Ann Martin - Stacey And The Haunted Masquerade

"This dance is going to be the best!" Grace

said, stepping back after we'd hung the last poster. "Ted's going to be really impressed," I knew Cokie was giving me one of her Looks behind Grace's back, but I pretended not to see it. "I'm sure he will be," I told Grace. I wanted so badly to believe that there was a Ted, so I wouldn't have to believe that Grace could have destroyed the streamers and light bulbs. Now that I was with her, it was almost impossible to picture her doing such a thing. Grace has such a sweet, honest face.

"Yeah, well, Carrie had a sweet face, too," said Claud as she pulled out a purple marker and started on some careful lettering. "And look what happened at her school!"

I shuddered, remembering. Claudia and I rented the movie, Carrie, a few months earlier, and I don't think I slept for a week afterward. I like scary movies, but that one was over the top.

It was Wednesday afternoon, and my friends and I were gathered in Claudia's room for a BSC meeting. But we weren't talking about clients or schedules or any other kind of BSC business. We were talking about the latest bizarre episode at SMS.

Here's how I found out about it: When I arrived at school that Wednesday morning, Todd Long met me near the side door. "You

won't believe it," he said. "I don't believe it."

"What?" I asked. But Todd wouldn't answer. He just led me through the halls until we were near the cafeteria. The floor was covered with tiny bits of red confetti. "So?" I said. "Somebody made some weird mess here. Is this what you wanted to show me?"

Todd didn't answer. He cast his gaze around at the walls, and I followed it. That's when it hit me. The posters! That wasn't confetti on the floor. It was Claudia's beautiful posters, all ripped into minuscule bits.

I put my hand over my mouth. I couldn't speak.

"I know," Todd said grimly. "They also tore up the one near the auditorium and the one by the main entrance."

"But why?" I asked. "What a horrible tiling to do."

"That’s not the worst of it," Todd said. "I want you to see something else." He led me through the halls again, this time toward the gym. I had no idea what he was going to show me, but I did know one thing: I probably didn't want to see it.

"Nice, huh?" Todd asked as we rounded the last corner.

I looked up at the poster we'd hung there and drew in a sharp breath.

"At least they left one of them up," Todd

said. He was trying to lighten the situation, but it didn't work. What I was seeing sent chills down my spine, and no amount of joking was going to make those chills go away. Spray-painted across the poster, in drippy, red, bloody-looking letters was this message:

Todd was looking at me, as if he expected me to say something, but I couldn't. I was too creeped out. Instead, I helped him take the poster down and roll it up. We'd have to make more posters — I knew that much — but would they just be ruined too?

Finally, as we walked down the hall toward our lockers (it was nearly time for homeroom), I thought of something. "Do you think it might have been the Mischief Knights?" I asked Todd.

He shook his head slowly. "I almost wish it had been them," he said. "That would make this easier to understand. But if they did it, they sure didn't want anyone to know. They didn't leave a note, or their initials, or anything."

I remembered what Rick had said about the torn-up streamers, that it wasn't the Mischief

Knights' style. I'd thought he was right about that, and the same thing applied here. Ripping up posters isn't mischief; it’s vandalism, plain and simple. And writing on them is vandalism also, especially if you're trying to scare people.

And people would have been scared, if they'd seen the poster, or heard about what it said. But Todd and I agreed to keep it as quiet as we could. That's why I had waited until the BSC meeting to tell my friends about it, and to show them the poster, which I'd stuck into my backpack after we'd rolled it up.

Claudia was already at work on some new posters — that’s what she was doing with the purple marker — while we talked about what had happened and tried to guess who had done it.

Claudia had a suspect in mind. "Little Ms. Mason," she said angrily. "Face it, she never liked my posters to begin with. I wouldn't put it past Cokie to take advantage of the fact that all those pranks have been happening at school. She knew she could do some vandalism and blame it on the Mischief Knights."

"I don't know," Kristy said, tapping her pencil against her teem. "I think the Mischief Knights really might have done it. Maybe that other stuff they did was just for starters."

"You mean they were leading up to bigger things?" asked Abby, from her perch on

Claud's art books. She was playing with one of the Twizzlers Claud had passed around. She had pulled the strands apart, and now she was braiding them back together.

"Right," said Kristy. "Just when everybody was starting to enjoy their fun and games — wham!"

"What about Grace?" Jessi asked. She was talking into the floor as she did one of her painful-looking ballet stretches. "Is she still a suspect, Stace?"

"Well, I don't know," I said. "It really seems unlikely. She's just too sweet, even if she is Cokie's best friend. I can't imagine her tearing into those posters."

"But somebody did it," Mal said. "And whoever it is probably looks just as sweet as Grace. But underneath, he — or she — is different."

"Oohh, creepy," said Abby, grinning. 'I'll never look at my classmates the same way again. I'll always be wondering about that nasty 'underneath' part."

"You don't have to look far, with Cokie," Claudia muttered.

"What about the streamers and the light bulbs, though?" I asked. "Why would Cokie have ruined them?"

Claudia gave me a Look. "Come on, Stacey," she said. "Think about it."

I knew the answer almost before she finished speaking. "Because she hated the color scheme," I said slowly. Claudia nodded triumphantly.

"But is that really a reason for doing such a terrible thing?" Mary Anne asked suddenly. We all turned to look at her, and she blushed. She had been quiet during our meeting so far. "I've been thinking," she continued. "Maybe we're limiting ourselves by only looking for suspects at SMS."

"Where else should we look?" Kristy asked.

"Well, we could look in the community," Mary Anne said in a small voice. Then she sat up straight, and her voice became stronger. "We could look at Mr. Wetzler."

I gasped. "Mr. Wetzler! Sure! He's a definite suspect. Good thinking, Mary Anne."

Our meeting broke up soon after that, even though we hadn't come up with any answers. But less than twenty-four hours later, we were back in Claudia's room for an emergency meeting and we were talking about suspects again. Why? Because there had been another act of vandalism at the school. Somebody went wild with the red spray paint again, only this time it wasn't on a poster. It was on the walls of the gym. Here's what it said:

$10

That's all. $10. In figures about eight feet high. Nobody had a due what it meant. Especially Mr. Kingbridge, who made a special announcement to plead for an end to the vandalism, and to tell us that he might cancel the dance if it didn't stop. That’s why Kristy called the meeting.

"Okay," she'd said as soon as we had gathered in Claudia's room after school. "We have a genuine mystery on our hands. And the BSC never leaves a mystery unsolved, right?" She looked around expectantly.

"Right!" we replied.

"Right," Kristy echoed. "Let's do it. We don't want this dance to be canceled, do we?"

"No way," said Claud, pulling out a notebook. "Let's start. I'll make a list of suspects."

After that, we returned to the same discussion we'd had the day before. Only I wasn't contributing to it. I was remembering the "tragedy" Mr. Wetzler had mentioned in one of his wacky letters to the editor. And I was thinking about something Mr. Kingbridge had said when he first announced the dance. He'd mentioned something about "erasing those unpleasant memories of the past." What tragedy? What memories? Somebody seemed determined to make sure the dance never took