Kazu Jones and the Denver Dognappers

by Shauna Holyoak

  “What kind of questions?” I asked.

  “Because you can’t give us away,” CindeeRae said. “That would blow the whole operation.”

  “Trust me.” Madeline’s fists pushed into her hips. “I’ve got this.”

  “Riiiiiiiight…” March said, sneering just a little.

  Madeleine smirked at him before heading back to her own lunch table, and I smiled. Just one week ago, our little team couldn’t have survived lunch hour together, but look at us now, working together—kind of—on a serious rescue mission.

  CindeeRae, March, and I huddled by the drinking fountain outside music class while kids left for math. Madeleine stood in the middle of the room, waiting for Mrs. Hewitt to gather all the sheets of music from where we had stacked them at the end of the risers.

  “How are you doing, Madeleine?” she asked when she noticed Madeleine shifting from one foot to the other.

  “I’m very sad,” Madeline said, frowning.

  I rolled my eyes. We should have let CindeeRae, a real professional, handle this. Conniving or not, Madeleine Brown was no Annie star.

  “What’s wrong, Madeleine?” Mrs. Hewitt set the music down on the piano and led Madeleine to the risers. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  Madeleine sat down and then collapsed into a heap on her lap, her arms shielding her face. “The Denver Dognapper stole Lenny, my beautiful collie, from Sleepy Hollow the night before Halloween.”

  Mrs. Hewitt put her arm on Madeleine’s shoulders and cooed, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  Madeleine snapped up, knocking Mrs. Hewitt’s arm away. “Why are you sorry?”

  “What do you mean, dear?”

  “Do you feel bad about the missing dogs?” she asked.

  “Me?” Mrs. Hewitt tilted her head to the side, looking nervous. “Why do you ask?” Maybe Madeleine did know what she was doing.

  “Because they’re dogs and they’re missing. Duh! It’s not rocket science.”

  “Oh no,” I muttered. Madeleine was going off script.

  Mrs. Hewitt patted Madeleine’s back as CindeeRae snuck down the side of the classroom toward the teacher’s desk. March elbowed me, his eyes wide as he watched her. We were going to have a long talk about sticking to mission protocol.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Mrs. Hewitt said to Madeleine, like she was calculating the answer to a tricky math problem in her head. “Of course I feel bad about the missing dogs.”

  “I knew it,” Madeleine said just as CindeeRae snatched something from inside a book on Mrs. Hewitt’s desk and scurried back to us.

  “Abort, abort,” March whispered.

  “Madeleine,” I called into the room from the doorway. “We’re going to be late.”

  Madeleine glared at me over her shoulder before turning back to Mrs. Hewitt, who smiled at us. As Madeleine walked away, she made the peace sign, pointed at her own two eyes, and then turned the fingers back on Mrs. Hewitt.

  Mrs. Hewitt called after her, “Madeleine, honey, are you sure you’re okay?”

  “She’s the one,” Madeleine whispered as she walked past us, and we shuffled to keep up with her.

  “She’s right,” CindeeRae said, flashing the paper she had taken from Mrs. Hewitt’s desk. It was a receipt from the same King Soopers that Crowley had bought his fifteen bags from, only for two cheaper bags.

  “I don’t know,” March said. “It could be for Pickles.”

  “But it’s the only clue we have,” Madeleine said. “Plus, did you hear her? She admitted she feels guilty about the missing dogs.”

  “She feels bad,” March clarified. “Bad is different from guilty.”

  “We only have one more night.” I lowered my voice as we started up the crowded stairway to our classrooms. “And no other clues.”

  “Let’s meet at my house after school.” March stopped on the landing, leaning into our huddle. “We need to talk this out before we do anything else.”

  Mom was waiting at my bus stop. She wore a long puffer jacket the color of cranberries, the fur-trimmed hood pulled over her head even though it wasn’t snowing. She asked questions nonstop as we walked home through our neighborhood: How was school? Did I eat all my lunch? Did I remember to put my homework folder in my backpack? Was there another safety assembly today? Was I feeling any better about Genki? Was I sad or afraid?

  I gave her yes and no answers.

  Then she asked the big question she had been leading up to. “Why did you lie to us about Mr. Crowley? That’s just not like you, Kazu.” All those ordinary questions followed by a whammy.

  Mom’s super-sense was better than a lie detector any day of the week. I decided to stick as close to the truth as possible without giving away any big clues.

  “I was afraid to tell the Tanners it was my fault Barkley went missing. I guess I wanted to blame someone else so they wouldn’t hate me.”

  “By making up the story about finding Barkley’s collar in the garbage can?”

  If I told Mom the truth, she would work at me until I caved and shared everything I knew. I couldn’t put Genki in danger like that.

  I nodded.

  Mom didn’t respond, and the only noise I could hear was the shush, shush of her puffer jacket. Hopefully, when this was all over, she would still want me to be her assistant in designing the new spy and sleuthing exhibition at the exploration museum. “It took a lot of courage to be honest, Kazuko.” She wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “Now we can all stand back and let the police do their job and bring Genki home.”

  That one sentence wound around my heart and made my chest ache. I told myself that, ultimately, we were helping the police do their job. Maybe when we discovered the location of doggie-holding headquarters, we could finally share all our clues with them, and they could bring our puppies back.

  As we rounded the corner toward our house, a DineWise van pulled in across the street. Mrs. White stood at the edge of her driveway, where she used her cane to motion the vehicle into her tidy garage. As we got closer, she waved at us, her arm circling her side like a giant bird trying to redirect its course.

  I stopped walking, staring at the DineWise van disappearing into Mrs. White’s garage. Mom continued to walk, her arms still rustling against the jacket.

  WITHE = WHITE. No extra T.

  I remembered our conversation from when I pulled her weeds a month ago. Mrs. White needed money to open a nice little store selling old-people gadgets—the kind of money you could make selling dogs in a dognapping ring. The store she opened would be named after her husband Nile: Seenile Gizmos. That was the name of a local company depositing money into Crowley’s account.

  “Earth to Kazuko Jones!” Mom stood at the base of our walkway, arms outstretched. “Hello?”

  “Coming,” I said, running past her and into the house.

  I had to tell the team.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  I rushed to my room and grabbed the Zoo Crew packs with all the supplies from our last mission. My stomach somersaulted and my eyes stung.

  “Kazu?” Mom stood in my doorway, hands on hips. “What are you doing?”

  I knelt on the floor in front of my closet, holding the pack in my hands. I leaned back onto my heels to look up at her. “I’m gathering some stuff for an assignment.”

  “What assignment?”

  I stirred my hand inside the pack, thinking. “It’s a show-and-tell thing. Mrs. Thomas wants us to make a package of everything we’d take to a deserted island.”

  “Oh?” She raised her eyebrows and stepped closer. “What would you take?”

  I pulled out the kazoo. “This?” I reached back inside and pulled out the pocketknife. “And this? Because, survival?”

  She looked at me.

  “That’s all I have so far,” I said.

  “What about a book? You’d need something to keep yourself occupied.”

  “I can only take five things, and one of them will be a box of Froot Loops.”


  “That leaves two more.”

  “And a rain jacket and a magnifying glass, to build a fire. There’s no room for books.” I couldn’t believe I was arguing about an imaginary assignment.

  “You don’t even want a picture of your family?”

  “All right! I’ll trade the magnifying glass for a family portrait, because that’ll keep me warm at night.”

  Mom started to say something and then stopped. Her face softened, and she said, “You’re right, Kazu. You’ve got this.”

  I nodded, so shocked I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Then she asked, “Would you like to go to the Golden Buckle for dinner tonight?”

  My parents were super good at knowing how to comfort me, but I needed to meet the gang at March’s house to plan tonight’s mission, Operation: Take Down Mrs. White.

  “Mom, I can’t tonight,” I said. “We’re all meeting at March’s house to work on this assignment. Can we go tomorrow night?”

  Mom chewed on her bottom lip before responding. “Of course. What would you like me to make you for dinner tonight, then?”

  “Katsudon.” Next to baked manicotti, it was my favorite: a Japanese dish with a fried pork cutlet on a bed of rice soaking in an amazing soupy sauce with a scrambled egg on top.

  Mom nodded. “You got it.”

  I realized I just may have requested my last meal.

  March had unrolled a bolt of butcher paper across the floor, from the window to his closet. “I thought we could map out our plan here.” He gestured to the floor, where two marker packets and a big box of crayons aligned perfectly with the border of the paper.

  “But we haven’t even decided where we’re going yet.” Madeleine had been sitting at the desk but stood to approach me and CindeeRae on the bottom bunk of March’s bed.

  “I just told you,” I said. “Crowley’s partner is Mrs. White, my neighbor, not Mrs. Hewitt.”

  Madeleine folded her arms and huffed at me. “You think so, but there were just as many clues pointing to Mrs. Hewitt.”

  March, who hadn’t been convinced that our music teacher was the dognapping mastermind in the first place, had quickly agreed with me in naming Mrs. White our primary suspect. I looked to CindeeRae for support.

  She shrugged.

  “What?” I said. “Mrs. White fits the code perfectly. No extra T.”

  “I know.” CindeeRae picked at the knee of her jeans, not meeting my eyes. “But just this afternoon you thought Hewitt fit the code perfectly. And what about the receipt?”

  March jumped in. “It was only for two bags of dog food, and they were cheaper than the ones on Crowley’s receipt, probably because the bags were smaller. You don’t buy two small bags of dog food when you’re feeding lots of dogs. Plus, it was probably for her dog, Pickles.”

  “That’s another clue.” Madeleine held up two fingers. “She was at Sleepy Hollow the night Lenny was taken.”

  “The Processes and Procedures document proves that Crowley and WITHE do different things. Taking the dogs isn’t WITHE’s job.” I stood and stepped across the butcher paper to face Madeleine down. “She holds the dogs, and Crowley takes them.”

  That piece of information deflated Madeleine a bit, and she dropped her counting fingers and crossed her arms over her chest again.

  “That’s true,” CindeeRae agreed from her perch on March’s bed.

  “And don’t forget the payment Crowley gets from Seenile Gizmos,” I said, certain no one could argue with that. “Mrs. White’s husband’s name was Nile, and she wants to start a business selling gadgets for old people. That’s a pretty solid connection between Crowley and White. Not to mention the regular DineWise deliveries inside her closed garage.”

  We could hear March’s brothers banging around the next room, fighting over something called a flubber-blaster.

  “Should we take a vote?” March asked.

  CindeeRae nodded and Madeleine dropped her arms to her sides.

  “All those in favor of Mission: Take Down Mrs. White, raise your hands.”

  March, CindeeRae, and I raised our hands. Madeleine let out a slow breath, rolled her eyes to the ceiling, and raised her hand, too.

  “Then it’s unanimous!” I tried to high-five Madeleine, but she kept both arms stiff at her sides.

  “You better be right,” she said. “Because there’s no time for mistakes.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  By the time we had finished planning the mission, the butcher paper looked like a giant comic book panel.

  It started with a diagram of Mrs. White’s house, arrows pointing to the front door, the garage door, and the keypad for the security code.

  We knew that Crowley didn’t bring the dogs inside his house, but because the processes and procedures document said WITHE held them for seventy-two hours, we decided the dogs must be somewhere in Mrs. White’s house.

  She had hired me to do lots of odd jobs inside over the last two years. I once swept the cobwebs from the ceiling corners in her basement. I had painted a spare room upstairs. And I had cleaned out all her kitchen cabinets, emptying each drawer and wiping it down before applying new contact paper. I knew the inside of her house, and the only place she could hide dogs for longer periods of time without anyone noticing would be the basement: our target location.

  Next to the picture of her house was a square labeled Step One with a close-up of the garage keypad and the code I had been entering myself for two years: 1065. We would enter through the garage to the side door.

  Step’s Two and Three were in the same square. In CindeeRae’s swirly handwriting was a close-up of the side door with another keypad beneath a doorbell. We would run to the keypad and shut the door before Mrs. White could hear anything. Step Three: Open the door with the house key hidden above the door frame. If that didn’t work, we had learned how to pick a lock for the failed mission in Crowley’s garage.

  I had drawn the square for Step Four, which included a map of the house’s main floor, with a dotted line traveling from the garage through the kitchen, past the back door, and down the stairs. At the top of the landing, Madeleine would stand watch.

  On Step Five, March, CindeeRae, and I would stop any potential barking by giving the dogs peanut-butter tortilla wraps—we couldn’t afford to have yapping dogs foil another mission.

  Step Six also took place in the basement, where we would retrieve the dogs and escape through the back door of Mrs. White’s house, which Madeleine would open for us as she waited on the landing. We’d cut through the backyard to a gate at the side that opened onto my street. If we were being chased, we would run to my house, where the front door would be unlocked. If we left undetected, we would get our bikes from my backyard and go back to our homes before our parents even realized we were missing.

  Like a signature, CindeeRae, Madeleine, and I had each drawn a small picture of our dogs in the bottom right-hand corner of the butcher paper.

  “That looks good.” I stepped back to take in the big picture and then scribbled the steps in my Sleuth Chronicle.

  “We are breaking and entering.” March filed his markers back into the box with a sigh.

  CindeeRae patted his arm. “Think of it as hacking into her house.”

  I handed them their Zoo Crew packs. “It has everything from before, including a few extras.”

  “Extras?” March asked.

  “The peanut-butter wraps, and either a lightsaber or a wand.”

  “Lightsaber or wand. For what?”

  “Protection?” I shrugged. “I was just jamming stuff in there at the end.”

  March rolled up the butcher paper and folded it to the size of a newspaper, cramming it into his pack. We all watched until he was finally able to work the zipper closed, sighing loudly before realizing we had been watching him the whole time. He blushed.

  “So we meet at my place, midnight,” I said.

  They all nodded like everything we had just planned was perfectly reasonable.
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br />   CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  We stood in the shadow of the eaves over Mrs. White’s garage, huddled around the keypad. We had just walked our bikes into my backyard, shut the gate, and sneaked to Mrs. White’s. Even though we were just across the street from where my parents slept, it felt as if we were in a foreign land.

  I hadn’t considered how loud the garage door might be when activated this late at night. If Mrs. White woke up before we even got inside, everything would be ruined. I looked around. It was just after midnight and the neighborhood was dark. Even though the moon was a sliver, Mrs. White’s baby-blue house seemed to glow. A car could drive down our street any second and see a four-kid outline against the house like a giant arrow.

  I pulled the headlamp over my hoodie, clicked it on, and took a deep breath as I began pressing numbers: 1065—the month and year of Mrs. White’s wedding. I waited a beat to press five, almost long enough for the lights on the keypad to flash red for failure. But then I thought of Genki cowering in the basement, and I pushed my thumb hard in the center of the pad before pressing the up arrow to open the door. Luckily Mrs. White maintained everything on her property with exactness, and the garage opened silently. Allen, the handyman, had probably oiled the rails this week.

  The opening of the garage door triggered the light inside, and I ran to the keypad to turn it off and reverse the door, waving March, CindeeRae, and Madeleine over as it closed. We crouched by her back steps as the garage door creaked toward the pavement, my breathing the only thing I could hear. After a length of silence, and only when I was certain Mrs. White hadn’t been awakened, I grabbed the house key she hid atop the door frame and pulled off my backpack. I dropped the headlamp inside and reached for the small flashlight.

  I turned to them and asked, “Are you ready?”

  CindeeRae’s face looked pale against the black beanie she wore. When she nodded, I realized her crooked headlamp shone on her face, making her eye sockets all dark and creepy. Madeleine had opted for a dark red bandanna tied over her long braids, while March wore his own beanie, for Gryffindor, with a pom-pom on the top, the ball motionless.