“No one there,” he said in what he mistook for a whisper.
“Shhhhh!” I waved my hand in a violent “get down,” but he was in no hurry. He gazed into the room as though it were full of great art rather than pine boards and wood curls.
I gave up trying to signal him and crept ahead to the next window. Slowly, very slowly, bracing my hand against the side of the house for support, I raised my head to the level of the window—straight into a great staring glass eye. I must have screamed. At least I did something to make Call begin to run as fast as he could around the house and in the direction of the path. I didn’t run—not because I wasn’t terrified, not because I wouldn’t have liked to run, but because my feet had lost all power of movement.
The glass eye raised itself slowly from my face and a human voice said, “There you are. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I tossed my head, trying vainly to imitate the counterspy of my imagination, hoping that a clever, careless remark would float effortlessly from my lips, but my mouth was dry as sawdust and no remark, careless or otherwise, was about to emerge.
“Would you like to come in?”
I turned frantically to find Call and located him a hundred feet away on the path toward the village. He had stopped running. I felt a surge of gratitude for him. He hadn’t deserted, not really.
“Your friend, too,” the old man said, putting his periscope down on a table and smiling warmly through his white beard.
I licked my mouth, but my tongue was almost as dry as my lips. Franklin D. Roosevelt was hanging the Congressional Medal of Honor around my neck, saying, “Without regard for her personal safety, she entered the very stronghold of the foe.”
“Ca-all.” My voice cracked wide open on the word. “Ca-all.”
He started back in a sort of zombielike walk. I could feel the presence of the man in the window above me. Call came up and stood right behind me, his breath coming from his open mouth in noisy pants. We were both fixed on the form above us.
“Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea, or something?” the man said invitingly. “I haven’t had any visitors since I got here except for an old tomcat.”
I could feel Call stiffen like a dead fish.
“He acted like the place belonged to him. I had a time convincing him otherwise.”
Call butted me in the back with his stomach. I butted him back with my behind. Good heavens. Here we were on the very trail of a spy and Call was going to get upset by a ghost—a made-up ghost, one I had made up. Annoyance drove out panic.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice was a little too loud and there was a distinct quaver in it, so I tried again. “Thanks. We’d like tea, wouldn’t we?”
“My grandma don’t allow me to drink tea.”
“The boy will have milk,” I said grandly and flounced around to the front door. Call followed at my heels. By the time we got around the house, the man was there, holding the door open for us. Without regard for her personal safety…
There was very little to sit on inside the house. The man pulled a rough plank bench around for Call and me, and after he’d put a kettle on a two-burner propane stove and puttered about his kitchen a bit, he came in and sat down on a homemade st
ool.
“Now. You are—”
I was still in the process of deciding whether or not counterspies gave their actual names in a situation like this when Call spoke up. “I’m Call and she’s Wheeze.”
The man began unaccountably to laugh. “Wheeze and Call,” he said gleefully. “It sounds like a vaudeville act.”
How rude—to sit there laughing at our names.
“It would be better if it was Wheeze and Cough. Still, Wheeze and Call is pretty good.”
I sat up very straight on the bench. To my utter amazement, not to say disgust, I realized that Call was giggling. I gave him a look.
“It’s a joke, Wheeze.”
“How can it be a joke?” I asked. I almost said “It’s not funny,” but I stopped myself in time. Fortunately, the kettle whistled, and the man got up to make the tea. I gave Call a glare that should have stopped the tide, but he kept on laughing. I’d never heard him laugh in my life and here he was shrieking like a gull over garbage about something that was just plain insulting.
The man handed me a mug of very black tea. “I’ve only got tinned milk,” he said to Call while returning to the kitchen.
“That’s okay,” Call said, wiping the tears off his face with the back of his wrist. “Wheeze and Cough,” he repeated to me. “Don’t you get it?”