The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “I saw a light. The better question is what was he doing there? Have you asked yourself that?”

  “I do not like your tone,” her mother said, her own tone cold as a winter morning.

  Hazel opened her mouth.

  “Good night, Hazel.” Her mom spoke before she could. Then she left the room, turning out the light as she went.

  Hazel flopped back on the bed. Why couldn’t her parents understand what kind of danger they were in? A bomb could come any day. There were Russian spies living right in their town. Worse was that: now Mr. Jones knew that she knew his secret, and they were doing nothing to protect her. She imagined him coming back to the house. She’d be in that sausage grinder by morning, and buried all around the graveyard so no one would ever find her. And while that would prove she had been right all along, she wouldn’t be around to experience the satisfaction. She slipped out of bed and locked her door. She knew it wouldn’t stop The Comrade if he came to get her, but at least it would slow him down.

  31

  Inside the Mausoleum

  The mausoleum Hazel had chosen was stone, with columns flanking the door. Her plan had been to come back and organize the cans, maybe even get some shelving, but of course that plan had been ruined by her mother, who was so angry she’d sent Hazel to clean up the fallout shelter without changing out of her school clothes. If another skirt was ruined, this time it would be her mother’s fault. Somehow Hazel was sure her mother wouldn’t see it that way.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Her mother stood on the back steps watching her and made a sweeping motion toward the door. Hazel sighed and pushed as hard as she could. Having been opened and closed a few times, the heavy stone moved a little easier now, but it still took all her weight.

  With a deep breath, she stepped inside. The air was ten degrees cooler and still as glass. She shivered. The walls were lined with neat drawers like a filing cabinet. Inside each of the drawers was a body and somehow that bothered her much more than the bodies buried in the ground. Each body had a story, a family, a life. And now here they were stacked up like her canned goods.

  How had everything gone so wrong so quickly? Her cover was blown and Mr. Jones knew she was onto him. Her mother had found her stockpile, so now when the bombs were dropped they would have nowhere to go—if The Comrade let her live that long.

  She grabbed a bag in each hand and carried them outside. As she set one down, the bottom of the other ripped, sending cans spilling out all over the cemetery. Her mother threw her hands in the air and started back into the house. Hazel couldn’t help herself. She stuck out her tongue. Her mother hesitated, then held up a warning finger. Then she continued on her way inside, leaving Hazel gaping and wondering how her mother always seemed to know exactly what she was up to—or figured it out. Her mother should have been a detective.

  Hazel scanned the graveyard for Mr. Jones. She was conflicted—a feeling she wasn’t used to, and didn’t like. On the one hand, she was more certain than ever that Mr. Jones was a spy. On the other hand, her parents had made it clear to her in no uncertain terms that she was to have nothing more to do with him—beyond writing him an apology note for her deplorable behavior. They just couldn’t see what kind of danger lurked right in their cemetery.

  Hazel started picking up the cans, stacking them three or four high. Lima beans, carrots, Spam, tuna fish. They would have eaten well in the bomb shelter. Hazel could just picture it, all of them sitting around a kerosene lamp, eating out of tin cans. Her parents would have no choice but to talk to her, what with all their horticulture magazines and catalogs still in the house, which was full of toxic air—if it hadn’t been blown to smithereens by the blast. Hazel, we just can’t thank you enough. Why, Hazel, without you, we would be dead and glowing. We’re so sorry, Hazel, so sorry we doubted you. So sorry that everyone doubted you, Hazel.

  “Hazel!”

  Hazel looked up and there was Samuel. “I figured it out,” he declared.

  “Figured what out?” Hazel asked, picking up a loose can of pitted olives. She detested olives, but her mother loved them.

  “The headstone. What was bothering me. There was no moss.”

  “Yeah, so? You already noticed that.”

  “That was the red herring. I noted that, and we assumed Mr. Jones had cleaned it.”

  “We know Mr. Jones cleaned it.”

  “Sure,” Samuel said, waving his hand in the air. He looked around then, and noticed all the cans. “What are you doing, anyway?”

  “I’m cleaning up cans.”

  “What about your fallout shelter?”

  “My mom has ordered it shut down,” she said. She stepped to the side and held out her arm like a conductor ushering a passenger onto a train. “If you go in, bring out a bag.”

  Samuel walked in, and Hazel followed him. “It’s eeriequiet in here,” he said. His voice echoed softly. “Like even the sounds from outside are hushed.”

  “Way too quiet for my taste,” Hazel said.

  “It’s peaceful,” Samuel said, his voice as wistful as a summer rain.

  “That’s the point,” Hazel said. “Anyway, I think it’s a little sad all these bodies stacked up like they’re in an apartment building or something.”

  “You wouldn’t want to be buried here?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “This isn’t even really buried, is it? No, I want a shady plot so people are comfortable when they come to see me, and a simple, sturdy casket, and a nice stone with all my accomplishments on it and maybe a statue.”

  “I think I’d like to be cremated,” Samuel said.

  “Cremated? Why? Who will have your ashes?”

  Samuel shrugged, then bent over and picked up a bag of canned goods. Hazel picked up the other and they went outside.

  Cremated. That was just like Samuel, she thought. Even in death he’d try to take up less space. Not her. She decided then and there that she definitely wanted a sculpture. It would be her, but done classically, like the Greeks. She would be dressed as Athena, the goddess of war, with a spear and a shield, and an owl on her shoulder to represent her wisdom. She would have to write it all down when she got inside.

  “The stone,” Samuel said as they began walking toward the house. “That’s what I came to tell you about.”

  “What about it?” Hazel asked.

  “I was so distracted by how clean the stone was that I didn’t look closely at the letters.” He put down his bag of cans and dug his graveyard book out of his satchel. He flipped through to a page with barely legible words. “Think of an old stone. Think of the way the letters are. They’re fuzzy around the edges, right?”

  “Sure. Wind and rain and everything wear them down.”

  He flipped through the book to the Alice headstone. “Look at this,” he said.

  Hazel studied the letters. “Sharp as can be. So?”

  “So we were wrong about the dates. We were looking back in the Civil War era, but this is newer.”

  “But no one has been buried there for decades.”

  Samuel shook the book at her. “Someone has, Hazel. We need to get back to the library.”

  Hazel looked at the cans, then at her house. “I’m grounded.” She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be involved in the mystery anymore. Samuel was right. It wasn’t a game. So far she’d been chased with an ax, been grounded, been threatened, and thoroughly angered her parents. Not to mention that she had a Communist spy on her tail. Maybe solving mysteries wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  “You’re giving up? I thought you were relentless.”

  Hazel looked around at the bags of cans. She looked at her stupid saddle shoes. Her parents didn’t trust her to make even the most basic of decisions. No one trusted her. No one ever let her do anything. Mrs. Ferrigno wouldn’t let her play anything but the triangle. Mrs. Sinclair made her sit in the second row. Miss Angus didn’t want her on the second or third floor of the library. They all treated her like a baby. Her parents had told
her that she needed to grow up, that she had made up the whole thing about Mr. Jones being a spy, that it was all her overactive imagination. She had no proof, they had told her, and was just harassing a nice, quiet man. It’s not like she could fall any lower, so she might as well do what she wanted.

  “Okay,” she said. “But help me with these first.”

  32

  The Story of Mr. Jones

  Hazel kicked one of the rotten apples that had fallen onto the sidewalk outside the library, and it skittled away down the cement, leaving a brown trail behind it. She and Samuel hadn’t spoken much on their way to the library, walking side by side with Hazel’s bike between them. She still hadn’t told him about her confrontation with Mr. Jones the night before. She wanted to, but she worried that he might react the same way her parents had: like she was the one who had done something wrong.

  She sighed. And then she sighed again. Then she coughed.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “What? Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

  “You’re making a lot of funny noises.”

  They reached the apple and she kicked it again. “I made contact with the subject last night.”

  Samuel stopped walking right at the base of the stairs. “You what?”

  Then it all spilled out of her and she didn’t even care who might have heard her. “He was in the graveyard last night, only I didn’t know it was him. I thought it was Maryann and when I got there he was creepy and I screamed and my parents came but they didn’t believe me.”

  “Wow,” Samuel said.

  “Exactly.” She bit her lip. “There’s something else you need to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I told him that we know his secret. I told him that I knew about Alice, about everything. It just slipped out. I didn’t mention you by name, of course, but he is a spy, and it wouldn’t be too hard for him to figure out who my associates are.”

  “Associate,” Samuel said. “Singular.”

  “Associate,” Hazel agreed glumly.

  He shook his head. “I really hope that you are wrong about this man.”

  “Why?”

  “I wouldn’t want a spy coming after us. Come on, let’s go do this in a safe manner. For once.”

  They went up the stairs and Hazel pulled open the heavy wooden door. Together they walked to the third floor. On the way inside, Hazel had picked up the Burlington papers, plus the Maple Hill Banner to find out if there was any new information about the investigation at the plant.

  When she spread out the paper, there was Connie’s handsome father looking back at her. He still wasn’t talking, and the investigators were getting angry. She thought that maybe she ought to try to find the phone number for Senator Joe McCarthy and his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and hand the whole big mess over to them. Samuel was right. Now that Mr. Jones knew she was onto him, she wasn’t safe. Her whole family wasn’t safe. As a matter of fact, he could be at the house right now with her parents tied up, waiting for her to come home so he could send them all to Siberia. She bet her parents would be regretting that they hadn’t believed her.

  The only problem was, she didn’t know how to find the phone number for Senator McCarthy or the FBI, and the only person she could think to ask was Miss Angus. She tried to come up with a good cover story. Maybe she could tell Miss Angus that they were doing career exploration and she wanted to be an FBI agent. She didn’t know if women were allowed to be agents, though. If not, she would fix that. She could be the first woman FBI agent. That would certainly be exciting and noteworthy. She was imagining herself being sworn in when Samuel said, “Huh.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Once I realized that it was a new grave, I decided to search from that angle. I used the indices to find information about Memory’s Garden, and look what I found.”

  He pushed back his chair, and Hazel leaned over to look at his screen. She saw the photograph first. In it, the man was blurry, as if he were trying to step out of the photographer’s frame. His head was tilted down, but his eyes were lifted, so she could see his sorrow. Her parents stood beside him, looking younger, with somber expressions on their faces. The article was dated July 19, 1941, about a year before she was born.

  She read:

  MAN RETURNS TO HONOR SISTER

  Paul Jones returned this week to place a headstone on the grave of his sister. Alice Jones died in 1932 at the age of ten from influenza. At the time, the family could not afford a headstone or a plot. Alice was buried in Pauper’s Field.

  “When Mr. Jones came and spoke to us about it, I must admit I didn’t believe him at first,” says Lydia Kaplansky, co-proprietor of Memory’s Garden. “Pauper’s Field hasn’t been used in almost seventy-five years. There were many buried there during the early nineteenth century, but none since the Civil War. Or so we thought.”

  Mrs. Kaplansky’s husband and co-owner, George Kaplansky, chimed in, “When he came and asked about putting in a headstone, we did some research and sure enough there was a notation in the records. It seems influenza swept through Maple Hill that year. It being the Depression, many folks couldn’t afford a burial. The town paid for them to be buried in a little knoll on the edge of Pauper’s Field. None of them have a headstone.”

  None of them, that is, until now.

  Mr. Jones, who now lives in Texas, said he was just glad that his sister’s grave was finally marked. “It’s been weighing on me ever since she died.”

  Hazel read the article again. Her body felt heavy. “Well, that’s a disappointment,” she said.

  “I think it’s nice,” he said.

  “I wasn’t looking for nice,” she replied. “Of course, this doesn’t actually prove anything.”

  “Hazel,” said Samuel, exasperation edging into his voice.

  “Well, sure it explains the headstone, but there’s still the matter of the safes.”

  “I am sure there’s some other sort of explanation. An honest one.”

  “Maybe.” But even as she said it, a sinking feeling came over her. The sinking feeling of having done something really, really wrong. Like when she told Becky she didn’t know why she wasted so much time watching the popular girls when they were never going to let her be one. She was just as bad as whoever had thrown a brick through the Lis’ window. It was like Miss Lerner had said: she’d gotten all caught up in the rumors, and she hadn’t been able to see the truth.

  “I told you he wasn’t a spy. He’s just sad. He came back so he could be near her and watch over her.”

  “But she’s gone,” Hazel said. She had gathered all that evidence, and in the end it had amounted to nothing. Maybe she wasn’t such a super-sleuth after all. Nancy Drew would never have made this kind of mistake. Mr. Jones was an honorable man. He’d come all the way from Texas, first to get Alice a headstone and then he had returned to be by her grave.

  “Not to him she’s not.” Samuel’s voice was hard and Hazel knew she had made him angry again, though this time she had no clue as to why. “I wonder if she even had a real funeral,” Samuel added.

  “What do you mean?” As far as Hazel was concerned, a real funeral was one in which the body went into the ground.

  “Like with an official presiding and folks saying nice things about her.”

  “I’m not sure,” Hazel said.

  “Not just her, but all those people. They didn’t even mark their graves, Hazel.”

  Samuel looked near tears again and Hazel was baffled as to why he was so upset; it wasn’t like he knew those people. “Headstones are expensive.”

  Samuel shook his head. Hastily, he rose to his feet. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Hazel said. “Bye.”

  She watched Samuel walk away and wanted to call out to say she was sorry, but she didn’t know how to apologize when she wasn’t even sure what she had done. Instead she took out a piece of paper and a pencil and started worki
ng on her apology note to Mr. Jones. It was going to have to be a good one.

  33

  Birthday Un-Party

  If there was one good thing about being in deep trouble, it was that Hazel would not need to go to Connie’s birthday party. Or so she thought. Her mother had a different idea.

  Saturday morning Hazel was about to head into the cemetery for more of her forced labor, but her mother stopped her. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Weeding.”

  “Not this morning you’re not.”

  For a moment Hazel let herself believe that her parents had realized that even though she had made a terrible mistake about Mr. Jones, she had done it with the best intentions. Not to mention that the fallout shelter in the mausoleum had been an expression of love. So, she hoped, her mother was going to tell her that the grounding was over.

  “You have a birthday party to attend.”

  Hazel opened her mouth, but what could she say?

  “I’ve put a dress on your bed. Wear your Mary Janes.”

  “But they rub my toes funny,” Hazel protested.

  Hazel’s mom raised her eyebrows, and Hazel knew not to argue.

  The dress her mother had picked out was plain awful. It had been her Christmas dress the year before. She hated it then, and she hated it now. The white top was made of some sort of stiff, satin-like fabric. There was lace around the collar that itched like red ants were biting her. The skirt had crinoline under it that bunched up every time she sat down. She had grown since the previous year, so now the dress was tight around her chest and belly. She wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to breathe. In fact, she just might pass out in the Shorts’ living room from lack of oxygen. That would serve her mother right.

  When Hazel got downstairs, her mother was looking at the sheet of paper that Hazel had torn out of the notebook—the one labeled “Doctoral Dissertation Ideas.”