Love Over Matter (20 page)

Haley is such an eavesdropper. “Like
what?” she asks, despite the fact that I’m not talking to
her.

“
None of your business,” I
say. “It’s not about you.”

She melts into a chair, keeps at me.
“Need any help?”

Aleks perks up. “Now that you mention
it.”

I shoot him a stifling glare to no
effect.

Haley toys absently with the salt
shaker, a castoff from The Moondancer.
“So . . . ?” she says.

“
We’ve got to create a
diversion,” Aleks starts explaining, but then Mom slinks back into
the kitchen, silencing him. Luckily, she only stays a minute before
excusing herself for work (not that she’s actually going anywhere,
since today is a work-at-home day). Haley and I, on the other hand,
have been granted vacation time until Aleks splits for Queens—or
wherever he lives.

I reach for Haley’s chair and drag
it—and her—into whispering range, in case Mom pops up again. “It’s
really none of your business,” I repeat, “but we’ve got to get into
the Brookses’ house to look for something.”

“
Yeah?” my sister says in a
bored voice.

I check Aleks’s eyes for permission to
blab about George’s kidnapping, Ruth Dawson’s murder, and the
Brookses’ secret-agent status. “They’ve done something bad,” I
settle for saying, “and we’re gonna tell the police. But first
we’ve gotta prove it.”

A panicked thought hits me. I ratchet
my head in Aleks’s direction. “You didn’t leave the place like that
yesterday, did you?”

He shakes his head and grins. “I’m not
an amateur.”

He’s not?
“Oh. Because they’re very . . .
particular.
They’d
probably notice a carpet fiber out of place.”

“
I have a photographic
memory,” he proclaims. “Even the carpet fibers are
safe.”

I catch a dazed, lovesick look on
Haley’s face that makes me shudder. If I didn’t know better, I’d
swear she was falling for George’s twin. “Anyway,” I continue, “you
know how wacko they are about security. We can’t just parade in
there and start turning the place upside down.”

“
What about Mrs. Brooks?”
Haley asks. “Shouldn’t we check on her because . . .
because she was sick?”

“
No one told you that,” I
say, wondering how my sister got in the loop yet again. “And since
when did we start filling in for Florence Nightingale?”

“
Now seems like a good time
to start,” says Aleks, and then we get to work.

chapter 16

We wait until the Brookses’ garage
yawns open like the mouth of a drowsy bear and the Camry, Mr.
Brooks behind the wheel, begins its Monday-morning journey to the
lab—NewTech BioPharm, I think it’s called—where its driver works as
a molecular geneticist.

Mrs. Brooks, as usual,
plays the doting housewife, waving energetically from behind a bow
window—
is that bulletproof
glass?
—as the car disappears around the
block.

“
Okay, go,” I say, giving
Haley an encouraging shove off the porch.

“
If I’m not back in ten
minutes, send a search party,” she quips. She pulls a bouquet of
carnations to her face, the delicate pink petals clashing with her
stark, exaggerated makeup. “Remember,” she says, giving the flowers
a shake, “you’re going to have to replace these.”

“
Mom won’t care,” I argue,
even though this is a lie. “Now get out of here.”

Aleks and I watch breathlessly as
Haley saunters up the Brookses’ front walk and rings the doorbell.
In a matter of seconds, she has gained entry, Mrs. Brooks’s pale
forearm risking a moment of sun exposure to beckon my sister
inside. “Wow, that was easy,” I mumble, more to myself than Aleks,
who is preoccupied with the nozzle of an aerosol can—our secret
weapon in avenging George—which he’s poking at with a green stick.
“Where’d you get these, anyway?” I ask. There are three cans
altogether, one each for Aleks, Haley, and me.

“
From another sleeper,” he
tells me with a chuckle.

The joke hangs in the air for a few
seconds before hitting me. “Ha-ha,” I say. “Sleeping gas from a
sleeper? How punny.”

“
Technically, that’s not a
pun,” he says. “But it
is
kind of ironic.”

“
Does it work?”

“
It better.”

I pick up one of the cans and roll it
from hand to hand. It’s heavier than I expected. “But you’ve never
tried it?”

“
Never had to,” he admits,
“until now.”

Aleks’s full confession last night
revealed that he had, in fact, slipped Mrs. Brooks a mickey, though
it wasn’t anything as harmful as the poison I’d imagined, causing
the reaction she’d had to the tea. “This won’t hurt her, right?” I
ask, holding the can on display as if I’m a TV spokesmodel. “I
mean, after yesterday . . . She’ll be able to handle
it, won’t she?” The last thing I want to do is accidentally
overdose—and potentially kill—a Russian spy.

“
It’s not lethal,” he tells
me in a sure voice. “The most that’ll happen is, when she wakes up,
she’ll be kind of disoriented. She might have a headache, a sore
throat, dizziness. That’s why we’ve gotta wear the
masks.”

Masks? Now
I
feel like a secret
agent. My mind circles around another question. “How do you know
the sleeper? The one who gave you the gas?”

“
There’s a network,” he
says, his gaze tunneled on the Brookses’ front door. “I’m not
involved in anything, but I do have contact with an old friend of
my mother’s from Columbia. She’s the one who told me about Anatoly.
About the kidnapping. But even she didn’t know where they’d taken
him.”

“
And then I showed
up?”

He nods.

“
Sorry about that,” I say.
“I didn’t mean to stir up so much . . .”
Pain,
I think.
That’s the right word.
But before I get it out . . .

Aleks bolts to his feet, makes a
beeline for his motorcycle, which is parked lazily in front of our
garage; meanwhile, Haley moseys toward us.
“So . . . ?” Aleks says, jimmying the bike’s
saddlebag open.

Haley: “It’s a go.”

I can’t help laughing. Suddenly we’re
talking in burglar code? “You got the windows? And the door?” I
question.

My sister pulls a face. “Despite what
you may think, I’m not an idiot.”

“
I never said
that.”

“
Do you have a stepstool?
Or a ladder?” Aleks asks. “The windows might be too
high.”

“
You know, it’s pretty hot
out here,” Haley says, squinting into the sun. “If we don’t hurry,
she’s gonna notice the temperature difference.”

I hate to say it, but my sister is
right. The Brookses’ house it hermetically sealed. Even the tiniest
bit of hot air wafting in through those slyly cracked windows will
draw attention. “I’ll get the ladder,” I say, just as Aleks
produces the gas masks from the saddlebag. “Meet you around
back?”

“
Yep,” he confirms with a
nod.

I hustle past the Prius for the corner
of the garage, where Dad stores a small aluminum ladder. I wiggle
it away from the wall, nearly spilling a can of paint he’s been
using to touch up the window sills.

Haley was the prep person on this
mission, and she’s done a fine job. Two of the windows on the back
of the Brookses’ house (and one on the side, if Aleks’s
instructions were followed to the letter) are pried open six inches
each.

“
We can reach these, I
think,” Aleks says, motioning at my sister’s back-of-the-house
handiwork. He nods at the ladder. “Maybe bring that
around . . .”

I’m on it (and Aleks and Haley are on
my trail). We round the corner and stop below the third window,
where I carefully lean the ladder against the vinyl siding. “Here
you go,” I tell Haley. “You’re the shortest,
so . . .”

She doesn’t bother arguing. “Is there
a signal?” she asks as she ascends.

“
Count to sixty,” Aleks
replies. “And only use half. We’ve gotta save some in case she
wakes up later. And put this on.” He passes her one of the masks,
and suddenly we become as conspicuous as flies in a sugar
bowl.

I can’t believe we’re doing this, but
soon Aleks and I are lined up, elbows bent, nozzles set to
knockout. The masks give the impression of a nuclear holocaust. He
shoots me a thumbs-up and we start the onslaught, unleashing enough
sleeping gas to incapacitate . . .

A spindly old lady?

When Aleks stops, I do too. Then we
clamp the windows shut and wait for the gas to work its
magic.

I’m busy marveling at our boldness
when Haley comes around the corner, her mask shoved to the top of
her head like a pair of forgotten sunglasses, the ladder tucked
under her arm and clunking along unevenly behind her. “Be right
back,” she says, rattling past us for the garage.

Aleks and I unmask ourselves. “How
long before we can go in?” I say.

“
There’s no such thing as
standard when it comes to this stuff,” he responds, wagging the
sleeping gas through the air. He shrugs, his expression not
betraying an iota of nervousness. “Probably ten
minutes.”

Spending
one
minute paralyzed by
fear is enough to send me groping for the eject button, but
ten?

Haley trots back to our
sides and, in silence, we await the inevitable. Finally, Aleks
slinks alongside the building, climbs over a shrub and peers into
the Brookses’ library. And he must like what he sees, because with
a cowboy swagger, he heads back our way. Then,
bam!
: the mauve door twists open
under his grip, permitting us entry to the scene of the soon-to-be
crime.

We rejigger our masks and
form an orderly line. I’m the last one in, so I secure the
door.
There’s no turning back now,
I think.
It’s sink or
swim.

Even with the mask, I sense something
ominous in the air. A fusion of potpourri and nicotine. “Where do
we start?” I ask, my words swallowed by the breathing apparatus
cupped over my mouth and nose.

“
This way,” Aleks gurgles,
beckoning me upstairs with a wave. We peel away from Haley, but not
before turning over the remainder of the sleeping gas. The plan is
for my sister to act as a lookout and babysitter. From a cushy
perch in the Brookses’ library (since that’s where Mrs. Brooks has
collapsed, it seems) she will monitor the driveway and the
garage—not to mention Mrs. Brooks herself—for unwelcome signs of
life. If
Mr.
Brooks should rear his head, Haley will alert us; if his wife
begins to stir, Haley will give her the gas.

The second-floor landing is foggy, or
so it appears through the goggles hovering in front of my eyes. As
if by instinct, Aleks cuts a path to George’s room. He doesn’t
hesitate at the door, but I do.

Take a breath,
I tell myself, though it’s difficult to accomplish
in my constricted respiratory state.
You
can do this.
You
have to
, for George.

The room is just like George left it,
giving me a jolt of compassion for the Brookses. I mean, even if
they’re spies, they must’ve loved him in some small, indiscernible
way to leave this shrine in his honor.

And now
we’re
violating it.

I let Aleks take the lead in defiling
George’s possessions, since he doesn’t have the burden of history
holding him back. Soon he’s got the place swimming in chaos. “Would
you mind, uh, taking a look in that nightstand?” he asks without
missing a beat in his routine.

“
Tell me again,” I say,
“what I’m supposed to be finding.”

“
If I knew that, it would
be easy,” he says, a grin in his voice. “You’ll recognize it when
you see it. I promise.”

I shuffle over to the nightstand, pull
the drawer open and sigh. The first thing I find, of course, is a
twisted Funyuns wrapper. I shove it to the back of the drawer and
keep looking. A lighter? That’s weird; George didn’t smoke.
Baseball cards? Other than clamping one to the spokes of his bike
to give it that badass rumbling sound, I can’t see him owning these
either. A comb? Well, okay, that one made sense; his hair was
always in a state of mutiny. In fact, there’s still a mahogany
strand threaded heartbreakingly around the comb’s plastic teeth. I
send the comb sideways and wade through a mass of random papers.
“Nothin’ here,” I eventually announce, finding no evidence of the
Brookses’ clandestine activities.

Aleks urges me to look under the bed,
where I come up with zilch. Zero. Nada. Not even the furball traces
of Otto that have been known to haunt the corners
downstairs.

Oh my God! The cat!
I think, panic rising into my throat.
I hope we haven’t murdered him with the
gas.
Before I get too far gone over the
possibility, though, George’s voice mercifully intervenes.
He’s like a vagabond,
he
tells me, an echo of a conversation long past.
Stops in for a bowl of kibble and a fresh drink. Takes a nap
in the window, and then he’s gone again.