Spy in the Alley

by Melanie Jackson

  “Dinah, your collapsing in laughter every two minutes doesn’t make this any easier,” said Mother, her cheeks faintly pink with the effort.

  Mother was pretty in a vague, delicate way, which Madge had inherited. But where Mother’s vagueness was due to confusion about the world outside her comforting library stacks, Madge’s vagueness was deliberate, a sort of remote retreat she withdrew into to block the world off.

  I found the real world very interesting, and at all times tried to plant myself right in its face. Madge said I was like a truck with flashing lights and a lot of noisily clattering tin cans attached. The world, she added, wasn’t quite ready for me.

  I had forgotten Pantelli, and was gainfully helping push the bundle buggy up the hill, when I heard a shout.

  “Hey, Galloways!”

  Jack French caught up with us. He’d been shopping on Commercial Drive, too. In his cloth shopping bag, TV dinners stuck out between film rolls.

  Jack swung his bag over his shoulder and took over the pushing of the bundle buggy. “So how’s everybody at your house?” he asked cheerfully.

  I knew he meant Madge. I wasn’t the sister of a gorgeous teenage girl for nothing. “She’s fine,” I told him. “I think you should keep trying with her. I, naturally, will continue working on your behalf from the sidelines.”

  “Great,” Jack said — could that have been a note of insincerity in his voice? In any case, Mother, who’d been eyeing the TV dinners doubtfully, interrupted, “I do urge you to sign up for our church’s youth group. I’m involved with the leaders of the group, helping them plan activities and so on.

  “Well,” Mother continued, as Jack, not used to her rambling discourses, looked increasingly puzzled, “one topic we often get speakers to tell the kids about is healthy diets. Fresh vegetables are part of the daily regimen these speakers invariably recommend. You’d find these talks informative, I’m sure.”

  “Um, Mrs. Galloway,” Jack broke in apologetically, “I’m actually not a Cath — ”

  “Yo!” came a shout from the branches of a horse chestnut tree.

  Jack glanced around. “I hope that isn’t God, calling down from on high to reprimand me.”

  I giggled. “Hardly, Jack. It’s my friend, Pantelli.”

  The tree in front of the yellow house we were passing, which happened to be Pantelli Audia’s, shook vigorously. Leaves and twigs cascaded down. These were followed by Pantelli, landing not quite on top of the bundle buggy. He beamed at me, his dark eyes bright with self-congratulation at this scene-stealing method of arrival.

  He grabbed an apple from one of our bags, chomped into it and importantly informed us, mouth full, “By the way, there’s a goon snooping around your backyard.”

  Jack and I instantly took off. “Hey, wait for me!” called Pantelli, and raced after us. Luckily, we’d been almost at the top of the hill, so Mother wasn’t left with far to push the heavy bundle buggy.

  The three of us arrived, colliding, at the back gate. We could see the back of an unfamiliar head beyond the gate. A squarish, crewcut head; whereas Buckteeth had, as I remembered, wispy straw-colored hair sticking out from his powder-blue sun hat, and a sort of narrow head.

  Before I could note to Jack that this new person was not the spy in the alley, he charged through the gate, jumped Crewcut and tackled him to the ground.

  “Wow,” said Pantelli admiringly.

  Plowing our way through the foxgloves, long grass and prickly blackberry tendrils, we arrived for our own close-up look at Crewcut.

  By the time we got there, he and Jack were getting up. Jack looked sheepish, Crewcut, well, goonish, and Madge cold and scornful from her chair in the shade of the patio table umbrella.

  Removing his hand from the back of Crewcut’s neck and his knee from the small of Crewcut’s back, Jack got up. He was much slimmer than Crewcut, whose body, like his head, was box-like. Without the element of surprise, Jack probably couldn’t have tackled him.

  “Let me guess,” said Jack to Madge. “You know this guy.”

  “Jack, Dinah, Pantelli … I’d like you to meet Buzz Bewford,” returned Madge. From a tall, frosty pitcher she poured lemonade into glasses. “Buzz is the security guard Roderick hired to watch over our house. Just for a couple of weeks, in case that spy reappears.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Jack told the security guard, who was busy brushing dirt and grass off the knees of his blue suit.

  Buzz scowled. Then, abruptly, he announced, “Everyone stay here for ten minutes while I check the grounds.” And he disappeared around the side of the house.

  “Great tackle,” Pantelli congratulated Jack. “Where’d ya learn how to do that?”

  “High school football,” Jack replied. He looked at Madge, who instantly put her nose in the air. She pulled the Vogue magazine from the top of the grocery cart Mother had just wheeled in the gate.

  “Football! Cool!” Pantelli’s jaw dropped in admiration, exposing the large chunk of apple he was chewing.

  “It’s cool on the football field. I try to keep civilian attacks to a minimum,” Jack said ruefully.

  All this was aimed at Madge. I thought it was pretty funny, but Madge simply raised the Vogue, with its back-cover photo of that soulful male model, ever higher to blot Jack from her sight.

  Jack clutched his sandy hair. “I don’t believe it! They’re gonzo!”

  Pantelli and I, shamelessly munching on Mr. Rinaldi’s tomatoes now that Mr. Rinaldi was safely out of the country, regarded him with curiosity. We were in the Rinaldis’ kitchen, which seemed undisturbed and not missing anything obvious.

  “A big envelope of prints,” Jack explained to us, his gray eyes bewildered. “I took a bunch of shots of Enzo’s tomato garden, to mail to him in Italy so he could check up on how his plants were doing. Yeah, I know it’s odd, but he says he’s never been away from them before.”

  Pantelli and I exchanged guilty glances. We stuffed the rest of the tomatoes into our mouths. I inquired, in a slightly muffled voice, “You mean, you just left the envelope a while ago, and it’s gone?”

  “I left it right there!” said Jack, pointing to the kitchen table. “Weird. I mean, stealing pictures of tomatoes.”

  “Maybe whoever stole the envelope thought it was full of money,” suggested Pantelli.

  “The thief must be pretty dim-witted,” said Jack, “not to mention lazy. If he’d bothered to open my sister’s cutlery drawer, he would have found some really valuable antique silverware.”

  He pulled open that drawer, just to check: the silverware gleamed back at him, untouched.

  “Jack, did you leave the door unlocked?” I demanded. When he nodded, I launched into my authoritative Block Watch tirade. “This is the big city, Jack French. It’s also a port, and weird people come off ships and roam around stealing things. You have to be extra careful about your property.”

  “Yeah, we had our garbage can stolen last week,” Pantelli chimed in. “Dad thinks it was the Watson boys. They like to squish themselves inside garbage cans and roll down their back alley.”

  I scowled at Pantelli. His story did not exactly match the image of ruthless cosmopolitan crime I was trying to present.

  Jack rubbed a hand over his mouth; I could tell he was hiding a smile. “Well,” he shrugged, “I guess I’ll go develop some more tomato pictures. You guys can look around, if you want. Maybe you’ll see a photo you like — take it for a souvenir! It’s the least I can do in return for your helpful tips about crime prevention.”

  “We’ll be sure to lock the door behind us,” I told him pointedly.

  “I have a feeling Jack is not going to become our neighborhood’s Block Watch role model of the year,” I confided to Pantelli in disgust. We were sorting through the piles of photos on the dining room table. “Talk about poor attitude!” I added.

  I was a staunch supporter of Block Watch, though Madge claimed I just used it as an excuse to snoop around neighbors’ yards. Specifically, yards
with edible produce.

  “Hey, get a load of this, Di.” Pantelli was pointing one of Jack’s cameras at me; more were scattered over the buffet. “Do you ever look huge!”

  “Gimme that,” I demanded. I peered through the viewfinder: grinning Pantelli was spread wide, transformed into a funhouse-mirror fatty. I giggled.

  “Maybe Jack will take a picture of you like this, and you can send it to your grandmother, and write on it, ‘So, Gran, do you think Mom’s overfeeding me?’”

  “Or how ’bout, ‘Maybe I’ll roll over to your place sometime.’”

  Pantelli and I doubled up with laughter at our one-liners. I had to set the camera down because I was afraid I’d drop it. Then I stood looking at the cameras on the buffet.

  “Pantelli,” I said. “Why would a thief steal an envelope of tomato pictures when he could just as easily grab some of this stuff?”

  Having found a digital camera, Pantelli was trying to photograph himself. Teeth clenched in a phony smile, he replied, “Like Jack suggested, the guy must’ve been dim-witted.”

  Before I could answer, he’d aimed the digital camera at himself, and — snap! “Cool! Instant self-portrait!”

  “Let’s not break Jack’s equipment,” I advised.

  I selected a photo of a seagull perched on a girl’s shoulder. The gull seemed to be looking down at the girl’s dog. Behind both of them, a little boy looked on, sucking his thumb. The neat thing was, the girl and the dog were statues, two of several behind the Vancouver School Board building. Only the seagull and the little boy were real. Studying the photo, I could tell that the seagull knew the girl wasn’t real — but did the little boy? He was wearing a perplexed expression.

  Pantelli chose a photo of a batter poised to grand-slam an oncoming baseball. Then we headed outside.

  “We oughtta pay him for these photos,” Pantelli said, peering at the batter. “I mean, they’re awesome.”

  I ran my fingers along the tomato stalks by the Rinaldis’ garden path. “Jack’s too nice to accept money. But you could get your mom to invite him to dinner. His idea of a solid, well-rounded meal is one that comes frozen, in a package.”

  “Nothin’ like fresh vegetables,” asserted Pantelli, reaching for a plump red tomato on a stalk near the path.

  “Or fresh fruits,” I said. People down through the centuries had disputed which food group the tomato belonged to, but to me it could only be a fruit. No vegetable could be as yummily juicy.

  I reached for a tomato myself, one that was farther into the stalks than Pantelli’s had been — and, in so doing, tripped over Pantelli’s foot. Down I went with an ungraceful thump, jarring loose several tomatoes that tumbled along with me. The photo went flying out of my hand, bumpity-bumping down from one tomato leaf to another, till it landed at last on a blue leaf on the ground … Wait a minute. Who ever heard of a blue leaf?

  I lifted the photo. Beneath was a powder-blue sun hat that took me all of a nanosecond to recognize.

  Buckteeth’s!

  Chapter Five

  We make a new old friend

  “Now I remember,” I told Pantelli, as we turned the sun hat over, examining it in the alley. “On my last glimpse of Buckteeth, his pink, balding head was reflecting the sun like a piece of glass. So the hat must’ve fallen off in his mad scramble through the tomato patch.”

  Pantelli bent the sun hat inside out. He fingered a label that was stapled to the inner brim. “Carole’s Old Friends,” he read aloud, musingly. Then he brightened. “Hey, that’s a shop on Commercial Drive! My sister buys stuff at Carole’s all the time.”

  “She might be able to tell us something about Buckteeth!” I exclaimed.

  “Who, my sister?”

  “No. Carole of Carole’s Old Friends,” I said impatiently.

  I spotted Crewcut, I mean Buzz Bewford, the security guard, lumbering down the alley toward us. According to my careful upbringing, I was supposed to advise an adult when anything weird or unusual, or both, happened. So I waved the sun hat at Buzz and shouted, “We found a clue! Want to help us — ”

  “Leave me outta your games, kid,” Buzz snarled. Taking out a cell phone, he jabbed in some numbers and then muttered into it. He must’ve been hot in that suit, in August. His square face was pink, and his forehead shone with sweat.

  “Maybe he’s ordering out for lemonade,” whispered Pantelli.

  We giggled, which earned us another, even meaner snarl from Buzz. By then we were beside my yard, with its back gate still hanging open because none of us had yet remembered to buy a replacement lock. Over the hydrangeas, foxgloves and blackberry shoots, we saw Madge talking to Roderick. He had his burgundy, crocodile-leather briefcase with him, which usually meant he’d stopped by to give Madge memos about her next Bonna Terra modeling assignment.

  Roderick’s voice, droning as it always did when he was discussing business, floated across to us. “A lot depends on our impressing Bonna Terra and Fields Tobacco, you know,” he was telling Madge.

  Well, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to. “We have a clue!” I yelled at them. “Hey Roderick, know what that makes you?”

  He paused, memos in hand, squinting down our overgrown path. “No, what?”

  “Clueless!” I shrieked, and Pantelli and I scooted away.

  Never underrate the pleasures of immaturity.

  Pantelli emptied out his piggy bank, which was where he kept his daily reward money for piano practice, and we headed down to Commercial Drive for ice cream cones and an investigation into Carole’s Old Friends.

  It ended up that we got the cones free at Julio’s Gelati, a café scrunched between a market overflowing with fresh lettuces, and an art gallery overflowing with wavy-shaped chairs, chess games and lamps. Julio’s deal was, though, that Pantelli had to play the piano and I had to sing.

  He often did this to us. I guess I haven’t mentioned that I’m — well, I’m considered to have a not-bad voice. Okay, a pretty decent one. Madge says this is the positive side to the coin that is me; my having such deafening yells and just being generally noisy is the negative side.

  Dad had encouraged me with my singing, just as he had Madge and her art. “You’ve got this incredible gift, Dinah,” he’d say, leaning forward in his old stuffed chintz chair, with its foam bubbling out all over the place from rips. “You’ve got a big voice, and you know what else you’ve got? A big heart. Put all your heart into that voice, and you’ll reach people with notes — and emotions — that they’ll carry around in their own hearts for the rest of their lives.” Then he’d laugh at my expression. “You think I’m being goopy, don’t you, hon? I’ll put it this way. Don’t just use your voice. Rejoice in it.”

  So I’d sing to him, and I knew by the way his eyes shone extra-sparkly that I’d reached him. Anyhow, one day I was trying out for the school variety show. The song each auditioner had to sing was “Lullaby of Broadway”. Well, I got started and I was enjoying myself, kind of letting loose, “Listen to the lullaby of o-o-old Bro-o-o-oadway-ay-ay … ”

  I noticed there was total quiet in the gym. Even the music teacher had stopped playing the piano. “What?” I demanded, thinking I’d committed some horrible gaffe.

  The music teacher’s eyes were misty. “We’re nurturing a young Garland in our school, and we never realized it,” she breathed.

  Garland? I looked around, puzzled, assuming that there was some kind of flower arrangement on the stage. It took the drama teacher, who was also gazing mistily at me, to explain that her colleague was referring to a Garland as in Judy, as in the classic Wizard of Oz movie, rather than to flowers.

  Not to belabor this, word got to Julio, whose son is in my class, that I had these supposedly powerful vocal chords. Which is how I got to be belting out “After You’ve Gone” at Julio’s Gelati that particular day. Pantelli was a pretty good pianist. I think he’d passed his grade seven with honors, or something outrageous like that. This afternoon, though, partway through “After You’
ve Gone,” he began to play a bit oddly, leaving out a lot of the notes.

  I stared at him. As I swung into the refrain, I noticed that not only was Pantelli’s right hand not playing the piano, it was waving toward the café’s open door, as if he were having some kind of weird muscle spasm.

  Huh?

  Not at the door. Through it. Across the street was a sign for Carole’s Old Friends. So the shop was close by. Great, I thought, nodding enthusiastically at Pantelli. Everyone in the café applauded, thinking that I was really getting into my song.

  He didn’t look enthusiastic in return. He flailed his right hand some more. Huh? I peered out the door again.

  Uh-oh. Carole was leaving. At least, I assumed that the peasant-skirted woman draped in shawls, with bangles at her ears and wrists, was Carole. She was locking the shop door from the outside.

  “After you’ve gone,” I crooned in a panic. She couldn’t leave now. I edged between the café tables to the door and belted out, at my loudest, across Commercial, “Don’t leave me cryin’!”

  Which are words from the song. The people in Julio’s Gelati clapped wildly: what a show I was putting on, even singing out on to the street!

  Carole turned and glanced around, her gaze falling on me. “DON’T LEAVE!” I shouted.

  Passersby stared. Julio beamed. What an attention-grabber I was for his café!

  “All right, already,” Carole called across the traffic to me.