Trouble in Paradise (6 page)

Two women, followed by a group of four, came out past the sentries.

“And we’re not the only ones waiting to meet somebody,” I said. There was a group of soldiers and sailors waiting directly in front of the hotel.

“Maybe just hoping to meet somebody,” Jack said.

“What do you …? Oh, never mind … I get it.”

The women walked past the men, who tried to strike up conversations with them. The women kept walking and the men stayed back as more women came out.

“Only makes sense,” Jack said. “Thousands of men stationed on the island and hundreds of women working at the hotel. Like bees to honey.”

“One of those
honeys
is our mother,” I pointed out. “I don’t like that at all—”

I tried to get to my feet but Jack reached out and pulled me back down. He was still a lot stronger than me.

“Don’t be a little goof. Mom can take care of herself. Besides, they’re not after old married ladies.”

“Wait till I tell Mom you called her old.”

“Better keep your mouth shut or you won’t live long enough to grow old,” Jack threatened. “There’s Mom now … watch.”

Mom walked out with three other ladies. They all seemed older than most of the others. Together they walked through the gauntlet of soldiers and sailors. Some of the men tipped their hats or appeared to say something, but the ladies just walked through and were left alone. They turned up Front Street, walking away from us.

“See, she’s okay,” Jack said.

He started to get up but I pulled him back down.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“She hasn’t seen us,” I said. “Let’s tail her.”

“Why would we do that?”

“To make sure that nobody does bother her. If we’re beside her, we won’t know for sure if people really leave her alone.” I paused. “Besides, it might be fun.”

“I can think of better ways to have fun,” Jack said.

“Okay, so we’ll do it just to see if we can. Come on.”

Jack shrugged. “Why not?”

We both got to our feet, but we waited. We wanted to let her get farther ahead. She continued to walk with the other women along the edge of the far side of the road. We watched, but we didn’t move until there were lots of people and passing carriages between our mom and us. Then we started after her.

She was chatting with the other women, not looking back, not even looking around. So far, this was a piece of cake. Continuing along Front Street, the crowds of pedestrians and the traffic got heavier. That made it easier for us to find cover. But then she looked to the right, and the left—almost straight at us—and crossed the street. We froze in place. She hadn’t seen us, but she certainly
could
have. Now she was on our side of the street, and there really wasn’t any place to hide.

Jack grabbed my hand and dragged me up a side street. We were out of sight—but so was she.

“Come on,” Jack said. “We’ll go this way.”

“But she’s going along—”

“She’s only going along Front for another block and then she’s going to cut up Queen Street.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I guess it’s easier to follow somebody when you already know where they’re going.”

“We’ll get back on her tail by cutting across the park. We won’t lose her for long.”

Jack and I started running. It was uphill, away from the harbour. We cut between two stores, along an alley and then into a park. There were paths, but we went across the grass and between the trees. We crossed partway and then Jack came to a stop behind a big cedar tree.

“We’ll be able to see her from here as she passes,” he said.

The words had hardly left his mouth when she did pass by—going up Queen. We waited a few seconds until the post office blocked her from view.

We ran to the building and Jack peered around and up the street. I bent down so I could see, too. She was a few storefronts ahead of us.

“We’ll wait here until she gets farther … at least a dozen or so stores.”

That made sense.

“Okay, just wait another … Now! Let’s go now!” Jack said.

We started out after her. She was quite a long way up the road, but there were very few people between us. If she glanced backward, we’d be seen for sure.

“Let’s cross to the other side,” I suggested.

Four horses, pulling a milk cart, were coming up the road. We let them pass and then fell in behind. Good cover. The cart was moving up the hill at a faster pace than we normally would have walked, so we had to jog to keep up. It was perfect cover, but we couldn’t stay with it for very long because we were gaining on our mother. We circled around to the side of the cart, keeping it between her and us, and then moved off to the sidewalk.

The milk wagon continued to move forward—it was still blocking our view of Mom … wasn’t it?

“Where is she now?” Jack asked.

She was nowhere to be seen. I looked up and down the street—it was like she’d vanished into thin air! Had she been kidnapped or—?

“The bakery,” Jack said. “She’s gone into the bakery … look through the window.”

I squinted slightly, peering through the glare of the glass. Of course that was where she’d gone. Mom often brought home fresh buns and bread when she came from work. Sometimes she’d even bring a couple of jelly-filled donuts. I loved those donuts.

“Hide,” Jack said.

We bumped together as we both tried to fit behind a slender tree. It didn’t hide us completely, but enough so that she couldn’t tell it was us. I peeked around the tree as she came out of the bakery, carrying a bag, and turned back along her route toward home.

Jack and I shuffled around, keeping the tree between her and us as she crossed Church Street and continued up the hill on Wesley. We trailed along, block by block, at a very safe distance, making sure that we kept her in sight. Our street was just up ahead and she’d soon make the turn. We’d done it. We’d followed her the whole way without being seen!

“What are we going to say when she asks where we were?” Jack asked. “It’s not like we can tell her we were tailing her.”

“Well, we could tell her that we walked Dad to the train.”

“And then she’ll want to know why we didn’t go and meet her. Where did we go after we said goodbye to Dad?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.

Mom made the turn onto our street and disappeared. “Maybe we don’t have to tell her anything,” Jack said with a grin. “Come on!”

He started running and turned onto the street
before
our street. He was moving fast and I had to work hard to keep up with him. My legs were sore—rugby-practice sore—but I couldn’t complain or ask him to slow down.
Suddenly he turned into the driveway of a house— What was he doing? I took off after him as he ran along the side of the house and— There was
our
house on the other side of a low concrete wall!

Jack didn’t even slow down. He jumped over the wall, putting one hand on top to propel himself. It was higher than it looked and I had to scramble over, climbing more than jumping.

The back door of the house was unlocked and we ran inside, quickly kicking off our shoes and settling in at the kitchen table, where our homework was already waiting for us.

“Pretty slick,” I huffed as I struggled to catch my breath.

Jack smirked and I thought he was going to say something … when we heard the front door open.

“Hello!” Mom called out.

“We’re in the kitchen!” Jack called back. “We’re doing our homework!”

She came into the room. “I have to see this first-hand.” She gave us each a kiss on the top of the head.

“Just trying to be conscientious students,” Jack said.

Mom laughed. “Very nice to see. You look like you’ve been working far too hard.”

We looked at her questioningly.

“You’re both sweating, and it isn’t even that hot in here,” she said.

“We were sort of roughhousing a little bit,” I said.

“But we have been working hard,” Jack added. “Maybe so hard that we deserve a reward. Could we have a jelly donut before supper?”

“I think that might be … wait a minute, how did you know that I bought jelly donuts?”

I looked at Mom. She wasn’t carrying the bag—she must have left it at the front door. How could we possibly explain?

“Isn’t it obvious?” I asked. “The smell … I can smell fresh bread. Can’t you, Jack? Mom must have gone to the bakery … and she wouldn’t go to the bakery without buying her beloved sons their favourite donuts. Would you, Mom?”

“Of course she wouldn’t!” Jack added. “So … are there jelly donuts?”

She laughed. “Two donuts coming up for my hardworking boys.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I LOOKED UP
into the night through branches and leaves. There had to be a million stars. The combination of a clear, cloudless sky and the almost total darkness because of the blackout rules made them all visible. The moon was a sliver of brilliant white light, but it wasn’t bright enough to distract from or hide the stars.

I took a deep breath. It was clean sea air, but cool. I was glad I was wearing a sweater, but it was more the colour than the cold that had caused me to put it on. The sweater was black. Like my pants and my socks. The only things that weren’t black were my shoes, and the dirt I’d rubbed into them had helped to erase any traces of white canvas.

“Do you see anything?” Jack called up from the lower branches of the tree in which we both sat.

“Nothing,” I replied. I could see lots of things but I knew what he meant. Did I see our mother or anybody else coming out of the hotel?

It couldn’t be much longer. At least, I
hoped
it couldn’t be. We’d been sitting in the tree for almost two hours. It was a great place to see and not be seen. Who looked for people up in a tree at night?

I held on to a branch with one hand and looked at my watch to check the time. I turned my wrist back and forth, trying to catch enough light to see the hands. No luck. It had to be at least eleven. I was just grateful that Mom was working so late on a Saturday and not a school night, or we wouldn’t have been able to stay out and watch over her.

We’d followed her home three times already over the last two weeks. We obviously couldn’t do it every night, but when we could, we did. It was what Dad wanted, it was keeping her safe, and it was exciting—not just trailing her, but being out and downtown, especially on a night like this.

The blackout rules might have dimmed the city lights, but apparently that didn’t stop people from going out on a Saturday night. We were at least two blocks away from the nearest hotel down the way on Front Street, but I could still hear voices—talking, arguing, yelling and even singing … badly. The downtown strip was crowded with hundreds of soldiers and sailors. It was obvious that more than a few of them had had something to drink—maybe a
lot
of something to drink. Among the military personnel were the M.P.s—Military Police—who were there to
keep order. From what I’d been told, that was a losing battle. It was just a matter of time before a fight started. It could be between sailors and soldiers, or Americans and Brits, or the locals and the soldiers or maybe even between two best buddies who had drunk too much. Once started, a lot of them turned into full-fledged brawls. That made us even gladder that we were here to watch out for our mom.

My eye caught a movement at the sentry gate in front of the hotel.

“Can you see who it is?” Jack asked. Obviously he had seen something, too.

“I can’t see much … one person … maybe a man …”

A dark figure came from behind the sandbags. It obviously wasn’t Mom. It was a man … a little man, a little
old
man. He turned and headed in our direction, away from the downtown. He moved slowly, more shuffling than walking, and he was bent over as if the satchel he carried was weighing him down. He wore a long, dark trench coat, all buttoned up, and had a large fedora on his head, the rim throwing shadows so that it was impossible to see his features.

I felt myself tensing, holding my breath, as he went by. I looked down, past Jack, to the road below, only able to see the top of his head as he passed directly beneath us. He continued shuffling down the road, moving painfully
slowly. So why was an old geezer coming out of The Princess … especially this late at night?

He was almost lost from sight when a dark shape stepped out from an alleyway and started in the same direction.

“Did you see that?” Jack asked.

I nodded my head and then realized he couldn’t see a nod. “Yeah, I saw.”

“Look how slowly he’s moving,” Jack said. “The same speed as the old guy.”

“Do you think he’s trailing him?” I asked.

“Could just be a coincidence.”

The instant Jack said that, I knew we were thinking the same thing—a good spy didn’t believe in coincidences.

“Do you think we should do something?” I asked, realizing that there was only one thing we could do.

Without another word we both started to climb down from the tree, trying not to make any noise. By the time we reached the ground, the old man was lost in the darkness, but we could still see the man who was following him.

We moved silently on our sneaker-clad feet along the grassy patch that paralleled the road. From our dark clothes, to our shoes, to the distance and the angle of our pursuit, we’d been working on our technique. It wasn’t only our mother we’d been trailing—we’d followed other people, too. We were playing a game—and we’d become better at it.

My feet were silent but my heart was pounding as we kept pace, not moving too fast. We didn’t want to catch up with the second man, or with the old guy ahead of him. Our subject turned down an alleyway leading toward the ocean.

We hurried to the entrance and then stopped. Carefully, we both looked around the corner of the building. The narrow alley was pitch-black. I couldn’t see anything beyond a couple of dozen yards. And the man we were following had vanished into the darkness.

“What now?” I whispered.

“We have to be careful.”

That sounded like a good plan. We could find a spot outside the alley and keep watch, or maybe find another way around without going down the alley, or—