but kept banging her knee because she couldn’t concentrate.
“Come on, warrior!” Maria called as Mia slid down. “Focus!”
The problem was, Mia had too much to focus on. Gram’s troubles at the farm and Vermont Launch Junior and the spying moose she had to carry around now.
When Mia got home, she took the moose straight to her closet and stuffed it into the bottom of a box, under a heap of old Halloween costumes. She had dinner with her parents and talked a little about Vermont Launch Junior. Families were allowed to be in the audience, but thankfully, her mom and dad agreed to skip that. Mia had told them it would make her too nervous, and that was true.
It was also true that Mia didn’t want Mom to know what she and Clover had been working on. Mom would just start in again about how it was time for Gram to retire. She’d laugh at Mia’s plan or, worse, do that thing that adults do where they smile because they think something is cute instead of an actual serious project that you’ve worked hard to prepare.
And they had worked hard. They had Saturday’s presentation all planned out. Mia’s introduction would talk about how insects are a healthy, sustainable protein. Clover would talk about their social media campaign, and Anna would demonstrate the harvesting robot. They had samples to give out, too. Gram had made a batch of barbecue crickets that were really great, so Mia chose those and the sea salt and garlic to share. Gram was so distracted lately that she hadn’t even asked what they were for.
Mia couldn’t stop thinking about that as she got ready for bed. It was hard to believe this ready-to-call-it-a-day Gram was the same person who’d been so excited to show off the cricket farm to her family just a month ago. And it was all because of those awful men and their rotten spying moose. They’d taken away all Gram’s excitement for something she loved so much. Who did they think they were?
Mia flung back her covers, got out of bed, and dug the moose out of the box. She stared at it, and a hard knot of anger tightened in her chest. She knew she had to leave it alone or their plan wouldn’t work. But she wanted to shred it to threads and stuff them into Mr. Jacobson’s stupid, lying mouth. What kind of terrible person pretended to be nice to somebody just so they could hurt them?
Mia’s fingernails dug into the plush moose.
Her eyes stung with tears. She knew what kind.
She dropped the moose on the floor and dragged another box out of the closet. She shoved her hand way down through the wrinkled leotards and sweatshirts and felt around. Where was it? She pulled out trophies and T-shirts and ribbons and warm-up jackets. She pulled out exhibition programs and athletic tape and the towel they gave everybody at the Snowflake Competition the year she was nine.
And then there it was at the bottom of the box.
I’ve been holding on to this for just the right person.
You work so hard on the beam.
You deserve it.
No, Mia thought.
No.
She hadn’t deserved any of it.
She wanted that pin out of her room. Out of her house. She wanted it out of the world.
Mia squeezed her fist tight around the pin and opened her door. Her parents were in their room—she could hear the TV—so she crept past and went downstairs. She opened the kitchen door, let it close slowly so it wouldn’t slam, and stepped onto the porch.
A jigsaw puzzle of a moon was shining through the branches of the neighbor’s oak tree, lighting up Mom’s garden with the rock wall. The crickets were chirping. The males, anyway. Mia wanted to scream at all those quiet female crickets.
Say something!
Chirp!
Mia walked barefoot through the cool grass. She pulled a big, flat rock off the garden wall onto the lawn and set the pin on top of it, right in the center. She had felt so special with that pin.
All the way from the Olympics.
Just the right person.
Mia grabbed another rock and knelt in the damp grass. She lifted the rock high over her head and smashed it down onto the pin as hard as she could. Shards of enamel flew into the grass. Mia let them go. She lifted the rock and brought it down again.
You deserve it.
Again and again, until all that was left was a bent-up, scratched metal post and a pile of dust.
Mia blew it away.
She sat back, breathing hard. The hair around her temples was damp with sweat. She hadn’t even noticed she was crying until a breeze
swept in and cooled the tears on her cheeks.
Mia took a long, deep breath of dark, quiet air. She stood up and put the rocks back on her mother’s garden wall.
Then she went back inside to bed. And slept.
Mia was having cereal when her mom came downstairs Friday morning. “You’re an early bird today,” Mom said.
Mia nodded. “Last day of Launch Camp before the competition.” Zoya had added a Friday session so they’d have one more day to work.
“We need to leave a little early to pick up Gram, okay? I’m taking her to an eye doctor appointment after I drop you off.”
“I’ll be ready in, like, five minutes.”
“I’m so glad you decided to do that camp.” Mom poured a cup of coffee. “And oh! Did I tell you that it looks like Fiona will get to go to Tumblers after all?”
“What?” Mia’s cereal felt like sawdust in her mouth.
“Fiona got into Tumblers! Isn’t that great?”
Mia couldn’t answer. Her heart was pounding so fast, she thought it might burst out and keep going right through the kitchen door.
“They had a last-minute opening.” Mom kept going. “Aunt Abby says Fiona won’t stop talking about it. Just like Mia, she says. She’s going to compete on the beam, just like Mia.” When Mia still didn’t say anything, Mom said, “Are you okay?”
Mia forced herself to swallow the cereal, but it stuck in her throat. Finally, she managed, “I’m fine. Just nervous about the competition.”
“You’re going to be great,” Mom said. “Let me get dressed, and we’ll get you to camp.”
Mia dumped her cereal in the trash, went to her room, and packed up her folder for Vermont Launch Junior. She didn’t have to bring the moose to camp today. The plan was for her, Anna, and Clover to visit Gram at the cricket farm after dinner and sneak it into Mr. Jacobson’s office then. But Mia couldn’t think about that now. All she could think about was Fiona.
