Harriet the Spy, Double Agent (4 page)

They agreed to meet ten minutes early for school so that they could walk past the lot with the plywood shack. At Annie’s insistence, they didn’t ask Sport. “He never
says
anything,” she said. “It’s creepy.”

“Sport isn’t creepy. He’s shy.” Harriet was affronted. She felt the need to defend her best friend.

“Well, he makes
me
feel creepy. Anyway, I think two spies are enough.” There was some logic to this, Harriet had to concede. They would have to be subtle, especially now that the young man had seen them close up. Two girls heading to the Gregory School with their backpacks were unlikely to catch anyone’s eye, but Sport might throw snowballs or something. She wanted to find out what the pizza eaters were planning to do with those weird-looking racks.

“Torture devices, no question,” said Annie.

“They’re right out in public. The fruit stand is open all night.”

“Maybe they’re in on it. They own the vacant lot. Maybe they’re smuggling drugs in each shipment of kiwifruit. Poisoning your cook’s tomatoes.” Maybe not, thought Harriet, but she decided to hold her tongue.

The men were already at work when Annie and Harriet rounded the corner. There were three of them now, two holding the two-by-fours upright as the third swung a sledgehammer.

“I rest my case,” Annie whispered, jerking her head toward the shortest man, who was holding one end of the rack. It was the sour-faced Korean grocer.

The man with the hammer made one final pound and laid the tool next to the finished rack. “Ready to unload ’em?” he asked, and the others nodded.

Harriet and Annie exchanged looks. They were probably going to be late for homeroom, but this was too good to miss. Without saying a word, they took up positions in front of the fruit stand, this time pretending to search for the perfect ripe apple.

The three men walked to the truck, the father’s gait laid-back and slouching, the son’s hulking, the greengrocer’s tight and erect. The father and son picked up the long planks that led up to the back of the truck and leaned them in place. With a clatter of metal, the truck’s gate rolled up. Both girls stared as the men disappeared into the truck.

After a moment or two they heard sounds from inside: indistinct voices, shoving, and a thumping that sounded like something large being lifted.

The son was the first to emerge. Over his shoulder, he carried a giant trussed Christmas tree. His father followed with a second. The grocer was lugging a plump Scotch pine.

“
Christmas
trees,” Harriet said, disappointed. “Is that all?” She mentally kicked herself for not recognizing the wooden racks as Christmas tree display stands, even though they were a different shape than the ones the Dei Santis put up every year on the pavement in front of their grocery store. There wasn’t a shed at the Dei Santis’, either.

The Koreans must be trying to corner the market by building a bigger display.

Annie shook her head. “Don’t believe it for a second. Those trees are a front.”

“You buy?” snapped the grocer’s wife, and Harriet realized she had been holding the same apple for several minutes.

“For my teacher,” she said with a great show of dignity, hoping she had enough change in her backpack to pay for it.

Janie Gibbs sat in the lunchroom with Beth Ellen Hansen and three sixth graders, Sara, Amelia, and Alexandra. They were talking about their projects for the school science fair. “I’m going to do one on chemical slime,” Sara was saying as Harriet passed them. “You make it with borax and food coloring.” Janie looked up at Harriet, patting the last empty seat at their table.

“Oh,” said Harriet. “I was planning to sit with Cassandra.”

“You never sit with us anymore.” Janie’s eyes were accusing.

“That’s not true,” said Harriet. It actually
was
true, but not because she had anything against Janie. She just wanted to spend every ounce of free time trading notes with her co-spy.

For the past several days, she and Annie had followed the same routine. They met ten minutes early and walked to school via the Christmas tree lot; they passed by it again on their way back home. Harriet showed Annie the alley behind the Dei Santis’ grocery store, from which they could watch all the intrigues in the stockroom, mostly starring the Dei Santis’ rebel son, Fabio, who’d left his fiancée, Marie, for a torrid romance with the dry-cleaner’s daughter, Naima. They spied on Harrison Withers, an elderly man whose twenty-six cats had been taken away by the Board of Health (now he was down to a modest nine kittens) and on the Birdlip Twins, the chinless, identically mannered English nannies who worked for the Belgian ambassador.

But their favorite stop on the after-school spy route, by far, was the Christmas tree lot. The racks were now filled with trees, and the pine-needle fragrance was bracing.

Wreaths and red-berried garlands hung from the spikes on the front of the shed, in which father and son huddled next to a space heater. Harriet wanted to know everything about these exotically nonurban men, with their wool shirts and earflap hats. Where did they grow their trees? What did they think of New York, with its all-night traffic and Cuban-Chinese diners? Did they actually
sleep
in that shack?

Annie had dubbed the pair Balsam and Douglas Fir. The girls wondered aloud about wide-eyed Douglas, and why he was spending his days shaking dry needles off trees with a rumbling machine and shoving them through a mechanical hoop that sheathed them in plastic fishnet instead of attending some New Hampshire high school.

“He must be a dropout,” said Annie with a sniff. “He’ll spend the rest of his life hauling carts of manure.”

“Maybe he’s homeschooled,” said Harriet.

Annie shook her head. “Look at him.” Douglas was hunched onto one of the camp stools, his unlaced boots splayed out in either direction as he whittled long curls off a piece of wood. “Douglas the Dumbwit.”

As for Balsam, the father, he seemed to spend undue amounts of time buying coffee and snacks from Myong-Hee. He would pay her and stand in his checkered wool overshirt, blowing steam off a blue and white cup with a Greek key pattern, trying to come up with something to say. His fingers were weathered and filthy, with battered knuckles. Myong-Hee would pick up her magazine, and after a few awkward moments, Balsam would mumble, “Fine cup of coffee,” or, “Well…,” and lumber across the street.

“
Nobody
drinks that much coffee,” said Harriet sagely. “It’s love.”

“He’s too old,” Annie said. “And she doesn’t speak English.”

“Details,” said Harriet.

“Anyway, he must be married to Douglas’s mother.”

“There’s no guarantee of that nowadays.” Harriet tried to sound worldly. “Or maybe he’s saddled with some mousy farm wife who spends all day knitting and making cheese. He’s abandoning her to the acres of stumps while he turns his affections to someone exotic, romantic…”

“Disinterested,” Annie said. “Myong-Hee doesn’t give him the time of day. He brought her a wreath with a red velvet bow, and all she said was ‘We Buddhist.’”

“They have to be cautious in front of his son.” Harriet knew she was spinning a fantasy—usually Annie’s role in their exchanges—but she couldn’t stop herself. “Maybe Balsam was tragically widowed.”

“Or just plain divorced. Like my parents will be any minute,” Annie said bitterly.

Harriet stared at her. So
that
was why Annie was staying at her aunt and uncle’s. What else was she going to confess? Would her secrets gush out in a flood? Harriet wasn’t sure how to proceed. If she said the wrong thing, Annie might slam on the lid, and they’d be right back where they started. But something else stopped her from speaking. She had never seen Annie emotional, and now, Harriet noticed, there were tears just behind her friend’s lashes. Not knowing what else to do, she reached out and laid her hand awkwardly on Annie’s arm.

“Get your fingerless gloves off me, H’spy.” Annie’s voice sounded sharp, as if she were embarrassed and trying to hide it. “I’ve had it with watching these dumbwits.

Let’s go eat some cake.”

Chapter 4

Sport stared at the long list of deli meats over the counter at Dei Santi’s Market.

“What does she bring for lunch?”

“Who?” said Harriet irritably, though she knew full well there was only one “she” on Sport’s mind these days.

“Yolanda.” Sport’s voice went from tenor to bass and back.

Harriet put her hand up to one ear and adopted the nasal twang of a phone operator. “I’m sorry, there’s no listing for that name—”

“All right, all right,
Annie
. What kind of bread does she use for her sandwiches?

White, whole wheat, rye?”

“There’s no pattern,” said Harriet. “Her aunt doesn’t have a clue what goes into a school lunch. Today she had leftover Chinese takeout and a corn muffin.” Sport made a face. Behind the counter, Papa Dei Santi straightened his apron and pulled on the string that flipped over the customer numbers. “Eighty-six,” he mumbled.

“That’s me,” said Sport, moving up eagerly. Harriet watched as he took out a much-folded grocery list. Sport had a stepmother now, but he’d shopped for his father for so many years that he still considered it his job, not Kate’s. Kate, whose office was way across town, was only too happy to let Sport take charge, and Sport’s father, Matthew, couldn’t have cared less if anyone
ever
bought groceries, as long as he had enough coffee to stay up and work on his novel all night.

Harriet wondered how Matthew and Kate had figured out they were in love. Had it been an instantaneous realization, as Sport claimed he’d had when the girl with green shoes had picked up his pencil? One minute he was his normal self; the next he was head over heels in love.

Harriet found the whole subject absurd. She’d picked up plenty of boys’ pencils and it hadn’t changed her life one bit. The phrase “falling in love” seemed morbidly apt: Sport made it sound unexpected, sudden, and possibly fatal, like falling into a manhole while crossing the street. The boy who was standing in front of her, asking Papa Dei Santi to slice the Virginia ham thinner, was not the same Sport who had been her best friend since preschool.

Oh well, she thought, I have a new best friend anyway. Luckily Annie had not fallen victim to Sport’s disease. She thought Sport was a bore and love was a waste of emotion; the week before, when a cold snap had forced the girls indoors to spend an afternoon spying on patients of both Drs. Feigenbaum, she had told Harriet that living with a gynecologist
and
a psychiatrist had turned her off romance for life.

None of their classmates agreed. The Gregory School was coed through sixth grade, and it seemed to Harriet that boys had been banished in the nick of time: all the seventh-grade girls were obsessed with them. Even Janie, the no-nonsense chemist, had left common sense behind, mooning over a pop star named Jason Orlando, whose breathy voice sounded to Harriet’s ears like a calf with its foot in a trap. Janie’s locker was plastered with teen magazine photos; she’d even moved some of her chemistry things from her bedroom to install a new stereo system and life-size fan poster. She talked about Jason nonstop.

“Why do you keep calling him by his first name? You don’t even
know
him,” Harriet snapped as they tied their sneakers for gym class.

Janie rolled her eyes and shot her a don’t-you-know-
anything
look. “Yes, I do.”

“Well, he doesn’t know
you
.”

“That’s his loss,” said Janie. “And anyway, that’s just a detail. When Jason does meet me, he’ll fall in love in a nanosecond. Spontaneous combustion.” Harriet tied her lace in a triple knot. She thought about making a cutting comeback, but she was too irritated to come up with anything witty. It’s one thing for Marion Hawthorne and the popularity clones to have idiot crushes, but if this can happen to
Janie
, thought Harriet darkly, it can happen to anyone. Even to me.

Annie had stayed home from school that day— she’d been fighting a cold, and her aunt was a world-class worrier—so Harriet left school alone. She thought about taking the usual detour to spy on the Christmas tree men, but the thought of a thin slice of Cook’s lemon pound cake and a glass of cold milk sitting inside the fridge, on the same shelf where Cook left her afternoon snack every day, was too irresistible. She headed for East Eighty-seventh Street.

Cook had gone home early, as she always did on Fridays, leaving a casserole covered in plastic wrap and a pot of soup next to Harriet’s cake and milk. Both pots had taped-on reheating instructions in Cook’s solid block letters. I wonder if she minds, Harriet thought as she chewed her pound cake, which was not lemon, but marble. I wonder if she gets sick of making a dinner for us every Friday and then taking the subway to Brooklyn and making another for her lazy son.
I’d
mind.

Harriet stared out the basement window at the Feigenbaums’ nearly identical window across the street, wondering if Annie’s aunt had forced her to stay in bed all day long. She felt strangely restless. I’m not used to being alone anymore, she realized. For years she had come home from school, eaten her cake, and spent the afternoon spying and then visiting with her beloved Ole Golly. When Ole Golly left to get married, Harriet had added new stops to her spy route to fill in the gap. She’d taken to making long phone calls to Sport, or visiting him in his walk-up apartment, on those too-frequent nights when her parents went out, her mother adrift in a swath of silk scarves and Chanel N°5