Ann Martin - Mallory And The Mystery Diary

Buddy and I dashed downstairs. While Buddy put his jacket on, I explained to Mary Anne what we were doing. (Mary Anne was sitting for Suzi and Marnie that afternoon.)

"Good luck!" Mary Anne called after us as we ran out the Barretts' front door.

Buddy was so excited that he kept right on

running, all the way to my house. When I opened our door for him, he ran up to Va-nessa's and my room.

Vanessa was surprised, to say the least, to see Buddy appear breathlessly before her.

"What's going on?" she asked. She was in a poetry-writing phase, surrounded by papers. I hoped we hadn't broken her train of thought, "This isn't Nicky's room, Buddy," she said. "And he isn't home anyway."

"I'm not here to see Nicky," replied Buddy, undaunted.

"He's here to see the diary and the trunk," I said.

"Hmphh." Vanessa huffed out of our room with an armload of papers.

"Is that the trunk?" asked Buddy excitedly, pointing to it.

"It sure is," I answered. I was proud of the trunk. I had cleaned it and polished it and even tried to fix the broken locks. It looked more beautiful than ever.

"Where's the diary?"

"Right here." I retrieved the diary from my nightstand and Buddy and I sat next to each other on my bed.

Buddy opened the diary carefully. He

flipped to January 1st and just stared at the page. "Gosh," he said after a moment, "this is hard to read."

"I know. The ink is faded and Sophie had funny handwriting."

"She couldn't spell, either," said Buddy, and we both laughed.

"Good for you," I said. "What did you find wrong?"

"This word. Happy. She only put one 'p' in it. You would have to pronounce that 'hay-

py-'"

"You're absolutely right." I wanted to hug Buddy. If only Mr. Moser could see him now. He would probably send a nice note home to Mrs. Barrett.

Buddy struggled along with the diary for about ten minutes, sometimes reading to me, sometimes to himself. When he reached the middle of January, he said, "This is really boring. Where's the mystery?"

"You have to skip way ahead to when Sophie's little brother was born," I told him. I flipped through the diary. "There. Start reading there."

Buddy did. To himself. He read for so long that I got bored and began to read a new horse story I'd borrowed from the library. It was

after five o'clock when Buddy suddenly closed the diary.

I closed my book, too, and glanced over at him.

"I couldn't find the clue," said Buddy, looking disappointed.

"Well, don't feel too bad," I told him. "No one else has found any clues, either. This isn't Encyclopedia Brown, you know."

"Maybe the clue's not in the diary," said Buddy, as if he hadn't heard me. "Maybe it's somewhere else, like in the trunk. Could I look in the trunk, Mal?"

"Sure," I replied. "Just be really careful. Some of the clothes in there are so old they're falling apart."

"Okay."

Buddy opened the trunk and began feeling around. He dug deeper and deeper through the clothes until —

"Uh-oh," he said.

"What-oh?" I asked.

"Mallory, my hand is stuck."

"Stuck? How could it be stuck?"

"It just is."

I got up and felt around in the trunk. I followed Buddy's arm down, down until . . .

"It is stuck!" I exclaimed.

"Told you so."

"It's in a sort of pocket, I think." I moved aside some clothes and tugged on Buddy's arm. At last his hand came loose. It had been stuck in a pocket (a very well-hidden one), and it was now clutching a packet of papers.

"Look what was in there!" said Buddy.

We spread the papers out on my bed. Like the pages of the diary, they were old and yellowed, only some of these were actually crumbling, so we had to be extremely careful.

Buddy looked at the page numbered "one." He bent over so he could read it without touching it. "James Hickman," he said. "My Confession."

Buddy and I looked at each other, our mouths open. Then Buddy began to read out loud, but I was too excited to listen to his slow, careful pronunciation. For just a while, I couldn't be his tutor. I skimmed ahead silently.

It turned out that Grandfather Hickman really was James Hickman — so Kristy had been right. He was also Old Hickory, of course. And you will never guess what he did. People might have thought Jared was a mean guy, but he wasn't half as terrible as Old Hickory. Although I have to admit that if you can

believe Old Hickory's confession, he didn't set out to do something terrible. He just allowed something terrible to happen.

Old Hickory wrote that after his daughter died, he was distraught and couldn't even bear to look at her portrait. He didn't want to get rid of it, though, so he hired someone he called an "itinerant painter" to paint over the portrait of Sophie's mother. (I found out later that an itinerant painter was an amateur artist who made his living going from town to town painting portraits and other pictures for people who wanted "art" in their homes.) Then Old Hickory changed the frame around the painting and moved the new painting into another room in his house. That way his daughter was with him — and yet she wasn't.

Okay, that much I could understand. But then Old Hickory's friends (I guess he hadn't become a recluse yet) began asking where the portrait was. Old Hickory was embarrassed about what he'd done, so he lied and said the painting had disappeared, had probably been stolen. Immediately, the townspeople suspected Jared. They knew how Old Hickory felt about him — that Jared was a good-for-nothing who had married Sophie's mother for her money and then insisted that she have

another child when she was really too weak for it. And the terrible thing that James Hick-man had done was to let the people believe they were right. He never admitted to having the portrait painted over — not until he was old and ready to die and bursting with his secret. Then he wrote out his confession, knowing that someday someone would find it and learn the truth.

"Whoa/' said Buddy when he'd finally finished reading the confession and I had helped him understand the hard parts.

"I know," I said. "Double whoa. What a find you made, Buddy! I'm glad you got your hand stuck. Maybe you will become a detective one day."

"Maybe," said Buddy. "You know, detectives ask a lot of questions, and I have one right now."

"What is it?"

"How did this trunk with Old Hickory's confession in it turn up in the attic of Sophie's house — with Sophie's diary and clothes in it?"

I frowned. "Good question," I said. "Maybe when Old Hickory's nephew inherited the mansion, he moved some things he didn't want over to Sophie's house. Old Hickory

owned that house, too. The trunk was probably half empty, and the nephew just dumped some stuff into it."

"Hey!" cried Buddy. "If the nephew moved the trunk to Sophie's house, he might have moved some other things over there, like, say, an old painting!"

"Whoa," I said again.

Chapter 14.

"Buddy, you're a genius!" I exclaimed.

Buddy blushed. "Maybe, maybe not. I'm just guessing."

"But your guess is a good one. Come on, let's call Stacey and see if she's home. It's almost five-thirty. We still have half an hour before I have to get you back to Mary Anne. We have just enough time to take a look around Stacey's attic."

"Oh, boy!" cried Buddy.

I was on the hall phone dialing Stacey in about two seconds.

"Stace! Stace!" I said. (I'd been so afraid she wouldn't be home.)

"Mal? Is that you? Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, it's me, and everything is better than all right. You will not believe what Buddy found today!"

I told her how Buddy and I had come over

to my house, and Buddy had gotten his hand stuck and found the confession. Stacey sounded somewhat confused — until I told her our theory about Old Hickory's things winding up in her attic. Then she got the point immediately.