The Case of the Missing Dinosaur Egg Read online

  Still, it was a relief when she smiled and said, “Such a large piece of chocolate!”

  Score! So far, Tessa’s sneaky plan was working perfectly!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  While the chocolate-dipped dinosaur egg finished cooling, Toni, Tessa, Nate and I went out and played Frisbee with the dogs. It was almost time for Granny to pick us up when we went back inside and packed the egg into the basket.

  We were admiring our work when Abuelita came into the kitchen to say the White House van was out front.

  That was when I thought of those unsmiling soldiers at the gate and realized maybe this wouldn’t be so easy. None of us had ever tried to sneak a dinosaur egg fossil out of an embassy before. We didn’t know what it would be like.

  In the front hall, Abuelita gave us each a hug good-bye.

  Then, with Tessa in the lead, Toni, Nate and I walked out the front door and around to the courtyard. At the same time, a woman from the embassy staff brought Hooligan from the back. Since I was carrying the Easter basket, Nate took Hooligan’s leash.

  Through the black metal fence, I saw the White House van parked on the street. Also outside were two Secret Service guys. Jeremy was one, and I didn’t know the other.

  “Good-bye, dear friends.” Toni gave us each a kiss on the cheek. When it was my turn she whispered, “And good luck!”

  Toni is super pretty, and even though I was busy worrying, I noticed that her kiss made Nate turn pink.

  We started walking toward the gate, and the soldier on the left unlatched it. With the dinosaur egg inside, the Easter basket was heavy and awkward to carry. I felt like every step was an effort, but I kept my chin tilted up so I would look confident.

  Step, step, step, step, step. We were almost out . . . . . . but then, in an instant, everything changed. The soldier on the left—responding to something he heard on the earpiece of his radio—shoved the metal gate shut—clank!—and now our way was blocked.

  I froze. Outside the fence, Jeremy and the other Secret Service agent squared their shoulders and rocked back on their heels, ready for anything. Meanwhile, Malik emerged from the White House van.

  Toni spoke to the soldier: “What is wrong? Open the gate at once!”

  The soldier answered, “Your friends may leave, Miss Alfredo-Chin. But the holiday basket must remain.”

  Toni stamped her foot. “The basket is my gift to them!”

  “I have my orders,” he said. “Once the basket has been returned to Mrs. Casera, then your friends may leave.”

  Mrs. Casera—wha . . . ? But then I smelled her cigarette smoke and turned. Out of nowhere, she had appeared beside me. Scowling, she reached for the Easter basket.

  I have never been so scared, and—in case you don’t know—I am not a brave person. But the egg was important to science, it didn’t belong to her and—darn it—we had gone to a lot of trouble to get it back.

  So instead of handing it over, I held it closer, stepped away and shook my head no.

  Hooligan growled.

  For a few seconds, it looked like a standoff—our team vs their team. The numbers were about equal, but their soldiers had way bigger guns.

  Then Abuelita appeared in the courtyard. “Let the children pass, Sergeant.”

  “We have our orders, ma’am,” he said.

  “Orders?” she repeated. “From whom are these orders? I am the mother of the president of our nation and the mother of the ambassador!”

  The soldier looked uncertain until Mrs. Casera spoke up. “His orders are from me.”

  “A housekeeper?” Abuelita said.

  Mrs. Casera made an awful face she probably thought was a smile. “I’m afraid that was only a cover. I am in fact a high official in the secret police force of our nation, sent here to ensure the security of the embassy.”

  Abuelita nodded. “Ah, I see. This explains why you are such a terrible housekeeper.”

  Mrs. Casera ignored the insult and grabbed the handle of the basket. To protect me, Hooligan lunged, which made Mrs. Casera shriek and let go, and after that things really got crazy. The sound of radio static and shouting voices filled the air. Ozzabelle showed up to yip and run in circles.

  “Throw the basket over the fence, Cammie!” Tessa called, but the basket was way too heavy. Meanwhile, three men in suits, taking orders from Mrs. Casera, advanced toward me—and I was trapped!

  It was Ozzabelle who came to my rescue, zigzagging between my feet and snapping at the men, who tried to stomp her with their shiny shoes. No way would Hooligan allow that! Protecting his little buddy, he jumped and threw his full furry weight against the first man, who fell against the second, who fell against the third, so that they all went over like dominoes.

  Outside the fence, Jeremy was on his radio. Maybe Mom would send in the marines to rescue us! But if that got on the news, it would not look good for the friendship between the United States and a nearby nation.

  My thoughts were as chaotic as the action around me, when all of a sudden, everything changed—like someone had hit the Pause button. First the soldiers at the gate turned their heads, then the three men in suits on the ground, then Abuelita and even the dogs.

  They were looking at someone standing in one of the second-floor windows—and when finally Mrs. Casera looked up, too, she groaned in dismay.

  The man in the window was wearing a blue work shirt. He had curly black hair, dark eyes, a crooked nose and a skinny face. His expression wasn’t pouty like it is on his CDs, though. It was stern.

  “Wait a second, that’s—” I started to say, but Toni shushed me with a finger to her lips. When I looked again, the man was gone.

  Tessa took advantage of the momentary confusion: “Run, Cammie!”

  I did, and I could tell that now the soldiers didn’t know what to do. Obey Abuelita? Obey Mrs. Casera?

  Tessa crossed her arms over her chest and spoke to them: “It looks like you just have to decide for yourselves. Whose side are you on?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  For a moment, the soldier on the left looked hopeless and confused, but then his face changed. He had made his decision.

  “You’ll pay for this, Sergeant!” cried Mrs. Casera as he unlatched the gate and let us through.

  “Thanks very much, Sergeant!” said Tessa. Then she shoved me ahead, and Nate and Hooligan followed. Before I knew what was happening, Granny had hustled us into the White House van and Malik was gunning the motor.

  “Are you okay?” Granny asked. “And wherever did you get such a huge chocolate egg for your Easter basket?”

  “We’re fine,” I said, breathing for what seemed like the first time in a while.

  “But we can’t tell you about the egg, Granny,” said Tessa.

  “We promised,” said Nate.

  “Hmph,” said Granny. “Perhaps we will discuss the egg later. For now, though, I have to tell you Easter dinner will be delayed. There are a couple of gentlemen waiting in the Treaty Room to see you.”

  It was Mr. Morgan and Mr. Webb in the Treaty Room—I mean, in case you hadn’t figured that out. Mom was there, too, making a special guest appearance. So was Charlotte.

  “Hey, hi—how was Pittsburgh?” Tessa asked when we’d all sat down. “We have bad news, though,” she went on. “Professor Bohn didn’t do it.”

  Mr. Morgan nodded. “We know. We established that the first day. So right after we sent you the postcard, we left Pittsburgh to travel to a certain nearby nation.”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  Mr. Morgan looked at Mom, and Mom said, “I’m afraid their trip was top secret.”

  “Oh, fine,” said Tessa. “So you knew about it and didn’t tell us!”

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said, and that was all. One thing I’m finding out—when your mom is the president, there are a lot of things she can’t tell you.

  “I bet we know some things that you don’t,” Tessa said—and you could practically hear t
he nyah-nyah-nyah in her voice. “Like how the housekeeper is an officer in the police and Mr. Valenteen is a spy.”

  Mr. Morgan and Mr. Webb looked at each other. “How did you—”

  Tessa waved her arms the way she does. “Never mind. And we’ve got another secret, too, so don’t even bother asking where the dinosaur egg is now, because we won’t tell you.”

  Mr. Morgan said, “You know where the dinosaur egg is?”

  Mom looked equally surprised, which—I have to admit—kind of made me feel a little nyah-nyah-nyah myself.

  Tessa said, “I never said we knew where the egg was.”

  And Nate said, “But if we did, we’d for sure turn it over to the scientists it belongs to, the ones who want to study it.”

  “And now we have some questions for you, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Webb.” Tessa crossed her arms over her chest. “At the embassy today, there was a guy in the window, and when he showed up, it was like he was a rock star or something. All of a sudden, the soldiers didn’t know who to listen to.”

  Nate started to say, “Wasn’t the guy in the window Eb—”

  But Mr. Webb put a finger to his lips, and Mom said, “It will be better for everyone if we don’t name names. I will only say this. There is a hero of the protest movement in a certain nearby nation who is beloved by the people there. It is even possible he will one day be elected to office. It is also possible that, for his own safety, he must remain in hiding for now. Who knows? He may even be in hiding in his nation’s embassy in the United States—protected by relatives of the current president.”

  All of a sudden, things started to make sense.

  “If that’s true,” I said, “maybe President Manfred Alfredo-Chin sent a high official in the secret police to find this guy . . . and maybe she didn’t do such a good job?”

  Mom nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Wow.” Tessa shook her head. “So sometimes politics are so complicated even people in the same family disagree with each other! I’m sure glad it’s not like that here.”

  “Not in our family, at least,” Mom said. “And now that you three are safe and sound, the important thing is the egg. It must be returned as quietly as possible. And it looks to me like the First Kids are on the case.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The morning of the Easter egg roll was clear and bright. The party started at nine-thirty with “the President’s Own” United States Marine Band playing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” and Hooligan—trying to look dignified—making an appearance on the Truman Balcony wearing pink-and-white bunny ears.

  Later, singers and dancers performed, and authors and actors and senators read stories. Nate played the piano—a song called “Easter Parade” by a man named Irving Berlin.

  Meanwhile, Tessa and I got to roll Easter eggs with kids. I like the really little kids best because they don’t understand we’re supposed to be famous, and they just act normal.

  All the time, though, what Tessa, Nate and I were really looking forward to was meeting one special guest, Professor Cordell Bohn.

  We had an Easter basket to give him.

  With all those people, we couldn’t count on running into Professor Bohn, so we made arrangements to meet him near the East Gate at noon.

  “There he is.” Tessa pointed. Nate was carrying the basket. I waved, and Professor Bohn waved back. When we got closer, I saw that his usually merry face looked sad.

  “I have to go back to Pittsburgh tomorrow,” he said. “It’s been a tough time here in Washington. I don’t think Professor Rexington is ever going to forgive me for letting the dinosaur egg get away.”

  Tessa consulted her Barbie watch, the one she’s too old for. “In about thirty seconds,” she said, “you are going to feel a whole lot better. But first I have one question. How come you called Jan and Larry to tell them the egg was missing? To certain people I won’t name, that looked suspicious.”

  Professor Bohn raised his eyebrows. “I called because I wanted to get the word out,” he said. “I thought if it was on the news, a lot of people would hear about it and someone might call the police with a tip. But”—he looked at each of us in turn—”I don’t get it. Why am I going to feel better?”

  “Because we have a present for you.” Nate held out the basket.

  Professor Bohn started to say, “Aw, you didn’t have to—” but then he wasn’t expecting the basket to be so heavy and almost dropped it on his foot. “What in the world . . . ?”

  “Don’t try to eat that egg,” Tessa warned him. “Seriously.”

  The oversized chocolate egg nestled among the jelly beans in the green Easter grass. We had asked the White House pastry chef to add a few pastel frosting flowers that morning, so the egg really did look nice.

  Professor Bohn stared down at it, and his jaw dropped. “It’s the right size, the right shape, the right weight, but . . . it can’t be!”

  “Yeah, it can,” Tessa said.

  “But this is wonderful!” Professor Bohn said. “I must contact the museum at once. They’ll want to make an announcement, and—”

  Tessa crossed her arms over her chest. Nate shook his head. My voice was stern: “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “We never gave this to you,” Nate said.

  “It just appeared, you don’t know how,” said Tessa. “It’s a matter of national security.”

  “But still—good luck with your research,” I said.

  “And”—Tessa wagged her finger—“be sure to share with Professor Rexington! Even though you think she’s wrong about how the dinosaur’s related to the birds and all, scientists have to play fair just like everybody else.”

  THE WHITE HOUSE EASTER EGG ROLL

  First Kid Tessa Parks can be forgiven for thinking an eggroll is something you eat at a Chinese restaurant. An eggroll really is a Chinese-style appetizer. Less well known is an egg roll—two words—a game in which competitors use a serving spoon to push eggs across a lawn. The tradition of egg rolling around Eastertime comes from England and is still popular in some places there.

  With one exception, egg rolling is not so common in the United States. But that exception is a big one: the White House Easter Egg Roll, which takes place the Monday after Easter.

  HISTORY

  While some people say it was First Lady Dolley Madison who started the egg roll tradition in Washington, there is no proof of this. In fact, the first recorded egg-rolling activities there seem to have been spontaneous. After the Civil War, children enjoyed rolling hard-boiled eggs from their lunch pails on the slopes outside the Capitol in the spring. The local newspapers wrote about this, also noting approvingly that these children playing together were from all races and classes.

  That kind of integration was unusual in nineteenth-century Washington. As a side note, you would have to fast-forward all the way to 1953, when Mamie Eisenhower was First Lady, before African-American children would be invited to attend the official Easter Egg Roll at the White House. More than fifty years after that, President and Mrs. Obama made a point of including same-sex couples and their children on the guest list.

  The Easter tradition moved to the White House in 1878. That spring, Congress had outlawed games of any kind on the Capitol grounds to save the lawn. President Rutherford B. Hayes learned how disappointed local children were one evening when he was taking a walk. According to Hayes’s journal, a boy approached him and shouted, “Say! Say! Are you going to let us roll eggs in your yard?”

  The surprised president was from Ohio and didn’t know about the local tradition. When his staff explained, he and his wife, Lucy, decided that yes, they would let the boy—and all the other children of the town—roll eggs on the White House lawn. Thus the White House Easter Egg Roll was born.

  BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

  By 1889, when Benjamin Harrison was president, the event was so well established that vendors selling fruit, waffles, peanuts, balloons, pinwheels and sweets set up shop outside the White House gates to serve the people wa
iting in line.

  The vendors weren’t the only ones who saw the egg roll as a business opportunity. Since adults were not allowed to attend without children, clever kids figured out they could get paid for escorting childless adults. Once on the grounds, the children doubled back to wait for their next customer. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, an eleven-year-old boy told a reporter the five quarters he earned that day would help pay his family’s rent.

  THE TROUBLE WITH EGGS

  While the Easter Egg Roll has always been a hit with kids, it has not always been popular with the First Family. President Theodore Roosevelt’s wife, Edith, wanted to call it off entirely because it was hard on the lawn and she didn’t like the smell of leftover eggs. First Lady Pat Nixon had the same problem when she tried using hard-boiled eggs for an old-fashioned Easter egg hunt. The eggs that weren’t found remained rotting outside for days—pew!

  President Gerald Ford tried using plastic eggs, but it was President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan who came up with the most enduring solution: painted wooden eggs. Now thousands of colorful wooden eggs, stamped with the president’s and First Lady’s signatures, are given away every year as keepsakes.

  Mrs. Reagan can claim an additional egg roll distinction. She not only hosted the event when her husband was president in the 1980s, but she also attended as a guest of President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge when she was a child during the 1920s.

  PRESIDENTIAL PETS

  As a guest in 1927, the future First Lady might have seen the glamorous Grace Coolidge parading among the partygoers, carrying one of the best-known White House pets, Rebecca Raccoon. At the 1922 event, President Warren G. Harding’s photogenic Airedale, Laddie Boy, sniffed kids, shook hands and did tricks. Eleanor Roosevelt brought first dogs Meggie, a Scottie, and Major, a German shepherd, to the 1933 egg roll.