Through the parted leaves, Birdie and me watch as The Wretched One flattens her nose against her giant picture window. She’s locked on to the spot where we’ve hidden from her a gazillion times before, so I know she can’t see us, but we gotta be careful that she doesn’t hear us, because just like The Mutual Admiration Society, our enemy has got what Chapter Five in Modern Detection calls TOOLS OF THE TRADE of her own. “A fedora may be worn low over one’s eyes to conceal one’s identity,” the book says, which makes sense. Eyes can tell somebody everything about you because they are the windows to our soul. I couldn’t find a fedora hat to fit me at Toppers, so I boosted a pair of sunglasses from the five and dime last week to keep my peepers hidden. A trench coat—a tan coat that has nothing to do with sickness of the mouth—also comes highly recommended, but I figure a beige top and shorts would work just as good. And an ordinary drinking glass is also nice to have on you if you want to listen to people talking on the other side of walls, and I keep one of those in our Radio Flyer.
But as good and helpful as hats, shades, and drinking glasses are, I got my sights set on something much, much better. I want the same TOOLS OF THE TRADE that Gert’s got. Hearing aids. They’re not much to look at, but I’m not kidding, those little plastic shrimp that hook around her long ears are so powerful that she can hear you burping the alphabet or making farting noises under your armpit in the front pew of the church when she’s all the way in the back. Oh, having hearing aids of my own would be so helpful for blackmail and detecting eavesdropping! Betcha I could be five cars away and still hear a greaser bragging to one of the gang at the Milky Way Drive-In, I scored third base offa Mary Catherine O’Donnell at the necking tree last night or It’s me who stole over two hundred clams outta the Pagan Baby collection box, or the best confession ever, Yeah, I was the one who snatched and murdered Sister Margaret Mary, ya wanna make something of it, Clyde?
From where Birdie and me are hiding, I watch with held breath as our rancid neighbor with the A+ hearing moves from her picture window over to her smaller shouting-at-us window. “Church paper drive, my foot!” she screams. “I see you and your sister crouched in those bushes, Theresa Finley, you little banshee!”
“No, she doesn’t. She’s trying to trick us,” I whisper to Birdie.
“If you don’t come out, I’m calling your mother and telling her what you’ve been up to!” Gert bellows.
When I feel Birdie tighten, I tap my finger against her cute mouth and say, “Zip it, lock it, and stick it in your pocket,” because I wouldn’t put it past her to jump up and shout back to Gert, Tell Mommy I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry! So just to make sure she doesn’t, I wrap my arms around her little body and start singing softly the same thing I always do when we’re hiding. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.” When I reach, “twenty-one Mississippi,” which is my lucky number, because it was Daddy’s, I remind my partner in crime one more time to keep her trap shut before I separate the bush branches to check and see why Gert has suddenly gone quiet as a tomb.
Damnation!
Her bunions must not be bothering her this morning as much as I wanted them to, because our bulky neighbor has made it out her door, down her porch steps, around the prickly hedge, and to the back of our house in record-breaking time. She must’ve decided that we weren’t crouched down in the cemetery bushes after all, which is good, but now she’s coming over to check on us the way Louise asked her to before she left for the Clark station, which is not good.
“Open up!” Gert bellows as she pounds on the back door of our house.
When Birdie and me don’t do her bidding, she takes something out of her flowery housecoat pocket in a frenzy and starts talking in the secret language they teach at St. Nazianz Seminary, which is where boys go to become priests after high school if they can’t get any girls to put out for them.
“Dominos vobiscum,” Gert shouts in Latin.
What is that she’s choking in her meaty hand? Is that . . . no. That can’t be her precious bottle of Holy Water she brought back from her pilgrimage to Lourdes, could it?!
“Theresa Marie Finley, in the name of His Holiness Pope John the Twenty-Third and our savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, and His mother Mary,” Gert yells as she dips her fingers into the purple bottle and makes the sign of the cross on our back door. “I demand you show yourself immediately!”
What . . . in . . . the . . . hell . . . is . . . she . . . doing?
It sorta looks like something that Kitten Jablonski told me the church had to do to her older sister, Dawn, who got in Dutch for getting caught too many times with her blouse off in the back of some boy’s hot rod. When my confidential informant was describing it to me, her exact words were, “It’s called an exercism. The bishop sent a special priest to our house to shout a bunch of Latin, throw Holy Water on Dawnie, and force her to do Royal Canadian push-ups so the devil would hop outta her.”
Even though Kitten’s information is usually so reliable, I didn’t believe her at first because that exercism business sounded sorta off the wall to me, but whatta ya know? Here’s Gert Klement proving once again that famous saying “Seeing is believing.”
Gert says as she holy sprinkles our house again, “This is your last chance, Theresa, before I . . . I . . .”
Before you what, you holier-than-thou hag? Call your friend the bishop and tell him to send a special priest over to our house tonight who’ll force me to drop and do fifty in our living room?
That’ll be the day.