Spying on Miss Muller (11 page)

Maureen was sitting with her finger ready to dip when someone knocked on my door.

“Who is it?” I asked as we fumbled to hide the tuck box. We were supposed to eat treats in Long Parlor, not in our rooms where crumbs could bring mice—and did.

“It's Greta,” the voice said.

Maureen raised her eyebrows.

“Come in,” I called.

Never before had Greta Ludowski been in my room. Never before had she been in our dorm.

Lizzie Mag moved closer to the cubie wall. “You can sit by me.”

Ada hadn't finished wrapping the cake. “Want a piece?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Greta said.

We watched her eat, none of us saying a word till she finished.

She wiped her fingers on the face flannel that I offered her, still damp from this morning. “Thank you.” She looked at us, one by one. “So?” she asked. “Tonight we go?”

“That's not the plan,” I told her. “Tonight, first, I'm going to listen. If Miss Müller comes out of her room, I'll get the others and we'll follow her.”

“And me?”

“I will come for you,” Lizard said. “I'm awfully sorry—we're all awfully sorry—about your daddy.”

Greta's face seemed to crumple. She bent her head, then lifted it. When she spoke it was in her normal voice. “What if she doesn't spy walk tonight?”

“We're not sure,” I said. “It may take a while before she goes up to the roof again, so we'll take turns staying awake and listening.”

Maureen sighed. “I know it's for a good cause, but have you any idea what staying awake does to your looks? We'll have bags under our eyes, big ugly black ones. Ian won't like you anymore, Jessie. You'll look like an old crone. He won't want to kiss you, even if there's another air raid, even if it
is
in the dark.”

“Shut up, Mo,” Ada told her.

Maureen gazed into the distance. “I know. Phyllis Hollister has this special stuff. It's
for
bags. She sent away for the formula and made it herself in chemistry. You smooth it on like this.” Maureen's sugary finger drew a white smudge under each eye. “Phyllis says it's sulfur and molasses and Egyptian oils.”

“Where did she get those?” Ada asked, interested for the first time.

“Oh, she substituted cod liver oil. She stole it from the dispensary. Phyllis says cod liver oil is probably even better than Egyptian oils. She says that if it's so good for our insides, think what it'll do for our outsides.”

Lizzie Mag shuddered. The smell of cod liver oil was awful.

“You'll stink us all out, Maureen,” I said.

“If Miss Müller does go tonight,” Greta said, as if she hadn't heard anything else, “and if we follow her and find her engaged in traitorous work, what is the plan then?”

“Well, we haven't really thought past finding her,” I said.

“We'll say, ‘Halt,' ” Maureen said brightly. “ ‘Who goes there?' ”

Greta gave her a disbelieving look. “The German will fight, you know. She will not be taken. Have you a plan for that?”

We looked at one another. Of course we had no plan for that. We had thought Miss Müller would meekly come with us.

“She might jump, of course,” Greta said in a conversational way.

“You mean... off the roof?” Maureen's Arcs de Triomphe hoisted to high mast.

“No, she means through a hoop,” Ada said. “Honestly, Maureen.”

I swallowed nervously. “We could hold her and not let her go. There are four of us... I mean five.”

“Criminy, she might pull us off the roof with her,” Maureen said.

“Perhaps she will have a gun,” Greta said.

“Oh, no.” I tried for a laugh. “The maids would have found it. Maids find everything in this place.”

“Not necessarily,” Greta said. “Germans have ways of hiding things. They can hide hundreds of dead bodies. Hide them from the world. A little gun? Poof.” She snapped her fingers.

“Dead bodies?” Maureen grabbed my pillow and held it over her face. “Did she say dead bodies?”

“We should consider,” Greta went on. “It is best to be prepared and never to underestimate the enemy. That was the trouble with my people. We thought the Germans were human.”

We were all quiet, sitting there on the bed. What awful things Greta had seen and suffered. We couldn't begin to imagine them. It was a relief when the dressing bell clanged through the dorm. We had only fifteen minutes to change for high tea.

“You know which is my cubie?” Greta asked. “It is the first one by the door in Sleeping Beauty.”

“I know,” Lizzie Mag said. “We will not leave you behind, Greta. I promise.”

I wished Lizard hadn't made that promise, because I was afraid of Greta. Hate is frightening.

“She's a load of fun,” Maureen whispered sarcastically when Greta had left.

We were gathering up our debris, bundling the package together so Ada could give it to her brother Jack after tea.

“This is not supposed to be fun, Mo,” I said. “It's dead earnest. Sometimes you're ridiculous.”

Maureen looked offended. “Same to you with brass knobs on it,” she said.

When they'd gone, I brushed the sugar off my quilt and began looking for my nail file to wipe it clean. It was nowhere. But it had to be. We'd just used it.

“Ada,” I called. “Is my nail file still in the package for Jack? Would you look?”

I heard paper rustling. Ada called, “Not here. Check under your bed.”

I checked there and all around. Under my quilt, under the things on my chair. The nail file, long and sharp as a dagger, had disappeared. Had someone taken it? Who? Could it have been Greta? But why? I didn't want to think what I was thinking.

“A
LADY ALWAYS DRESSES
for high tea,” Old Rose said, so we had to throw off our gym tunics and blouses and black stockings and put on frocks. We were allowed to have two frocks, one to alternate with the other. “Excess is not in good taste,” Old Rose told us. As Ada said, she should have taken a look at herself.

One of my frocks was dark red with a white collar, the other Alice blue cut in a princess line. I'd picked the styles from the Butterick Pattern Book, and Mrs. Reader, our Ballylo dressmaker, had “run them up” for me. Mrs. Reader knew everything about everybody, and she released it all to my mother through a mouthful of straight pins while she knelt adjusting my hems.

“Did you hear about Maggie Mulcahy? Another wee'un on the way and her with eight already.” The pins shifted disapprovingly between Mrs. Reader's big yellow teeth. White threads clung like skinny worms to her black jumper. The tape measure around her neck quivered with indignation. “Old C.F. was full as the Boyne again last night, singing rebel songs. A terrible thing, the drink,” she said, and her eyes flashed to my mother and away. She never mentioned my father and how he was drunk again last night, too, though she knew the way everyone in Ballylo knew.

Today I pulled the Alice blue frock from my wardrobe and put it on. My cousin Bryan said I looked thinner and older in it, so of course of the two it was my favorite. Bry had terrific taste. But I was thinking again about the nail file. Had Greta taken it? Or could it have slipped between the bed and the wall? I jerked the bed out and peered again beneath it. No use looking. She'd taken it, all right. Following Miss Müller had become ten times more dangerous since Greta got involved.

I peeled off my black stockings and put on my misty-morning lisle ones. Ada said the color was more like cow pats than morning mist, but Ada tended to see the worst in everything. I took my brown suede wedgies from my wardrobe shelf. They were my pride and joy. Wedgies were all the rage that year. We had bought mine in the Dolcis shoe store downtown. “The American look,” twenty-four clothing coupons. To finish things off, I clipped on my single, understated string of cultured pearls.

The four of us—Lizzie Mag, Ada, Maureen, and I—walked to the dining room together. We weren't hungry, of course, after all that tuck, which was too bad because tonight was the best tea of the week—fried potato bread. The maids served us from platters, standing behind us, flinging the fried bread onto our plates. Usually we begged for seconds, like Oliver Twist. Usually the maids wouldn't give seconds. “A little power,” Ada said, “is a dangerous and rotten thing.”

Miss Müller wasn't at tea. The teachers had a Primus stove in their lounge and were allowed to make their own evening meal there if they preferred to. If I'd been Miss Müller, I'd have preferred to.

Down at the babies' end of the table the little first formers were hooting and howling, their hands over their mouths to smother their noise, their wicked little eyes darting around the table. Whatever they were up to seemed to involve Hillary and the pimply maid, Sarah Neely. She was hunched down beside Hillary having a giggly conversation. They'd both be in trouble if they were seen.

“Jessie?” Lizzie Mag leaned across the table. “Ian's making terrible googoo eyes at you. It's easy to see he's got a bad case of the lovesickness.”

“Honestly?” My heart blipped a little blip.

“Here.” Lizzie Mag shined her spoon on her napkin and reached it across to me. I held it up and tried to use it as a mirror since we weren't allowed to turn around to look. Sometimes if the light was right, and if I jiggled the spoon perfectly, I could get a glimpse of Ian, distorted but better than nothing. Tonight I couldn't see a thing.

The maids came along the table gathering up the silverware, so I had to surrender the spoon. At Alveara they were so scared we'd sneak something into our rooms that they cleared the tables before we'd eaten our last bites.

Already the prefects were setting up the cod liver oil tables across the two entrances. There was no escape in this world from cod liver oil. Mr. Bolton, who was the master on duty, said closing grace and ended it by saying, “...and for the oils of your big fish, so kindly provided, Lord, the boarders present are not terribly thankful.” It made us all laugh. Honestly, Mr. Bolton was the nicest teacher in the world.

We lined up to get our spoonfuls. As soon as they took the tops off the big bottles, the whole dining room smelled like the bowels of a whaling ship. “Like we just harpooned Moby Dick,” Ada said. We held our noses and opened our mouths. Lizzie Mag and I had vowed that if we were ever prefects at Alveara, we'd let some girls slip by, especially the ones who were almost boking on the way up the line. We had to say thank you to the prefects so they'd be certain we'd swallowed, though holding it in your mouth to spit out seemed a hundred times worse to me.

“And you're honestly going to put this stuff under your eyes, Mo?” Lizard asked. “What if the smell never comes off?”

“I'll suffer anything for beauty,” Maureen said.

Ada had permission to stay behind and meet her brother to give him his share of the tuck. The rest of us milled back along the corridor to get our dressing gowns and put them over our frocks before we went to study hall. The hall was just one of the day classrooms with the heat turned off, and it was so cold that your breath froze in a cloud, and the rest of you froze right along with it.

“Carol Murchison's on study-hall duty,” Lizzie Mag said, and rolled her eyes. “She'll keep us till the last minute and won't allow as much as a whisper.”

“The only time I liked her was when she got the egg with the chicken in it this morning,” Maureen said. “When she screamed, I realized she was a human being.”

We got our dressing gowns and our books from our lockers, took our gas masks, and trailed back along the corridor. Boots was mopping the floor, and we hopped around the wet spots. “Don't slip, young ladies,” he warned, and we called back, “We won't,” even though we knew he couldn't hear us.

Lizzie Mag and I sat next to each other in a double desk, with Ada and Maureen directly behind. But Ada hadn't arrived yet. Two rows over I saw Greta Ludowski. She had her head bent over her French book, and though I stared and stared, she didn't look up. “Greta!” I hissed, and Carol Murchison, always on the alert at her desk in front, said: “Perhaps you aren't aware that study hall has started, Jessie Drumm. No talking, please.”

We coughed, which was permitted, loudly slammed our books on the desks, whacked the pages open.

Carol's little beady eyes followed our every move.

In about five minutes Ada came, excused herself to Carol, and sat down. Immediately she touched my back. Something poked between my shoulders. Cautiously I put a hand back, brought it forward just as cautiously. It was an envelope. The name Jessie Drumm was written in little cramped writing on the front. A letter. Human instinct is an incredible thing. I knew instantly that it was from Ian. My stomach knew too, and gave a loud warning gurgle. Secretly, quietly, I opened the envelope.

“Dear Jessie,” he wrote. “It was nice seeing you last night. I liked kissing you. I hope you had no ill effects. Ha ha. I hope we can see each other again. Yours sincerely, Ian McManus.” I read it twice, then turned it over. He hoped I'd had no ill effects. Just a semi—heart attack and smoldering intestines, that was all.

I passed the letter under the desk to Lizzie Mag, who read it, smiled, reached down, and squeezed my hand.

I slid it behind then and listened to the throb of silence as Ada and Mo read.

Ada whispered with her mouth right against my hair, “It's not exactly ‘My love is like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June.' ” I could hardly hear her, but Carol, who had ears on her like a Belleek china jug, did. Her head came up fast.

“Ada Sinclair, were you whispering?”

“Yes, Carol.”

“A hundred lines for tomorrow. ‘I will not talk in study hall.' ”

Ian's letter slid forward to me.

“Ada Sinclair, did you just pass something to Jessie Drumm?” Carol's voice quivered with anger. Carol prided herself on running a tight study hall. “Bring it up here this minute,” she ordered.