Spy to the Rescue

by Jonathan Bernstein

  I hoped, now that Strike was back in my life and my family had accepted him, we’d go on more secret spy adventures, that he’d teach me everything he learned during his years in the field. But when I actually spoke the words “Teach me everything you learned during your years in the spy field,” Strike’s reply was “Forget any of this ever happened. Don’t dwell on it. Move on. Take it from an old burned-out spy, this is not the life you want. Be normal, stay normal. That’s the best advice I can give you.”

  That was horrible advice and the last thing I wanted to hear. But Strike thought he was doing the right thing. If I persisted in my demands, there was a chance Strike would see his presence in my life as doing more harm than good. He might disappear again, this time maybe permanently.

  So I don’t try to talk to him about gadgets or surveillance or double agents anymore. When I visit him in his new condo in Suntop Hills, a strip mall–dominated area a few miles from my family’s house, he tries out new recipes he learned from the Food Network. Other times, we play his PGA Tour video game, and there are dark moments when he insists on making me suffer through this horrific old country song called “If I Could Only Win Your Love” that sounds like two geese being strangled. Sometimes we talk about school and what colleges I might want to attend and sometimes, awkwardly, boys.

  But not one particular boy. Not Dale Tookey, the double agent Strike assigned to monitor me at Reindeer Crescent Middle School. The genius hacker who helped me save my little sister, Natalie, from the boss of Section 23 when he drugged and abducted her. The same Dale Tookey I kissed twice and then watched drive away (in a Smart Car programmed to talk with my voice). I don’t know where he is. I don’t know who he’s working for. I don’t know if he’s still alive. Strike, who recruited and trained him, only ever answers my questions with a shrug. “Don’t dwell on it,” he repeats. “Move on.”

  It’s been six months since Strike nailed the coffin lid shut on his old life and contented himself with getting to know me and making up for all the time we were denied each other. Having him around has only strengthened my relationship with my mom and dad, with my brother, Ryan, and with Natalie. I feel complete and sure of myself in a way I never did before. In time, I’ll forget I was ever any kind of spy.

  But not today.

  Someone’s trying to set me up. Trying to make me take the fall for selling cheerleading secrets. Pushing all the right buttons. I suddenly find I’m tingling with excitement. Like I’m a spy again!

  CHAPTER THREE

  Blabby

  “Who do you think it is?” asks my friend Joanna. “Brendan Chew?”

  Brendan Chew, my former nemesis and one-time class clown, simmers with resentment every time our paths cross. The fool who used to take huge pleasure in calling me Midget Wilder is still bitter over the definitive way I shut down his shenanigans. (Let’s remember together: I pulled back an arm as if to hit him. Chew flinched. I said, “This midget just made you pee your big-boy pants.” Everybody laughed. Happy memories.)

  “Brendan Chew is like Tinker Bell,” I tell Joanna. “He needs the love and applause of a gullible audience. Setting me up for cheerleader-choreography theft is way too anonymous and complicated for someone like him.”

  “That’s exactly why it might be him,” she says. “You wouldn’t expect it.” Then she yells, “I know, I’m coming! I said I’m coming! I’ll call you later, Bridget.” And the phone goes dead.

  Even though I still talk to Joanna Conquest on my way to and from school, as I have every day for what feels like the past fifty years, she doesn’t live in Reindeer Crescent anymore. Four months ago, her grandmother, the woman she affectionately—as affectionately as Joanna is capable of—refers to as Big Log took a tumble on her way downstairs. She tripped, it turns out, on a discarded yogurt carton. A carton emblazoned with the words Mine. Don’t touch! in Joanna’s scrawl. Old bones take a while to heal and Big Log’s recuperation at Reindeer Crescent Memorial Hospital turned out to be such a lengthy process that a question mark started to form over Joanna’s future. She was too young to be left alone in a home filled with discarded yogurt cartons. She had no relatives in the state of California and no one to look after her.

  I overheard my mom and dad having a late-night conversation about the possibility of taking her in. It was a lot like the time Dad drove over a hedgehog. They were still talking halfheartedly about bringing the wounded critter to the nearest vet when they were twenty miles away from the squished prickly mess.

  The endlessly repeated joke around school was that Big Log had thrown herself downstairs rather than spend any more time around Joanna. Which was harsh but, like the meanest jokes, had the ring of truth. Joanna could be tough to take. She thought the worst of everybody, she was endlessly judgmental, and she was incapable of being happy about another person’s good fortune. But when the cousins in Brooklyn she’d never mentioned saved her from getting sucked into the child services system and possibly dumped onto an unsuspecting foster family, I was surprised, pleased for her, and worried for me. I hadn’t exactly told her everything about Carter Strike, Section 23, and my double life. But she’d been around for some of it. I could talk to Joanna the way I couldn’t talk to anyone other than Carter Strike, and since he’d adopted the be-normal-stay-normal lifestyle, I could barely talk to him the way I talked to her.

  So, yes, I was feeling a little abandoned when she packed up and moved three thousand miles away to New York. Joanna called me every day to keep me informed about her new home: “There’s a burned-out shell of a car out front and a dead dog living inside it. That’s the part they like to show visitors.” She was equally enthusiastic about her new family: “Barely civilized. Like Planet of the Apes if the monkeys had stayed stupid.” Those calls almost made up for not having her around. But then, a good spy is at her best when she’s on her own with no excess baggage and no one else’s feelings to consider or worry about.

  By the time I get home, I have zero energy to construct credible theories as to the culprit behind my cheernapping. I throw my backpack across the hallway and charge into the kitchen. I need a grilled cheese sandwich to refuel my throbbing, pulsing brain-thoughts. I wrench open the fridge door. And I feel an impact. There’s something on the other side of the door. Something solid. I hear a faint mewl, like a cat. A cat! Has Boots followed me home? I slowly, fearfully close the fridge. I see a slight, waifish girl with a hand pressed to her forehead. Where I hit her with the door.

  “Oh my God!” I gasp. “Abby. I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there. Are you okay? Is anything broken?”

  Ryan’s girlfriend, Abby—don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a moment—says something like “MumblemumblemumbleRyan.” She says it with her tiny little mouth almost completely closed and her huge gray eyes staring over my head. Thus ends what might have been my longest conversation with Abigail Rheinhardt since Ryan brought her home from the Creepy Broken Toy Sale (or, for accuracy’s sake, since she made a favorable comment about one of the prank videos on his Instagram).

  I feel bad that I hit her with the fridge door but I feel worse for me because now I’m morally obligated to remain in the kitchen with Abby until Ryan shows up to take her to his room to . . . I don’t know . . . feed her twigs or worms. I sound mean, don’t I? Save your sympathy. For me. I’m stuck here with a fake look of concern on my face while Abby gives me nothing. Not a word. She just stands there vacantly with her arms hanging at a weird angle like they’re suspended by invisible wires. I’m not even a talky-talk kind of person but she doesn’t try.

  It’s not as if I don’t have any conversational topics to bring up with her: You’re at least sixteen but you have the affect of a nine-year-old; what’s that about? That’s a good one. Or how about: Why do you go out of your way to make everyone uncomfortable, and don’t pretend you don’t know you’re doing it because you totally do? I can tell from the way you lurk around our house like you want us to think you’re a ghost. But these relevant questions re
main unspoken. Maybe, just maybe, there’s some childhood trauma that makes Abby act the way she does. Maybe, just maybe, lurking around our house is in some way helping to heal deep wounds. And so, because I am a sensitive and caring person, I say nothing and back slowly out of the kitchen. As I leave, I hear the front door open.

  “What are you doing?” yells my sister, Natalie, from behind me. “Are you hiding from Blabby?”

  Natalie, still universally regarded as the nice one of the Wilder siblings, would not have used the nickname intended only as a private joke between us if she’d known Abby was standing a few feet away. But she didn’t see her at first. Only I did. Only I saw the expression on Abby’s face, signifying that being clobbered with the fridge door hadn’t hurt her as much as discovering that we call her Blabby behind her back.

  “Oh,” says Natalie. She joins me in the kitchen, wearing her cheerleader uniform, and sees Abby, hands clasped, eyes downcast, toes pointed inward, a model of discomfort.

  Natalie nips the flesh of my upper arm. “Did she hear me?” she whispers. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  The awkward moment between the three of us seems to go into slow motion. I feel like Natalie and I are frozen in time, nipping and whispering and glancing at each other as we try to not to deal with the distress we just caused Blab . . . Abby.

  The awkward moment ends when Ryan shoves past us and moves toward his girlfriend. It’s like watching a magnet pick up a safety pin. She enfolds herself into him like she’s an extra limb growing out of his armpit. She gazes adoringly up at my brother and says something like “MumblemumblemumbleRyan.”

  “That car I said I was going to look at,” he replies. It’s almost as if he understands what she’s saying. She arches up on tiptoes to kiss him. Natalie and I curl our lips and clutch our stomachs at the exact same time. This is a revolting display but somehow we can’t look away. Ryan stops mid-kiss and touches a concerned finger to the fading red mark on Abby’s forehead. She mumblemumbles something and he gives us a dirty look.

  “Nice,” he says, shaking his head to let us know we’re not nice. To the untrained eye, Natalie in her Cheerminator gear and me with what I like to think is my understated coolness might seem like the mean clique of oppressors, and Abby might seem like the poor innocent outcast who got hit with a door and then insulted, but . . . actually, at this moment, it’s hard to make a convincing case for me and Natalie.

  “You’re jerks, you know that?” says Ryan. He leaves the kitchen with Blabby clinging to him.

  As he passes me, he mutters, “You better be nicer to her. I kept your secrets.”

  During the time Brian Spool had me convinced I was a fully functioning spy, Ryan saw me in action. He saw me kick butt (including his) and he covered for me when I snuck out at night. There isn’t much he could do with that information. Certainly nothing that could damage me. But just the fact that he knows something gives him a smidgen of power over me. I meet his eye and give him the faintest acknowledgment that I understand what he’s saying.

  Natalie and I wait in silence until we hear Ryan’s bedroom door close.

  “You called her Blabby! To her face!” I yell.

  Natalie waves away my accusation. She goes to the fridge—the scene of the crime!—removes a carton of almond milk, and pours herself a glass.

  “What was it, like six, eight weeks ago, every word out of his mouth was a lie? He broke stuff and stole things and stayed out all night?” I marvel. “Now: whole different Ryan.”

  “I liked the old one better,” says Natalie, wiping her mouth. “If he has to date anyone, it shouldn’t be that drip. It reflects badly on us. Doesn’t someone in your class have a big sister with partial vision or a life-threatening illness? Someone better than Blabby he could go out with?” Natalie leaves the kitchen. “That’s a nice little project for you. I know you can handle it. Don’t let me down.”

  “How is it my project?” I call after her. But she skips happily upstairs, leaving the Blabby Project in my hands.

  So now I’ve got to find out who set me up to take the fall for the Cheerminator choreography scam and then I need to disentangle Ryan from Blabby.

  My phone vibrates. I look at the screen. Two texts. Both from Carter Strike.

  Did your parents talk to you yet?

  I didn’t do it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Strike Out

  “It’s nothing,” says my mom.

  “It’s fine,” says my dad.

  I do not believe a word my parents are saying. They came home late. They keep shooting shifty little glances at each other. They talk louder than normal. They laugh louder and they laugh a lot. This is especially noticeable in my mom. Nancy Wilder is not what you’d call a chuckler or a chortler. She is not amused by jokes or sitcoms or YouTube clips of people walking into walls. That isn’t to say she doesn’t have a sense of humor. “I’m just not one of those big laughers,” she has said in the past. She is tonight, though.

  “Sorry I’m so late. One of those days when everything just boom-boom-boom . . . one thing after another HAHAHA!” “Your brother upstairs with whatshername? She should just move in. Maybe she already has HAHAHA!”

  Mom sounds like an alien from a planet where the concept of laughter is unknown who’s attempting to fit in with us Earth folk by impersonating the sounds we make when amused. Dad is also acting like an alien. An alien amazed by the long black plastic object with the buttons that makes pictures appear and disappear on the big flat screen attached to the wall. Jeff Wilder is not a channel flipper. Jeff Wilder likes to settle into his brown leather chair and watch a Law & Order marathon or a baseball game that goes into extra innings. Tonight, though, he’s jabbing the remote at the TV screen, hurtling through channels, flying past makeover shows, renovation shows, pawnshop shows, dance studio shows, haunted house shows, and cake-baking shows.

  “Dad, Bait Car,” I say as he zips past one of our old obsessions. He keeps on flipping, but at the same time, he reaches out to the half-empty pizza box and tears off a piece of the buffalo chicken pie. Mom takes the occasional nibble of her tepid slice between bursts of forced laughter. These are the people who told me “It’s nothing” and “It’s fine” when I asked them if anything was wrong.

  I know something is up. I knew it when Strike sent me those texts designed to send alarm bells clanging in my head. I knew it when he failed to respond to my many, many return texts, calls, and emails. I knew it when Jeff and Nancy Wilder came home from their respective jobs an hour later than usual, he from managing the local Pottery Barn, she from the courier company she runs, Wheel Getit2u.

  They came home together. They came bearing pizza. And they requested the pleasure of my company. Not Ryan and Blabby, who, they claimed, they didn’t want to disturb (or, more likely, be disturbed by). Not Natalie, whose Cheerminator health regime meant pizza was a no-no. So, just Bridget in the living room with her laughing mother and flipping father. Both of them chomping down morsels of pizza and looking like it was giving them as much pleasure as eating dirty concrete.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. Again.

  Dad looks at Mom. Mom looks at Dad. She stops laughing. He hits the Power button, turning the screen black. Dad leans forward. Mom sits down on the couch and pats the cushion next to her. They both have these half smiles and wide eyes that say, Trust us. We love you.

  Uh-oh.

  Whatever’s coming, I’m not going to enjoy it.

  I sit on the end of the couch, leaving two cushions between me and my non-laughing mother. I notice pink foam packing chips at her feet, the kind companies use to fill crates so that the items inside don’t get damaged. The floor of my mom’s workplace is ankle-deep in them. She must have tracked them into the house and not noticed, which, like the laughing, is out of character for her and evidence that something is on her mind.

  “We like Carter Strike,” she says.

  I say nothing.

  “We were surprised the way you made
contact with him. We’d rather you’d talked to us first and let us approach him. But we know what it meant to you to meet your biological father and we’re glad you got to know him.”

  She looks over at Dad. His turn.

  “And we like him. He’s a good guy. He’s made what could have been an awkward situation comfortable for all of us. He’s got your best interests at heart, I really believe that, in spite of . . .”

  Clang clang clang!

  “In spite of?” I repeat.

  Dad finishes his slice. Mom sighs. Ball’s back in her court.

  “We’re home a little bit later than usual tonight because . . . I had a kind of a crisis at work . . .”

  “Boom-boom-boom. One thing after another,” I say. I don’t try to copy her forced laugh.

  She nods. “One of our vans that should have been back in the depot never returned. You know we got that account with the software company I was telling you about?”

  I pretend I do.

  “This was one of our first big jobs with them. A lot of specs and samples going to clients. The driver made a couple of the deliveries on his schedule and then the van went missing.”

  Did your parents talk to you yet?

  I didn’t do it.

  I feel myself flush.

  Mom picks up speed. “I called the police. They found the van. It only took about . . .”

  “A half hour. Forty minutes tops,” says Dad. “They got on it.”

  “They found it in Suntop Hills,” says my mom, looking straight at me. “Outside Carter Strike’s condo.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he’s got anything to do with it,” I say. I hear my voice echo around the living room.

  “No one’s saying it does,” Dad assures me.

  “But the van was empty,” says Mom.