The Girls Take Over (13 page)

Forty-five minutes later, Sergeant Bogdan came down the hall. “Well, well, you make a good taskmaster,
Jake, because I never saw this floor looking so good,” he said.

“Thanks,” Jake said.

Eddie gave a snort under her breath, but Bogdan didn't hear her.

About eleven that morning the girls were just putting away their mops and brushes when Sergeant Bogdan gave a little whistle.

“Son of a gun!” Caroline heard him say. “There's the inspector pulling up right now. He's early!” While he and the Hatford boys lined up outside to greet the police chief, the girls rushed about putting the final touches on the reception area. They heard Sergeant Bogdan say, “Chief Decker, I want you to meet Jake here. I've got a bunch of kids doing some … uh … volunteer work, you might say, sprucing up the station, and Jake Hatford's the guy in charge.”

Caroline watched the man in the chief's uniform hold out his hand. “Glad to meet you,” he said. “Maybe you'll go into police work one of these days yourself, young man. We need all the good men we can get. So you were in charge of the work detail, huh?”

“Yes, sir!” said Jake, his chest thrust out like he'd just won a gold medal or something.

“Well,” said the captain. “Let's take a look around.” They all came inside, and the captain just
smiled at the girls who squeezed by them there in the hall.

“We're done,” Eddie whispered to Jake.

“Yeah, see you later,” said Beth.

“Have a nice day!” said Caroline as the girls went out the door.

Eighteen
The Decorators

“W
ell,
that
was a change,
Wally thought. He'd expected the girls, Caroline in particular, to hang around and claim the glory. He'd sort of expected
her
to say she had worked her fingers to the bone. She might even have pretended to faint from exhaustion.

Chief Decker, followed by Sergeant Bogdan, followed by Officer Clay, followed by the four Hatford boys, moved down the hall toward the little kitchenette behind the office. Everything was crisp looking and white, including a tall chef's hat with a pink ruffle around the bottom sitting on top of the microwave.

Wally stared at the ruffle while Jake and Josh stood with open mouths, speechless.

“Hey, look at the hippo!” Peter cried delightedly, pointing to a refrigerator magnet of a hippo wearing a pink tutu and eating a pizza.

Chief Decker turned slowly around the little kitchen. Pink curtains had been tacked over the small
window above the sink, and a paper cup filled with daisies stood in the middle of the little table.

Without a word he moved on down the hall to the waiting room, and Wally sucked in his breath, because someone had put lace doilies over the backs of the vinyl chairs and tied bows at the bottom of each metal leg.

“Peppermints!” Peter cried, pointing to the dish of pink-and-white candies on the metal table beside the vinyl couch. On top of the TV, on another lace doily, a dime-store ballerina did a pirouette.

“Is this a police station or my aunt Millie's parlor?” asked Chief Decker with a frown, looking at the dazed faces of Sergeant Bogdan and Officer Clay.

The tile floor gleamed, the walls were spotless, the windows shining, but these were hardly noticed, for when they got to the rest room with its roll of toilet paper tied with pink ribbon, a pink ruffle taped around the lid of the toilet tank, plus a box of pink tissues by the sink and little stick-on hearts around the rim of the mirror, Sergeant Bogdan exploded.

“Jake, what the blazes were you kids trying to do? Embarrass us?” he asked, ripping off the pink ruffle and stuffing it in his pocket.

“We … I … the g-girls must have done this before they left!” Jake croaked.

“A good officer knows what his troops are doing,” said Chief Decker, his eyes twinkling, “and he has to take full responsibility for his subordinates.”

But the worst was yet to come, Wally discovered.
Because when they moved back out into the hall and looked in the other direction, toward the holding cells, they found that someone, and Wally knew who, had pasted on the wall row after row of round yellow smiley faces, now grinning at the police chief.

Wally couldn't tell whether Chief Decker was choking or coughing or laughing, and he didn't stick around to find out. All he knew was that he was racing down the hall after his brothers—out the front door of the station, down the steps, and then, as fast as they could go, toward home.

But a block away, the girls were waiting for them. Caroline and her sisters were leaning against a tree, helpless with laughter.

“You dumbos!” Jake yelled when he saw them.

“Oh, come on, Jake. You know it was funny,” said Beth.

“Yeah, what are you going to do? Fire us?” Eddie teased.

“I thought the hippo in the pink tutu was the best,” said Caroline. “Sergeant Bogdan can keep it if he wants, sort of a reminder of what he's going to look like if he keeps on eating so many doughnuts.”

“Well, you could at least have let us in on the joke,” Jake complained as they started home together. “I didn't know what to say. Bogdan kept looking at me as though—” He stopped suddenly. “That's why you put me in charge, isn't it?”

“Clever boy! You figured that out in a hurry,” said Eddie. “Well, you worked us to death with all that
scrubbing, so we earned the right to a little fun. I'd say we're about even.”

“I thought it looked nice!” said Peter. “The peppermints were good too!” He held out his hand and showed them a fistful.

“See?” said Beth, laughing some more. “At least somebody appreciates all our work.”

“I'd appreciate you a whole lot more if you'd just leave Buckman!” Jake growled.

“You'd miss us. You know you would,” Beth cooed, and Wally noticed that Josh was even smiling a little.

Nineteen
Not Again!

M
rs. Malloy insisted that the whole family attend the countywide spelling contest that night, even though none of her daughters would be in it. “It's important to show our support for the language arts, just as much as it is to support the band concerts and ball games,” she said.

“Why should I want to go see Wally Hatford win for the fourth grade?” Caroline whined. “
I
should be up there onstage, not Wally.”

“Caroline, you missed your word, so you should
not
be up there,” said her mother. “Those were the rules. Thinking things through and taking your time are important too, and you didn't do either of those. Now put on a clean shirt, and let's try to be at the school by seven so we don't have to sit at the very back.”

It was almost more than Caroline could bear. It was like being a famous actress and having to sit in the audience while an understudy went onstage, playing your
role. Wally Hatford was a good speller but he didn't like being in contests. He never even liked standing up in front of the room. Caroline
deserved
to be in that contest. She, who loved the stage and the spotlight,
deserved
to win for Buckman's fourth grade. She would have been so good at it. She could have worn her best dress, and she would have bowed to the audience when she won first place.

She changed her shirt, and out the door they went, crossing the swinging bridge on a beautiful April night, and walked two blocks to the school. Cars were lined up on each side the street, for people had driven in from all over the county. The air was filled with the sounds of friends calling to friends, parents calling greetings to parents, and contestants laughing and chattering.

The Malloys took seats in the middle of the auditorium and, after they sat down, discovered that the Hatfords—all but Wally, of course—were sitting in the same row across the aisle. Mrs. Malloy leaned forward and smiled, and Mrs. Hatford waved back.

The contest began about fifteen minutes later, with a great deal of lining up and changing places and counting heads before the contestants took their places in the first three rows of the auditorium. The winning first graders from all the schools went up onstage first.

When students spelled their words correctly, they went to the end of the line to wait for another turn. But if they missed, a teacher escorted them to the steps at one side of the stage, and they joined their classmates below.

The winning word for the first grade was
untie,
and everyone clapped as the boy who won it grinned and waved at his parents.

The second graders came onstage next, their arms straight down at their sides, looking even more serious. When only two girls were left onstage, one misspelled the word
dinosaur
and—to her even greater embarrassment—broke into tears and left the stage weeping.

The winning word in third grade was
discipline,
and then it was the fourth grade's turn.

“Remember,” said the county superintendent, who was calling out the words. “You may ask to have a word repeated, and you may ask to have it used in a sentence.” He also reminded the contestants that the winner for each grade would go to the statewide spelling contest in Charleston in May.

Miserably, Caroline watched as Wally Hatford shuffled across the stage, hands in his pockets, beside the other contestants. Mrs. Malloy leaned forward again and smiled down the row at Mrs. Hatford, and Mrs. Hatford leaned forward and smiled back.

“Tremendous,”
said the superintendent to the first person in line. The girl spelled the word correctly and moved to the end.

“Scissors,”
said the superintendent. The next girl mistakenly put an
e
before the
r
and was escorted offstage.

Wally was given the word
knowledge,
which he spelled correctly, and again the Malloys and the
Hatfords exchanged smiles. Peter clapped for his brother.

Caroline was silently weeping already. No actress should have to go through the agony she endured.
Look at Wally up there!
she thought. His shoulders were slumped, his eyes were on the floor, hands in his pockets, toes pointing inward. He looked as uncomfortable and awkward as an elephant at a tea party. Wally no more wanted to go to the state contest than he wanted to go to the dentist.
She
would have been such a wonderful contestant to represent Buckman's fourth grade! She would have gone on to the state contest, and then the national, and she would have been on TV. From there it was only a short step to Broadway. Oh, life was so unfair!

One more contestant was eliminated as the line moved toward the superintendent, and once again it was Wally's turn.

“Handkerchief,”
said the superintendent.

Oh, that's so easy!
Caroline thought. That was the easiest word so far! She could spell much harder words than that.

“Handkerchief,”
Wally repeated, looking straight ahead. “
H-a-n-d … ”
He hesitated, and Caroline knew with every bone in her body that he was about to misspell it so that he wouldn't have to go to the state contest. He would probably put in a
c
instead of a
k.