Nanny X Returns (3 page)

My friend Ethan has four survival guides, so when he got a fifth one he gave it to me. That's why I knew I wasn't drowning. The survival guide says that when people drown, they don't scream. I was screaming. “
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh
.”

The second thing it says in the guide is that you should try not to panic. It was too late for that, so I skipped to step 3: Try to take in more air. You were supposed to be able to do this by floating on your back. The book forgets that floating on your back can be hard if you can't swim. But with the life jacket, floating was pretty easy. I tilted my head back, just like the book suggested. Slowly, my legs started to rise.

I could feel the cold water all around me. Slime and algae swirled around, too, like monster hair. I could feel wet dog. Plus, I could
smell
wet dog. When you are drowning, you do not pay attention to how things smell. Yeti paddled next to me. He licked some water off my nose.

“Hold on, Jake Z,” called Nanny X.

“
I'm trying
,” I yelled. But there was nothing for me to hold on to.

I felt something smooth and cold rub against my leg. My
Fantastically Freaky Animal Facts
book says all snakes can swim, including poisonous ones. What if I died from a snakebite instead of drowning?

“
Aaaahhhhhhhhh
,” I yelled, a little higher.

“Can we help?” I whipped my head around and saw a small boat. Our friend Stinky, who is in fifth grade with Ali, was leaning over the side. The person steering was his nanny, Boris, who is a member of NAP, like Nanny X. They had their own fishing gear, which meant that they must be the special agents who got the case first. The good news was that they were in a perfect position to stop me before I drifted over a waterfall. Going over a waterfall is something that happens a lot in the movies.

“Aaaahh,” I said, but not as loud.

Nanny X waved, like she was shooing them away. “We've got him covered.” But she was nowhere near me. Then I saw her pluck a fishing lure from her hat and stick it in the water. It floated toward me, and grew from what looked like a purple minnow to a purple eggplant. It kept growing, until it was the size of a man-eating shark. But it wasn't eating anybody. What it was doing was swimming. What it was doing was coming to save me.

“Tundra,” I said, which means that it was way cooler than just regular cool. After that, I stopped talking so water wouldn't get in my mouth.

The minnow reached me. Its tail was flat, like the bottom of a chair. There was a handle, and I grabbed it. My legs were still churning around in the water, so it took me a little while before I could pull myself up. I pulled Yeti
up, too. He shook himself and I could see all kinds of ripples in the water where the drops fell. Slowly the minnow turned around and started swimming back toward Nanny X.
Upstream
. Which didn't seem possible. It had more control with its fins than Nanny X and my sister had with their paddles.

The minnow moved forward until it bumped smack into the canoe. Ali helped us on board, and Nanny X squeezed the minnow's cheeks so its fish lips looked even fishier.
Pppfffffft
. It sounded like a whoopee cushion as it shrank back to its original size. Nanny X snatched it out of the water and stuck it back on her hat. Then she squeezed me.

“I guess I should start swimming lessons again,” I said.

“It's not a bad skill for a special agent to have,” she agreed, as Stinky and Boris buzzed toward us. Their boat had a motor. When they were a few feet away they cut it off, and Boris pulled out a hook—not for fishing, but for grabbing—and attached our boat to his. Then he pulled out a small anchor and threw it over the side.

“Fancy meeting you on this fine morning,” said Boris, who is tall, even when he is sitting in a boat. He has brown skin and a little beard that Eliza likes to pull on.

“Hello, Boris,” said Nanny X. She sounded kind of frosty. Not frosty as in cool or tundra; frosty as in angry.

“What have you caught?” he said.

“Not a person, place or thing,” Nanny X admitted.

“We report the same,” Boris said. Nanny X got a little friendlier after that.

“But
why
isn't anything out here?” Stinky asked. “That's just wrong.” Stinky is very concerned about the environment. Not seeing any live fish probably bugged him a lot more than not seeing The Angler.

“Ali saw a ripple, before I fell in,” I said. I thought that might cheer him up.

“It's true,” Ali said. “Jake's splash scared whatever it was. But there was something out there.”

“Dare. Dare!” Eliza pointed. We looked, but we didn't see anything. Eliza puffed up her cheeks and blew out a breath. If she were a grown-up, it would have been a sigh. Then she went back to her coloring book while Nanny X and Boris talked about which parts of the river they'd covered and wasn't it nice to be working together again? And did anyone happen to see a suspicious-looking character on shore with a sketchpad or maybe a blowtorch?

No one had.

Eliza ripped a page out of her coloring book.

“Eliza,” Ali said. “That's not how we treat books.”

Eliza held up a picture of a mouse wearing overalls and balled it up, like a baseball. She inherited that from me.

I looked at Stinky, who was talking about healthy rivers, and at Nanny X, who kept saying, “Yes, but what's the motive?”

“Fame?” said Boris.

“The Angler is anonymous,” said Nanny X.

“The Angler is pseudonymous,” said Boris. “A person can be known by a pseudonym.
You
are known by a pseudonym.”

“Pseudonym,” which is a name someone uses in place of their real name, would be a good reading-connection word, but I was too wet to write that one down.

“Maybe there's a political point,” said Nanny X.

“Maybe the artist is making a statement that if we don't take better care of our rivers, the fish are going to end up on dry land,” said Stinky.

“Actually,” I told him, “some fish can survive on dry
land. Like mudskippers and the climbing gourami.” I don't think you'd find a climbing gourami on the White House lawn, though; they live in Africa and parts of Asia.

“Pish!” said Eliza. She was holding my fishing pole.

“Eliza,” Ali said, “be careful of the hook. It's sharp!”

“Sarp!” Eliza said. She took the hook and put her coloring-book paper on there.
Ppppping
. She dropped the line into the water.

Then, all of a sudden, the line went straight. I'd been fishing enough times with Ethan to know what that meant.

The flies hadn't worked. Neither had Weinrib's Canadian Night Crawlers. But somehow a piece of soggy coloring-book paper
had
worked. My baby sister had caught a fish.

Eliza had no idea what to do with that fish. She didn't even realize she'd caught one. For all she knew, there was a sea monster on the end of that line. Or a cantaloupe. She puckered her lips and her eyebrows got all wavy as the fishing rod bent toward the water.

“Pull, Eliza,” I said. “Pull it up.”

But I guess all of that movement on the end of the line was too scary.

“Bad,” Eliza said, as the end of the pole dipped down and the reel started spinning. Eliza threw the rod on the floor of the canoe.

Nanny X snatched it up and turned the handle. I suppose I should stop being surprised when Nanny X moves quickly. It's like a snake stalking a mouse: slow, slow, and then
bam
.

Jake leaned over the side of the canoe—hadn't he
learned his lesson?—and reported on her progress like a sports announcer.

“It's moving through the water. It's almost here. Closer. Closer. I can see it!”

And then so could we. Nanny X reached down and grabbed the line with her hand. She pulled a gleaming fish out of the water.

“Oh!” Eliza said.

The fish flicked its tail, and Yeti barked and sniffed it. Then he lost interest and went back to his end of the canoe.

“Good job, Eliza,” I said. But Eliza lost interest, just like Yeti. She started coloring again.

The fish was smaller than you would have thought for all of that pulling—about the size of Boris's right hand, which was reaching out toward the fish, holding a pair of scissors to cut the line.

When he did, Nanny X put the fish in a white bucket, and we peered inside.

The fish was slightly reddish in color, with a lower lip that stuck out, like it was pouting. Its body was shaped like the leaves on the rhododendron my dad planted last fall.

“It looks sick,” said Stinky.

“That's how I'd look if I were caught.” I made my eyes sort of sad and googly, to show him.

“He's a strange color,” Stinky said.

“But the tail's moving in a healthy way,” I said. Still, two other things bothered me.

One: The fish had gills, but the gills
weren't
moving, which meant it wasn't breathing, right?

And two: We weren't supposed to be obsessing over the health of the fish or even the river. We were supposed to be fishing for a
criminal
—a criminal who had threatened the
president of the United States. A criminal who had threatened to destroy national treasures starting at noon, which was only two hours away. Time was running out.

“This fish,” Nanny X announced, “is a Pacific herring.” How could NAP think she didn't know enough about fish to take the case?

Jake looked confused. “There shouldn't be any Pacific herring in the Potomac,” he said. Jake reads a lot of books that have animal facts, but this bit of knowledge didn't come from a book; it came from the Fish of the Potomac place mat he'd bought at the hardware store. Only my brother would spend his allowance on a place mat. “Bass,” Jake recited. “Perch. Pickerel. Black drum. Plus, Pacific herring are found in the
Pacific
.”

“Maybe it got here accidentally,” Stinky said. “Maybe they stocked the river with Pacific herring for a fishing tournament, which would be irresponsible to the ecosystem.”

Nanny X lifted the fish by the snippet of fishing line. “It's heavy. Heavier than it should be. Still, I wonder if it would work for lunch.”

Leave it to Nanny X to find a way to cook a fish in a canoe in the middle of the river. My stomach got queasy as Nanny X took the fish in her hands and turned it over.

“That's odd,” she said. She reached into her diaper bag and pulled out a pair of baby nail clippers. She pushed a button, and out came a sharp knife that shouldn't be anywhere near a baby. Eliza looked up, and she was
mad
. Even if she wasn't interested in the fish, that didn't mean she wanted Nanny X doing anything to it.

“Distract her,” Nanny X said to me.

Wait a minute
, I thought.
What kind of nanny kills a fish in front of an almost-two-year-old? Or an almost-eleven-year-old?

“I don't believe it's even alive,” Nanny X said, reading my mind again.

“But the tail is moving.”

“True.” But Nanny X didn't put her knife away. She waited until Eliza turned to look at a butterfly that landed on the side of the canoe. Then she plunged the knife into the fish, just behind the dorsal fin. There was a crunching sound as she cut a small slit in the fish's back.

I expected Nanny X's hand to fill up with blood and fish guts. But there was no blood. She tilted the fish upside down and her hand filled with a bunch of cogs and gears.

“Just as I thought,” she said.

Boris pulled a small bag out of his pocket (his pants had an awful lot of pockets) and held it beneath the fish, so that none of the parts got away.

Nanny X held up the bag to show Eliza. “Broken,” she told her. “Toy.”

But it wasn't exactly a toy. And it wasn't exactly a fish, either. It was a robot.