I admit I was getting to be a pretty good actor myself. I just sat at my desk looking cool and exchanging faces with Peatmouse while Banana had his conference up at Miss Blossom’s desk. Then, even though my heart was thumping away I sat and stared out the window with a blank face until they were both done.
“See ya at the monkey bars!” Peatmouse called.
“See ya!” I called back, and sauntered up to Miss Blossom’s desk. As soon as I arrived there, she pulled a sheet of paper from the drawer and laid it down on the desk.
“Amazing!” she said peering closely at it. From past experience, I recalled that Miss Switch had often gotten carried away with actually being a teacher instead of a real, honest-to-goodness practicing witch. So could I have actually been called up to her desk to discuss my math homework? I inched closer to her desk to see what she was studying so closely I was relieved to discover that it was my copy of Saturna’s report.
“What’s amazing about it, Miss Switch?” I asked, tingling with anticipation.
“Miss Blossom! Miss Blossom, Rupert!” she said impatiently. “When I’m in this costume, it’s ‘Miss Blossom.’ We have to keep our focus here. But what’s amazing is that a message like this can be plucked out of thin air.”
“Not exactly thin air, Miss Blossom,” I said. “More like a thin wire.”
“Thin air, thin wire, who cares? It’s still astonishing,” said Miss Blossom. “You don’t think science is going to overtake witchcraft, do you, Rupert?”
“Not a chance, Miss Blossom,” I replied. “I mean, take getting a broomstick airborne on its own steam, or going back in time, or a person being turned into a lizard or a woolly caterpillar. Never happen.”
“In all fairness, Rupert,” said Miss Blossom, “we do get help from certain little bewitching aids. You know, eye of newt, wing of bat, tongue of toad, and items of that sort.”
“I don’t think any of those things would do much to move science forward, Miss Blossom,” I said.
“You may be right,” said Miss Blossom. “At any rate, what did you conclude from Saturna’s message?”
“Nothing much, at first,” I replied. “Now it looks as if the class is going to be putting on the play mentioned. But I have to tell you, Miss Blossom, ‘revenge’ and ‘disaster’ don’t sound too good.”
“They don’t, indeed! You are dead right about that, Rupert,” said Miss Blossom. “But did you conclude anything else?”
“Afraid not,” I replied. “I mean, I couldn’t detect any instructions you said Saturna was going to be spoon-feeding to Mr. Dorking, so how are we supposed to know what she has in mind for him to do?”
“Bingo!” shouted Miss Blossom. “I knew you’d get it! You’re absolutely right, Rupert. There are no instructions. Which means, I am sorry to say, that we are in very deep trouble!”
I didn’t like the sound of this. “What … what kind of trouble?” I asked.
“Rupert,” said Miss Blossom, “if Saturna is not issuing instructions to Grodork, it can mean only one thing. It means that for the very first time since I’ve known him, that brother of Saturna’s, from somewhere in the vacant space he has between his ears, has actually come up with an idea of his own!”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Of course I’m sure!” replied Miss Blossom grimly “Analyze it, Rupert. What does ‘I approve’ suggest to you?”
“I guess that Saturna approves something someone else has done,” I replied.
“Exactly!” said Miss Blossom. “Grodork! He has some surprise spell, and Saturna’s buying the idea. Blast and botheration! Here I thought we had a direct link to Saturna’s brain. Devious it might be, but at least we’d know what we were dealing with. The question is how does Grodork communicate with her? Do you suppose she’s set him up with his own Web site that she can pick up—dodo.com, password grodork, or something like that?” Miss Blossom smiled thinly at her little joke.
“More likely he just sends her an E-mail,” I said.
“Well, if he can do that,” said Miss Blossom, “why can’t she just communicate with him the same way without all the computowitch Web site nonsense?”
“It’s the privacy issue, Miss Blossom,” I replied. “I just discovered computowitch.com and the password by dumb luck. But sending an E-mail with the kind of stuff she’s sending via a computer to Pepperdine Elementary School would be the height of craziness. All the teachers have E-mail addresses here and anybody can pick them up. [email protected] would probably be yours, if you were interested. I think that the school secretary distributes the teacher E-mail a couple of times a day. What would she think if she happened to light on [email protected] and read Saturna’s poetry?”
“I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole,” said Miss Blossom.
“Exactly! But … but …” I said excitedly, “the messages Mr. Dorking is sending to Saturna could still be in the computer, if he was, well, too stupid to know how to delete them. I could find out right now.”
“I can’t go with you. Too risky,” said Miss Blossom. “But go on! I’ll be right here waiting for you.”
It was a wasted trip. When I raced back to Miss Blossom in Room Twelve, I had to report that there was nothing.
“No messages from Mr. Dorking to Saturna. Nothing!” I announced. “He’s erased everything.”
“Blast and botheration!” said Miss Blossom. “Now we’re back to square one with nothing but guesswork.”
“A play doesn’t sound too dangerous, Miss Blossom,” I said.
“Don’t you be too sure about that, Rupert,” she replied.
“Can’t you come up with any play-bewitching aids along the lines of eye of newt and that sort of thing?” I asked.
“Oh, there’s probably a whole medicine chest full of aids of some sort,” said Miss Blossom.
