A Spy Among the Girls Read Online Free

looked to Wally as though the backyard had been covered with cream cheese.
    He went down the steps and started to open the lid of the garbage can, then paused, his hand in the air.
    “Hey!” he called. And then more loudly, “Hey, Josh! Jake! Hey, Dad! Come here!”
    A chair scraped against the floor inside the house, and there were footsteps. Then the back door swung open.
    “What is it?” asked Jake. Josh stuck his head out too; then Mr. Hatford came out on the porch, followed by Peter.
    “Look!” said Wally, pointing.
    There on the ground, around the garbage can, were large paw prints in the snow. They were larger than a cat's. Larger than a dog's. And they certainly weren't deer tracks. They looked like nothing Wally had ever seen before.
    “The abaguchie!” breathed Peter. “That's what it is.”

Five

The Plan
    E ddie was upset.
    “All the good ideas are already taken!” she complained, telling the family about the science fair that was coming up at school. Each of the sixth-graders was to think of an experiment. “I had a good idea about photosynthesis: taken. I had another idea for evaporation: taken. Someone is even going to do that experiment on magnetism I did back in Ohio last year.”
    Mrs. Malloy was framing a picture to put at the top of the stairs. “Well, maybe you've got to think in a new direction, Edith Ann,” she said. Eddie hated to be called by her full name. “Maybe you need to think of an experiment involving people instead of things.”
    “You mean, evaporate
people
?” Caroline asked incredulously from the living room couch.
    “No, I mean…do a survey, maybe. Be creative! You'll think of something,” Mrs. Malloy said.
    “We're supposed to think up a hypothesis and then test it out,” said Eddie.
    “What's a hypothesis?” asked Caroline.
    “You figure out something you think might be true, and then you set up an experiment to test it,” Eddie explained. “I might say that plants always grow toward the light. That's what I think would happen, so that would be my hypothesis. Then I might put some plants in a box with a window on one side. I might keep them there for a week, and when I took the cover off the box, I'd expect all the plants to be leaning toward the window if my hypothesis was true.”
    “So, do that one,” said Beth. “Everyone knows that plants lean toward the light.”
    “That's why I can't do it. It's dumb,” said Eddie. “Even a
survey
would be better than that.”
    Mr. and Mrs. Malloy had a faculty dinner to attend that evening, so the girls were on their own. Eddie made spaghetti sauce, Beth boiled the spaghetti, and Caroline made the salad. As they were eating, Caroline said that all the boys wanted to talk about in her class that day was the abaguchie. Wally Hatford had told them he'd gone out to empty the garbage and there were strange tracks in the snow made by no creature known to man.
    “Ha!” said Eddie. “I wouldn't believe a thing those Hatfords say.”
    “Some of the boys claim the abaguchie is a prehistoric animal,” Caroline went on. “Boys are the most gullible creatures in the whole world. They'll believe anything.”
    “
Some
boys, maybe,” said Beth.
    “I'll bet if we said we had the abaguchie in our garage, every boy in school would be over to see it,” said Caroline.
    Eddie suddenly put down her fork and said, “Hypothesis: boys are more gullible than girls.”
    “True!” said Caroline.
    “But I have to prove it,” said Eddie, and Caroline could tell from the glint in her eye that Eddie's brain was racing on ahead of her. “What if we…I know! What if we spread the word on the playground that we've trapped the abaguchie in our garage, and if people want to see it, they should come by our house on Saturday or something.”
    “What you'd get would be huge crowds of kids coming together. You wouldn't know who really believed it and who didn't,” said Beth.
    Eddie sat twisting a long strand of spaghetti around and