Bubble in the Bathtub (3 page)

Lisa rolled her eyes, but Nilly pretended not to notice.

“READ ThIS and an arrow pointing to the stamp,” he continued. “That means that the rest of the message is under the stamp! We just have to take it off.”

“That is exactly what I have been thinking for a while now,” Lisa said.

Nilly passed the card back to Lisa with a satisfied sniff: “Good thing you have me here to crack these secret codes, don't you think?”

LISA'S FATHER, THE Commandant, woke up on his sofa with the taste of newspaper ink in his mouth. This was because, as usual, he had fallen asleep with the newspaper over his face and was snoring so vigorously that the curtains over by the window were swaying and the bottom page of the paper—the one with the
weather on it—was being sucked into his mouth each time he inhaled. He glanced over at the clock and gave a contented sigh when he saw that it was almost time for bed. But first a chicken sandwich. Or two. He tossed the newspaper onto the coffee table, and hefted his large stomach out over the edge of the sofa, thus automatically tipping himself up onto his feet.

“Hi there,” he said when he walked into the kitchen. Lisa was standing by the counter and Nilly was standing on a chair next to her. The Commandant knew him as the tiny neighbor boy from the strange family that had moved onto Cannon Avenue that spring. The teakettle in front of Lisa and Nilly was quivering and sputtering as steam spewed out its spout.

“Tell me, aren't you kids a little young to be drinking coffee?” the Commandant asked them with a yawn. “And at this late hour?”

“Aye aye,
el commandante
,” Nilly said. “We're not making coffee.”

Only then did the Commandant notice that Lisa was holding something that looked like a postcard in the cloud of steam billowing up from the kettle.

“What are you guys up to?”

“Go back to the living room, Dad,” Lisa said.

“Hey, I'm the Commandant here!” the Commandant said. “I want to know what you two are up to!”

“Sorry,
el commandante
,” Nilly said. “This is so top secret that if we told you, you would know too much. And you know what happens to people who know too much, right?”

“What?” the Commandant asked, putting his hands on his hips.

“They get their tongues cut out so they can't speak. And all the fingers on their right hands cut off so they can't write.”

“And what if you guys discover that I'm left-handed?” the Commandant said.

“Then you'll be really unlucky, because then we'll
have to remove the fingers from that hand, too.”

“And what if I can write with the pen between my toes?”

“Both legs right off,
el commandante
. Sorry, but spy work is serious business.”

“Yes, apparently it is,” the Commandant sighed.

“But everything has a bright side,” Nilly said. “Without legs you could lie on the sofa until Easter without having to wax any skis, wash any socks, or tie any shoelaces.”

“You may be onto something there,” the Commandant said. “But what if I figure out that I can put the pen in my mouth? Or send signals in Morse code by blinking my eyes?”

“I'm sorry you figured that out,
el commandante
. Now we'll be forced to cut off your head right from the start.”

The Commandant laughed so hard his enormous belly shook.

“Quit fooling around, you two,” Lisa said. “Dad, get out of here! That's an order.”

Once the Commandant had left, shaking his head, Lisa pulled the card out of the steam. They sat down at the kitchen table and Lisa peeled the stamp off very gingerly with a pair of tweezers.

“It worked!” Lisa exclaimed. “How did you know that steam would loosen the stamp?”

“Ah, just a little basic forensics,” Nilly said, but actually he looked a little surprised himself.

“There's something written under where the stamp was, but the handwriting is too small for me to read it,” Lisa said, holding the postcard closer to the light. “Maybe it would be easier for you since you're … uh, smaller?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Nilly asked, looking at her with his eyebrow raised.

Lisa shrugged. “Smaller people wear smaller clothes
sizes and are happy with smaller cars. Why not smaller print, too?”

“Let me see it,” Nilly mumbled, grabbing the card and squinting at it intently.

“Nada,”
he said, and held out his hand without looking at Lisa. “Magnifying glass, please.”

Lisa darted over to a drawer, found her mother's magnifying glass, and placed it in Nilly's outstretched hand.

When he saw what it said, Nilly said, “Aha.” Because what he saw was this:

SOS. I've disappeared in time. Bring the jar labeled “time soap” from the lab and come to Paris immediately. Also bring the French nose clips that are in the drawer marked “Unpatented Inventions.” You can get money for the plane ticket by selling this stamp to the Trench Coat Clock Shop on Rosenkrantz Street. But don't say anything to the storeowner about where you got the stamp from or where you're going. You understand, Nilly?

“Yup, understood,” Nilly mumbled, moving the magnifying glass down.

In Paris go straight to the Hotel Frainche-Fraille. Once you're there . . .

. . . Sincerely, Doctor Proctor

“Hey!” Nilly yelped. “What is this? The rest is missing.”

“It must have gotten washed away by the water,” Lisa whispered breathlessly over his shoulder. “Does it say anything else?”

Nilly moved the magnifying glass down farther.

P.S. I hid the key to the lab in a very clever spot: under the doormat.

“What are we waiting for?” Nilly shouted.

“On your mark, get set …,” Lisa yelled.

“Go!” they both shouted in unison.

Then they jumped out of their chairs. Lisa rummaged around in the bottom drawer in the kitchen until she found her father's flashlight and then they ran out onto Cannon Avenue, where darkness and silence had fallen over all the yards and wooden houses. The moon was curious and peeked out at them as they climbed over the fence surrounding the smallest house and the yard with the tallest grass. (Doctor Proctor had been away for a while.) They sprinted past the pear tree over to the cellar door and lifted up the doormat.

And, sure enough, a key gleamed in the moonlight.

They stuck it into the keyhole in the old, unpainted door, and the metal made a slightly spooky squeaking sound as they turned it.

They both stood there looking at the door.

“You first,” Lisa whispered.

“No problem,” Nilly said with a gulp. He took a deep breath. Then he kicked the door as hard as he could.

The hinges made a chilling creaking sound as the door swung open. A gust of cold, raw cellar air wafted out of the doorway, and something fluttered over their heads and disappeared into the night, something that might have been an unusually large moth or just an average-sized bat.

“Yikes,” said Lisa.

“And ew,” said Nilly. Then he turned on the flashlight and strolled in.

Lisa looked around outside. Even the usually welcoming pear tree looked like it was clawing at the moon with witch's fingers. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and hurried in after Nilly.

But he was already gone and all she saw was total darkness.

“Nilly?” Lisa whispered, because she knew that if you talk loudly in the dark, the noise would make you feel even more alone.

“Over here,” Nilly whispered. She followed the
sound and saw that the cone of light from the flashlight was pointing at something on the wall.

“Did you find the time soap?” she asked.

“No,” Nilly said. “But I found the biggest spider in the northern hemisphere. It has seven legs and it hasn't shaved them lately. And a mouth that's so big you can see its lips. Check out this beast, huh?”

Lisa saw a very ordinary and not particularly large spider on the cellar wall.

“A seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider. They're extremely rare!” Nilly whispered, excited. “They live by catching and sucking out the brains of other insects.”

“The brains?” Lisa said, looking at Nilly. “I didn't think insects had brains.”

“Well that's exactly why the seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider is so rare,” Nilly whispered. “It hardly ever finds any insects with brains to suck.”

“And just how do you know all this?” Lisa asked.

“It's in—”

“Don't say it,” Lisa interrupted. “In
Animals You Wish Didn't Exist
?”

“Exactly,” Nilly said. “So if you'll go find the time soap and the nose clips, I'll work on trying to capture this rare spider specimen. Okay?”

“But we have only one flashlight.”

“Well why don't we turn on the overhead light, then?”

“The overhead li—” Lisa started to say, putting her palm to her forehead as if to say
duh
. “Why didn't we think of that before?”

“Because then it wouldn't have been so delightfully spooky,” Nilly said, pointing the flashlight at the light switch next to the door. Lisa flipped it on and in an instant Doctor Proctor's laboratory was bathed in white light.

There were kettles, pressure cookers, buckets, and shelves full of mason jars with different types of powder mixtures and chemicals. There were iron pipes,
glass pipes, test tubes, and other kinds of pipes—even an old rifle with an ice hockey puck attached to its muzzle. And next to the rifle, on the wall, hung the picture that Lisa was so fond of. It was of a young Doctor Proctor on his motorcycle in France.
She
was sitting in the sidecar—the beautiful Juliette Margarine with the long auburn hair. His girlfriend and the love of his life. They were smiling and looked so happy that it filled Lisa's heart with warmth. In the
last
postcard he'd sent, he had written that he was on her trail. In the only other card he'd sent from Paris, in June, he'd also written that he was on her trail. Maybe by now he'd found her?

Lisa continued scanning the room again and stopped when she spotted an almost empty mason jar with something strawberry-red in the bottom. It wasn't the strawberry-red that caught her attention, but the label.

Because it looked like this:

Lisa took the jar down from the shelf and walked over to a big, rusty filing cabinet. She pulled out the drawer labeled “Unpatented Inventions,” flipped through the files until she got to
F
, and—sure enough—there was a manila folder marked “French Nose Clips.”

She opened the folder, turned it upside down, and two blue and seemingly completely normal clips fell out. But no instructions. They looked like you would use them for swimming. She tucked them into her jacket pocket and announced, “I found them! Let's get out of here.”