Nanny X Returns (10 page)

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.

Boris led us back to the Mall side of the Castle. He spotted two people in the distance, running at top speed with a stroller. They stopped running, and Boris's phone rang. He held it to his ear, but we could still hear it when Nanny X said, “We've got her. We've got The Angler.”

“Got her” was an exaggeration. What Nanny X should have said was that we “possibly almost cornered her.” Or “We see her!” That would have worked.

Because we did see The Angler. She was still standing on the top step of the Museum of Natural History as the rain fell down around her. And she was studying the screen on what was not a video game, but a remote control, just like I'd guessed.

At first I thought we should just go up behind and grab her, but we didn't know if she had any weapons. Plus, she had threatened the president of the United States. And even though she had threatened to destroy things and not people, once you start threatening destruction, it's probably hard to know when to stop. Nanny X's computer database—before it got destroyed—hadn't said “Armed and Dangerous.” It hadn't mentioned Ursula at all. But there could have been an update.

“Approach with caution,” Nanny X said, reading my mind. “Watch Eliza, Jake Z.”

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“I will engage.” Nanny X adjusted the brim on her fishing hat. Then she reached into the diaper bag and pulled out a small, flowery umbrella. She popped it open and marched up the museum stairs. She actually marched, like a band was playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Because of the rain, the tourists were getting inside as fast as possible. No one was paying attention to us. I guess that's the best way to be inconspicuous: Conduct your most important operations when it's raining.

I know I'm in trouble when my mom calls me by my whole name, Jacob Zachary Pringle. So I wasn't surprised when Nanny X used Ursula's whole name, now that we knew it.

“Ursula Marie Noodleman?” she said.

The lady looked at us, and I could tell she hadn't expected anyone to come up with that. She seemed to notice the rain for the first time, too. She took a fishing hat out of her pocket and put it on.

“I believe,” Nanny X continued, “that you and I share an affinity for fish.”

“I love fish,” Ursula said. “And other creatures. Bugs, for instance.”

If Ursula liked bugs, she was in the right place. The top floor of the Museum of Natural History had an insect zoo. But Ursula didn't seem interested in the exhibit, which was partly sponsored by an exterminating company. It turned out she had brought bugs of her own—beetles. Not that we needed more of them. According to my
Freaky Facts
book, there are more beetles than any other type of bug in the world.

Ursula's beetles were about the size of a half dollar and almost as flat. Some of the shells were green, like
emeralds—and like the tiny screw Eliza had found at the art museum. Some were black.

You might think: What could a bug do? The answer is: a lot. For one thing, it could sneak through a museum door a lot more easily than a squirrel. Plus, beetles can chew.

Even if they didn't have brains as big as a squirrel—or a fish—they had Ursula at the controls. They could chomp on a painting, or the Easter Island statue, or the fur on the Neanderthals in the Prehistoric Man exhibit. They could destroy things.

Nanny X walked up a few more steps so she and Ursula were even. “You've brought some visitors to the museum, I see,” she said, nodding at the bugs, which were getting rained on with the rest of us. I thought that was a weird word choice—“visitors”—as if the bugs were going upstairs to hang out with the hissing cockroaches
.

“Just one is exploring the museum at the moment,” said Ursula. “Sometimes one is all it takes.”

If that was true, I thought, somebody had to find it.

My brain ping-ponged back and forth.
Ping
: A bug was already inside.
Pong
: Ursula was outside.
Ping
: The bug was small.
Pong
: It could still go
chomp
. What if the bug was chomping mummies in the Ancient Egypt exhibit
right now
?

I grabbed Eliza and we ran inside to search for that bug. This was where our dad worked. I'll bet even Nanny X didn't know the museum as well as we did. I'll bet Ursula didn't, either. I tried to guess where the bug would go. What was the most valuable thing in the museum? What was a national treasure?

So far she'd taken the Warrior of Montauban's thumb, a painting of George Washington and a pitcher by Paul
Revere. But she'd said she was going taller, which meant bigger.

The museum had lots of big things, starting with the African elephant near the front. We didn't see the beetle there. We peeked into the marine hall. Nope. Then I thought about the biggest things in the museum: the dinosaurs. They were big in size, plus they were popular.

I wanted to look at the T. rex, but Eliza toddled over to the triceratops. “Dina-tore,” she said. He wasn't the tallest dinosaur ever made, but he was taller than me. He was also about thirty feet long.

I put my hands on the railing and stood next to Eliza. I felt a tickle. Then—
ouch
—I felt a chomp. A beetle, like the ones we'd seen near Ursula, had bitten my pinky.

My mother doesn't like us to kill bugs, except for mosquitoes. Instead, she asks us to “escort them outside.” I picked up the beetle the way you'd pick up a crayfish, holding my fingers behind the pinchy part.

“Come on, Eliza,” I said.

We escorted the bug back to Nanny X.

I am not afraid of worms, snakes, mice, rats, bats or raw chicken, but bugs have freaked me out ever since Jake told me, during a previous visit to the museum, that there are more than ten quintillion insects in the world at any given time. There were only about twenty bugs outside the museum when we found Nanny X, but they were still disturbing, even though none of them was actually moving. The only bug that was moving so far was the one inside the museum, with my brother and Eliza.

“You know,” said Stinky, who was probably sorry he'd given me the rain poncho, “with global warming there's going to be a major increase in the number of insects.”

More than ten quintillion? But I was not going to run screaming down the stairs in front of Stinky. Yeti looked like he wanted to run, though. He has not liked bugs since his flea problem.

“The population has already grown,” said a woman who had to be Ursula. She looked at her own bugs—kind of fondly, I thought. Her hair was brown, pulled back in a braid that poked out from underneath her fishing hat, which was like the one Nanny X wore except it was green instead of orange and it didn't have as many fishhooks in it.

Ursula hit a button on her remote, and the bugs near her feet began to move. They fanned out in different directions, some going toward the museum and some going away from it.

Nanny X took her umbrella and pointed it at one of the bugs. The umbrella didn't fly or talk, like Mary Poppins's umbrella. Instead, it shot out a blurp of clear liquid, the queen of all raindrops. The blurp hit the bug, which struggled for a minute, like it was dizzy. Then it straightened up and kept walking.

“Stop,” said Ursula. She was talking to Nanny X, not the bug.

But Nanny X shot another blurp as the rain continued to fall. “It's supposed to be sticky,” she said. “It's supposed to trap them like flypaper.”

“The rain must be counteracting the stickiness,” Boris said.

It was hard to believe my special-agent training was coming to this, but I couldn't think of what else to do. I walked up to the bug nearest to me and stomped on it. Tiny screws and mechanical pieces came spurting out of the side.

Stinky and Boris went after the bugs, too. So did Howard. Yeti stayed close to Boris but didn't attack anything. Nanny X reached into her diaper bag and pulled out an industrial-strength nasal aspirator. Nasal aspirators are what you use to suck the snot out of babies' noses when they are too young to blow properly. Jake called them “booger
suckers.” This one had a wide opening at the end, so when Nanny X squeezed the bulb part and let go, it slurped the beetle right inside.

“You are destroying my
art
,” Ursula said.

“What about you?” said Nanny X as she sucked up another bug, and then another and another. “What have you destroyed?”

My brother came out of the museum then with my sister. In his hand he was holding a small black beetle. He ran down the steps and stood next to me and Stinky. Boris and Yeti and Nanny X came over to us, too. So did Howard.

We fanned out on the same step, side by side, like a team. Ursula had one last beetle near her foot. She reached down to catch it—and save it—and when she did, Nanny X lunged.

She twisted Ursula's arm behind her back and handcuffed her with a teething ring. She attached the other cuff around her own wrist.

“Art is about creating,” said Nanny X. “Not destroying.” She pulled out her diaper phone and pressed a button. “X, reporting in,” she said. “We've got her.”

I'd heard that before. But this time it was true. We'd caught The Angler, squished a bunch of bugs and saved a lot of national treasures from destruction. We hadn't saved all of them, though. I didn't know what NAP would have to say about that. Would we get another case after this one?

“You know,” Jake told Urusla as the rain eased up and the sun started to look out on us again, “I thought your fish sculpture was very realistic. And your squirrel is totally tundra.” Leave it to my brother to be polite to a criminal. He was right, though.

“You mean you think I'm good?” Ursula said. She didn't
mean “good person,” which was in question at the moment. She meant “good at art.”

“Yes,” said Jake.

“Yes,” Stinky and I agreed.

Jake frowned. “I'm not so sure about your poetry, though,” he said. “Plus, you said you were going after something tall. None of the national treasures you picked was really very tall.”