Read Cross My Heart And Hope To Spy for Free Online Page A

everything on her desk in case I got a chance to snoop and then had to put things back. I wanted to stop being a spy and start being a daughter. Especially when Mom glanced at my wrist and said, “You’re wearing Grandma’s watch.”
    I rubbed my thumb over the smooth glass that now doubled as a telephoto lens. “Yeah.”
    “That’s nice,” she said, and smiled happily. Even though she seemed to be fine now, I thought about the worried woman I’d shared a limo with from D.C., and the conversation I’d overheard. I wasn’t the only operative in that room clinging to her legend.
    And then, before I could stop to think, I blurted, “Do you have any fingernail clippers?” Mom looked at me for a second, and I knew I couldn’t back out now, so I held out my right hand, which thankfully, wasn’t shaking. “I’ve got a hangnail that’s driving me crazy.”
    “Sure, sweetie,” Mom said. “In my desk. Top drawer.”
    So see, I didn’t even have to pick the lock or fake the fingerprint-activated drawers. I was perfectly within my daughterly rights as I moved to my mother’s desk and rummaged around for the clippers.

    A brief search of the headmistress’s desk revealed the following:
    Headmistress Morgan had ten different lipsticks in her desk (only three of which were for purely cosmetic uses).

    Mom carried a small pan into her private bathroom and turned on the water, and that’s when I took pictures of every single thing in her trash can. Headmistress Morgan had, evidently, been fighting off a cold, because her trash contained fourteen used tissues and an empty bottle of Vitamin C.
    I knocked a paper clip dispenser off her desk and channeled Liz with a loud “Oopsy daisy.” Then I huddled on the floor as I picked up paper clips with one hand and rifled through her bottom desk drawers with the other.
    Of all the items the Gallagher Academy receives royalty revenues from, Band-Aids are surprisingly the most profitable.

    I could hear my mother on the far side of the room, stirring things, pouring things. “Did you find them?” she called out.
    I held up the nail clippers with one hand while I closed her bottom drawer with the other.
    I smiled and waved my manicured fingers and thought, I am a terrible daughter.
    But my mother only smiled in return, because maybe I’m also a pretty good spy.
    Ironically, the one person who could explain the difference was the one person I totally couldn’t ask.
    I placed the nail clippers back where I’d found them and looked down at a desk that even an expert would swear had never been touched. I placed my palms against the middle drawer and felt my fingertips brush against the smooth wood of the underside, the cool metal track on which it ran. But something else, too. Something thin and worn.
    “I know this semester is going to be a big adjustment for you, kiddo,” Mom said. She stirred a bubbling concoction in a Crock-Pot while I pressed a finger against the paper—felt it move.
    “And last semester. Well, I can only imagine what it must have been like—the reports, the debriefings.”
    I probably hadn’t found anything important; after all, the underside of a drawer isn’t a preferred hiding place for a spy—nothing about it is secure or protected. But it is a good hiding place for a woman—a place to keep something you want nearby but out of sight.
    “And I want you to know,” Mom went on, “that I am so proud of you.”
    Yes, that’s right, not only was I invading my mother’s personal space right under her nose, but that’s the moment she chose to tell me how proud she was of my new-and-improved behavior! It was official:
    I was a terrible person.
    Then I felt the paper give. It fluttered through the air and landed right on my lap. And from that point on I barely heard a word my mother said.
    Dad. It was a picture of Dad—but like no picture I’d ever seen, because for starters, he looked older than he did in the pictures Grandma had given me, and