The Mutual Admiration Society(74)

I don’t bother yelling Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! like I usually would when she pulls a stunt like this, because my fiancé and me both know there is 0% chance—he could probably speak “statistically” about this for a good hour—that almost-always-starving Birdie would stop peeling faster than a GI on KP duty toward ex–army sergeant Mr. McGinty’s windmill cookies and Graf’s root beer that he keeps stocked for us in his cupboard.

But what Charlie and me are curious about is why, instead of running straight for Mr. McGinty’s front door, Birdie has scurried over to the side of his shack, to the lit window. And how come she’s crouching below it, giving us the shhh sign, and raising and lowering her hand the way I do when I want her to get down on all fours?

We don’t have time for this! We’re on a tight schedule and it’s already taken us fifteen minutes to get this far, but what choice do we have? Charlie, who knows good as me what can happen when we don’t buckle under to my sister’s demands, shrugs and says, “Ladies first.”

When we reach Birdie, I lean my back against the shack and whisper to her, “What the hell?” Mr. McGinty would not like it at all if he caught us spying on him. He hates Gotchas! and he’s so dang jumpy he might bayonet us by accident, and I think he knows jiu jitsu, too.

What my sister is doing only gets clear when she slowly stands up to peek into the shack window, which is one of the only ones in the neighborhood, except for Lutheran taxidermist Mr. Johnson’s basement one, that she can see into without me or Charlie piggybacking her or the soda crate raising her up a notch.

Oh, for godssakes.

I know what she’s up to. My little dodo Bird has gotten her wires crossed and is mixing up the plans. “First, we go see Mister McGinty and give him back his medal and ask for his help getting the money you took back into the Pagan Baby collection box. Second, we go snooping and eavesdropping around the neighborhood for information about where Sister Margaret Mary took off to,” is what I told her four times when we were eating the chocolate ice cream on our back porch.

I get a hold of the back of her shorts and take in a deep breath to pull her down and repeat the plan to her again, but my sister knocks my hand away and points frantically at Charlie and me and then points frantically to Mr. McGinty’s open window, so what choice do we have? Time is ticking and we still have so much left to do tonight, it’s best for all concerned if the future Mr. and Mrs. Charlie “Cue Ball” Garfield just get this over with and . . . and lo and behold!

I’m so surprised when I peek into the shack window to see the two of them sitting at the card table talking softly and smiling at one another that my tummy does a handstand, because it can’t figure out which end is up, either!

But I 100% know now that I’m not, I repeat, not going to have to spend the next three days biting my nails while I try to honor Kitten’s dare, but I also 100% know now that our dear and gentle caretaking friend is, I repeat is, going to be sent up the river.

Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower would drum me out of the modern detecting business for what I’m about to do, but I can’t stop myself.

When the guy who’s always on alert for intruders swivels his head and sees The Mutual Admiration Society peeking in on him and his guest, I shout, “Holy shit on a shingle, Mister McGinty! You really did kidnap Sister Margaret Mary?!”





22


A STATISTICAL MIRACLE


“Come on in, kids,” the caretaker of the cemetery says when he throws open the door of his shack. “We’ve been expecting you. After you help yourself to refreshments, please join us at the table.”

Of course, my sister practically knocks him down on the way to the snacks sitting on the kitchen counter, and after she’s snagged them, she plops down in one of the three folding chairs closest to the gal who has been the topic of my every thought and most of my conversations since Gert Klement told Birdie and me and Louise on our back porch this morning that a “terrible incident took place last night.”

“What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” an overfriendly and too-affectionate Birdie says to Sister Margaret Mary after she stuffed the bottom half of a windmill cookie in her mouth. (Please, God, please, I’m begging You, don’t let my sister suddenly go old-timey or juicy smooch our principal’s cheek or . . . or do anything else really weird, because as You know, this prickly employee of Yours has the power to keep her in the third grade forever.) “We been lookin’ for you all day, isn’t that right, Tessie?”

I’m still standing next to Charlie in the doorway of the shack, because I’m so shocked to see our principal that I’m opening and closing my mouth like Charlie McCarthy before Mr. Edgar Bergen supplies him with words. I know what should be coming out of my mouth is That’s right, Birdie, we have been looking for Sister Margaret Mary all day, good remembering, but that’s what a really great Gotcha! can do to a kid. Turn them into a dummy.

Charlie has developed a case of lockjaw, too, but Birdie is having no problem gabbing away with the gal who I barely recognize. She still looks like she swallowed a yardstick, but she isn’t dressed in her nun’s clothes. She’s wearing one of Mr. McGinty’s white Sunday shirts and a pair of the gray pants he puts on when he’s working in the cemetery, and her feet are in floppy mukluks and not in those squishy black shoes she wears when she sneaks around the halls at school trying to catch kids skipping out. And the answer to the playground question “Do nuns have hair and boobies?” is yes. Sister M & M’s hair is styled in a pixie cut and it’s a color that’s close to the same as Mr. McGinty’s chestnut brown, and if she had a job at Lonnigan’s serving schnapps to customers, believe me, this nun would make a ton of tips.