Island of Spies, page 17
Neb checked the typewriter. “Dolls and an unfinished letter.” He read:
MRS. CALEDONIA yVETTELIA ROBERTSON
DOLL SURGEON,
NEW yORK, NEW yORK.
DEAR CAL,
THanKS FOR HELPING EMMy. HER EyE’S GOOD AS new. I THINK IT GIVES HER PERSONALITy. HERE’s ANOTHER DOLLy WHo nEEDS yOUR HELP. I FOUND THIS BABE-IN-ARmS IN A JUNK STOrE IN greeNVILLE, N.C. AS YOU CAn SEE, HEr HAIRs HAvE FALLEN OUT. pITY.
THANKS AND DO SEND ME
“Her hairs have fallen out? That’s terrible grammar. Send her what?” I asked as a fly buzzed my head. I slapped at it.
“I don’t know. That’s where she stops.”
“She means this doll. It’s bald,” Rain said, cradling a porcelain doll. Click. The doll’s eyes closed. Rain sat her up. Click. The doll’s eyes flew open.
“That’s the sound Miss Agnes’s package made in the PO, the day you felonied the mail,” Neb said. A nest of yellow doll hair rested on the desk. He nudged it with a pen. “Looks like she balded the doll herself. Weird.”
No weirder than using felony and bald as verbs, I thought.
Neb rolled in a fresh sheet of paper and tried the typewriter keys, one by one. “Only the y actually sticks,” he reported, frowning. “She made the other letters lowercase herself. She could have used capital letters if she’d wanted to. This is code, or I’ll eat it.”
In the distance, a car backfired. And then again, closer. Schooner barked a warning.
“They’re coming back! Retreat!” I grabbed the carbon copy of Miss Agnes’s letter and stuffed it in my pocket as Rain sprang for the window shade.
“Go, go, go,” Neb whispered, holding the door open.
“Sorry, Dirk, forgot my hat,” Miss Agnes bellowed from the front door. “Won’t be a minute.” She slammed the door. “This way, Julia,” she said as we squeezed into the closet, leaving the door ajar. “I have news of your family,” she said, her voice soft. “We now know they were moved from Austria to Poland.” Julia gasped. “But that’s all we know. They may have escaped the train, they could have been taken through Poland to . . . well, I don’t know where.”
“Of course,” Julia said, her voice wobbling.
“We mustn’t lose hope.” Outside, Dirk blew the horn. Miss Agnes’s voice came quick. “Here. Take this lipstick. I won’t use it—wrong pocket litter. Just open, point, boom. It shoots one bullet,” she said, swiping at a fly.
They started toward the door as Dirk blew the horn again. “My brother can be obnoxious. Don’t forget your hat,” Julia said, and then snorted when she saw it. “What happened to that?”
“Edgar,” Miss Agnes said, smoothing its feathers back into place. She laughed a real laugh, one I’d never heard before. Light and carefree, happy as a hiking song. “Where’s my hat pin? Be careful, the tip’s poison.” She locked the office door, and their voices died away.
“Miss Agnes has a poison pin and a lipstick that shoots bullets?” I said.
“Just one bullet,” Neb said, like that made it better. “What’s pocket litter?”
“Little things spies carry, to make them fit in,” Rain replied. “Movie tickets, receipts for art supplies. Things like that. It’s in Dime Novel #53: A Spy Talks.”
Neb tiptoed to the door. “Sounds like Julia doesn’t like her brother.”
“Dirk’s not her brother,” Rain said. “He’s too rude. And if he was a brother, Miss Agnes would share family information with him too. He may not even know Julia’s family got stolen.”
“Good points. I wonder what they’re really doing, working together . . .” I shook my head. “This way,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about Miss Agnes’s chimney.”
The parlor smelled of lamp oil and mothballs. I knelt at the fireplace and reached up into the flue. Together, we lowered a small black case to the floor. I clicked it open. A jumble of dials and wires stared up at me. “A shortwave radio,” I gasped. “No wonder she didn’t light a fire.”
“Or invite Grand to visit,” Rain said.
“Hands up, thieves!” Miss Agnes shouted behind us.
We whipped around, raising our sooty hands.
She stood in the doorway, her white lace collar glowing in the dim light as she lifted a tiny camera to her eye. “Smile,” she said. Immortalized at the lowest moment in our professional lives. Still, Faye says there’s nothing a smile won’t improve. We smiled. CLICK.
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Nothing,” we chorused.
Outside, Dirk bounced on his horn. Neb edged for the door. “This has been nice, but it sounds like Dirk’s in a hurry. We don’t want to keep you.”
She grabbed the front of his shirt and twisted it tight, lifting him to his toes. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
Neb pried her fingers open one by one. “What do I want? In the long run, I’d say I want a family, but of course I need a mate first. My prospects are momentarily slim, but Daddy would feel better if my future was settled, due to his health. Rain and Stick are like sisters, so they’re out. I think we can agree there. So that’s the long run. Short run, we want to be famous. Famous scientist, famous artist, famous Neb. And there’s our FBI ambitions. You?”
Miss Agnes pushed him away and sank onto her sofa, hissing, her long legs splayed beneath her skirt. “I give up on you three. So choose: I can shoot you or recruit you.”
A bluff. Not even Miss Agnes would shoot us.
“Or,” she said, going crafty, “with the photo in this little camera, I can send you to jail.”
Neb swallowed hard. “Recruit us, I guess. Maybe. There’s a rumor going around that you’re a Nazi, and if that’s it, we’re out.”
Finally. One of us had said it to her face.
Miss Agnes glared like she could incinerate us. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, nodding to a burgundy love seat. “I’m American as apple pie. Your grandfather wouldn’t have me otherwise. Neither would the post office. Sit.”
We sat. “The only apple native to North America is the crabapple,” I said, my voice cold. “But please present your terms.”
“As postmistress, I’m head of the local Post Office Special Operations unit, a secret government organization charged with investigating the suspicious on this island.”
Is she kidding? “Post Office Special Ops? Never heard of it,” I said. But if true, the poisoned hat pin and loaded lipstick make sense, I thought.
“I never heard of you until I met you, but alas, here you are,” she said. “You three are always in my way. Since I can’t get rid of you, you may join me—as my underlings. Code names: Red Dime, Bristly Dime, Little Dime,” she said pointing to each of us in turn.
“Thanks, but we’re aiming higher,” Neb said. “The FBI.”
She narrowed her predator eyes. “Join me, or I report you to Captain Ed Davis for breaking and entering, and off you go to a juvenile detention center in Raleigh.”
“We’re in,” Neb said, and Rain and I nodded. “What do we do?”
“You’ll watch the Ringers. For some reason, they don’t cozy up to me. Find out what they’re really doing on this island. Because they didn’t come to play baseball. Submit a report every other week. In triplicate—standard PO procedure. You may ask one question.”
“Why are you hiding a shortwave in your chimney and who are Julia and Dirk?” I read the glint in her eyes. “That was a compound interrogative—technically, one question.”
“If you feel confused, it’s probably Latin,” Neb told her.
Miss Agnes ignored him. “I hid the radio in case of invasion. The Germans will take the lighthouse first—highest spot on the island. And Davis’s radio with it.” Probably true, I thought. “And I don’t know who Julia and Dirk are.” A lie. Outside, Dirk bounced on his horn like he could lasso Miss Agnes with its sound and drag her to the car. “You are dismissed.”
At the doorway, I turned. “How did you know we were in here?”
“You let flies into my office, Red Dime. Rookie mistake.” As we slunk to the back door, I heard her low, soft voice: “Gato gato gato. Where are you?” Edgar shot down the hall.
“That’s just wrong, a bilingual cat,” Neb fumed as we crossed the backyard. “I can barely do English.” He sighed as we neared the rose hedge. “Now we’re underlings. To the person we hate most next to Hitler.”
“We are not,” I snapped. “Remember what Eleanor Roosevelt says. ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’ We’re in a jam, is all.”
Rain tilted her head the way she does when a new drawing’s falling into place. “The important thing is, Julia and Dirk are going to the Oceanside this Saturday on the biggest mission of Dirk’s life, and we need to see who he’s meeting. And to see if Reed proposes to Faye.”
Rain has a way with a summary.
“We’ll go incognito, from the Latin word meaning unknown,” I said. “Dress mature.”
“How mature?” Neb asked.
“Gussy up, Bristly Dime,” Rain said. “We want to blend.”
“Use the alibi from Dime Novel #45: Triangle of Lies,” I added as Neb crawled out Edgar’s little door in the hedge. “It’s never let us down.”
Sadly, there’s a first time for everything.
CHAPTER 18
Triangle of Lies
April 4, 1942
Saturday afternoon, we darted across Reed’s backyard and rolled into the bed of his pickup truck. Schooner bounded in behind us, his yellow gingham bow tie gleaming. “What good does it do to dress nice when we have to ride with Schooner? He stinks,” Neb muttered.
Neb wore his navy-blue sweater, and pressed shorts. “Can you tell I singed these a little?” he asked, showing his cuff. “How do I look?” he asked, trying to mash his hair down.
I took in his crumpled shirt, his spiky hair, his scorched shorts. “Good,” I said.
Rain wore her pink-flowered dress with a wide red belt. I’d borrowed Faye’s shoulder bag of drama club disguises, and a waist-nipped blouse to go with my blue school skirt.
I peeked over the truck’s side, at the unpainted house Reed inherited from his parents last summer. A nearly finished skiff sat on sawhorses by the truck. A lean-to slouched at water’s edge.
Faye will live here if she marries Reed, I thought, admiring the rushes along the curved shoreline and the snowy white egrets hunting in the shallows. I’ll see her only for Sunday dinner, and after the babies come, not even then. Slowly, she will become a stranger to me.
“What is it?” Rain asked. “You look happy.”
“Get down,” I whispered.
Reed’s back door swung open and I yanked a seaweed-scented burlap sheet over our heads. Neb retched. “Breathe through your mouth,” I whispered as Schooner—outside the tarp—plunked down on my arm.
“Hey Schooner, ready to ride? Good guy,” Reed said, and Schooner thumped his tail against Neb’s face. I peeped out. Faye looked Doris Day good—sweet and perky.
“Faye, hold on. I want to ask you something,” Reed said.
“You don’t need to ask me,” she teased. “Yes, I want to dance, and no, I don’t mind if you step on my feet.” She gasped. “Reed! You’re gray as cement!”
“Hollywood Faye Lawson,” he rasped, “will you marry me?”
Rain inhaled sharp. I didn’t need to look to know Neb was trying to reduce himself to his essential elements. This is it, I thought. Faye’s caught in a crosscurrent of dreams. Her dream since fifth grade—marrying Reed—against her dream of Hollywood.
“You’re not going away. You’d never leave your family in danger,” he said. “And I’ll make you happy, Faye. I swear I will.”
“Does anybody else wish they could close their ears?” Neb whispered.
“Did you hear that?” Faye said. Schooner barked, and she laughed. “For a minute, I thought Schooner said something.”
She’s stalling, I thought. When she spoke again her voice tiptoed careful and slow. “Like Grand says, war changes things. I guess I need time to think.”
Time to think. A line from a movie. Fact: Faye’s never taken time to think in her life. She paused, and I knew she gave him the thirty-degree tilt. “Give me time. Come on. I don’t want to miss the dancing.”
That’s Faye in a nutshell. Hollywood or Hatteras Island, she never wants to miss the dancing.
* * *
• • •
Four stinking-dog hours later, the truck careened into an oyster-shell parking lot. Reed cut the engine, and slammed his door. “Thirsty, Schooner?” he asked, and water gurgled from a bottle. “Stay, boy. Hollywood Faye Lawson? Ready for the time of your life?”
As their voices faded, Neb threw off the burlap sheet. “I hate myself, I stink so bad.”
I sat up, gulping fresh air. Four hours is a long time to breathe in what other people breathe out. I cased the long building by the sea, its soft, yellowish light haloed against the evening sky, its bright windows shining.
“It looks like a fairy tale,” Rain whispered.
“They don’t believe in blackout curtains, that’s for sure. Get down!” Neb cried as a buzz of women sashayed past, perfuming the night. They beelined across the parking lot and up the steps, to a side porch. Neb vaulted over the side. “Wait here.” He wound his way through the cars. A minute later, he ran back with a fancy spray bottle. “Close your eyes,” he instructed. He spritzed us, and then himself. Schooner sneezed. “It’s perfume. I hate it, but it’s better than smelling like a dog,” he said, and darted away to return the scent.
Rain hopped out of the truck, light as a cricket. “Bathroom,” she said.
“A place this swank has bathrooms inside,” I told her, and her face lit up. It’s Rain’s dream to see indoor plumbing—a popular feature in dime novels. I saw it when we visited Tarboro, on the mainland. “Can you wait?” She shook her head. “Then we’ll go between the cars.” I grabbed Faye’s shoulder bag. “Girls, this way. Neb, that way. You can admire the indoor plumbing once we’re inside.” I scanned for Miss Agnes’s Buick. “Then we find the Artists. This may be our best chance to impress the FBI.”
Twenty minutes later, as we hid behind the scraggly shrubs at the club’s side door, a car backfired. “Finally,” Neb muttered, lowering a branch and peering out.
Julia and Dirk tooled up in Miss Agnes’s Buick and strolled across the parking lot, Dirk swinging a briefcase. Julia stopped to adjust Dirk’s tie as a pack of sailors headed for the door. “How will we know your contact?” Julia asked.
“Easy,” Dirk said, heading inside. “He’s wearing a green suit.”
We ducked as two men strolled in from the beach. “Try to smile, cuz,” one drawled as they trotted up the wooden steps carrying a paper bag. The door swept shut behind them.
“Carl Miller!” I whispered. “And Ralph! We can scout them for Miss Agnes. Now we just need a way in.” We shot onto the side porch and peered through the window. The bar stood elbow-deep in sailors and women in pretty dresses. Two women in aprons cleared tables. Across the room, light shot across the bar and a man entered carrying a box.
“A back door! Let’s go!”
As we neared the back exit, a car rumbled up. “Duck!” I said. On the black car’s only blue door, in fancy letters: the Dream Makers. Four hound-dog-skinny guys—three white and one Black—rolled out. They smoothed their suits and straightened their thin ties. “I guess this is it,” one of the white guys said, popping the trunk. “It’s lit up enough to invite the Germans in for a drink, but a gig’s a gig. Grab your things. Arnie, the piano is set up inside.”
The Black man, Arnie, nodded. “Hope so. Can’t make music out of thin air.”
Science’s cue to enter.
I stepped from the shrubs. “Actually, Arnie, music is always made of air—vibrating air. If the vibrations’ overtones and frequencies are compatible, the music sounds good.” They stared at me. “Volume M.” My smile wilted in the silence. “For music.”
Neb stepped from the shrubs. “Welcome. The manager sent us to carry your things.”
Arnie frowned. “Thanks, but musical instruments cost. We’ll carry them. How many of you live in that shrub, anyway? Come on, Dream Makers. Let’s roll.”
“Wait!” I cried, and, in a moment of desperation, went with the truth. “We’re the Dime Novel Kids on the trail of spies. The fate of the country plus our future careers with the FBI may be on the line. We must infiltrate, and you are our cover. Give me a horn.”
Arnie laughed. “Great story. See you later, crazy cats.”
Rain stepped from the shrubbery and grabbed Arnie’s hand. She looked up at him, her brown eyes pleading. “I have to use the bathroom, crazy cat. Now. Please.”
* * *
• • •
Arnie led Rain through the employees’ digs, past the line of Delco batteries that powered the lights, into the dim heart of the club. Neb and me followed, slipping behind a large potted plant inside the door. “Potty’s over there, shug,” Arnie told her, and Rain disappeared behind a door marked Ladies. I pulled down a large, artificial leaf.
“Planta artificialis,” I whispered. “A total misuse of science.”
Neb lowered a fake limb. “Thanks, Arnie. We owe you.”
“Indeed.” Arnie frowned. “You smell like a girl. You should try a different aftershave.”
Neb went pink as the Dream Makers walked away to set up their instruments. “Arnie thinks I shave,” he crowed, looking delighted. “Where’s Julia? She might think I shave too.”
“Nobody thinks you shave. Julia’s over there, talking to sailors. We need to get closer.” I eyed a stack of trays at the end of the bar.
