Spyhole Secrets by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page A

him to the chair when he got home from work and when she won he would pretend to sit on her, and she would scream and kick and they would both yell and laugh. Usually the game ended with her sitting on his lap while they read a book or the comics or sometimes just discussed really important things. Things like having conversations with God, for instance.
    Some people, even good friends like Marty, would kid her when she told them about the things she used to say to God, but Dad never did. Dad said everybody talked to God in one way or another, and he thought the kind of chatty, neighbor-to-neighbor way she did it was just fine.
    But that brought back other memories, the ones about how many times she’d asked God why He had let Dad be a part of the accident on the foggy freeway. God hadn’t ever answered that question no matter how many times she’d asked it, and after a while she’d stopped asking Him anything at all. When she got back to the hot, stuffy apartment she was crying angry tears again, but this time they didn’t last very long.
    By the time her mother got home, Hallie had stopped crying and had started thinking about how she could find out how often and on what days Zachary stopped at the library on his way home from school. When her mom asked how her day had been she said the usual “Oh, okay, I guess.” But then, for some reason, she had a sudden urge to talk to Mom about Zachary. Without spilling the beans about the attic and the spyhole, of course.
    “Mom,” she started out, “something funny happened on the way home the other day. This little kid, who I’d kind of met at the library—he came along carrying a whole bunch of books and all of a sudden he fell down and the books went everywhere and …”
    Mom winced. She’d always been that way about kids or animals getting hurt. “Oh dear,” she said. “I hope he wasn’t—”
    “No. He wasn’t hurt. Not really. Just a skinned knee. But I started talking to him and we wound up sitting on the bus bench talking about a lot of stuff. And Mom, this little kid, he’s only eight years old, isreally pretty weird. He reads all these big books about things like psychiatry and shamanism….”
    “Shamanism?”
    “Yeah, do you know about shamans?”
    Mom nodded uncertainly. “Not a great deal. Only that they are something like wise men, or gurus.”
    “Yeah, like that, sort of. I didn’t know either, so I looked it up. But this kid says that the reason he’s interested in being a shaman is that they cure mental cases who need to get their heads straightened out. Like being a psychiatrist, sort of. That’s the other thing he thinks he is—a psychiatrist. I think he wants to be a psychiatrist because they get to ask people a lot of personal questions. You know, like how they feel about things and why they feel that way.” She smiled, remembering.
“Why
seems to be his favorite word.”
    Mom laughed and Hallie laughed too. “He sounds like quite a character,” Mom said. “Does he live near here? In the Towers, maybe?”
    Hallie quickly looked up at her mother. Dad used to say that he was married to a mind reader, and sometimes Hallie thought he wasn’t just kidding. She tried to make her shrug say she didn’t know and didn’t really care where he lived. “Could be,” she said. “I guess an awful lot of people live there.”
    Watch it, Hallie. Better change the subject. Better cool it about Zachary, and anything else that might bring up the spyhole.

T he next day Hallie visited the library again, but not to get a book. At least, that wasn’t the main reason. The main reason was to see if she could get some information about Zachary’s library habits. She did check out three more books on the Middle East, but they were mostly for cover, and to get Mrs. Myers in a friendly state of mind. Which was something that probably needed doing, since Hallie had insisted on telling her how much better everything was at the Bloomfield library. But