Spy in the Alley (2 page)

Wait a minute. Mr. Rinaldi had to be puttering about somewhere in his garden. He always was. At a shout from me, this wiry, sun-bronzed Italian-Canadian would wrestle Buckteeth to the tomato-splattered ground.

Cheered by this image, I jumped into the tomato patch after Buckteeth. I could still hear him thrashing in there — when
would
Mr. Rinaldi appear? He showed up fast enough when I was sampling one of his tomatoes. I loved tomatoes, either just-ripe and ready to chomp into, or sliced and fried with cheese on top.

A door slamming close by shoved thoughts of food out of my mind. Then, silence.

Edging through more stalks, and picking a tomato that looked as though it was ready to fall off anyway, I emerged into a small square of sun.

That slam had come from the kitchen door. The yellow potted mums right by the door were still quivering from the resulting gust of air.

I eyed the door doubtfully. Had Buckteeth fled inside? Taking a bite of the tomato, I considered this. The only thing wrong with my theory was that the Rinaldis' alarm hadn't gone off. And Mr. Rinaldi, so protective of his tomatoes, was equally paranoid about anyone getting into his house. He even set the alarm when he went out on the front stoop to fetch the morning paper. (Or so my friend Pantelli claimed.)

So that meant — I took a second bite of tomato. It was just the way I liked 'em, still a bit green, not quite ripe — that meant the alarm wasn't on. Therefore Buckteeth must be a friend of the Rinaldis, not a burglar.

That did it. Madge may have been the one with the red hair, but I had the red temper. So the Rinaldis palled around with spies, did they?! Angrily I rapped on the door.

A moment later, as it swung open, I realized too late that Mr. Rinaldi would be less than thrilled to see me munching on an obviously stolen tomato.

I crammed the rest of it into my mouth, all at once.

But it was not Mr. Rinaldi, or any of his family, or Buckteeth who stood in front of me. It was a tall young man with sandy hair and humor-filled gray eyes. He squinted, as if he had just woken up. He didn't look a whole lot older than Madge.

“Hi,” he said, smiling but puzzled. “Can I help you?”

In my surprise at not confronting any of the Rinaldis or Buckteeth, I'd forgotten to chew the tomato. My cheeks still bulged with it.

“Mlflgmitch,” I said.

The young man leaned comfortably against the doorframe and waited for me to finish chewing. When I had, I blurted out, “You're not Mr. Rinaldi!”

“No,” the young man agreed pleasantly. “I'm Jack French. I'm house-sitting for the Rinaldis, who are probably, as we speak, floating through Venice on a gondola. My sister, Mrs. Rinaldi, decided a visit to Italy would be good for Enzo's high blood pressure. Or bad for it, I guess you'd say,” Jack puzzled, frowning. “Anyhow, would lower it.”

He grinned. “Sorry. I've just spent two hours in the darkroom and I'm a bit out of it.”

So
that's
why he'd been squinting. I grinned back. It was almost impossible not to like him. “I'm Dinah Galloway. I'm chasing someone with buckteeth.”

“Why, are you an orthodontist?”

I giggled. It
was
impossible not to like him. “This guy with buckteeth was spying on us. Well, on my sister, really.”

“Why? What's so interesting about your sister?” Jack inquired, amused. I could see he wasn't taking me seriously.

It was at just at the moment he said this that Madge emerged from the tomato stalks, carrying Wilfred. Jack did a double take that finished with a slightly stunned stare. Sigh. How often I'd witnessed this.

“Madge — short for Marguerite — Galloway, meet Jack French,” I said. “Oh, and he's
not
a dweeb.”

Madge regarded Jack coldly, then, ignoring him, addressed me. “I heard your voice, Dinah, so I came to get you. Why were you looking for Wilfred
here
? I found him cowering in terror behind our garage.”

“From what, the tomcat?” I demanded.

“No,” Madge sighed. “The Greens' pet rabbit.”

Jack and I laughed. At a second frosty glance from Madge, Jack said hastily, “I think maybe I should explain. Your sister was hot on the trail of a spy. A voyeur-type spy, evidently, not a James Bond-type spy.”

I knew from Block Watch meetings what
vo
yeur
meant. A weird person who watched other people just for the sake of watching. Who was seriously deprived of a life of his or her own. A creep, in other words.

“A
bucktoothed
voyeur-type spy,” I elaborated, for the second time in a few minutes. These high-speed chases seemed to require a lot of explaining. “I caught him watching us through binoculars, so I chased him here, and — ” I clapped my hand over my mouth. Jack, Madge and Wilfred all stared at me.

“The back door,” I gasped. “I heard it slam — and you were in the darkroom, Jack
. Buckteeth
could be in your house right now
.”

The three of us trooped in to investigate. From their skeptical expressions, I was pretty sure I was the only one convinced there might be a strange, possibly dangerous, bucktoothed trespasser lurking inside.

I peered under every table we passed and checked every closet. Every painstakingly neat, well-arranged closet, I should say. The Rinaldis sure were tidier than the Galloways!

Madge had switched to carrying Wilfred by the scruff of his neck because he'd spotted a goldfish tank and, frightened, had tried to wriggle free.

She, in the meantime, was thawing toward Jack. He was explaining how he'd graduated from high school in June, but was taking a year off before he went on to university. He wanted to work on his photography. And to volunteer for an anti-smoking organization.

“My mom died of lung cancer, so I'm sort of dedicating this year to her,” he said. “I'm organizing volunteers for public workshops and rallies against smoking. Y'know, at schools, community centers, libraries … ” He grinned. “Whoever will host us, basically. I've already got a list of college-age kids who want to help. I'm going to get to know them over the next little while, and I'm also looking to recruit more.”

He smiled, a nice, kind of lopsided, shy smile. “I figure getting involved in helping people beats sitting around moping about Mom. I did
that
for quite a while. I think she would have liked what I'm doing now better.”

Our dad had died in a car accident — of his own fault, because he'd been driving drunk, and had hit a tree instead of, thank goodness, a person. Though Madge never talked about what had happened to Dad — namely, that he'd been an alcoholic — I could see she was moved by Jack's words.

She was just telling him that our family, too, knew about the effects of substance abuse when we noticed that the front door was ajar.

“Hey! I didn't leave it like that,” exclaimed Jack.

The three of us — or four, to include Wilfred, still hanging by the scruff of his neck — peered out. “Betcha Buckteeth ran in the back and out the front,” I said. “He must've used this house as an escape route.”

“You were right.” Jack looked at me with chagrin. “I will never doubt you again, Ms. Dinah Galloway.”

“
I
will doubt you, often,” Madge informed me. Then she smiled. “But not today.”

Jack closed the front door and fastened the long row of sliding bolts and chains his brother-in-law had installed. “So some creep was spying on you,” he exclaimed. “If you see him again, just phone me, and I'll — ”

“I think we'll start by putting a new lock on our back gate,” Madge said. She did not, however, look displeased by his promise of protection. I was delighted. Maybe the dweeby Roderick would be edged out of the picture.

“Why don't you come over for dinner?” I invited. I felt Madge's suspicious glance on me, but I kept my eyes widely and innocently on Jack.

“That'd be great,” he exclaimed. “I mean, if it's okay with your mom — I wouldn't want to — ”

“It'll be fine with her,” I assured him, trying to keep the glee out of my voice. Jack could start edging Roderick out this very evening! “Mother always encourages us to bring people home for dinner. ‘The more people, the merrier,' she says.”

I felt Madge's gaze harden. I couldn't really blame her: I was making our extremely shy mother sound like Old King Cole.

“Well, if it's okay … ” Jack looked uncertainly at Madge.

Madge was pretty decent as people go, much as it pains me to compliment my sister. She wasn't about to make Jack uncomfortable because of her annoyance at me. “We'd welcome you,” she said, in such a nice tone that I knew she was planning, later at home, to kill me.

“I sure appreciate it,” he said gratefully. “My own culinary specialty, toast and peanut butter, gets boring after a while.”

Madge laughed. “So this is your work?” she asked, strolling over to look at some photos he'd spread out on the table.

Black-and-white, they showed scenes of nature. In one, paths wound between fir trees to disappear in a mysterious patchwork of shadow and light. You couldn't quite tell if the paths were visible again farther along, or whether these were rays of sun. In another photo, a seal was poking out its whiskered, bright-eyed face just beyond a wave off Prospect Point in Stanley Park. If you stepped back, you'd think his bright eyes were a mere flash of sun on the water, and he wasn't there at all. That was the thing about Jack's photos: they made you want to keep looking at them.

“This is beautiful work,” said Madge admiringly, as I separated the lace curtains and glared up and down the street for signs of Buckteeth. She said, “It's as good as a lot of the work I've seen by professional photographers.”

“You know something about photography?” asked Jack.

“Well, I — ”

“Madge models. Most often for Bonna Terra Sports,” I called back helpfully.

Buckteeth had either jumped into a car and sped off, I decided, or jumped on to a bus on 1st Avenue. He was wilier than I thought.

I turned back, prepared to share this information with Jack and my sister. Then I saw that Jack was staring, slack-jawed with dismay, at Madge.

“You model for Bonna Terra Sports?” he exclaimed. “That SUCKS!”

Chapter Three

Dweeb at the dinner table

Oh
no
. Obviously I couldn't leave these two un

“Excuse me, do you have a problem?” Madge demanded icily.

“It's just that Bonna Terra organizes sports events with Fields Tobacco,” said Jack. “Don't you see a slight contradiction there? Like that Walk for Health that Bonna Terra and Fields organized last weekend. On the one hand, they're encouraging people to walk. On the other hand, with the Fields logo on billboards, magazine ads and T-shirts, they're encouraging them to become the walking
dead
.”

“I personally am not encouraging people to do anything,” Madge returned, hoisting Wilfred higher with such vigor that he was woken from the nap he'd been settling into.

Madge then addressed me: “I'm going home — that is to say, to the house with the brand-new roof that evil Bonna Terra enabled us to buy last winter. See you later.”

Jack looked after my departing sister ruefully. After a moment, his contrite features lapsed into an admiring grin. “She definitely knows how to make an exit,” he observed.

Jack may not have been impressed by Madge's modeling, but Mother viewed it as a godsend.

It had happened like this.

Last summer, a year after Dad's death, Madge and some friends entered a modeling contest put on by Wellman Talent. Funnily enough, her friends had been much more enthusiastic about the idea — Madge had just wanted to stay home and draw, but they convinced her to go along and keep them company.

You guessed it. It was Madge who won. Soon she was posing for fashion flyers and billboards. Eventually she became the official Bonna Terra girl.

Which was a bit of a laugh, because Madge, posing in hiking gear, tennis duds, etc., was in real life totally unathletic. She liked mooning about in the Vancouver Art Gallery, or in smaller, funkier galleries on Granville Island or on Commercial Drive.

Madge said the secret to modeling was never to look at the camera straight on. You tilted your head somehow, so you had to slide your glance a bit in order to meet the camera's eye. Um, lens.

Of course, being slim, with porcelain skin, brilliant blue eyes and a naturally remote expression didn't hurt.

“A godsend,” our mother said fervently about the modeling.

It was true. Madge's earnings helped us just at the time we needed it. Dad hadn't bothered setting money aside in life insurance or any kind of pension or savings.

“Truly a godsend,” Mom would repeat, crossing herself thankfully.

Mom had a clerking job at the local library. She was taking courses toward getting a librarian's degree. Once she had that, she could get a job as a genuine, certified librarian. (Sometimes, when the “godsend” stuff got too much for me, I'd think she was already a genuine, certified nut — but then, that's how daughters are supposed to see their moms. It's practically a rule in kidville, if you know what I mean.)

On Sundays, the three of us would walk beneath the rows of crabapple trees down to mass at St. Cecilia's. In my prayers, as well as apologizing to God for having jumped up and swiped a lot of crabapples, I would ask that in heaven Dad be allowed to unwrap himself from the tree he'd smashed into, and live out a happy, unalcoholic eternity.

The thing was, Dad had been a pretty happy guy to be around, most of the time. It wasn't like he spent his whole day staggering around with a whisky bottle or whatever. He was lively and fun, with sparkling black eyes that snapped with energy, crisp black hair that crackled when he ran his hand through it, and a laugh that could warm you up on the coldest, darkest, rainiest night.