Spy in the Alley (13 page)

“Huh? But –”

“Really, there's an element of the bloodhound
about you, Dinah.”

I would pursue this matter further, except that
an unwelcome sight greets my eyes. Roderick Well
man, sliding his Mazda in front of our home. It's
newly green, the pink having been scrubbed off.

“So that's your date. Dear Roddy.” I load my
voice with as much scorn as I can muster. “Do
you think he sticks his head into a pencil sharp
ener every morning? It's looking even more pointy
than usual.”

“It's his new haircut.” Madge smothers a laugh
and tries to sound stern with me. She and Mother
are forever trying to get me not to make scathing
personal remarks about people's appearances. “The
hairdresser cuts upwards, in increasingly thick lay
ers. It's the latest style.”

“To be avoided if one has a head like a pin,” I
muse, peering through the flower-patterned, white-
lace curtains at Roderick.

There's a box of elastic bands beside the compu
ter. My fingers itch to take hold of one and stretch
it back for a nice, clear shot at Roderick.

But, to resume.

Chapter Fifteen

The dweeb outsmarts us

About a dozen Grad Advocates for Smoking Prevention had gathered outside the Hotel Vancouver. Their signs, held high to avoid bumping passersby, resembled the clustered sails of an armada.

But the Spanish Armada, I recalled from my project last year on Queen Elizabeth I, had at least
met
the English.

GASP hadn't met anyone. There were no representatives from Wellman Talent, Bonna Terra Sports Clothing or Fields Tobacco in sight.

“They were supposed to be here, announcing a celebrity tennis match. The papers
said
they would,” insisted the intense girl with tightly permed hair who'd been at Stanley Park.

“The TV cameras came and went,” someone else moaned. “They laughed at us. I mean, the people holding the cameras did, not the cameras themselves. We'd publicized this as a rally of hundreds.”

“It would have been hundreds,” Jack said sadly, “if my laptop, and therefore my database, hadn't been transformed into a piece of lasagna. Everybody was ready to show up. They just needed the time and place — and then,
pccggghhhhewww!
” He finished off with an impressive exploding noise.

The other GASPers looked at him rather oddly. They didn't know about the dim-witted thief.

A cell phone bleeped. The intense girl fished it out of a deep pocket in her peasant skirt. “Yeah?” she said into it. “Yeah … huh. Well, thanks.” Switching the phone off, she announced glumly, “We've been foiled. Outmaneuvered. Roderick Wellman and his Fields Tobacco buddies are grinning all over their faces and making their announcement in
Steveston
.”

The signs sagged like sails that had just lost all their wind.

“Steveston,” Jack repeated numbly. “The announcements would be over and done with by the time we could get there.” He checked his watch: we were right in the middle of rush hour. “In fact, we'd be collecting our old-age pensions by then.”

“They found out you were going to be here,” I said, puzzled. “How could they, though? Wasn't it supposed to be a surprise?”

The girl shrugged. “We did what we always do. We show up about an hour beforehand and start handing out flyers. Usually by the time the tobacco types arrive, a little crowd has built up. Even if Roderick Wellman and his buddies got hold of one of the flyers, an hour wouldn't — shouldn't — have been enough notice for them to switch locations.”

“Maybe it's a coincidence,” suggested a lanky boy with a Toronto Raptors cap.

“No coincidence,” the intense girl said bitterly. “These guys are professionals.”

“We'll get 'em next time,” Jack promised, giving her a comforting hug.

Something she'd said was looming in my mind, as prominent as a GASP protest sign.

These guys are professionals.

Where had I heard that before?

I said slowly, talking to myself more than the others, “Buzz Bewford, the security guard, is a professional. Roderick told us so, very indignantly, when I was making fun of Buzz for being useless. For not having found out even the simplest infor mation about the spy in the alley.”

The other GASPers stared at me. “In a word —
huh
?” said the Toronto Raptors boy.

I went on hurriedly, “Buzz knows Theo, our buck-toothed spy in the alley.
Maybe he also knows
the thief
.”

“You mean, they're both spying on you?” Jack said incredulously.

“A nice girl,” I overheard one GASPer mutter to another. “Too bad she's a bit off.”

“I'm not ‘off,'” I protested in exasperation. “Don't you get it? The dim-witted thief wasn't so dim-witted after all. He never wanted antique silver or anything like that. He'd been assigned, by Roderick through Buzz, to steal GASP information from Jack. To destroy the GASP database and cripple the organization.”

I took a deep breath. Was I on a roll, or what? “He grabbed the tomato photos the first time round, thinking they were files. Probably got chewed out big-time by Buzz — remember how Buzz kept growling into his cell phone? Naturally, mission incomplete, the thief came back.”

Madge said, puzzled, “But what about the guy in the park? The one Buzz described? I didn't get the feeling Buzz was making him up — Buzz isn't imaginative enough, for one thing.”

I persisted, “What I'm trying to tell you is that the spy in the alley wasn't really a spy at all. He couldn't have cared less about watching you.”

“Oh, really,” said Madge, used to everyone automatically admiring her.

“Theo is a geek, all right, but not a gawking geek — as Roderick tricked us into believing. The spy was a thief.
Theo
. It's been Theo all the time. We just assumed he was spying on us, and Roderick and Buzz played along. They used the idea of a spy, which I thought Theo was, as a cover for what they were really doing: sabotage!”

Madge looked even more puzzled. “Are you saying there are
two
thieves, Theo and the guy in the park? I don't get it.”

“That's not the point right now,” I said impatiently. Why oh why did people have to be so dense? “Who cares if there were two thieves, or, for that matter, forty? Theo and Buzz — ”

“Now just a minute,” Madge interrupts. “I object
to being called ‘dense.' Just because the rest of us
don't have minds like sharp knives, ruthlessly able
to cut through mysteries — ”

“Yeah, right.” Now I'm offended. My sister's
managed to make good deducing skills sound like
a flaw. Sharp knives indeed! “Well, Madge, I object
to all these interruptions.”

Madge's slim white hands, with their carefully
manicured nails painted a delicate dusty rose, de
scend on the keyboard. She blocks out the word
“dense,” obviously intending to delete it. Older
siblings are getting so aggressive these days.

My own nail-bitten hands — and what's wrong
with nail biting? Everyone should have a hobby
— clamp on hers and remove them.

“Have it your way,” Madge shrugs, examining
her hands for signs of any grime. “I have a date to
get ready for anyhow.”

I screw up my face at her disapprovingly — then
hastily unscrew it, remembering that she believes
this makes me look cute. “I can't believe you're
going out with Roderick. Not after he lied to us
about Buckteeth. Not after he tried to sabotage
Jack and GASP.”

Madge puts on her most remote look, knowing
full well that this will annoy me. “Let me know if
Roderick gets impatient, will you? Poor boy. You
could always take him out a glass of lemonade.”

The den windows are wide open today, to let in
the soft, lilac-scented air. I scowl out at Roderick.

“I really can't believe you,” I sigh, in the most
injured tone possible. “I thought, after all this, that
you and Jack — ”

“You shouldn't try to plan my life for me,”
Madge informs me. Then she glides aloofly from
the room. Now I've lost my train of thought. Well,
I'll skip the gathering in front of the Hotel Vancou
ver, which mostly consisted of everyone confusedly
staring at me. It was the next day that things really
got hopping, let me tell you.

Chapter Sixteen

I storm Wellman Talent

There I was, about to solve the mystery of the spy in the alley, and I was bundled off to musical-arts day camp again! I was sure this hadn't happened to Sherlock Holmes.

That's my favorite story, well, stories, by the way. I devoured them all for the first time when I was nine, and I'm still rereading them. My devotion to Sherlock Holmes was interpreted by Mother and Madge as proof that I was bright and headed for a scholarly future.

It was proof I should head for a
detectively
future, I would argue in vain. They never agreed, so I had to satisfy myself, as revenge, with relating detail by detail the plot of
The Speckled Band
to Madge. She hates snakes, and shrieked most gratifyingly.

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” I sang. I was practicing scales again. This, of course, went along with another plan by Mother and Madge: that I develop my talent for singing.

Talent — or volume? I wondered, as I again sang, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” and my instructor nodded wisely and took notes.

By lunchtime I'd been chosen to sing the role of Annie in excerpts from the musical of the same name. Our class was going to perform for our families on the last day of camp. Me, Dinah Galloway, the lead!

“That's awesome,” I stammered, glowing. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, as the instructor and the rest of the class congratulated me, I did have
some
talent amid all the volume.

Buckteeth faded to the back of my mind. He didn't
quite
disappear: his prominent teeth still gleamed back there, like the Cheshire cat's grin. A vague but bothersome presence in my thoughts.

In the afternoon I practiced belting out “Tomorrow” as if my whole heart and soul depended on it, as Annie's did in the story. “Fervor, fervor,” the instructor kept urging. Distractingly, he insisted on waving his arms about as if he were a windmill.

Even more distractingly, through the glass wall of the classroom, I could see a bunch of people exercising. The next room was evidently the site of a rigorous fitness class. It was difficult to generate “fervor” with those people gyrating in front of me.

I was just throwing myself into the part, imagining that I, like Annie, was alone and friendless — “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!” — when I happened to notice through the glass that the exercisers were watching a television suspended from the ceiling by cables. I watched, too. Not that I was a TV addict, unless you counted PlayStation; it was who was on the TV that riveted me.

“Tomo-o-r-r-row … ”

“Dinah?” The instructor stopped fluttering. The rest of the class stared, including the portly boy who was playing Daddy Warbucks and had been waiting impatiently for
his
turn to belt out.

But I was staring into the next room, over the bouncing, sweatsuit-clad exercisers, at the TV screen.

Roderick Wellman was on, smirking dweebishly and making some sort of announcement against the gray-shingled backdrop of Steveston. This must be footage from the previous evening, from the event that GASP had intended to protest. Other, equally smirking people stood around him. Off to the side stood
Theo
. Wasn't daytime TV rated for decency? Didn't they care about impressionable underage viewers like me?

Then I recalled Madge's insistent question about the identity of the second thief. She was right. We
should
be trying to figure out just who that was. As long as his identity eluded us, there was still an unsolved mystery. Buzz hadn't invented the guy. We both knew we'd seen him somewhere.

I was so intent on trying to figure out who the second thief was that that no further notes at all came from my mouth. I stood there, slack-jawed.

The instructor stepped forward and actually peered inside my mouth, as if he thought the rest of the song might be sitting inside, too shy to come out. “Dinah?” he said.

On the TV, a large, box-like hand shot out from off-camera and grabbed Buckteeth by the neck of his T-shirt and abruptly wrenched him from view. Buzz Bewford lumbered into his place. Hoisting up his belt, the security guard adopted the smirk that everyone else was wearing.

“Oh, I get it,” the instructor said. “Dinah's emoting.”

Roderick and his buddies vanished from the screen and a newscaster smiled out at the exercisers, mouthed a few words and gave way to a string of commercials.

It was then that the gauzy curtain, to use Madge's arty expression, lifted from the identity of the second thief. No … It couldn't be … Preposterous
,
I thought. I gaped at the TV
. And yet this
would explain everything …

I transferred my stunned gaze to the instructor, who was now beaming at me with approval. “‘Emoting'? ” I repeated feebly.

“Yes! Expressing your emotions. Or, rather, Annie's emotions. Naturally, being alone in the world, she would lapse into a bewildered silence. Bravo!” He glanced round at the class and made some palms-up flapping movements; obediently, everyone applauded.

I sang, “Tomorrow!”