“How old are you?” Moms asked.
“Sixteen. How old are you?”
Moms didn’t reply.
“So you’re thirty-five.”
Mom’s cheeks flushed and that’s how the team learned that Moms was thirty-five. They all owed Doc ten bucks.
“What do you think is going on?” Nada repeated.
The girl stopped scratching at her arm and started gnawing at a cuticle and Moms knocked her hand away. “Don’t do that.”
“No touching, bitch, I ain’t cutting myself.”
Everyone tensed and the girl noted. “Cool. So you’re in charge. Love that.” She leaned forward and parted her blue hair a bit. “My curling iron did that to me this morning.”
They could all see the angry-looking burn hiding in the blue. Then she held up her hand, the one she’d been chewing, and said: “And Skippy bit me. He’s, was, a mean dog, but he never bit me before.” There was an angry gash, half-concealed with an inadequate Band-Aid.
“Doc,” Nada said into the throat mike. “Down here with your kit. Eagle, take upper rear over-watch.”
The girl continued. “Granted, Skippy was a ditz of a dog, but I’ve always been good with dogs and he nipped me last night.” She swooshed the wound with her little green-painted fingers.
Other than Eagle leaving, no one was moving and she looked about. “Helloooo?”
Doc came in with his med kit. “Let me take a look at that.”
The girl stared at him dubiously for a moment. “You really a doctor? I mean a doctor who, like, treats people rather than makes things in a lab? ’Cause we got lots of doctors around here who wouldn’t know the right end of a scalpel.”
“I’m a real doctor,” Doc said, and everyone on the team was surprised he didn’t add in the usual about his four PhDs on top of his MD.
“What about your curling iron?” Moms asked.
“It isn’t my curling iron anymore. Am I getting warm?”
Moms nodded and Roland reached behind him and pulled out his golf bag of weapons and began strapping up.
“Whoa,” the girl said as Nada and Moms pulled guns from under their shirts and chambered rounds. “Liftoff.” She smiled. “Just kidding.”
“Where are your parents?” Moms asked as Doc worked on her burn and bite.
“At work. Helloooo? The mortgage is ten grand a month. Where do you think they’d be?”
“Why aren’t you in school?” Nada asked.
“Spring break?”
“Seriously,” Nada said. “Is it spring break?”
“Yeah, you’re a bunch of grad students for sure. It’s summer. Fourth of July soon?”
Nada sighed. “So there are a bunch of kids home without parents around?”
The girl laughed. It was the youngest thing about her, the laugh. “Helloooo. Swim practice, Bible camp, violin, piano, dressage, traveling soccer and baseball and dance team? Nobody here but me. All the mommies and daddies are at work to pay for all the nannies driving everyone everywhere all the time.”
“Why aren’t you practicing something?” Moms asked while Nada was on the net, telling Eagle and Mac to come down and prep for a Firefly swat.
The girl did a remarkable series of three backflips across the marble floor, ending up in front of the piano. She leaned over and started to play. It wasn’t perfect, but the message was clear: don’t have to practice when you can do. Her green-tipped fingers were flying across the ivory as Eagle and Mac came down, golf bags on their shoulders, weapons in hand. Roland had his flamer on his back and machine gun in hand.
“Can you play the violin?” Doc asked.
“Can you?” she asked him, not missing a stroke on the keys.
Nada started to laugh and the team turned toward him because Nada never laughed.
“She’s our Asset,” Nada said. “Our Scout.”
“Oh,” the girl said. “I love love love that movie.”
“What movie?” Mac asked as he checked the fuses he was putting in the pockets of his golf shorts.
“Really?” the girl said. “Scout and Boo Radley and just nothing?”
“And Atticus,” Eagle threw in.
“We get it,” Moms said, trying to get the derailed team back on track. “The curling iron.”
“You want me to get it?”
“NO!” Everyone said it at the same time, causing the girl to actually pause in her playing.
“So, we all cross the Rubicon?” the girl asked.
Nada looked at Moms. “I like her.”
Moms gave him a look.
“I mean, she’s young,” Nada said, “but she knows the area and is quick and—”
Scout slammed the lid over the keys and sang at the top of her lungs: “Love it, love it, love it, the lady is in charge. The boys have to ask.” She turned toward the front door. “Let’s go to my house.” She looked over her shoulder at the group, loaded with weapons, explosives, and flamer. “Might not want to walk across the street like that.”
The team scrambled to jam everything back into the golf bags, tennis racket bag, and shopping bags (eco-friendly, they boasted) that Eagle had uncovered in the garage. When they were done the team stood in the foyer and Scout shook her head. “Better, but not going to fly. You look like a bunch of government people hiding your weapons in a tennis racket bag, golf bags, and supermarket bags.”
“What do you suggest?” Nada asked, earning him a hard look from Moms.
“I go over there with one of you to protect me from my curling iron — I cannot believe I just said that last part — and I open the garage, and the rest of you drive from here to there in your big black gas-guzzlers. It’s not far. I think you can make it without getting lost.”
Moms sighed. “All right, Roland, you escort—”
As soon as Roland stepped forward, Scout was shaking her head. “No, no, no, and no.” She wrapped her arm around Nada’s bicep. “I prefer this gentleman.”
Roland frowned, Moms sighed once more, and Eagle laughed again.
“He ain’t no gentleman,” Mac said.
“He’s been nicer than any of you,” Scout said, the seriousness of her tone causing everyone to shut up for a little bit and feel the truth.
“I don’t fit in here,” Nada said.
“We meet anyone, I’ll take care of it,” Scout promised.
“Tell them I’m the new gardener?” Nada asked.
Scout laughed. “I can do better than that.” She tugged on his arm. “Come on, before that curling iron burns down my house.”
Moms opened her mouth to say something, but Scout already had Nada out the door, the heavy wood slamming shut behind them.
“Well,” Moms said.
“I’ll get the SUVs ready,” Eagle said, heading for the garage.
“I’ll load the gear,” Roland said, gesturing for Mac to help.
“I’ll help load, too,” Kirk said.
Moms was left standing alone in the foyer, staring at the closed front door.
Nada walked across the street next to Scout. He noticed that while her house was on scale with most of the others — ridiculously large — the one to the right of hers was on a scale all its own, at least twice the size. Looking more closely, he also noted a lot of things that troubled him. A small security camera was tracking them. As if on cue, the sprinklers came on. All of them, surrounding the house in a wall of water.
“Yeah,” Scout said, “that’s been the real problem until you people arrived. Bluebeard’s house.”
They reached the porch.
“Wait there,” she said, pointing at a swing. Before Nada could say anything, she disappeared inside the house, returning a few seconds later with a garage door opener. She sat down next to Nada.
“I watched them build that thing.” She pointed at the mansion, more a fortress. “I could sit in my room in the day and on the roof at night and watch. And a lot of stuff was done on it at night. Stuff Bluebeard didn’t want anyone to know about.”