“There was some under the missing picture in the museum,” I told him. “It was mysterious, too; not like regular sawdust.”
“Paper?” Boris asked. “Or perhaps canvas?”
We nodded.
“That means that painting did not disappear, like the headline said, eh?” said Boris.
“No,” Jake said. “It means it was destroyed.”
“And our No. 1 suspect?” he asked.
“Still Ursula,” I told him. “She’s our only suspect. Unless you count the squirrel.”
“Because she sculpts fish and smeared salmon pâté on our reviewer friend.”
“He’s not a friend,” Stinky reminded Boris.
“No,” Boris said. “Not of ours and not of Ursula’s.”
That made me remember something. “Wait a minute. Mr. Huffleberger said he’d seen her work before, a long time ago, at a fair. They may not be friends, but they must have met. At least once.”
Boris nodded, slowly, and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He punched in the names “Ursula” and “Bartholomew Huffleberger.”
Two articles flashed onto the screen. One was the review we’d already seen in Artsy Bartsy. The other was a 1974 article from the Calvert City Messenger. The article said that Ursula Marie Noodleman was the first-place winner in the county fair’s painting category for ages twelve and under. She also took first place in the electronics competition, and she won third place for her goat in the juniors division. Mr. Huffleberger was only listed once, in the twelve-and-under painting category. “Honorable mention,” it said.
Mr. Huffleberger and Ursula had known each other a long time ago because Ursula had beaten him.
“I’ll bet he couldn’t wait for the chance to give her a bad review,” I said.
Jake nodded. “It was revenge.”
“And now,” said Stinky, picking up the story, “it’s Ursula’s turn to strike back.”
“That’s what she’s been doing all day,” I said. “That’s what she’s still doing.” We just needed to figure out where she’d strike next.
Yeti barked at a squirrel running across the sidewalk. It was light gray instead of dark brown like our squirrel, so Yeti was the only one who wanted to chase it. Then we heard Howard’s “Eeee!”
He’d spotted a squirrel, too, with dark fur and sad eyes. And this time it was the squirrel we were looking for. That meant it wasn’t just a coincidence that he was hanging out at the sculpture garden when Montauban lost his thumb, or that we’d seen him at the museum when something had eaten half of a pitcher by Paul Revere. That squirrel and Ursula were working together. Jake’s Freaky Facts book was right: Squirrels could be trained for espionage. Or destruction.
“Let’s go!” I said.
“But Nanny X is still in the museum unchecking her bag,” Jake said.
“She’ll catch up,” Boris said, putting Eliza in the stroller. “She’s very spry.”
So was the squirrel. Soon we were passing my dad’s museum—Hooray, the squirrel had left it alone!—but we were heading for the Museum of American History, which was full of treasures, too. I didn’t know if any of them counted as tall, like the treasure The Angler threatened to attack next. But they were all in danger.
I was still holding onto Hop, Sweet Bunny, the book Nanny X had given me. It was my only weapon. I pulled back the book’s cover, which showed an angelic bunny dancing in a field of carrots. It screamed, twice as loud as Moo, Sweet Cow. It screamed like that bunny was being chased around the Beltway by a three-hundred-pound fox.
Everyone around us froze and covered their ears. Birds flew out of trees. A squirrel (not ours) dropped the french fry he was carrying.
But the squirrel we were chasing didn’t stop or flinch. The squirrel we were chasing kept running.
Jake pulled out his stink-bomb pacifier. He squeezed the nib and threw it. Hard-boiled-egg smoke poured out. People’s hands moved from their ears to their noses. But the stink bomb didn’t stop the squirrel, either.
Jake and Stinky were huffing from running. So was Yeti.
One person was not huffing. And that was Nanny X. She’d put on her pink bunny slippers again, and now she was gliding past us with her elbows out, like she was practicing for the roller derby. She sailed through the stinky smoke just in time to see the squirrel ignore the No Animals sign and sneak through the museum door with a family of six.
This time Nanny X ignored the No Animals sign, too. By the time we caught up with her, she’d already changed back into her black Pilgrim shoes, flashed our badges at the guard and motioned us to follow her inside.
“Why didn’t you just do that at the art gallery?” I asked.
“It didn’t feel like as much of an emergency,” she said.
“Mergenthee,” said Eliza. It was the longest word she’d ever said.
“Exactly,” said Stinky.
The squirrel had left the lobby, so we split up again to look for him.
“We meet back here in ten minutes,” Nanny X said, pointing to a circle in the floor design.
“What if we don’t find him by then?” asked Jake.
“Then another treasure,” said Nanny X, “will have bitten the dust.” The expression had a whole new meaning now.
Jake headed downstairs toward the trains, which are his favorite part of the museum. Nanny X and Eliza went with him, while Boris and a not-so-delicate Yeti headed for the Star-Spangled Banner. Maybe that counted as tall. Boris had Yeti’s leash wrapped tightly around his wrist. “Keep that tail under control,” Boris told Yeti. “No wagging until we’re back outside.”
Stinky and I took Howard and tried to decide between Lincoln’s hat (which might count as tall), the first ladies’ gowns (which could count as tall, too) and Dorothy’s ruby slippers (not tall but very popular). What would attract a squirrel most? What would attract The Angler?
Then we saw a sign with a woman holding an enormous fish. “That’s it,” I said. “Julia Child’s Kitchen.”
Julia Child was a famous TV chef back when my grandmother was learning to cook. She was at least six feet tall.
We hurried downstairs to the exhibit. There he was! Julia Child’s kitchen was mostly closed off by plastic, but a panel was missing, and the squirrel considered that an invitation to climb on top of Julia’s counter, right next to the sink. He was holding a fake grape.
“We could jump it,” Stinky said. Howard nodded. I’ll bet he wished he had Julia Child’s recipe for bananas flambé. I wished I had something—anything—to stop that squirrel.
And then I realized that I did. My pockets weren’t as deep as Boris’s and I didn’t have as many of them, but there was some fishing line and thread in there, from when I was tying flies. I had a tiny weight, too, the size of a pebble. I threaded the fishing line through the weight and twirled it for a second, like a bola.
Then I loosened my grip and let the weight fly. It wrapped around the squirrel’s tail. Maybe my true calling was being a cowgirl.
As the fishing line went tight, a couple of ladies who had been admiring Julia’s pots screamed. I thought the squirrel would break the line and run away, but that’s when Howard ran right into the exhibit. He took one of Julia Child’s copper sauté pans off of the wall and conked the squirrel over the head with it. He brought the squirrel over to us. It was still kicking. Stinky wrapped some more fishing line and my black thread around its arms and legs. I tied the knots.
“It could have rabies!” shouted one of the women.
“It’s a robot,” Stinky said, showing off the metal underneath the fur.
But how would a robot know its way around the Museum of American History?
I thought about the drone that had brought Howard to us. It worked two ways, according to Nanny X: Remote programming and remote control. Someone must be controlling the squirrel.
My mind flashed back to the woman who’d been playing the video game outside the museum. Only now I was pretty sure it wasn’t a video game. And I w
as pretty sure of something else, too: The woman was Ursula.
This time she hadn’t left us an almost decent rhyming note, but maybe that was because she hadn’t had the chance yet. The Angler was on the move. And so were we.
16. Jake
Nanny X Learns Some History
The squirrel wasn’t near the trains or the 1903 Winton, which was the first car ever driven all the way across the United States. I figured he wouldn’t be too hard to find, though. Someone would see him and scream. But all I heard was the recording of the train whistle.
Then I heard another sound, like lava bubbling. Nanny X pulled out her diaper phone and opened a text message from NAP: “New fish. Fountain near Castle. Go.”
I had never noticed a fountain by the Smithsonian Castle. Nanny X said that was because it was small, and there usually weren’t any fish in it, not even goldfish. I wondered if that meant we were going after another robot. And if this time it was going to eat more than Eliza’s coloring-book pages.
Nanny X called Boris and told him to wait for Ali and Stinky at the meeting spot in the lobby. Then they would join us at our new meeting place. (Actually, what she told him was that we would “rendezvous” near the Castle fountain. I wasn’t sure “rendezvous” counted as a reading-connection word, because I’d never seen it in my reading.)
We took off for another round of fishing. I saw a woman standing outside the museum, playing some sort of video game. We’d seen her before, by the art gallery. She didn’t notice anything around her, like the fact that our nice day was turning cloudy.
Eliza looked at the sky. “Uh-oh,” she said.
I was getting tired of being paired up with Nanny X and my little sister all the time. But then I got a reward. As soon as we crossed onto the sidewalk on the Mall, Nanny X pulled out her bunny slippers and offered them to me.
“These are arctic,” I said, pulling off one of my wet socks.
“Hyperborean,” said Nanny X.
“Hyper—?”
“From the land beyond the north wind. I think that would count as cool. But be careful,” she added. “We don’t want any more broken legs.”
I took off my other shoe and sock, and put my wrinkly feet into the softest slippers I’d ever worn. Then Nanny X helped me up, and I headed for the Castle.
The crowd was thinning out, now that it was getting cloudy, so there weren’t many people to avoid. I led us around the building and into the courtyard on the other side.
Fast. Faster. Fastest.
“To the left, Jake Z,” Nanny X called. I curved around.
The fountain was up ahead, between the Castle and the Arts and Industries Building. Fortunately my skating was way better than my swimming. I skated around two little kids and aimed for the fountain. But there was one thing I couldn’t remember: how to slow down. It had something to do with the direction you pointed your toes. In? Out?
The fountain was getting closer.
“In!” yelled Nanny X. “You point your toes in!”
I changed the direction of my feet, but I wasn’t fast enough.
Bam. I plowed right into the fountain. My knees went kind of numbish and my arms went into the water. At least the bunny slippers were still dry.
Since I had a close-up view of the fountain, I saw the fish right away. It looked almost identical to the fish we’d caught in the Potomac, only this one was kind of greenish, like the water, instead of red.
This time we knew exactly what to do. I took off the bunny slippers while Nanny X took a hook from her hat and added a little bit of fishing line. Then she borrowed a small piece of paper from Eliza’s coloring book and baited the hook.
“You may do the honors,” she said.
I dangled the line in the water.
Chomp.
I wondered what Ethan would think if I brought Eliza’s coloring book with us the next time we went fishing. Nanny X didn’t cut the fish open when I reeled it in, which made Eliza happy. Instead, our nanny poked the fish right in the eye. The tail stopped moving.
“I found an off switch!” she said. “That was almost too easy. The fish just doesn’t seem as smart as that squirrel.”
“Fish have smaller brains,” I said.
Her eyebrows came together. “Maybe the fish were a prototype. An early version. Maybe they really aren’t as smart.”
Nanny X stuck the fish in her diaper bag. While we waited for Ali to meet us, we walked across the garden to see her painting, which was on display with a bunch of other artwork by fifth graders. Ali’s portrait of Yeti was set up on an easel. His paws were on a screen door. I thought he looked like he was waiting for us to get home from school. I also thought he looked hungry.
Wait a minute: I thought he looked hungry. I thought.
What about the squirrel? Was it thinking, too? Or was somebody else doing the thinking for it? Somebody who was programming it, or maybe even using a remote control, like with Nanny X’s drone?
An image of the video-game-playing lady sneaked into my brain again. She hadn’t looked up when Stinky was yelling at the art museum. She hadn’t looked up when we went running to the Castle. Maybe she hadn’t looked up because she was busy trying to make a squirrel destroy the world.
“I think I know where Ursula is,” I said.
We rushed back to the Mall, but the video-game lady had moved on. Nanny X grabbed her baby-powder spyglass. She looked both ways. Finally she focused on a giant building with a green dome on it: the National Museum of Natural History—my dad’s museum.
“There she is,” she said. She handed the glass to me and I peeked through it in time to see Ursula—or the lady we thought was Ursula—on the museum steps. The lens was so powerful, I could even make out a small beetle on the step beside her.
17. Alison
Nanny X Sets the Trap
We met Boris in the lobby and headed outside. Stinky held on to the fishing line with the squirrel dangling from the end of it. It swung back and forth when he walked. Its sad squirrel eyes looked even sadder. Anybody watching us would think it was dead.
We’d just started walking across the Mall when a park ranger stopped us.
“What in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?” he said.
“Going to the Castle,” said Stinky. He added a “sir” for extra politeness.
“I’m not even going to ask if you have a hunting permit,” the ranger said. “Even with a permit, there’s no hunting allowed.”
“Hunting?” Stinky’s mouth dropped open a little. The only thing he had ever hunted for was litter to pick up, and maybe some worms for compost. “We weren’t hunting.”
“No trapping,” added the ranger. “No fishing.”
Stinky held the squirrel right in front of the ranger’s face, which got all scrunched up, like he smelled something bad. I guess I’d make a face like that, too, if I thought someone was waving a dead squirrel at me.
“It’s mechanical,” Stinky explained. “It isn’t real.”
The ranger reached out and flicked the squirrel. Even with the fur, it made a dull clanging sound. It swung back and forth, like a pendulum. I wanted to point out that the ranger could be getting fingerprints all over our evidence, but he took his fingers away.
He looked at Yeti for a minute, and then his eyes went to Howard. “Do you have a license for that?” he said.
“We do,” Boris said. He pulled out his own badge. I hoped it would be enough, since Nanny X seemed to have everybody else’s.
“Well,” said the ranger. He didn’t seem to know what to say after that, so Boris made a suggestion.
“Perhaps we should put our squirrel in a bag. That way we won’t frighten the tourists.”
The ranger looked grateful. “Just what I was going to suggest,” he said. “Bag it. Carry on.”
We stuffed the squirrel into a green nylon sack that Boris had in one of his pockets, and moved on to find Nanny X at the fountain. I was glad we had been reassigned to the Castle. That meant I
could finally see my painting of Yeti.
Just then, a big drop of rain landed on my forehead.
“My painting!” I said.
I took off as the rain started falling even harder.
When we reached the exhibit, Mrs. Bonawali, our art teacher, was trying to cover up the artwork with a plastic sheet. “This was not in the forecast,” she said.
Boris was craning his neck, looking all around for the fountain and for Nanny X, but he took out a rain poncho and handed it to me. I put it over the Yeti painting, which had only gotten a little smeary near the tail. That’s when I noticed the purple ribbon that meant fourth place.
Stinky had a piece in the exhibit, too, a mosaic he’d made out of lentils and other kinds of beans. But when Boris handed Stinky a poncho to put over his project, we saw a squirrel sitting on the easel, nibbling on the lentils.
From the way it was holding its head, it didn’t look like a robot squirrel, either.
“I’m sorry, Daniel,” Boris said, putting a hand on Stinky’s head. Daniel was Stinky’s real name. “At least we know he has good taste.”
Stinky didn’t look even a little upset. “And at least beans are natural,” he said. “It’s better for him than the other food he’s probably finding around here.”
Then I noticed something else on Stinky’s artwork: a red ribbon, for second place. He’d beaten me, just like Ursula had beaten Mr. Huffleberger. But I could still beat him by finding more clues first.
I was working very hard on not being jealous when Stinky gave me his poncho. “I don’t want to bother the squirrel,” he said. I think he still felt bad that the robot squirrel got clobbered with the sauté pan.
I almost said no. But then the rain started coming down harder and I pulled it on. I looked like a dandelion, but at least I was dry. If there were ribbons for junior agents, I’ll bet Stinky would have gotten a blue one. He’d get a blue one if there were ribbons for friends, too.
We still didn’t see Nanny X or Jake or Eliza anywhere, even though they’d left way before we had. We went over to the fountain, which was pretty small. There were lots of ripples from the raindrops hitting the water. But we didn’t see a fish. Maybe my brother had caught it already.
Nanny X Returns Page 6
