Spy in the Alley

by Melanie Jackson

  He helped Madge up. “I’d be happy never seeing the guy again. But it’d be great if you joined in the rally. What with my laptop getting smashed up, I lost my complete database of the GASP membership. I wasn’t able to alert very many people about the rally today.”

  I opened my mouth to lecture him on the need to back things up — I certainly did, with my extensive reports for Block Watch meetings — but he anticipated me. “I copied the database on to a disk, and, you guessed it, the disk was in the briefcase.”

  At his unhappy expression I clamped my mouth shut again. Of course he should always keep his a back-up disk safely separate from his computer, but he’d probably figured that out by now without my explaining it to him.

  “Did the disk get smashed up, too?” Madge inquired sympathetically.

  “Like a bitten-in-half Triscuit.”

  I observed in disgust, “Our vaguely familiar thief certainly isn’t sporting. I mean, destroying your stuff because it wasn’t what he wanted. Who is this guy, Madge? You’d think that we could remember somebody from school or wherever who was dim-witted, scowled a lot and threw tantrums. Hey! Maybe Mr. Dubuque’s our guy.”

  “Don’t be rude about the neighbors, please, Dinah,” Madge corrected automatically.

  “Oh? Who should I be rude about?”

  Usually Madge would have uttered a frosty reprimand at an uppity remark like this. But she just smiled at Jack as if the remark had been a butterfly flitting by. People in love are no fun, I thought, and decided on the spot never to be one.

  At Madge’s suggestion, I ran home to leave a note for Mother about where we were going. After a bit of a wait, Jack and Madge pulled up in front of our house in his rattly old jeep and he drove us to the Hotel Wancouver. I mean, Vancouver.

  I pause and eye Madge suspiciously.

  “Just why was there a ‘bit of a wait,’ Madge Galloway?”

  “I have no idea what you mean,” Madge returns loftily. However, she has reddened. “Perhaps one day you’ll grow up and stop being so tiresome.”

  “Huh? But –”

  “Really, there’s an element of the bloodhound about you, Dinah.”

  I would pursue this matter further, except that an unwelcome sight greets my eyes. Roderick Wellman, sliding his Mazda in front of our home. It’s newly green, the pink having been scrubbed off.

  “So that’s your date. Dear Roddy.” I load my voice with as much scorn as I can muster. “Do you think he sticks his head into a pencil sharpener every morning? It’s looking even more pointy than usual.”

  “It’s his new haircut.” Madge smothers a laugh and tries to sound stern with me. She and Mother are forever trying to get me not to make scathing personal remarks about people’s appearances. “The hairdresser cuts upwards, in increasingly thick layers. It’s the latest style.”

  “To be avoided if one has a head like a pin,” I muse, peering through the flower-patterned, white-lace curtains at Roderick.

  There’s a box of elastic bands beside the computer. My fingers itch to take hold of one and stretch it back for a nice, clear shot at Roderick.

  But, to resume.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The dweeb outsmarts us

  About a dozen Grad Advocates for Smoking Prevention had gathered outside the Hotel Vancouver. Their signs, held high to avoid bumping passersby, resembled the clustered sails of an armada.

  But the Spanish Armada, I recalled from my project last year on Queen Elizabeth I, had at least met the English.

  GASP hadn’t met anyone. There were no representatives from Wellman Talent, Bonna Terra Sports Clothing or Fields Tobacco in sight.

  “They were supposed to be here, announcing a celebrity tennis match. The papers said they would,” insisted the intense girl with tightly permed hair who’d been at Stanley Park.

  “The TV cameras came and went,” someone else moaned. “They laughed at us. I mean, the people holding the cameras did, not the cameras themselves. We’d publicized this as a rally of hundreds.”

  “It would have been hundreds,” Jack said sadly, “if my laptop, and therefore my database, hadn’t been transformed into a piece of lasagna. Everybody was ready to show up. They just needed the time and place — and then, pccggghhhhewww!” He finished off with an impressive exploding noise.

  The other GASPers looked at him rather oddly. They didn’t know about the dim-witted thief.

  A cell phone bleeped. The intense girl fished it out of a deep pocket in her peasant skirt. “Yeah?” she said into it. “Yeah … huh. Well, thanks.” Switching the phone off, she announced glumly, “We’ve been foiled. Outmaneuvered. Roderick Wellman and his Fields Tobacco buddies are grinning all over their faces and making their announcement in Steveston.”

  The signs sagged like sails that had just lost all their wind.

  “Steveston,” Jack repeated numbly. “The announcements would be over and done with by the time we could get there.” He checked his watch: we were right in the middle of rush hour. “In fact, we’d be collecting our old-age pensions by then.”

  “They found out you were going to be here,” I said, puzzled. “How could they, though? Wasn’t it supposed to be a surprise?”

  The girl shrugged. “We did what we always do. We show up about an hour beforehand and start handing out flyers. Usually by the time the tobacco types arrive, a little crowd has built up. Even if Roderick Wellman and his buddies got hold of one of the flyers, an hour wouldn’t — shouldn’t — have been enough notice for them to switch locations.”

  “Maybe it’s a coincidence,” suggested a lanky boy with a Toronto Raptors cap.

  “No coincidence,” the intense girl said bitterly. “These guys are professionals.”

  “We’ll get ’em next time,” Jack promised, giving her a comforting hug.

  Something she’d said was looming in my mind, as prominent as a GASP protest sign.

  These guys are professionals.

  Where had I heard that before?

  I said slowly, talking to myself more than the others, “Buzz Bewford, the security guard, is a professional. Roderick told us so, very indignantly, when I was making fun of Buzz for being useless. For not having found out even the simplest infor mation about the spy in the alley.”

  The other GASPers stared at me. “In a word — huh?” said the Toronto Raptors boy.

  I went on hurriedly, “Buzz knows Theo, our buck-toothed spy in the alley. Maybe he also knows the thief.”

  “You mean, they’re both spying on you?” Jack said incredulously.

  “A nice girl,” I overheard one GASPer mutter to another. “Too bad she’s a bit off.”

  “I’m not ‘off,’” I protested in exasperation. “Don’t you get it? The dim-witted thief wasn’t so dim-witted after all. He never wanted antique silver or anything like that. He’d been assigned, by Roderick through Buzz, to steal GASP information from Jack. To destroy the GASP database and cripple the organization.”

  I took a deep breath. Was I on a roll, or what? “He grabbed the tomato photos the first time round, thinking they were files. Probably got chewed out big-time by Buzz — remember how Buzz kept growling into his cell phone? Naturally, mission incomplete, the thief came back.”

  Madge said, puzzled, “But what about the guy in the park? The one Buzz described? I didn’t get the feeling Buzz was making him up — Buzz isn’t imaginative enough, for one thing.”

  I persisted, “What I’m trying to tell you is that the spy in the alley wasn’t really a spy at all. He couldn’t have cared less about watching you.”

  “Oh, really,” said Madge, used to everyone automatically admiring her.

  “Theo is a geek, all right, but not a gawking geek — as Roderick tricked us into believing. The spy was a thief. Theo. It’s been Theo all the time. We just assumed he was spying on us, and Roderick and Buzz played along. They used the idea of a spy, which I thought Theo was, as a cover for what they were really doing: sabotage!”

  M
adge looked even more puzzled. “Are you saying there are two thieves, Theo and the guy in the park? I don’t get it.”

  “That’s not the point right now,” I said impatiently. Why oh why did people have to be so dense? “Who cares if there were two thieves, or, for that matter, forty? Theo and Buzz — ”

  “Now just a minute,” Madge interrupts. “I object to being called ‘dense.’ Just because the rest of us don’t have minds like sharp knives, ruthlessly able to cut through mysteries — ”

  “Yeah, right.” Now I’m offended. My sister’s managed to make good deducing skills sound like a flaw. Sharp knives indeed! “Well, Madge, I object to all these interruptions.”

  Madge’s slim white hands, with their carefully manicured nails painted a delicate dusty rose, descend on the keyboard. She blocks out the word “dense,” obviously intending to delete it. Older siblings are getting so aggressive these days.

  My own nail-bitten hands — and what’s wrong with nail biting? Everyone should have a hobby — clamp on hers and remove them.

  “Have it your way,” Madge shrugs, examining her hands for signs of any grime. “I have a date to get ready for anyhow.”

  I screw up my face at her disapprovingly — then hastily unscrew it, remembering that she believes this makes me look cute. “I can’t believe you’re going out with Roderick. Not after he lied to us about Buckteeth. Not after he tried to sabotage Jack and GASP.”

  Madge puts on her most remote look, knowing full well that this will annoy me. “Let me know if Roderick gets impatient, will you? Poor boy. You could always take him out a glass of lemonade.”

  The den windows are wide open today, to let in the soft, lilac-scented air. I scowl out at Roderick.

  “I really can’t believe you,” I sigh, in the most injured tone possible. “I thought, after all this, that you and Jack — ”

  “You shouldn’t try to plan my life for me,”Madge informs me. Then she glides aloofly from the room. Now I’ve lost my train of thought. Well, I’ll skip the gathering in front of the Hotel Vancouver, which mostly consisted of everyone confusedly staring at me. It was the next day that things really got hopping, let me tell you.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I storm Wellman Talent

  There I was, about to solve the mystery of the spy in the alley, and I was bundled off to musical-arts day camp again! I was sure this hadn’t happened to Sherlock Holmes.

  That’s my favorite story, well, stories, by the way. I devoured them all for the first time when I was nine, and I’m still rereading them. My devotion to Sherlock Holmes was interpreted by Mother and Madge as proof that I was bright and headed for a scholarly future.

  It was proof I should head for a detectively future, I would argue in vain. They never agreed, so I had to satisfy myself, as revenge, with relating detail by detail the plot of The Speckled Band to Madge. She hates snakes, and shrieked most gratifyingly.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” I sang. I was practicing scales again. This, of course, went along with another plan by Mother and Madge: that I develop my talent for singing.

  Talent — or volume? I wondered, as I again sang, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” and my instructor nodded wisely and took notes.

  By lunchtime I’d been chosen to sing the role of Annie in excerpts from the musical of the same name. Our class was going to perform for our families on the last day of camp. Me, Dinah Galloway, the lead!

  “That’s awesome,” I stammered, glowing. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, as the instructor and the rest of the class congratulated me, I did have some talent amid all the volume.

  Buckteeth faded to the back of my mind. He didn’t quite disappear: his prominent teeth still gleamed back there, like the Cheshire cat’s grin. A vague but bothersome presence in my thoughts.

  In the afternoon I practiced belting out “Tomorrow” as if my whole heart and soul depended on it, as Annie’s did in the story. “Fervor, fervor,” the instructor kept urging. Distractingly, he insisted on waving his arms about as if he were a windmill.

  Even more distractingly, through the glass wall of the classroom, I could see a bunch of people exercising. The next room was evidently the site of a rigorous fitness class. It was difficult to generate “fervor” with those people gyrating in front of me.

  I was just throwing myself into the part, imagining that I, like Annie, was alone and friendless — “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!” — when I happened to notice through the glass that the exercisers were watching a television suspended from the ceiling by cables. I watched, too. Not that I was a TV addict, unless you counted PlayStation; it was who was on the TV that riveted me.

  “Tomo-o-r-r-row … ”

  “Dinah?” The instructor stopped fluttering. The rest of the class stared, including the portly boy who was playing Daddy Warbucks and had been waiting impatiently for his turn to belt out.

  But I was staring into the next room, over the bouncing, sweatsuit-clad exercisers, at the TV screen.

  Roderick Wellman was on, smirking dweebishly and making some sort of announcement against the gray-shingled backdrop of Steveston. This must be footage from the previous evening, from the event that GASP had intended to protest. Other, equally smirking people stood around him. Off to the side stood Theo. Wasn’t daytime TV rated for decency? Didn’t they care about impressionable underage viewers like me?

  Then I recalled Madge’s insistent question about the identity of the second thief. She was right. We should be trying to figure out just who that was. As long as his identity eluded us, there was still an unsolved mystery. Buzz hadn’t invented the guy. We both knew we’d seen him somewhere.

  I was so intent on trying to figure out who the second thief was that that no further notes at all came from my mouth. I stood there, slack-jawed.

  The instructor stepped forward and actually peered inside my mouth, as if he thought the rest of the song might be sitting inside, too shy to come out. “Dinah?” he said.

  On the TV, a large, box-like hand shot out from off-camera and grabbed Buckteeth by the neck of his T-shirt and abruptly wrenched him from view. Buzz Bewford lumbered into his place. Hoisting up his belt, the security guard adopted the smirk that everyone else was wearing.

  “Oh, I get it,” the instructor said. “Dinah’s emoting.”

  Roderick and his buddies vanished from the screen and a newscaster smiled out at the exercisers, mouthed a few words and gave way to a string of commercials.

  It was then that the gauzy curtain, to use Madge’s arty expression, lifted from the identity of the second thief. No … It couldn’t be … Preposterous, I thought. I gaped at the TV. And yet this would explain everything …

  I transferred my stunned gaze to the instructor, who was now beaming at me with approval. “‘Emoting’? ” I repeated feebly.

  “Yes! Expressing your emotions. Or, rather, Annie’s emotions. Naturally, being alone in the world, she would lapse into a bewildered silence. Bravo!” He glanced round at the class and made some palms-up flapping movements; obediently, everyone applauded.

  I sang, “Tomorrow!”

  Tomorrow, nothing. I was taking action today.

  After the day camp finished, I escaped my now-ultra-enthusiastic instructor — “Great emoting, Dinah! More of it next time, please!” — and took the bus over the Granville Street bridge into downtown. I intended to storm the Wellman Talent office and demand a full confession from Roderick.

  I was supposed to get a lift home with one of my day-camp friends and her mother, but I fobbed them off with a story about Madge picking me up. It was only as the bus rumbled over the Granville Street bridge that I realized I didn’t actually have any sort of plan for storming the Wellman office.

  The prudent side of me, tiny as that was, cautioned that barging in and yelling might not be the best strategy.

  As the bus descended the ramp, I watched Yaletown rise up at me with its gleaming new condos and mellowing old brown-and-red-brick buildings. Yelling would be so satisfyin
g, though, I informed the prudent side of me.

  Imagine Roderick involving the Galloway family in his dastardly plans to sabotage GASP. We were just a regular, law-abiding, well-behaved family!

  I reached the old-warehouse-turned-trendy-office-building that housed Wellman Talent. By the time I got to the fourth floor, and the Wellman Talent receptionist, I was feeling anything but well-behaved. How dare Roderick, I mean, how dare he, mix us up in this?

  “Why, hello,” the receptionist said sweetly. “And what show are you in? Or are you doing a commercial?”

  It occurred to me that I was still sporting my Annie makeup: lots of freckles on heavily rouged cheeks. At least I’d remembered to leave the red wig at day camp.

  I glowered at the receptionist. “I’m Dinah Galloway. I want to see Roderick Wellman — now!”

  Raising her eyebrows — no doubt she thought I was just another temperamental star — the receptionist lifted the phone.

  “Yes, Ms. Cram?” came Roderick’s voice over the intercom.

  “I — there’s a Ms. Galloway here to see you, sir.”

  “Excellent,” Roderick exclaimed jovially. “Send her in.”

  I could see Roderick in a large room at the end of the hall. He was addressing a group of people, telling them how “fantasmo” things were.

  There were several smaller rooms on either side of the hall leading to the large room. From one of these smaller rooms, just as I was passing, a blood-curdling scream rang out.

  Needless to say, I was startled. The odd part was, Roderick wasn’t at all. He just kept beaming at the group of people, none of whom even stirred.

  I stared into the room beside me. A young woman with buggy eyes and eyebrows plucked to thin, high half-moons sat holding a script.

  “Very good screaming, Cindi,” praised a dignified-looking, iron-gray-haired man. “Let’s work on it a bit more, and you might get the role in Horrorville when you audition tomorrow.”