A Spy Among the Girls Read Free Page B

downstairs. Peter was eating ice cream in the kitchen, Mr. Hatford was in the living room watching the news, Mrs. Hatford was working a crossword puzzle at one end of the dining room table, and Jake was doing homework at the other end.
    “As soon as Josh comes in, tell him to come out here and help me with our math assignment,” Jake said. “He must have done his already.”
    “Okay,” said Wally.
    “Where
is
Josh?” asked Mrs. Hatford.
    “Around somewhere,” Wally answered, wandering off again.
    He went upstairs and sat down on the top step, studying the wallpaper. It was a striped paper of gray and green, a green rope twisting round and round a gray column, with skinnier lines on either side. All around the hall and down the stairs, columns and columns of gray with green rope twisting around them as far as Wally could see.
    He lay down and looked at the stripes from the floor. Now they were horizontal stripes, one on top of the other, all over the wall. Who designed wallpaper? Wally wondered. He liked to think about things like that. Were there factories where artists sat around at drawing boards, designing gray stripes with green ropes around them, and purple stripes with blue ropes around them, and brown stripes with yellow? Did they have to go on drawing the same pattern with every color you could think of before they could draw something new?
    How did you know you wanted to design wallpaper when you grew up? Wally tried to think of all his friends—the Benson boys in particular—and the things they had talked about being when they grew up. Policemen, doctors, forest rangers, football players…
    He couldn't ever remember hearing someone say he wanted to design wallpaper.
    The door to his room opened at last and Josh came out with an envelope under his arm. He looked surprised to see Wally waiting there on the stairs and went quickly into the room he shared with Jake.
    “Thanks,” he said.
    “Jake's looking for you,” Wally said.
    “Okay,” said Josh. He came out a moment later and went downstairs.
    Wally opened the door to his room and turned on the light. He looked around. He didn't see any binoculars. No false mustaches or other disguises. Nothing that looked like spy stuff. He peered all about—at the top of his bed, the top of his dresser—nothing.
    He got down on his stomach and looked under his bed. There were some small scraps of white paper, a little scrap of pink, and some tiny red sparkles, the kind you might find on a cupcake. What the heck had Josh been doing? Making cupcakes? Wally sniffed the air. Nothing
smelled
like cupcakes.
    “Wally!” came Mrs. Hatford's voice from downstairs. “You haven't done your chores yet. I wish I didn't have to remind you every night to empty the wastebaskets and take out the garbage.”
    Wally wished she didn't either. Jake and Josh usually remembered to do their chores because they did them right after dinner. One of them took the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and the other put the dirty onesin. You could hardly forget to do that with your mother watching you right there at the table.
    Peter didn't get a chance to forget his work either. He had to set the table for dinner every night. That was easy, because as soon as he got hungry, his stomach reminded him to set the table. But how could you remember to empty wastebaskets and take out the garbage when there were more important things to think about—like what was your brother doing in your room? Making cupcakes?
    Wally picked up his wastebasket and took it around to the baskets in all the other bedrooms, dumping their contents into his. He did the same with the bathroom wastebasket, then went downstairs and began emptying trash from all the baskets there.
    He went into the kitchen, pulled the garbage sack from under the sink, and took both the wastebasket and the garbage sack out the back door.
    The moon was full, and the backyard was bright in the one inch of snow that had fallen that evening. It