Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye (5 page)

Anyway, when Claudia went to sit at the Pikes' that afternoon, she had no idea what she was getting into. She thought she and Mallory would have just the usual Pike bedlam to put up with. But, no, Jordan had invented SA's.

"Where is everybody?" Claudia asked, as Mallory let her in the front door. She was used to being met by a herd of children.

"Out back," Mallory replied, rolling her eyes. "I'll explain as soon as Mom leaves."

Mrs. Pike bustled downstairs, giving last-

minute instructions and phone numbers to Claudia and Mallory. Then she inched her station wagon down the driveway and was gone.

"Okay," said Mallory. "Come here." She led Claudia to the Pikes' back door. "Look in the yard. What do you see?"

"Nothing," I replied.

"Look harder. Look in the elm tree, for instance."

Claudia squinted her eyes. She saw a pair of blue jeans and some curly hair. "Jordan?" she guessed.

"Right."

"What's he doing up there?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. See if you can find everyone else."

It took a while, but Claudia finally spotted Claire and Margo crouched behind a yew bush, Nicky lying flat on his stomach in some tall grass, Vanessa peeking around a corner of the toolshed, and Adam and Byron up an ash tree. There was not a sound in the Pikes' backyard.

"What are they doing?" Claudia whispered.

"Spying," Mallory replied. "And we don't have to whisper. They're playing a game called SA's. That stands for Secret Agents. Some people finally moved into the Congdons' house, and those goons — " (Mallory waved her hand,

indicating her brothers and sisters) "— think the new people are foreign spies."

The Congdons' house sat just beyond the back edge of the Pikes' property. Adam and Jordan in the ash tree were practically looking in the bedroom windows, that's how close they were to the house.

"Why do they think the new people are spies?" Claudia wanted to know.

"Oh, they have a long, funny last name, and they speak with accents. They sound like this: 'ow nize do meed you. Thank you zo moch for your 'ozpeetaleetee."

Claudia giggled. "Do they really sound like that?" she asked.

"They really do," Mallory replied. "But that doesn't mean they're spies."

This is what us sitters like about Mallory. She is totally levelheaded. And practical. And usually willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Not that she doesn't have an imagination. She does. She loves to read and is usually in the middle of at least four books. She likes to write, too. And when she's alone, she daydreams. But when she's helping us baby-sit, she's always on top of things.

"We better go out there and see what they're up to," Claudia said, opening the door.

Mallory and Claudia
 
strode
 
through the

backyard. They were intending to keep an eye on the kids. Instead, they wound up helping with spy missions that afternoon.

"Psst! PSSST!" hissed a frantic voice.

The girls looked around. They found Jordan signaling to them from his tree. He was waving a little spiral notebook around.

"What?" asked Claudia and Mallory at the same time.

"Come here. And keep quiet!"

The girls tiptoed to the base of the elm tree. "What is it?" asked Claudia. "By the way, your mother left. She'll be back around five-thirty."

"Okay," said Jordan quickly. Apparently, Mrs. Pike was the furthest thing from his mind. "Listen, you gotta keep quiet. We don't want the spies to know we're spying on them."

"Jordan, they are not spies," Mallory whispered.

"They might be. That's what we have to find out. You should see all the stuff that's in their den. There's a Xerox machine, a Telex machine, two computers, a printer —"

"How do you know?" Claudia asked.

"Vanessa looked in the window. She earned her yellow badge for that." ' "Huh?"

"You have to complete certain missions,"

Mallory explained to Claudia. "Every time you do, you get a badge. Getting the pink badge is easiest. Black is hardest. And there are eight other badges in between. If you earn all ten, you're named a top agent, like Byron and Adam. They've been going on missions more often than anyone else."

"Would you guys be quiet?" asked Jordan. "Nicky's setting up the tape recorder. I don't want it to pick up your voices."

Claudia nearly fell over. "Tape recorder? What tape recorder?"

Jordan jumped out of the tree and led Claudia and Mallory toward the house. "We have to find out what they're talking about," he said.

"I think that's invasion of privacy," Claudia told him. "Isn't it?" She turned to Mallory.

"I don't know," Mallory replied, "but you guys are trespassing."

"We are not," said Jordan huffily. "We're not setting a toe on their property. At least not for this. Nicky's going to tape from up in a tree. And the tree's in our yard."

"Well, I hope he's careful," said Mallory. "The only one of us kids who's ever broken a bone is Nicky, and that was when he fell out of a tree."

Jordan looked slightly worried, but he held his ground. "He has to start climbing again

sometime. Besides, he's going to earn a green badge if he does a good job. Anyway, can you two give me a hand? I can't assign missions and help my agents and keep track of who's earned which badges. Here." Jordan thrust his notebook at Mallory. "Just make a note any time an agent gets a badge." Then he ran back to the elm tree.

Mallory opened the little notebook and Clau-dia peered inside. At the top of each page was the name of one of Jordan's "agents." Running down the side were the words Pink, White, Yellow, Orange, Red, Purple, Green, Blue, Brown, and Black. At least one color was checked off on each page. All the colors on Adam's and Byron's pages were checked off.

"Hey," said Mallory, grinning. "Jordan didn't bother to give himself a page, since he's head spy. He is so stuck-up. He invented the game, so he doesn't even have to go on any missions. He just sits in that tree and gives out orders."

Claudia smiled, too. Then she said, "Come on. I have a feeling we should check on Nicky. I don't want any broken bones."

"Or any inversion of privacy," added Mallory.

"Whatever." Claudia smiled. Mallory might be practical and levelheaded, but she z's two

years younger than Claudia and the rest of the club members.

The girls hunted Nicky down. Just as Jordan had said, he was perched in a tree a few yards from one of the bedroom windows of the new neighbors. He looked safe enough, though.

"Let's see what the others are up to," Claudia said, but before they'd gone very far, Claire came running over to them.

"Give me my white badge! Give me my white badge!" she cried.

From somewhere nearby, Jordan shushed her.

Claire lowered her voice to a whisper. "I sneaked all the way around to their front door. Then I rang the bell and hid. Jordan says I get my white badge for that."

"Okay," said Claudia.

Mallory put a check next to the word White on Claire's page. "What happened when the people answered their bell?" she asked.

"Only the lady came to the door," Claire told her. "She has long, long dark hair. It's even longer than Dawn Schafer's. And she looked around and around and said, " 'elloo? 'elloo? 'oo eez 'ere?' Then she went back inside."

Claudia and Mallory glanced at each other and shrugged.

The spying continued all afternoon. Margo rang the bell and hid, too, but Claudia had to tell the SA's to quit doing that. Vanessa spotted an open basement window and lay on the ground at the edge of the Pikes' yard looking in with a pair of binoculars. She didn't see anything but darkness, but she earned a yellow badge for her quick thinking. At long last, Nicky climbed out of the tree with the tape recorder.

"Let's go inside and find out what they said," he suggested.

"Don't you know?" asked Mallory.

"Nope. I fell asleep."

The Pikes were tired of spying so they followed Nicky into the house. The first part of the tape was nothing but birds chirping and leaves rustling. Once, Nicky yawned. At long last, though, a voice was heard. Only one sentence was spoken and then a door slammed.

The voice said, "Ve vill have courgettes for deener." Then, slam!

"That just sounds like a regular old French accent," I said, but nobody heard me. The kids were in a panic.

"Courgettes? What are courgettes?" shrieked the Pikes.

"Children?" suggested Nicky, with terror in his eyes.

There was confusion until Mallory thought to look up the word in a cookbook. "Courgettes," she informed everyone, "is the French word for zucchini. You know, squash?"

Claudia grinned. Mallory had saved the day. She had prevented hysteria. Thank goodness she was so practical.

Claudia told me later that as she walked home that evening, she thought about my moving. She thought about the hole I'd leave in the club. Could Mallory fill the hole? she wondered. No, she decided immediately. Mallory was good with kids, but she was two years younger than the rest of us sitters. How would she fit into the club? And she didn't have nearly as much experience as I did.

As Kristy had said, I was going to be hard to replace.

Chapter 8.

"What do you think?" asked Claudia, holding up some sample ads for our yard sale.

"Well," I said, trying to be tactful, "the art is wonderful, Claud. I love your snail with his antennae, and the house on his back instead of a shell. . . ."

"But?" Claudia prompted me.

I glanced at our other friends.

"But the poetry stinks," spoke up Kristy. ''Hasty and Stacey don't rhyme, and we don't have any snails for sale."

"Well, thanks a lot," said Claudia huffily.

The members of the Baby-sitters Club were gathered, for the third afternoon in a row, at my house to get ready for the yard sale. Mom was right. A sale was a lot of work, but we'd been having fun. At least, we had been up until now.

"Hey, everybody," I said, "I don't want to be a slave driver or anything, but we don't really have time for arguments."

"But, Stacey, Kristy is so rude," Claudia complained, looking wounded.

"I'm sorry," Kristy said contritely. "Really I am. Look, why don't we divide up the work on the ads and each do what we're best at? Dawn and I will write the poems, Mary Anne and Stacey, you do the lettering, and Claudia,

you illustrate the ads. . . . Nobody can draw as well as you," she added.

Claudia looked mollified. "All right/' she agreed.

"And after we've made a few more good ads to put up," I said, "we better start tagging all that junk in the basement."

We bent over our papers and worked busily.

"Now this is an advertisement," Kristy announced a few minutes later. "Listen."

Here's what she read:

" 'We're moving back to New York City, We know it's going to be hard. But things will be just a little bit better, If you'll come to the sale in our yard.' "

"Not bad," I agreed. "I like that. Mary Anne, let's each letter one of those poems."

"Okay," she said and set to work on a piece of bright yellow construction paper.

"All right, how's this?" said Dawn after a few more minutes. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. Then, as if she were about to recite a composition in English class, she stood up, put her hands behind her back and said gravely, "Red are the roses, blue are the seas. . . . Come buy our junk. Please, please, please, please!"

For a moment, no one could tell whether

Dawn was joking or serious, but when we realized she was practically turning blue from trying not to laugh, we all began snickering and giggling. Dawn laughed the hardest of all.

"Very funny," I said, when we'd recovered. "Does anyone want something to drink?"

"Only if you've got some soda that's just brimming with sugar, caffeine, and sodium," replied Kristy. "And maybe some artificial coloring, and, oh, some bigludium exforbi-nate."

I laughed. "We've probably got something like that. I'm going to have iced tea, though."

"I'll have iced tea, too," said Dawn, who had turned green at the very thought of artificial coloring.

"I'll go for the glutious exorbitants," said Claudia.

"Me, too," said Mary Anne.

Claudia followed me to the kitchen and helped me fill five glasses. I'd noticed lately that when she and I were with the rest of the club, we acted happy or silly, and kidded around. But when we were alone we fell into a sad kind of silence. We weren't angry; we just had all these "last things" to say to each other but didn't know how to say them, which was maybe the saddest thing of all about my moving.

"You know/' I said, dancing around the edge of the awful subject, "I haven't told Charlotte that I'm moving."

Claudia, who was standing by the ice-maker in the freezer, glanced over her shoulder at me. "You haven't?" she said in surprise.

I shook my head. "I guess I've been putting it off."

"You better tell her soon," said Claud. "I mean, the ads for the yard sale will be a major clue. Don't you think she should find out from you and not from some poem that begins 'Red are the roses, blue are the seas'?"

I smiled. "I guess so. It's not going to be easy, though."

"No, I suppose it isn't. If she feels anything like me ..."

I waited for Claudia to finish her sentence, but she let it hang there.

"Well," I said, "we better go back upstairs. Kristy's waiting to be bigludium exforbinated."

Claudia just nodded. I thought she looked a little teary, but by the time we had joined the others, she seemed fine.

We worked on the ads until we had finished our soda and iced tea. We'd made quite a stack and were pretty proud of them.

"All right," I said. "Down to the basement.

Wait'11 you guys see what Mom bought for us this morning."

"What? What?" cried my friends.

"You'll see/' was all I'd tell them.

We reached the top of the steps to the basement and I flicked on the light. The sale items were downstairs in a big jumble on, under, and around the Ping-Pong table we'd bought the winter before and now had to sell.