Free The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill by Megan Frazer Blakemore

Once Hazel had been to a party at Becky’s, and they’d had tiny hot dogs wrapped in dough that Hazel thought were the most astounding things ever, but the only people Hazel’s parents ever had over were other horticulturalists, and she guessed they weren’t the tiny hot dog kind of crowd.
    So the toothpicks were kept on a high shelf of the pantry. She went to the table and lifted a large, heavy chair and carried it over to the pantry. Normally she just dragged the chair, which her mother hated because she said it would scratch the linoleum, but that night she couldn’t risk the scraping sound on the floor.
    When she climbed onto the chair, her knee hit the bag of King Arthur flour, tipping it forward. As she reached down to catch it, a small white cloud emerged, dropping tiny snow-flakes onto her nightgown. She carefully righted it, imagining the flour spilled all over the floor and the absolute disaster that had just been averted.
    Her hand closed around the small box, and she took outtwo toothpicks, just in case, and tucked them into the corner of her mouth. Mission accomplished, she climbed down from the chair and lugged it back to the kitchen, trying to make sure it was at just the same angle it had been when she’d retrieved it. It was true that her parents were not detectives like she was, and thus not trained to notice such things as a chair slightly out of place, but they had an uncanny way of knowing when she was on a mission or, in their words, “up to no good,” which she thought was an unfair characterization, as everything she did was for good.
    She eased open the door and heard her mother’s laughter tinkling like the wind chime above the garden.
It’s now or never
, Hazel thought, and scurried by, more mouse-like this time. She took the stairs two at a time, sloshing a bit of the lemon juice onto the green carpet.
    At her desk, she placed the cup of lemon juice next to a clean sheet of paper. She took one toothpick from her mouth, and left the other in, hoping she looked as smart as Mr. Wall, who sometimes chewed on a toothpick while sitting outside his garage. She thought it made him seem contemplative and wise, like John Wayne. She dipped the end of the other toothpick in the lemon juice and then held it over the paper. One single drop fell and landed on the paper.
    Then, nothing.
    She needed to ask for Samuel’s help in figuring out who Alice was, and to break up the spy ring, but of course she couldn’t just write that down in a letter, even one written insecret ink. Once Samuel held the letter to a lamp and the message was revealed, well, then anyone could read it—including Mr. Jones—so she didn’t want too much information on it. Secrets had to be kept. They would have to develop a code to send each other messages. In the meantime, she would be brief.
    The drop of lemon juice spread out, making a translucent dot before disappearing altogether.
    Finally, she wrote
We need to meet
. It took her longer than it would to write with a pen, scratching each letter out on the paper, and she imagined this was what scribes had felt like. She left the paper on her desk. In the morning she would fold it into a simple square, write Samuel’s name on the outside, and slip it into Samuel’s cubby.

10

Triangle People
    Hazel made sure no one was watching when she slipped the folded square into his cubby where it wouldn’t be obvious to anyone walking by but would be seen by Samuel when he was putting his things away.
    To her surprise, Hazel found a note in her own cubby. It was an office slip, telling her she should report to the main office, with the box next to “Immediately” checked. Normally these slips were for when kids needed to leave early for a dentist appointment or something like that. When “Immediately” was checked, though, it meant something was up.
    Mrs. Sinclair was busy talking to Otis Logan about multiplication