Nanny X Returns (5 page)

“Eeeee, eeee,” said Howard. He was wearing a crash helmet, but as soon as Nanny X helped him take it off, he put on her old gardening hat, which he was holding carefully in two hairy hands.

“Very fashionable,” said Nanny X. She handed him a
banana from the diaper bag. There were at least a dozen more in there.

I reached out my own not-hairy hand to shake Howard's. But the chimp lifted his arms, the way Eliza does when she says “Up, up.” I lifted him and he gave me a big, wet chimpanzee kiss, right on the mouth. Yeti jumped up on both of us. I'm pretty sure he was just saying hello.

Just then, a couple of tourists wandered up the hill to take in the view of the river below. But none of them even glanced at the river. They were all staring at us. Nanny X punched in some more coordinates and the drone lifted off again. While the tourists looked up to watch it, Nanny X grabbed the stroller and Eliza. I offered Howard a piggyback ride, and we went down the hill in search of Jake.

If we found him, we'd find that stupid squirrel. And if we could find the squirrel, we could get on to our real assignment, which was finding The Angler before something besides Nanny X's computer disappeared. I had another assignment, too, but that one wasn't official: solving the case before Stinky and Boris did, so NAP would know the Pringles were meant to be special agents. And then they'd know our nanny was meant to be one, too.

Squirrels can run twenty miles per hour.

Humans can run twenty-seven miles per hour, but only if they are Usain Bolt. We had an advantage, because we weren't running around with computers in our mouths. But the squirrel could climb. He went up trees, and down them. He went up buildings and onto ledges.

We split up, with Boris on one side of a building, me in the middle and Stinky on the end. We looked like a SWAT team, except that we didn't have black T-shirts and we didn't have guns and one of us had really soggy shoes from falling into the Potomac River.

Boris pulled something from one of his pockets. He didn't carry nearly as much as Nanny X did, maybe because Stinky didn't wear diapers. But he had a hook. I wasn't just a fish hook, either. It was a small grappling hook, like the one he'd used to hold our boats together, with a rope hanging
from it like a tail. He attached it to a tree and tried to swing it toward the next tree after the squirrel. The squirrel was too fast; I almost expected him to stick out his tongue at us.

“Okay, then,” said Boris. He pulled out a small green disc and sent it whizzing through the air. It opened into a net, and caught a fire hydrant.

The squirrel went back to the sidewalk and ran jerkily down the hill again.

We heard footsteps as Ali and Nanny X and Eliza caught up with us. Ali had someone on her back, and it didn't take me long to figure out that the someone was Howard!

He jumped down and hugged me around the legs. I guess he'd missed me, too.

“You should have seen it,” said Ali. “He came in a drone.”

It wasn't surprising that NAP owned a drone. Plus, it made sense that they used it for Howard. Chimps and monkeys have a proven record of being excellent fliers. They were sent into space before humans.

“Where's our squirrel friend?” asked Nanny X.

“Up there.” Boris pointed to a tree that was growing out of a space in the sidewalk.

Nanny X made a sign with both of her pointer fingers, like she was doing some sort of boogie-woogie dance. Then she held up a package of baby wipes—real ones. Howard took off his gardening hat and handed it to Nanny X like he understood her sign language perfectly. He went to the tree and started to climb. When he reached a high branch, he swung for a minute like he was hanging from a trapeze. Then he disappeared into the leaves. We heard a rattling sound as the squirrel moved to the next tree, but Howard was right behind him. They made a bunch of noise, like they were arguing with their mouths full of Listerine.

“Eeeeeee,” Howard said, getting in the last word. He
climbed down the tree, one-handed. In his other hand he carried Nanny X's baby-wipe computer.

“Good work, Howard!” said Nanny X, handing him a banana.

You too, Jake
, I thought to myself. Because I was the one who thought of calling Howard in the first place. Though I guess a diaper bag full of bananas meant that Nanny X might have planned on calling him, too. What I said out loud was: “There is something weird about that squirrel.”

“You think?” said Ali. This is called sarcasm. Because duh, there were lots of weird things about that squirrel.

“Did you notice the way it moved?” I said. “It didn't move like normal squirrels do.”

In real life, squirrels have ankles that rotate. That's why they don't come down trees backward, the way humans and chimps do; they come running down headfirst.

But
this
squirrel came down in reverse. Plus, it didn't have the smooth, hoppy motion most squirrels have.

“Yeti didn't do his squirrel trick, either,” I said. At first I'd thought that meant something was wrong with Yeti. Now I thought it meant there was something wrong with the squirrel. “We should keep following him,” I added. “He's suspicious.”

We were close to the bottom of the hill now. We were also close to people, and they seemed to be looking at us—at Howard, especially.

Eliza took off her sun bonnet and waved it around.

“Eliza, that's a great idea,” I said.

We pulled some extra stuff out of Nanny X's diaper bag. Soon Howard was wearing Eliza's bonnet, an extra pair of her overalls and a pink shirt. I pointed to the stroller.

“Go ahead, Howard,” I said. “Get in.” Howard squeezed into the stroller next to Eliza. Nanny X pulled down the sun
visor, and from a distance you couldn't tell my sister's seatmate was a chimpanzee. The squirrel came down the tree and ran the rest of the way down the hill, toward the Smithsonian Castle.

“That's where my art exhibit is,” said Ali. But the squirrel switched directions again and turned right, toward the Hirshhorn Museum.

We followed him, past an ice-cream truck and about a bazillion people. Then the squirrel crossed another street and disappeared into the Hirshhorn's outdoor sculpture garden.

Ali and I have spent a lot of time at the sculpture garden. We like to play hide-and-seek there, even though it's supposed to be a spot for “quiet contemplation.” The squirrel was playing hide-and-seek now.

“Squirrel, Yeti,” I said. But he just looked in the stroller at Howard. Howard looked back like he was thinking
Now what?

That's what I wanted to know, too.

I was happy about three things.

One: I didn't have wet feet, like Jake.

Two: We were away from the water and officially on land in Washington, D.C., where we could get down to the business of catching The Angler and maybe, eventually, go see my painting.

Three: The sculpture garden seemed like the perfect place to solve a mystery about someone who wanted to put a sculpture on the White House lawn. It was one of my favorite places on the whole Mall. I liked it because instead of going inside a quiet museum to look at strange art, you could stay outside in the sunshine and look at it.

And it looked like the strange art was about to get a little stranger.

“I am not an art expert,” Boris said, “but I think
The Great Warrior of Montauban
has a problem with his hand.”

The Warrior of Montauban had problems with other
body parts, too. He was missing his knees and the bottom parts of his legs. He was also missing pants. And a shirt.

He had a sword, though, a big one behind his back. And he had very muscular arms. One of his arms extended out to the side, and at the end of that arm was a giant hand. But his thumb was hanging from his hand at an odd angle.

“Maybe it's getting rusty,” said Jake.

Nanny X squatted down beneath the arm and looked up at the thumb to get a closer look.

“Watch out!” I said.

The thumb waved a little, like it was barely even attached. Then it plunked like a raindrop, straight onto Nanny X's head. Our nanny swayed back and forth as the thumb thumped onto the grass. Boris caught her before she joined it. He set her down, gently. When he removed her mirrored sunglasses, her eyes were closed. “She's unconscious,” he said. He slid the thumb, which looked like it weighed about fifty pounds, into an evidence bag.

“Nanny X, wake up!” I said. I wondered what NAP would do about an agent who lost a computer and got knocked out on the same mission. I fanned her with my hands, because sometimes air revives people when they are unconscious. Soon our nanny's eyes fluttered. When she opened them, the first thing she did was look at her watch. I thought it was because she was trying to figure out how long she'd been knocked out, but I was wrong. “It's almost noon,” she said. “The thumb is a warning.”

She didn't say who was warning us, but we knew: The Angler.

We tried to help Nanny X over to a bench.

“I am not a frail old lady,” she said. “I'm very spry.” She plopped down on the bench, reached into the diaper bag and grabbed Mr. Ow, a cold pack in the shape of an octopus
that Eliza uses when she gets a bad bump. Nanny X took off her fishing hat, put Mr. Ow on her head and set the fishing hat back in place. Then she opened up her mini computer.

The screen was blue. The computer made a sound, sort of like
Moo, Sweet Cow
, only it sounded a little more like
Moo
, Sick
Cow
. Nanny X slammed the computer shut again.

“We're running out of time,” I said, which didn't help.

“Indeed,” said Boris, dropping Montauban's thumb into the diaper bag. “We will have to choose our plan carefully.”

While Boris and Nanny X talked about their strategy, I walked over to the Yoko Ono Wishing Tree, the spot in the sculpture garden where people write down wishes and hang them from the branches.

A lot of the wishes were for world peace. One said, “I wish for a million dollars.” One said, “I wish my mom would get better.”

I took a pencil and wrote on a slip of paper: “I wish we could catch The Angler.” I wrote “we.” I meant “I.” But I knew it was going to take more than wishes to solve our case.

I found a low branch and was hanging up my wish when I noticed another wish, in swirly, slanted handwriting. “I wish the president would get some new art for his front lawn,” it said. On the back of the paper it had one word: “Mine.”

I guess there could be a lot of people who wanted their art to be discovered. But there were not a lot of people who said out loud that they wanted their art to be on the front lawn of the White House. I looked at the swirly handwriting again. It had an artistic quality to it. It also looked like a woman's handwriting. I don't know why we all automatically thought we were searching for a bad
guy
. Maybe The Angler was a woman.

“
Hey
,” I yelled.

“Hay is for horses,” said Nanny X. That meant that she was feeling a little better. She came over to see.

Except for the “mine,” the white tag was unsigned, like all of the other wishes.

“It's a clue,” I said. “The Angler was
just here
.”

“Wait a minute, now,” Boris said. “How often do they collect these wishes? I'm not saying it's not The Angler, but this wish could have been hanging on the tree for a very long time.”

“I know how to find out,” I said. I ran up the steps of the garden, two at a time. Stinky followed me, even though I could have done it alone. I guess he felt that as a safety patrol, it was one of his responsibilities to see that I got across the street safely.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To ask a question about my clue.” I used “my” just to remind him that whatever answer I got was mine, too. If I couldn't solve the mystery first, I wanted to solve it the best.