The Spy in Alley

By Melanie Jackson

Confronting a prowler in the backyard, Dinah is determined to find out why someone has taken an interest in her older sister and herself. Who is the buck-tooth burglar? Why are the Rinaldi's tomatoes always involved? And what is the connection between Madge's boyfriend and GASP, a group of well-intentioned anti-smoking activists? When it becomes apparent that Wellman Talent, the modeling agency Madge works for, is making deals with an unscrupulous tobacco company, and that the spy is out to sabotage GASPís plans to expose the connection, Dinah has to call on all her talents, both sleuthing and singing, to solve the case. In the spirit of Sammy Keyes, Dinah gets by on pluck, courage and an irrepressible sense of humor as she is catapulted into a mystery that twists and turns from the blackberry patch to the corporate boardroom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
• Release date: Jan 9, 2002
• ISBN: 9781554695409

Melanie Jackson

Melanie Jackson lives in Littleton, NH with her husband, Corey Jackson. She works full time as a licensed nursing assistant. Melanie was born with a rare medical condition called FFU (Femur, Fibula, Ulna Dyspepsia); and dyslexia. She is the second oldest of seven children, was raised by a single mom and was homeschooled. Reading and writing has never come easily to Melanie but she was inspired by her favorite authors to keep trying. With hard work and dedication she began writing and found worlds and stories existed within her she had never known. The journey to publication was filled with countless struggles but she learned every step of the way. Melanie hopes to give someone the same joy and inspiration she was given.

Book preview

A Dinah Galloway Mystery

The Spy in the Alley

MELANIE JACKSON

ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

Copyright © 2002 Melanie Jackson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Jackson, Melanie, 1956-

The spy in the alley

(A Dinah Galloway mystery; 1)

Electronic Monograph

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 9781551437835(pdf) -- ISBN 9781554695409 (epub)

I. Title. II. Series: Jackson, Melanie, 1956- . Dinah Galloway mystery; 1

PS8569.A265S69 2002    jC813’.6    C2002-910001-1

PZ7.J1366Sp 2002

First published in the United States, 2002

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001099823

Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for our publishing programs provided by the following agencies: The Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), The Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Cover design: Christine Toller

Cover illustration: Rose Cowles

www.orcabook.com

04 03 02 • 5 4 3 2 1

To Bart and Sarah-Nelle Jackson

MJ

CONTENTS

The First Word

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

The Last Word

The First Word

(I always like to have it)

It began with Wilfred the cat, though my sister Madge insists she started it by leaving the back door open. Wilfred wouldn’t have been able to get out otherwise, she says.

That’s Madge for you. She has to be the center of any story. I guess it’s because she’s so pretty, with her burnished red hair, lupine-blue eyes and smooth, porcelain skin. It would be hard not to believe you were the center of attention, looking like that.

My hair is auburn, says Madge, miffed. She’s peering over my shoulder at the computer screen, where I’m writing this.

Well, she’s part of the story, I’ll give her that.And, by letting Wilfred go, she set things off: the discovery of the bucktoothed spy and the mysterious thefts, not to mention the high-speed chases.(Okay, so the chases were on foot. They were still high-speed.)

But I still think it was Wilfred who actually started it. Madge may be pretty, but I’m pretty stubborn.

Now Madge is insisting that, since I can’t get the color of her hair right, there are parts of the story she had better check over. Oh, all right, Madge. I will certainly listen to any critiques you have to make (though not, ahem, necessarily pay attention to them).

Let’s see, we’ll call this file The Spy in the Ally.

How melodramatic, scoffs Madge. And that’s not how you spell ‘alley.’

Anyway, this is how it all began.

Chapter One

I spy ... a spy!

The back door was propped open with a cast-iron John A. Macdonald piggy bank that Mother had bought ages ago at an antique store on Commercial Drive. John A’s hand was raised, as if our first prime minister were making a point, perhaps while debating a bill in the House of Commons. No one cared enough to ponder what his point might be; we just used him as a doorstop.

Madge brushed past John A. Macdonald and into the kitchen with a bowl of blackberries she’d just picked in the alley. I’d picked some, too, that hot August afternoon, but I’d returned with my bowl empty.

Madge surveyed the blackberry-stained teeth and tongue I displayed for her. She observed coolly, "No self-discipline as usual, Dinah. I’m going to make pies with my blackberries, one for us and one for old Mrs. Gumboldt."

I’d been busy downloading the latest version of my favorite computer game, Deathstalkers at Zero Hour, when part of her sentence struck me. Not the part about nice Mrs. Gumboldt, a church friend of our mother’s. The other part. I used the hem of my T-shirt to wipe blackberry juice from my lenses. Pie. That means Roderick’s coming for dinner, right?

I sighed. Roderick Wellman, Madge’s boyfriend, was my deadly foe. So conceited. So stuffed-shirtish. Such a dweeb. Roderick’s dad owned the agency Madge often modeled for. Or with. Or whatever. Madge’s modeling money helped pay the bills, as Mother often reminded me — for instance, after I’d dumped salt in Roderick’s coffee when he was looking the other way.

And, Madge’s modeling money would help pay for me to go to university, Mother would add. She and Madge were bent on my having this great halls-of-academe experience, just because teachers kept assuring them I had high potential. Or, I sometimes thought wistfully, maybe because, freckled and bespectacled, I would never be pretty like Madge and able to model.

Madge wanted to go to art college after she finished high school. You might say that while I listened to teachers, she drew them. Her talent at art worked for her in art class, needless to say, and even to some extent in science — but in subjects like math … um, no. Madge was sixteen; I was eleven. This didn’t stop Madge and Mother from doing an awful lot of planning ahead.

To me, the future was fuzzy: it was impossible to believe that the three of us, plus Wilfred, would ever do anything other than live happily in our creaky Victorian barn of a house on Wisteria Street, on the big Grandview hill in Vancouver. I preferred to concentrate on the present, particularly on sinister elements of it — namely, Roderick Wellman.

"Yes, Roderick is coming for dinner, responded Madge, placing the blackberries on the kitchen counter. She pushed back a wave of auburn hair. Even on a day like this, Madge was unruffled, un-hot and unbothered. She shrugged. You could always stay in your room."

In case I haven’t made this clear before, Roderick is a dw — I began, but it was then that Wilfred tore through the kitchen and out the back door.

We gaped after him. This was not like Wilfred. Our fluffy white-and-pumpkin-colored cat was notoriously cowardly: if anyone even sneezed, he’d disappear under the bed for an hour. Plus, he was an indoor cat.

We went to the door and stared out at the long path, overgrown with hydrangea, that led alongside the garage to the back gate of our high fence. The bushes were rustling wildly. A monarch butterfly zoomed out; then, a fluffy white-and-pumpkin-colored paw thrust after it, scattering violet hydrangea petals.

Madge and I looked at each other.

Wilfred has finally found something he’s not afraid of, I commented.

Wilfred the Brave, said Madge. You’d bet>ter go after him, Dinah. You-know-who is lurking nearby.

You-know-who was a lean, mean, gray tabby from three houses down. He had a reputation for shredding other cats, so that what was left of them limped back to their owners and then to long, expensive stays at the vet’s.

The tabby often sat on our fence, peering in the window, yowling threateningly at Wilfred. Till now he’d never had the chance to get at him.

"Why can’t you go? I demanded angrily. I’m busy downloading."

Madge cast a scornful glance at the rockets soaring and exploding on screen. I couldn’t possibly go prowling through the undergrowth in this, she said, preening slightly in her cucumber-colored sleeveless blouse and matching shorts.

"You went prowling through the alley for blackberries to put in dear Roddy’s pie," I retorted. But in my blackberry-stained T-shirt I knew I was on shaky ground.

Madge sauntered off, humming; muttering foul things about her, I stomped outside to retrieve Wilfred.

We never used the back gate. Mother had long ago clamped a lock, now rusty, on its latch, in the theory that burglars would be unable to gain access to our house from the back. For blackberry excursions, I either walked around by the street or, preferably, took a shortcut through one of the neighbors’ gardens. Trespassing is much more satisfying, I find.

For that reason, when I say the path to the gate was overgrown, I don’t mean slightly unkempt. I mean almost obliterated. Tall, tough green weeds had sprouted to mix in with the foxgloves that grew happily there, and with the thick, overlapping hydrangeas currently in full bloom. Together, all these formed quite the jungle.

I pushed the outer edge of hydrangeas aside. Wilfred blinked up at me in surprise.

All right, you, I said, reaching for him.

He took off. My authoritative tone needed a bit of work.

Gritting my teeth, I stepped into our mini-jungle. Those first hydrangeas flapped back into place behind me. I could feel the sun on the back of my neck, but in front of me, as I proceeded in bent, cat-catching posture, there was just a haze of green. Through it the hydrangeas glowed intermittently, like violet traffic signals.

I saw Wilfred’s tail disappearing between some foxgloves. I was sure that, being fluffy, it and the rest of Wilfred were gathering up every bug, nettle, burr and leaf imaginable. Well, Madge was going to be the one who had to comb him and flea-bath him, I vowed, fuming, as a prickly blackberry branch scraped me from hand to elbow.

The blackberry bushes grew along the alley, which meant that I must be getting pretty close to the back gate. The branch that had got me would have burrowed its way through the gate.

Now Wilfred, I said. My tone was anything but cajoling, and I couldn’t really blame Wilfred for not leaping joyfully into my arms.

Time to give up. Wilfred would come back in his own time. Cats always came back, didn’t they? The song said they did. Besides, my glasses were steaming up from being in that hothouse of flowers and weeds. Removing the glasses, I began to wipe them off on my T-shirt. Suddenly, past the foxgloves, a rustle.

Wilfred? I parted the foxgloves.

Even with my glasses off, I could tell that the white feet in front of me were far too big to be paws. I slid my glasses back on and the feet turned into running shoes. I looked up, past khaki pants and a white shirt blotted with perspiration, to a powder-blue sun-hatted, bucktoothed young man holding binoculars.

He was spying on us.

I was so indignant that I forgot all the safety warnings about never confronting intruders. I stood up, through the flowers, branches and stalks, and glared at him. The young man drew back his lips and sneered, displaying his buckteeth even more prominently. You must be a younger sister or something, he said. "You’re obviously not the glamorous Madge Galloway, the