“Hey! C’mon!” Wally protested.
“All you’ve done so far is take copy back and forth between our houses and carry newspapers down to Oldakers’,” said Josh. “It wouldn’t hurt you to write something.”
But Wally didn’t want to write. He liked to spell, but he didn’t especially like to write. “I’m not getting any credit toward summer reading!” he said.
“Well, do a good job with your story and we’ll put it on the front page,” said Jake.
Embarrassing, that’s what it was.
Grandpa was an anthropologist, Wally wrote. He had a cupboard full of pottery pieces and shells and stuff. He could tell you a lot about people he had never met because they lived a long time ago, but he couldn’t tell you much about his neighbors.
That was about all Wally could think of to say, and he’d only gotten that far because that’s what he’d heard his dad say. Grandpa Hatford had died when Wally was five, so he didn’t remember much about him.
“Come on, Peter! Quit fooling around and help!” Wally said irritably as Peter ran his Matchbox cars along the window ledge, making a fearful racket when they crashed and fell to the floor.
Peter dutifully put the cars aside and walked over. “What do you want me to do?”
“Remember something about Grandpa. Any stories at all about him,” said Wally.
“I only remember his pictures!” said Peter. “He was tall and had a mustache.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“And he had big hands and big ears.”
“Yeah,” said Wally, remembering now. “And he always had an arrowhead or something in his pocket to show us.”
There were only two days left before the last issue of the Hatford Heraldwould be published. The Old Times Tribune, of course, came out with the story about how the “abandoned” house the Hatford Herald had written about wasn’t abandoned at all. Wally couldn’t wait till this whole project was over. Then he would have one full month left of summer to do whatever he wanted. It would not be anything to do with the Malloys. It would not have anything to do with girls at all. It wouldn’t even have anything to do with his brothers. Maybe he would just crawl up in a tree and stay there. Study the leaves and the stars.
The following night after dinner, however, something happened. The phone rang, and because Wally was finishing up kitchen duty, he answered.
“Wally?” came a man’s voice. “This is Mike. Mike Oldaker. I want you to round up all the kids who are working on your newspaper, tell them you’ve got a big scoop, and come over to the bookstore right away.”
“Now?”
“As soon as you can get here. But don’t tell anyone else. Just come.” And Mike hung up.
Wally stood holding the phone in one hand, the dish towel in the other. Then he put down the towel and called the Malloys. Eddie answered.
“Big scoop. Top secret. Meet us at Oldakers’ as soon as you can get there,” he said, and hung up, just as Mike had done.
Wally ran upstairs, where Jake and Josh were typing up a story on their computer. “Big scoop!” he said breathlessly. “Top secret. Mike Oldaker called. He wants us to come to the bookstore right away and not tell anyone. He’ll give us a story for our newspaper!”
“Wow!” said Jake, leaping to his feet, his eyes wide.
The boys tore downstairs.
“We’re going to the bookstore, Mom,” Josh called.
“Are you taking Peter?” Mrs. Hatford called back.
“Yeah. C’mon, Peter,” said Wally, and all four boys charged out the door.
“What isit? What did he say?” asked Jake.
“I can’t tell you,” said Wally.
“What do you mean, you can’t tell us?” asked Josh.
“My lips are sealed,” said Wally.
“Oh, come on, Wally!” said Jake, punching his arm.
“You can torture me, pull out all my fingernails, but I still won’t tell,” Wally insisted, not mentioning, of course, that he didn’t know much more than they did. Except for those noises. And the light coming from under the trapdoor.
His heart pounded inside his chest. He hoped it wasn’t a trick. He imagined Mike Oldaker opening the trapdoor and a hand reaching out and grabbing Wally’s leg. He imagined the trapdoor opening and a huge life force sucking them down into a black hole.
But now they were racing down College Avenue. Now they were turning onto Main Street. Now they were running up the sidewalk to the bookstore, with its CLOSED sign on the door, the Malloy girls at their heels.
Mike was waiting for them inside. So was a man with glasses, and dirt on the knees of his pants.
“Hello,” said Mike, letting them in and locking the door behind them. Wally looked around uneasily. So did Caroline, her eyes huge.
“I want you to meet a friend of mine, Gordon Rawley, who’s working on his PhD from Morgan State University, where your grandfather, Wally, got his degree,” Mike said.
The big man named Gordon reached out and shook Wally’s hand while the others stared. The skin on Gordon’s hand was rough, Wally discovered. And the fingernails were dirty.
“It was something your grandfather wrote in his thesis that gave Gordon the idea that there might be the remains of an ancient settlement right here in Upshur County,” said Mike.
“What kind of settlement?” asked Eddie.
Mr. Rawley said, “We call them the Archaic people. We knew they lived in the northern and eastern panhandles between 7000 and 1000 BC, but your grandfather seemed to think they might also have had a settlement where Buckman is today. In fact, right under our downtown.”
Wally’s eyes opened so wide he thought they might push his eyebrows right off the top of his head. Maybe the bookstore was haunted. Maybe it was haunted by people of long ago!
“And because this bookstore is the only building left on the block with a dirt floor in its cellar, Gordon asked if he could do some digging down there in secret to see if he could find anything,” Mike explained.
“And I did!” said Mr. Rawley, smiling. “Bones. Pieces of bones, anyway. A few shards of pottery.” He reached into his pocket and carefully drew out a few fragments.
“Wow!” said Jake.
“But why did you have to keep it secret?” asked Wally.
“Because there are a couple of guys in my department at the university who got wind of my idea, and my thesis will be a lot more important if I’m the first one to discover these artifacts in Buckman,” Mr. Rawley explained.
“Well, I haven’t told anyone,” said Wally, as his brothers gasped and the girls gaped.
“That’s good,” said Mr. Rawley. “I’m just lucky enough to be friends with Mike here, and I remembered this cellar. He and I used to play down there sometimes when we were kids, back when his dad ran the store, but we had no idea that there might be something historic about it.”
“Wally knew about this all the time?” Jake exclaimed.
Mike grinned. “He knew there was something secret going on in our cellar, but he didn’t know what.”
“So can we break the story in the Hatford Herald?” asked Josh excitedly.
“Absolutely,” said Mike. “Gordon has written an article for this Sunday’s Buckman Bugle, but since it was your grandfather who’s really responsible for this, we thought you guys should be the first to spill the beans. I tipped off Wally a few weeks ago, and he promised he’d keep it secret.”
Jake and Josh turned to grin at Wally. So did the Malloys.
“Hey, Wally, nice going!” said Jake, punching his arm again.
“All this time he’s been sitting on a scoop!” said Eddie.
Wally was the center of attention, and he actually found himself smiling. He had goose bumps on his arms, but not because he was scared. Maybe he wouldn’t want to sit in a tree all summer long with no one else to talk to. Maybe sometimes it was sort of nice to do something different, even with people as weird as the Malloys.
Two days later when the Hatfo
rd Herald came out, the banner headline read News Flash.… Important Discovery! Wally, with the help of Jake and Josh, had written the story of the discovery in the cellar of Oldakers’ Bookstore.
All afternoon and evening the phone rang. Friends and neighbors congratulated the boys on a top story, and the Buckman Bugle wanted a picture of the four Hatford boys standing in front of the bookstore to use in its Sunday edition, along with Gordon Rawley’s article.
When Sunday came and their picture appeared, Wally had to tell people again and again the story of how Mike Oldaker had told him there were bones down there in the bookstore’s cellar, and Wally hadn’t known whether they were the bones of someone dead or alive. He talked about the scratching and scraping and clawing and thumping, at which point Peter, who never tired of the story, provided the sound effects.
Jake and Josh and Wally and Peter, along with Eddie, Beth, and Caroline, walked downtown to pick up the copy of the Hatford Herald that Mrs. Hatford had taken to a frame shop. They were going to present the framed newspaper to Oldakers’ Bookstore to hang on the wall in appreciation for Mike’s letting them have the biggest scoop of the year.
What a day! They still didn’t know whether the girls were moving back to Ohio or staying in Buckman, but they weren’t thinking about that now. They were thinking about the triple scoops of ice cream they were going to have later at the soda fountain in Larkin’s drugstore—a great way to celebrate the final issue of their newspaper.
“All ready to go!” the man at the frame shop said. He picked up a large rectangular package wrapped in brown paper. “I taped it up good so you wouldn’t get fingerprints on the glass,” he explained. “Now see if you can get it down to the bookstore all in one piece.”
“Thanks!” Jake grinned. “We’ll take good care of it.”
So down the street they went, Wally in the lead.
“What’s this?” said Mike, looking up from the cash register as the group entered the store.
“A token of our appreciation, so that no matter where we go or what we do in life, you will always remember us as—”
“Stuff it, Caroline,” said Eddie.
“It’s just something we’d like you to hang in your store,” said Wally.
“Well, this is a surprise!” said Mike. He took off the wrapper and stared at the last copy of the Hatford Herald. “This is great!” he said. “This is really neat!” He looked around at the walls of his bookstore. “There’s a spot by the front door next to the window. Why don’t we hang it there?”
“Sounds good to us!” said Eddie.
A clerk appeared with a hammer and nail, and after Mike had hung the framed newspaper, the Malloys and the Hatfords stood back to make sure it was straight.
“A little to the left,” said Josh.
“Now a little to the right,” said Caroline.
Finally it seemed balanced perfectly, and they all gathered around to admire it.
“Hey!” Eddie said suddenly. “What’s that?”
“What?” asked Beth.
“There at the bottom!” said Eddie. “Don’t you see it?” She pointed.
At the very bottom of the front page, in a box insert, someone had added these words:
This is the last issue of our paper, the Hatford Herald. We have enjoyed bringing you stories of Buckman in the olden days and hope you enjoyed it too. The boys—Peter, Wally, Jake, and Josh Hatford—who wrote the important stuff. The girls—Caroline, Beth, and Eddie Malloy— who wrote the rest.
BOYS ROCK!
About the Author
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor writes:
“I don’t remember starting a neighborhood newspaper when I was young, but I did write little books. We didn’t have much money, so I was only allowed to use scrap paper that was blank on one side. I was the author, the illustrator, and the binder, all three. When a book was finished, I would cut an envelope in two, paste half of it in the front of the book, and stick an index card in it like the card in a library book. Then I would sign it out to neighborhood children and charge a penny if it was returned overdue! My mother saved many of these books, and I take some of them with me when I speak at a school. What did I write about? Well, one of them is called ‘The Food Fairies,’ and it’s about all the food in a refrigerator going to war. I even drew a picture of the hot dogs with rifles over their shoulders. It wouldn’t win any prizes, believe me.”
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor is the author of more than 125 books, including the Newbery Award—winning Shiloh and the other two books in the Shiloh trilogy, Shiloh Season and Saving Shiloh. She and her husband live in Bethesda, Maryland. They are the parents of two grown sons and have three grandchildren: Sophia, Tressa, and Garrett.
Read all about the Hatford boys and the Malloy girls
The Boys Start the War
Just when the Hatford brothers are expecting three boys to move into the house across the river where their best friends used to live, the Malloy girls arrive instead. Wally and his brothers decide to make Caroline and her sisters so miserable that they’ll want to go back to Ohio, but they haven’t counted on the ingenuity of the girls. From dead fish to dead bodies, floating cakes to floating heads, the pranks continue—first by the boys, then by the girls—until someone is taken prisoner!
The Girls Get Even
Still smarting from the boys’ latest trick, the girls are determined to get even. Caroline is thrilled to play the part of Goblin Queen in the school play, especially since Wally Hatford has to be her footman. The boys, however, have a creepy plan for Halloween night. They’re certain the girls will walk right into their trap. Little do the boys know what the Malloy sisters have in store.
Boys Against Girls
Abaguchie mania! Caroline Malloy shivers happily when her on-again, off-again enemy Wally Hatford tells her that the remains of a strange animal known as the abaguchie have been spotted in their area. Wally swears Caroline to secrecy and warns her not to search by herself. But Caroline will do anything to find the secret of the bones and finds out the hard way that she should have listened.
The Girls’ Revenge
Christmas is coming, but Caroline Malloy and Wally Hatford aren’t singing carols around the tree. Instead, these sworn enemies must interview each other for the dreaded December class project. Caroline, as usual, has a trick up her sleeve that’s sure to shock Wally. In the meantime, Wally and his brothers find a way to spy on the Malloy girls at home. The girls vow to get revenge on those sneaky Hatfords with a trap the boys won’t soon forget.
A Traitor Among the Boys
The Hatford boys make a New Year’s resolution to treat the Malloy girls like sisters. But who says you can’t play tricks on sisters? The girls will need to stay one step ahead of the boys and are willing to pay big-time for advance information. Homemade cookies should be all it takes to make a traitor spill the beans. In the meantime, Caroline is delighted with her role in the town play. Don’t ask how Beth, Josh, and Wally get roped into it—just wait until showtime, when Caroline pulls her wildest stunt yet!
A Spy Among the Girls
Valentine’s Day is coming up, and love is in the air for Beth Malloy and Josh Hatford. When they’re spotted holding hands, Josh tells his teasing brothers that he’s simply spying on the girls to see what they’re plotting next. At the same time, Caroline Malloy, the family actress, decides she must know what it’s like to fall in love. Poor Wally Hatford is in for it when she chooses him as the object of her affection!is haunted. Meanwhile, everyone in town has heard that there’s a hungry cougar on the prowl. When the kids decide to take a break from their tricks and join forces to catch the cougar, guess who gets stuck with the scariest job?
The Girls Take Over
The Hatford boys and the Malloy girls are ready to outdo each other again. Eddie is the first girl ever to try out for the school baseball team. Now she and Jake are vying for the same position, while Caroline and Wally compete to become class spelling champ. As if that’s not enough
, the kids decide to race bottles down the rising Buckman River to see whose will travel farthest by the end of the month. Of course, neither team trusts the other, and when the girls go down to the river to capture the boys’ bottles, well & it looks as if those Malloy girls may be in over their heads this time! especially when the Malloy girls stumble across an embarrassing item from the boys’ past. But Wally finally gets his chance to turn the tables on the girls’ scheme and prove who’s really in control. Boys rule!
Girls Rule!
The rivalry between the Malloy sisters and the Hatford boys is heating up! The kids have two weeks to earn money for a fund-raising contest. All those who collect twenty dollars or more for the new children’s wing at the hospital can be in the annual Strawberry Festival Parade or get lots of strawberry treats. The only place Caroline wants to be is on the Strawberry Queen’s float. How will she earn the money in time? Do the Hatfords have moneymaking secrets they’re not telling the girls?
Copyright © 2005 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
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Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Boys Rock!