Books in Signatures series

Best-selling author Richard Peck has created his richest work yet in this powerful story of a young girl starting over in a new place. After a lifetime of following her mother through one faceless city after another, Molly finds herself dumped on her great-aunt Fay. Though unwilling to believe her new home is anything more than a temporary stop, Molly is reluctantly drawn into a friendship with her next-door neighbor Will, a stray like herself. As the school year unfolds, Molly discovers the secrets behind the doors of the quiet town and comes to learn something important: The world is full of strays. Some just end up where they belong sooner than others. The author of more than twenty acclaimed novels for young people, Richard Peck will once again touch readers with his humor and compassion in a story that speaks to the stray in all of us. Richard Peck has received several awards for the body of his work, including the 1997 Empire State Award.

1944 Belfast. Fraulein Berg arrives to teach German at Kate, Harriet and Sally's school. Saturated with war-time propaganda, reading spy stories and imagining themselves dropping over enemy lines to perform daring and heroic deeds, the girls decide that, as she's German, she must be the enemy - and she must be a spy. They set to work to prove it, following her everywhere, recording everything in notebooks, hounding her, seeing themselves as valiant secret service agents helping their country. Finally on a train travelling between Dublin and Belfast, they alert a border guard ... The story is told by Kate years later, always haunted by their silly antics at the time, and often wondering what happened, in the end, to the unhappy Fraulein Berg. In fact, she was a Jewish escapee from Nazi Germany, having lost parents, two sisters and a brother in the gaschambers. Kate reflects that, so used to dividing people up into Protestants and Catholics, enemies and friends, they had never stopped to think of the tragedy they might be creating..First published in 1980 by Julia MacRae Books