A Spy Among the Girls Read Online Free Page A

around on her fork, her blond head resting on one hand. “Okay,” she said at last, jerking upright. “Then the messages have to be secret. Each kid has to think he or she is the only one we invited and can't tell anyone else. We could put a note in the pocket of every coat hanging outside the classrooms from second to sixth grades. Any kid younger than seven probably wouldn't be able to read it.”
    “Yeah,” said Caroline, “but once kids get to our house and there isn't any abaguchie to see, then what? We'll have a riot.”
    “Hmmm,” said Eddie. She hadn't thought of that.
    Caroline considered her sisters pretty lucky to have such a precocious child as herself in the family.
    “We'll make up a picture of an abaguchie,” said Eddie. “We'll cut parts of animals out of magazine pictures and paste them all together and claim that's what it looks like. I mean, ‘abaguchie’ is just a made-up name, right? So our picture will just be a made-up animal, and that's what we'll show anyone who comes over.”
    Dumb, dumb, dumb,
thought Caroline. Who was going to be satisfied with a picture of an abaguchie? And where did
she
fit into all this? Well, Caroline Lenore Malloy was going to play a part whether Eddie knew it or not. In fact, Caroline was going to save the day. She would
be
the abaguchie.
    Beth and Eddie were still discussing the plan as though Caroline weren't even there. “But there are three hundred kids in school, not counting kindergarten and first grade. Who's going to write out three hundred messages?” Beth was saying.
    “We'll do it on Dad's computer,” Eddie told her. “I'll type up a message, then we'll copy it all down the page, and print a whole bunch of pages till we get three hundred messages. Then we'll cut the pages in strips.”
    “And if a parent gets hold of one of the slips of paper and tells our folks?” asked Beth.
    “We'll just explain. It's a scientific experiment to see if boys are more gullible than girls. There's no harm in that.”
    Eddie didn't seem to care that kids would be disappointed, Caroline thought. As long as she got an experiment out of it, that was all that mattered. Well, Caroline would just have to see that no one went away disappointed.
    As soon as they'd finished eating, Eddie turned on the computer and typed out this message:
    Private: This is a secret message. If you want to
    see the abaguchie, come to 611 Island Avenue
    between 3 and 4 PM. tomorrow, Saturday. Free.
    Do not tell anyone about this message or you will
    not get in.
    She copied it again and again all down the page, then printed out page after page, until there was a message for every student in the second through sixth grades.
    Eddie and Beth took their scissors and cut the papers into strips, a message on each strip, then divided them up and stuck them in their book bags. After that, they spent the evening cutting parts of animals out of old magazines and pasting them together on a sheet of paper, until they had a weird animal that looked like no animal at all.
    “This isn't any good,” said Beth. “It's just plain stupid.”
    “Well, it's all we've got, so it will have to do,” Eddiesaid irritably. “Meanwhile, I'll hide this under my bed. The folks will be in Morgantown on Saturday afternoon, and the experiment will be over by the time they get back. Not that I'm doing anything
wrong,
of course. I just…I don't know how Mom would feel about us luring kids over here thinking they'll see a real animal.”
    Caroline said nothing. Nothing at all.
    The next morning, however, before the girls left for school, Eddie gave Caroline some of the messages to put in coat pockets.
Sure!
thought Caroline.
When there's work to be done, call on good old Caroline.
Still, she took her share of the slips of paper without complaining.
    She didn't say a word to Wally. She was as good as gold all day. Eddie had already decided that the messages should be put into coat pockets after the last recess so that kids