Nanny X (5 page)

Ali closed her eyes, to think about it, I guess, but then she opened them kind of wide. “It was round,” she said. “Rounder than most rocks you find around here. And bigger. And it didn't even come from where Stinky was standing. It came from someplace higher.”

She was right. If Stinky had pitched that rock, it would have gone up toward the stage and then down again. But this one just went down.

“If the rock that hit the mayor wasn't the one Stinky was carrying, the real rock could still be here someplace,” I said.

The stage was empty, but that didn't mean anything. Maybe the Green-Not-Mean lady had kicked it when it bounced off the mayor. I searched around in the grass. Then I crawled under the stage to look there. It was dark, but I could still see things, like some twigs and a cigarette butt and—

“I found something!” I shouted.

It was round and brown, like the rock that had conked the mayor on the head. But unlike a rock, it was also kind of hairy looking. Because it turned out that it wasn't a rock at all; it was a coconut.

Great. We had a nanny who was not only a certifiable crazy person, she actually believed she was a
special agent
. I'll bet that's not what my mother meant when she told me the new nanny was special. I guess having Nanny X believe she was a special agent was a little better than having her believe she was George Washington, but not by much. At least it was a good reason for her not acting like a proper nanny. Not that any of that made me feel better.

Just then, Jake scooted out from under the stage with a coconut. He was pushing it with a stick, like he was playing pool in caveman times. Looking at him, you might have thought he was being smart about not messing up any fingerprints—except I wasn't sure you could leave fingerprints on a coconut. Also, Jake had this thing for sticks. They reminded him of baseball bats, I guess. Nanny X pulled a plastic bag from inside her diaper bag and eased the coconut into it.

“Evidence,” she said. “Are there any others?”

Okay, so she found her “something out of the ordinary.” That didn't mean that she really worked for NAP. It didn't mean anything at all, except that we needed a new nanny.

Jake crawled under the stage again and moved from end to end. “Nope. I don't see anything else,” he said. When he crawled out, he was covered with dirt, and he had a leaf stuck in his curly hair. He looked at Yeti and pointed to the coconut.

“Find it, boy,” he said. “Go find another coconut.”
Oh, please
. Yeti started sniffing all around, even though he's a Samoyed, not a bloodhound. He sniffed up and down and around trees. Eliza, who was back in her stroller, started fussing, so Nanny X let her out again, and she toddled after Yeti yelling, “Arf, arf!” Yeti stopped near an extra-tall oak tree with branches that stretched toward us. He ran around and around, barking.

“Good try, Yeti,” Jake said. “But I don't see anything.”

Yeti put his paws on the side of the tree and whined.

I looked at Nanny X. It was obvious we weren't leaving the park until we found another “clue,” so I decided to play along. Anything to get us out of there faster.

“Maybe we don't need to look
around
the tree,” I said. “Maybe we need to look up
in
the tree.”

“That's it!” Jake started climbing. Mom says he should've been a monkey. I started climbing, too. Why not, right? We were at a park. And climbing is good exercise.

But my brother was ahead of me. He shimmied out onto a branch and parted the green leaves above us. “Aha!” he said, which is not a word I've ever heard him use. But I guess it's an okay word if you're pretending to be a special agent and you've found another clue. A few minutes later I wanted to use it, too, because I spotted a coconut of my
own. It was in a hollow of the tree, where a squirrel would have put it if he had an extra-big mouth and could actually carry a coconut. But a squirrel hadn't put it there. So who had?

Nanny X passed her evidence bags up to me, and I passed one on up to Jake. We slid the coconuts inside. Then we climbed down. At the bottom of the tree, we found something else: a brown, bruised banana peel.

“Whoever catapulted that coconut was hungry,” Nanny X said.

From somewhere in the diaper bag, we heard the ringing of a telephone. Nanny X reached in and pulled out her folded diaper. Now that we were close, we could see tiny metal buttons on the diaper's liner, and small holes for sound.
A secret phone
. Okay, if this was make-believe, her props seemed pretty real. But she couldn't possibly—

“Hello?” she said into the diaper. “Yes. Of course they're with me. What kind of a nanny do you think I am?”

She paused, and I knew it was because this time the diaper really
was
talking back. You know that expression “her jaw dropped”? Mine really did.

“Coconuts,” Nanny X was saying. “Three of them, just like on Roosevelt Island.”

Pause.

“I was afraid of that. We'll use the utmost caution.”

Pause.

“Is he at the hospital?”

Pause.

“He's a stubborn man. We'll meet him there. X out.”

She closed the diaper, which I guess meant she hung up.

“It's just as I feared,” she said. “Coconuts. We can't be certain, of course, but it looks like we're dealing with a very powerful crime syndicate.”

With coconuts. Right.

“What's a syndicate?” asked Jake.

“In this case it's a big group of bad guys.”

“Coconut-eating bad guys?”

“Coconut-
throwing
bad guys,” said Nanny X. “At least that's what happened on Roosevelt Island. There was a counterfeiting operation there, and when we got too close, the coconuts started flying. I . . . we lost them.”

I hadn't seen anything like that in the news.

“Do you think that's why the mayor got hit?” Jake asked. “Because he got too close to something?”

“Sure,” I said. “A crazy gang of coconut counterfeiters is trying to knock him off.”

Jake gave me a mean look, but he didn't speak.

“Right now it's about as clear as coconut milk,” said Nanny X. “But I'm sure it will begin to make sense. Let's go see the mayor.”

“Us, too?” I said.

“What?” Nanny X said. “You think I'm going to leave you on your own with a bunch of coconut hoodlums lurking around? Of course you're coming. Besides, you might notice something I don't. And you know Daniel Malloy. We should talk to him as well.”

“Nanny . . . X?” I said as she reached into the diaper bag and handed Eliza a baby cracker. Jake and I were going to have to tap into Eliza's supply if we didn't get some more food soon.

“Hmm?” our nanny said.

“Why don't you just use your normal cell phone?”

“I do sometimes,” she said. “But a regular cell phone can't do all of the things my diaper phone can do.”

“What can it do?” I asked her.

“It can take pictures,” she said.

“Cell phones take pictures.”

“Infrared pictures,” she said. “It also has a protected signal that cannot be intercepted, and a bypass option that lets it circumnavigate the switchboard at dozens of government agencies, including the White House. And it fits snugly around a baby's tush in case of emergencies. This one is just Eliza's size, you see?”

“But what happens if the baby—”

“Yes?”

“What if the baby
poops
?” Jake finished my sentence for me.

“Or pees,” I agreed. “Wouldn't that damage your ‘equipment'?”

“Heavens no,” said Nanny X. “It's waterproof. And my phone can do one more thing a cell phone can't. If it gets into the wrong hands, that is.”

“What does it do?” Jake and I asked together.

“It blows up,” said Nanny X. “Now come, children, or we'll miss our chance to see the mayor.”

I tried to forget that my little sister could be wearing a buttbomb. She wiggled around just like normal, and lifted her arms up to be held when we parked the stroller at City Hall. Nanny X carried her right up to the mayor's office.

“Hello?” she called.

“Yes? Who's there?” the mayor answered from a room in the back.

We went in. “Nanny X,” our nanny said. She pulled out a badge and flashed it. The mayor looked at it for a second while holding an ice pack up against his head. He started to hand the badge back, but Ali intercepted it. She held it to the light. Then she closed one eye and studied it. If she'd had a magnifying glass, I'll bet she would have used that, too.

“I want to see,” I whispered, but she ignored me.

“So this is what NAP is doing with its time these days, is it?” asked Mayor Osbourne. I elbowed Ali in the ribs.
Now my S.S. sister would
have
to believe our nanny was a member of NAP. The mayor did. Ali elbowed me back.

“I'm sure I don't know what you mean,” Nanny X said.

“There was an assassination attempt,” the mayor said. “Involving a juvenile. But the culprit has been captured. We don't need the involvement of a secret organization.”

“I beg to differ, Mr. Mayor,” said Nanny X. “I believe the culprit, as you call him, is an innocent eleven-year-old boy. And, excuse me, ‘assassination attempt'? I think we're dealing with something else here altogether.”

“Such as?”

“We're still trying to find that out.”

Ali rolled her eyes again, even though she'd seen the badge.

Just then the mayor's secretary came in. “Your smoothie, sir,” she said, leaving it on his desk.

I loved smoothies. The empty space in my stomach, which had only been filled by one apple and exactly zero bites of peanut butter and anchovy sandwich, rumbled.

“Cheers.” The mayor took the ice pack off his head, and we could see a purple goose egg where he'd been hit by the coconut. He gulped some smoothie through an extra-large straw, making a slurping sound even though the cup wasn't empty.

“That hits the spot,” he said.

Yeti licked his lips. I licked mine. Eliza made a sound sort of like Yeti makes when he's locked in the bedroom, so Nanny X pulled a bottle out of the diaper bag and handed it to her.

“I'm sorry, children,” the mayor said, gulping and slurping. “I'd offer to share, but . . . germs.”

“Is it chocolate?” I asked.

“Ha,” he said. “No, this was just delivered to me by the company that wants to set up a new business here in
Lovett. The very subject of the park meeting, in fact. I know I shouldn't show any favoritism by drinking it, but it seems a small compensation for the injuries I sustained. And it's just so darned good.”

“Strawberry?” asked Ali. She looked at him the way she looks at me when she knows I've been in her room.

“Nope,” said the mayor. “Actually, it's coconut.”

“
Coconut!
” I said.

“Coconut,” Ali whispered, and I could tell that she was finally starting to believe.

The mayor's eyes got sort of darkish. “Is there something
wrong
with coconut?”

“No but we—” I began, but Nanny X looked at me and I stopped.

“We just all like coconut, I guess,” Ali said. “The coconut kids, that's what they call us. And, um, the coconut nanny.”

“Not many children have a taste for coconut,” said the mayor.

“Ah, but these children are extraordinary,” Nanny X said.

“Then I'll let you in on a secret,” said the mayor. “The company I'm talking about wants to set up a coconut processing and distribution center, right here, if we can get the zoning for it. Think about it: Lovett, Virginia, could be the coconut hub of the entire eastern seaboard. We could have a new slogan: The Coconut Capital!”