by R. A. Spratt
“Me!” “No, please, me!” “I’ve got to have it!” exclaimed various members of the crowd.
“All right, the only fair way to settle this is to auction it off to the highest bidder,” announced Nanny Piggins. “Who will open the bidding?”
“One hundred dollars!” screamed a hungry man.
“A thousand dollars!” yelled an even hungrier woman.
“Ten thousand dollars!” called a man so hungry he was prepared to re-mortgage his house.
There were hands flying up left and right as people desperately tried to bid for the cake, because it is in adrenaline-filled moments like these that people see the world with greater clarity. And they realize that there are much more important things than rent payments, bills, and health insurance premiums—namely, cake. Everyone in that cake-frenzied crowd knew that they might never climb Mount Everest or swim the English Channel, but if they just ate this one heavenly slice of octuple-chocolate chocolate cake they would have really achieved something in life.
When the fete closed, Headmaster Pimplestock went around to every stall collecting the cash and thanking the stallholders.
“How did you do this year, Nanny Anne?” simpered Headmaster Pimplestock.
“I’ve made $8,200,” smiled Nanny Anne smugly as she handed over her pink frilly cash box.
“You’re such a treasure,” gushed Headmaster Pimplestock. “The school is lucky to have you as a member of our community.”
Nanny Anne smirked and batted her eyelids at the headmaster (even though she did not have any dust in her eye).
Finally Headmaster Pimplestock walked down the path and around behind the boys’ bathroom to the last stall, where Nanny Piggins was waiting.
“Did you manage to get rid of some of those books, then?” asked Headmaster Pimplestock.
“Oh yes,” said Nanny Piggins. “We ran out of books two hours ago, which is why I had to break into your storeroom and take all the horrible, miserable novels you hand out as required reading and sell them as well.”
“You did what?” blustered Headmaster Pimplestock.
“Which is how we came to make $108,000,” said Nanny Piggins, wheeling out a big trash bin full of cash. (Her cash box had soon overflowed, so Nanny Piggins had to borrow a large trash bin from the janitor to hold her enormous profits.)
Headmaster Pimplestock looked at the huge stash of money. “You haven’t robbed a bank, have you?” (He knew Nanny Piggins well.)
“I did consider that,” admitted Nanny Piggins. “But the banks aren’t open on Saturdays and it would be rude to break their door.”
Headmaster Pimplestock did not know what to say. So Boris helped him.
“This is where you say thank you to my sister for all her hard work,” said Boris.
Headmaster Pimplestock looked up at the ten-foot-tall bear looming over him and gulped. “Thank you so much for all your hard work, Nanny Piggins.”
“And…” prodded Boris.
“What more do you want?” asked Headmaster Pimplestock.
“We want you to promise that you’ll go straight home and call the fashion designer,” prompted Boris.
“You were serious about that?” asked Headmaster Pimplestock incredulously.
“Oh yes,” said Nanny Piggins.
“Very serious,” said Boris, leaning in close to Headmaster Pimplestock’s face.
“All right, I’ll call Milan today,” promised Headmaster Pimplestock, reaching for the wheeled trash bin.
“There is one more thing,” said Nanny Piggins, not letting go of the bin handle.
“There is?” asked Headmaster Pimplestock worriedly.
“I want to run the cake stall next year,” said Nanny Piggins.
“But Nanny Anne—” began Headmaster Pimplestock.
“Only sold $8,200 worth of cake,” interrupted Nanny Piggins.
“All right, the job is yours,” conceded Headmaster Pimplestock.
“Then here you are,” said Nanny Piggins, handing the trash bin to Headmaster Pimplestock, who ran away as fast as a man pushing a very heavy overstuffed trash bin possibly can.
“Well, children,” said Nanny Piggins. “I think we have done an excellent day’s work.”
“We’ve raised $108,000 for the school,” agreed Samantha.
“Fifty-eight thousand of which will be spent on flying in a leading fashion designer to yell at Headmaster Pimplestock in Italian,” added Boris.
“But more importantly,” said Nanny Piggins, “I have proven, yet again, that my cakes are much, much better than Nanny Anne’s.”
CHAPTER TEN
Nanny Piggins and the Ominous Sounds
anny Piggins was not having a good day. Now, as you have probably gathered from reading the previous nine chapters, Nanny Piggins had a much higher ratio of good days to bad days than most ordinary people. But even she, occasionally, every year or two, would have a bad day. And this was one of them.
It all started when she tried to get to the sweetshop before closing time. The sweetshop always closed at noon on Sundays so that the man who ran it could have a nap. After all, fulfilling the sugary requirements of the town’s children (and Nanny Piggins) all week was exhausting work.
Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children had set out for the sweetshop in plenty of time, but characteristically, they were distracted along the way. First by an ice-cream truck going in the opposite direction; then by the new slide at the park; then by them all going to the service station to buy a four-liter bottle of motor oil to pour on the slide because Nanny Piggins thought it was not slippery enough.
As a result, when they set out for the sweetshop again, two hours after they had first left the house, they were cutting it a little close. When they rounded the corner, they were horrified to see the sweetshop man hanging the CLOSED sign in his window and pressing the button to lower the heavy security door.
“Noooooo!!!” screamed Nanny Piggins. Dreading the horror of a full Sunday afternoon without chocolate, she immediately sprinted toward the shop. It was an impressive sight. The children knew their nanny could fly when she was blasted out of a cannon, but they never realized she could fly along the ground as well. If the Olympic one-hundred-meter final had been held in the street in front of the sweetshop that afternoon Nanny Piggins would have definitely won the gold medal. However, as she narrowed the distance between herself and the sweetshop, the security shutter narrowed the distance between itself and the ground.
Fortunately Nanny Piggins had seen many adventure movies, so she knew exactly what to do. Just as the security shutter seemed impossibly close to the pavement, she dived headfirst at the gap, sliding under the shutter, smashing open the shop door with her head, and coming to a halt on the sweetshop floor.
Unfortunately this is where her luck ran out, for Nanny Piggins had slightly misjudged something. Whether it was the hardness of the shop door, the un-slipperiness of the floor (if only the sweetshop man had kept it regularly oiled), or her own height—no one will ever know. One thing was clear, however: Nanny Piggins had not slid into the shop quite far enough. As a result, the shutter continued down and landed on her trotter.
“Owwww!” said Nanny Piggins.
“Oh no!” said the shopkeeper, horrified to see his best customer get crunched by his security door.
“Mmm-mmm-mmm,” said Nanny Piggins as she bravely distracted herself from the pain by eating a handful of chocolate bars that happened to be within arm’s reach.
An ambulance was called, and Boris and the children rode with Nanny Piggins to the hospital (Boris had to ride on the roof because ambulances are not designed with ten-foot-tall dancing bears in mind). At the emergency room, after numerous X-rays, investigations, and proddings (that only made it hurt more), the brilliant medical minds declared Nanny Piggins’s ankle to be sprained. They sent her home with an elastic bandage, a pair of crutches, and instructions to stay off her trotters for a week.
“Hmpf,” said Nanny Piggins as Boris
carried her up the stairs to her bedroom.
“Is the pain dreadful?” asked Samantha.
“Oh, I don’t mind the pain in my trotter. I can ignore that. I’m just upset that I forgot to stock up on supplies while we were at the sweetshop,” complained Nanny Piggins.
“There were a lot of distractions,” comforted Boris, “what with Michael calling an ambulance, Derrick holding the ice blocks to your foot to stop the swelling, and the shopkeeper weeping and begging forgiveness.”
“Well, if the ankle injury doesn’t kill me, I may not survive the night because I’ll starve from lack of chocolate,” said Nanny Piggins.
“You did manage to shove thirty-seven chocolate bars in your pockets while you were lying on the floor of the shop,” Samantha reminded her, “and eat them all on the ambulance ride to the hospital.”
“Ankle pain makes me hungry,” admitted Nanny Piggins.
“Would you like us to go down to the kitchen and bake you some cake,” asked Michael, “just so you have basic supplies to see you through?”
“That is very kind,” said Nanny Piggins, “but it’s all right. I told the sweetshop man to ring Hans at the bakery and he knows what to do—in cases of extreme emergency he is to hire a helicopter and drop a crate of basic rations on our roof. So I shouldn’t be surprised if they are there now.”
And Hans, being a good baker, had followed those instructions precisely. Unfortunately (as mentioned in Chapter Six), the roof of the Greens’ house was not one-hundred-percent structurally sound, so Boris and the children actually found the huge crate of gourmet cakes sitting on top of Mr. Green’s dresser, having smashed straight through the roof and into his bedroom (which is a lesson to us all. If you are going to have something dropped onto your home from a helicopter, make sure your roof has sturdy crossbeams).
“Do you think your father will notice the hole?” asked Boris.
“If he does, we could put some plastic wrap over it and tell him it’s a skylight,” suggested Michael.
Nanny Piggins made it through the night, but the next morning her ankle was not only swollen, it had also turned all the colors of the rainbow. So Boris helped her get settled in a cozy chair by the window, with her trotter propped up on a cushion, and the children made her comfortable by putting a stack of novels within arms’ reach on one side and a huge box of chocolate bars (that the sweetshop man had sent over as a get-well present first thing that morning) on the other.
“Would you like me to bring up the television?” asked Boris.
“No, it’s all right,” said Nanny Piggins. “I’ve got my binoculars, so I can watch TV through Mrs. Simpson’s window. She always watches The Young and the Irritable and The Bold and the Spiteful, so I won’t miss my programs.”
“We’ve got to go to school,” said Derrick.
“But you went last week!” complained Nanny Piggins.
“Only on two days,” said Samantha.
“Your school is so hypocritical,” sighed Nanny Piggins. “The teachers always complain about class sizes, but when I do something to help reduce numbers by keeping you home, they complain about that too.”
“Boris will be here to look after you,” said Samantha.
“Actually, I can’t,” said Boris. “I’ve been hired by the bank to teach their tellers ballet.”
“Why?” asked Nanny Piggins. “All they do all day is sit behind a big counter taking people’s money.”
“Apparently studies have shown that bank tellers are the most miserable human beings on earth. So they are seeing if introducing ballet to their lives cheers them up,” explained Boris.
“Now I feel bad about complaining,” said Nanny Piggins. “Your day is obviously going to be a lot more painful than mine. I have my novels, my chocolate, and my binoculars. True, I can’t perform acrobatics or gymnastics or chase down the ice-cream truck, but at least I will be having fun.”
So Nanny Piggins was left on her own. And she was immediately incredibly bored. She tried to ease the boredom by spying on the neighbors with her binoculars, but nobody in the street was doing anything interesting. (Mr. Levinstein was doing his Jazzercise workout in his living room, but Nanny Piggins had seen that many times before, and watching his chubby tummy wobble was not as funny the twenty-seventh time as it was the first.)
Nanny Piggins tried amusing herself with chocolate, but once she had stuffed two dozen chocolate bars in her mouth (three seconds’ worth of entertainment), she was left wondering what she could do with the other six and three-quarter hours of the day before the children came home. So she picked up a book.
Samantha had put out a stack of her own favorite kind of novels—girl-detective stories. Nanny Piggins usually preferred romance, but she enjoyed any story that involved excitement, mystery, and completely unqualified amateurs making citizen’s arrests, so she was soon engrossed. She avidly read as the girl detective showed up all those silly police officers with their forensic teams, legal procedures, and years of experience, simply by following the clues. Nanny Piggins enjoyed the books so much she even skipped watching The Young and the Irritable (confident that Bethany would not actually tell Bridge about her secret marriage to Hutt while suffering amnesia in Nepal, at least not for another six episodes).
So when the children came home from school, they were surprised to find their nanny happily reading her books. In fact, Nanny Piggins was so happy that she had only eaten two dozen of the three dozen cases of chocolate the sweetshop man had sent over—so there was something left for dinner.
The next morning Boris and the children set Nanny Piggins up in her cozy position by the window again.
“Are you going to spend the day reading detective novels again, Nanny Piggins?” asked Derrick.
“Oh, no, I won’t have time,” said Nanny Piggins. “Today I’m going to fight crime.”
“But the doctors said you mustn’t move!” protested Samantha.
“I won’t have to!” said Nanny Piggins. “In The Case of the Naughty Math Teacher, girl-detective Tracey McWeldon was snowbound in her house, but she still solved the case simply by using deductive reasoning and tidbits of information she had picked up while gossiping with her friends on the telephone.”
“I thought you’d been put off crime fighting after that trouble with the Neighborhood Watch,” said Derrick.
“I’m willing to give it another go,” said Nanny Piggins.
“So do you want us to fetch the telephone?” asked Michael.
“Yes, please,” said Nanny Piggins. “And the telescope from your father’s study. I want to be able to invade the privacy of the people down at the far end of the street as well.”
“But what if there isn’t anybody in the street committing a crime?” asked Samantha.
“Ha!” laughed Nanny Piggins. “I thought you’d read these books. There is always someone committing a terrible crime right under your nose. It’s only because the police aren’t as intelligent and observant as a fourteen-year-old girl that they never notice.”
So the children went off to school, just as worried about their nanny as they had been the day before, except now for different reasons.
“You don’t think she’s going to get into trouble, do you?” asked Samantha.
“How much trouble can she get into sitting in a chair in her room?” asked Derrick.
Samantha and Michael looked at Derrick. He blushed. They all realized the answer—a lot.
At first there was no crime for Nanny Piggins to solve. But she kept busy by calling Mrs. Roncoli across the street and telling her the answers to her crossword puzzle (Nanny Piggins was using Mr. Green’s powerful telescope to read over Mrs. Roncoli’s shoulder as she sat at her kitchen table).
But at ten o’clock Nanny Piggins hit the jackpot. She spotted a disheveled-looking man breaking into the Lau residence across the street. Nanny Piggins was immediately on the phone to Mrs. Lau, who she knew (thanks to the telescope) to be in the upstairs bathroom re-grouting the til
es. Nanny Piggins then called the police, sat back, and watched as Mrs. Lau snuck down the stairs, went into the kitchen, picked up a frying pan, crept into the living room, and hit the burglar hard across the back of the head.
As Nanny Piggins later told the police in her official statement: “How was I to know that Mr. Lau had lost his key and was climbing in through his own window so he could get a nap after a long night working the late shift?”
Mrs. Lau did not mind. She was angry with Mr. Lau about some overzealous pruning he had done on her pear tree, so she was glad of the excuse to punish him. But the Police Sergeant gave Nanny Piggins a lecture about wasting police time and instigating violence. Nanny Piggins was, however, not deterred. In fact it encouraged her. Girl detectives were always told off for wasting police time, right before they uncovered the international ring of wicked thieves. So as soon as the Police Sergeant got back in his patrol car and drove off to the doughnut shop (even being around Nanny Piggins made people want sugary food), she went back to work, on the lookout for crime.
Now you have to understand, Mr. Green had not chosen to live on this street because it was a high-crime area. Most of the residents were every bit as boring as him. So even though she had a vivid imagination and a 20x30 power telescope, Nanny Piggins still struggled to find a crime over the next few hours.
She did consider calling the newspaper to report an outbreak of plague when she saw a rat gnawing at one of Mr. Pieterson’s garbage bags. And Nanny Piggins consulted Mr. Green’s law books (the ones he forced her to get back after the bookstall) to see if she could have Mrs. Merkel arrested for crimes against food when she saw what her neighbor was cooking for her husband’s dinner (but it turns out you can’t have someone arrested for bad cooking unless that cooking is so bad it causes injury. So Nanny Piggins would just have to wait until Mr. Merkel got food poisoning the next day).
