Taking Care of Terrific by Lois Lowry Page B

heard myself asking.
    Mrs. Kolodny nodded. "Suzanne doesn't know this, of course. But Greg knows that Lance has an identical twin brother, Vance. If they can find Vance and produce him at the trial, how will the witnesses be able to say for sure that it was
Lance
they saw with the gun?"
    "Wait a minute. What do you mean, Suzanne doesn't know that Lance has a twin brother? Didn't you say he's her son? She gave birth to twins and didn't know it? Come
on,
gimme a break, Mrs. Kolodny."
    She waved her hand impatiently. "All of that was a long time ago. Suzanne was in a coma when the twins were born. She had a brain tumor and she was going to die, so they took the babies away for adoption. Later her brain tumor cleared up, so she got Lance back. But she doesn't even know that the other one, Vance, exists."
    "How does the lawyer know?"
    "He was the twins' father, see. Suzanne doesn't know that, either, because after this brain
tumor she ended up with amnesia. Shhhh." Mrs. Kolodny turned the sound back up.
    "Mrs. Kolodny," I said as I headed for the door, "it's a beautiful day. You should go out for a walk."
    Real life was certainly a lot less complicated than soap opera life, I thought, as I entered the Garden with Tom Terrific. He scampered off and knelt by a bush, to deposit his worm in a new home. Beyond the flower beds, I could see Hawk, sitting on a bench with our bag lady. They were both slurping brown Popsicles, and I grinned; the Popsicle man had kept his promise. I strolled over to greet them and to tell them that we had a new partner in crime, the Russian general Sethsandroff, and that on Saturday night we were going to capture the navy.
    Hawk rolled his eyes apprehensively when I described the plans. He leaned back and made a
Whoooo
sound with his mouth. "I gotta cogitate on that one," he said.
    But the bag lady didn't have to cogitate at all. She grinned, her mouth full of root beer ice. She swallowed the last bit of Popsicle and said, with her eyes sparkling, "Let's go for it."

Chapter 13
    The telephone conversation between me and Seth sounded like something out of his Robert Ludlum thriller.
    "Meet me to check things out." (Seth. Low voice, almost a whisper. Humphrey Bogart, maybe, calling from a phone booth in Vienna.)
    "Where? When?" (Me. I wish I had a throaty voice and a slight accent from some Balkan country. But it was only me with my mouth full of chocolate chip cookie. I had just gotten home from Tom Terrific's house.)
    "Six. The boat dock."
    "Right."
    We hung up without saying good-by. It seemed appropriate. Spies never say good-by.
    The timing was important because six o'clock was when the Swan Boats closed up. We wanted to see exactly how they did it, how they secured the boats each night, so that on Saturday night we could undo it.
    When I met Seth at the dock by the duck pond, I was still wearing the jeans I had been wearing all day. But Seth, having just come from work, looked surprisingly respectable and un-Sethlike in chinos and an L. L. Bean shirt. He sauntered over to the bench where I was sitting, sat down beside me without saying anything, looked around, and then muttered out of the side of his mouth, "You got a pencil and paper?"
    I nodded and reached into my backpack.
    "Take notes," Seth said in a low voice. He was really into the spy routine. I felt as if we should be wearing trench coats and dark glasses.
    No one was paying any attention to us. To any observer—even to the mounted policeman who came up the path now and stopped his horse near the dock—we were just a couple of fourteen-year-olds sitting on a park bench. The policeman was keeping his eye on a shabby-looking man who was leaning on a tree, his eyes a little glazed as if he were stoned.
    The horse had his eye on a rhododendron bush. You could tell he wanted a bite of it. But the policeman held the reins firmly in his hand.
    The tourists in the park were tired now. Earlier in the day they'd been full of energy, folding and