Ann Martin - Mallory And The Mystery Diary

"David Michael?" she called.

Andrew and Karen looked up from their toys.

"Have you seen David Michael?" Kristy asked them.

They shook their heads.

"Oh, brother. You'd think he'd tell me if he was going back down — "

"Morbidda Destiny," interrupted Karen in a whisper.

"What?" said Kristy.

"The witch next door. I can see her house out the window. I bet she's a friend of Old Ben Brewer's and has powers in this attic and she and the ghosts have got David Michael — "

"BOOH"

Everyone jumped a mile as David Michael burst out of an old wardrobe in a corner of the room. Emily began to cry.

"David Michael," said Kristy sternly, "you scared us to death."

"I'm sorry," he said immediately. "I didn't mean to make Emily cry. Honest. But wouldn't

hide-and-seek be a good game to play up here?"

Everyone had to agree that it would, since they hadn't discovered all the hiding places already. So a game began. Kristy helped Emily dry her tears and then they worked together as a team.

The afternoon passed quickly. Kristy was looking for the zillionth hiding place that was big enough for both herself and Emily, when Karen, standing by a window, cried, "I see the Pink Clinker! I see the Pink Clinker! It's coming up the drive!"

"I think this is the end of hide-and-seek, you guys," said Kristy. "Let's go downstairs and see Nannie. She won't believe what we did today."

"Yeah," agreed Karen. "We stayed up in the attic for hours and didn't see a single sign of ghosts."

"Are you surprised?" asked Kristy, who confessed later that she'd been hoping for a little excitement, maybe a mystery like mine.

"I guess not," replied Karen. "Ghosts only come out at night anyway. This attic might be okay during the day, but I wouldn't want to come up here at night."

"Me neither," said Andrew and David Michael.

"Me neither," said Kristy.

She picked up Emily, and she and her brothers and sisters went downstairs to meet Nannie.

Chapter 9.

Kristy was sitting in Claud's director's chair, her visor in place, a pencil stuck over one ear. She was wearing her usual jeans-and-turtle-neck outfit, and she was busy trying to get the meeting underway.

"Order! Come to order, please!" she was saying as she tapped a pencil on Claud's desk.

The rest of us were gathered and ready to go. Jessi and I were sitting on the floor, leafing through the club notebook. Jessi was wearing a long, heart-covered sweat shirt over her dance leotard and a pair of pink pants that (although you couldn't see this) I knew were held up at the waist with a drawstring. I was wearing boring old jeans, but a top that I liked a lot — a big white long-sleeved T-shirt that said I Love KIDS across the front.

In a row on Claud's bed were Mary Anne,

Stacey, and Claudia. Mary Anne, who can be pretty funky in her own shy way, was wearing a very cool short printed jumper over a striped shirt. You might think that those two things would clash, but they didn't. They looked great together. The jumper was white with a small red print, and the shirt was white with narrow, widely-spaced stripes. Claudia called the outfit "a fashion risk that worked." Claud herself was wearing jeans, a plain white blouse, a pink sweater, white socks, and loafers. She said she'd gone back to the fifties for the day. Stacey, on the other hand, was in a much more typical outfit — a short-sleeved blue-and-white jumpsuit with cuffed pants. Parts of it were striped, parts were solid. On her feet were high-topped sneakers laced only halfway up so that she could roll the tongue of the shoe down (extremely cool), plus she was wearing a lot of jewelry. I think Claud had made some of it for her.

Last but not least was Dawn, sitting backward in Claud's desk chair, resting her arms on the top rung of the back. Her outfit was fairly normal — pants and a baggy sweat shirt — but on her head was a small straw hat! I couldn't believe it. Talk about fashion risks.

Anyway, Kristy was calling us to order, and we were all straightening up and paying attention.

"Treasurer?" said Kristy to Stacey.

"Dues day!" Stacey cried (as if we could forget). "Pay up, you guys."

Grumbling and groaning, we reached into our pockets or purses and forked over the weekly dues. Stacey collected it, tossed it in the treasury, added up the new total (she can do this practically just by looking at the money), and announced what was in the ma-nila envelope.

"Thirty-two dollars and forty-one cents. We're in good shape. Anybody need anything for the Kid-Kits?"

"Crayons," said Kristy.

"Can of Play-Doh," said Claudia.

"Stickers," I said.

Stacey handed each of us some money, reminding us twice to bring back the change. She looked as if parting with the money were painful.

Then the phone began to ring. After three job calls, things settled down. In fact, we reached a moment of silence.

"It must be twenty of six," said Jessi. "Si-

lences are almost always at twenty of or twenty after the hour."

I stretched my head up to look at Claud's digital clock, the club's official timepiece. "Nope," I replied. "It's quarter of."

"Oh, well," Jessi said, and shrugged.

When a few more moments went by without another call, I said, "Um, Stacey? Have you noticed anything unusual at your house?"

"Unusual?" repeated Stacey. "Yeah. It got neat. Every last thing has been put away."

"That's not what I meant. I meant, have you noticed anything strange at night, in the dark, especially after you and your mom have gone to bed?"

"You mean like ghoulies and ghosties?" teased Claudia.

"Well . . . yes," I answered. "I'm serious, you guys. I'm dying to know if Sophie ever proved that her father was innocent. If there are no wandering spirits at Stacey's, it might mean that she did."

"It might also mean there are no such things as ghosts," spoke up Kristy.

"Come on, Stacey. Have you seen anything?" I asked again.

"We-ell, I have heard a few funny noises."

"Like what?" I asked excitedly.

"Oh, scratchings and blowings. Mom says I've forgotten what country nights are like. She says the noises are just squirrels or the wind. Stuff like that. One night I did see something white in my room. It was at the foot of my bed/' (I heard Mary Anne draw her breath in sharply) "but I think it was just moonlight."

"Couldn't you tell for sure?" I asked. "Did it move or anything?"

Stacey shook her head. "Nope."

"Well, haven't you seen moonlight before?" I pressed.

"Only here in Stoneybrook. And at Camp Mohawk. In New York, it's impossible to tell moonlight from streetlights and lights from other buildings."

"Hmm," I said.

The phone rang then and we arranged a job for Mary Anne with the Perkins girls, who live in Kristy's old house.

When that was done, Kristy said, "You know, I've been thinking." (Isn't she always?) "We're going about this all wrong. We're solving the mystery backward. Instead of trying to find out whether Stacey's house is haunted, and then deciding if that means that Sophie and Jared's spirits are still hanging around —

which is pretty unlikely, all things considered — why don't we just try to solve the original mystery?"

"How can we do that?" I asked. "Everything happened over a hundred years ago."

"Oh, you never know what kind of information you can turn up once you start looking," replied Kristy. "For instance, we know that Sophie calls her grandfather 'Grandfather Hickman' and that he was rich and lived in a mansion across town from Stacey's house. You don't suppose Grandfather Hickman could have been James Hickman, do you?"

"Old Hickory?" squeaked Mary Anne.

"Oh, my lord!" exclaimed Claudia.

There's a legend in Stoneybrook about a recluse nicknamed Old Hickory, who was the meanest and stingiest, but also the wealthiest man in town, and who died decades ago, leaving his fortune to some long-lost nephew. In his will, he specifically said that he didn't want a big funeral or even a gravestone. But his nephew felt a little guilty, since he was inheriting so much money from someone he didn't even know, so he had a gravestone as big as a statue put up for his uncle in Stoneybrook cemetery. Now people say that the graveyard is haunted by the ghost of Old Hick-83