Abby and the Mystery Baby

  “Don’t get too attached, sweetie,” she whispered, putting a hand on my shoulder. “One of these days his mother will probably be back to take him away.”

  I nodded, knowing it was already far too late for me to avoid becoming attached to Eli. I bent down and kissed him good night softly, so as not to wake him. Then I kissed my mom, too, and headed off to bed.

  As I lay there waiting for sleep to come, I thought about the mystery of Eli’s appearance. Would I ever learn the truth? And what did my mother know that she wasn’t telling me? She can be so closemouthed when she wants to be. There’s no point in trying to make her talk when she prefers not to.

  Just before I fell asleep, I thought of something. Why had my mom talked about the baby’s mother coming, rather than his parents, or his father? That was the second time she’d said something like that. And why had she said “probably”? If I remembered, I’d ask her in the morning. And if I pushed her, she’d have to tell me what she knew. If I could convince her to talk to me, maybe I’d find some answers to my questions.

  It took Jessi and Mal quite a while to write up the events of that Tuesday afternoon (a week and a day A.E. — After Eli) in the club notebook. It had been a long, long day.

  Mal was sitting for her sisters and brothers that day (the Pikes used to require two sitters, but now, as long as one of the triplets is around, one is enough), and Jessi was sitting for her sister, Becca. The two of them had decided to bring the kids together for a writing workshop at the Pikes’. It was a dreary, gray afternoon, and they figured it would be a quiet, peaceful way to pass the time and keep the kids occupied.

  Ha!

  They should have known better. After all, Mal lives with her siblings, and Jessi’s sat for them often enough. No day inside with the Pikes can ever be quiet and peaceful, no matter what activity you’ve planned.

  Things were already close to out of control by the time Jessi and Becca arrived. Vanessa greeted them at the door.

  “Hi, come on in,” she said glumly.

  Jessi could tell that something must be very, very wrong. Why? Because Vanessa wasn’t talking in rhyme. She’s nine and wants desperately to be a poet when she grows up. Normally, she’d answer the door saying something like, “Welcome to our house, my friend. I hope this day will never end!”

  Becca skipped away to find the other kids, but Jessi stayed with Vanessa. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said Vanessa with a big sniff.

  “Come on, you can tell me,” said Jessi, leading her to the stairs. They sat down together, and Jessi put an arm around Vanessa’s shoulders. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s — it’s —” began Vanessa, but she was interrupted by a series of loud shrieks that came closer and closer.

  “Make him stop! Make him stop!” That was Margo, who’s seven. She was running along with her hands over her ears, trying not to hear the words her brother Byron was shouting as he chased after her.

  “Snot is gluey and snot is green, snot is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he chanted. Byron, who’s ten, is one of the Pike triplets.

  “Eww!” said Jessi. “That’s disgusting.”

  “No it isn’t,” Byron said, skidding to a halt. “It’s poetry. Mal says poetry can be about anything.” He gave Jessi a devilish grin.

  Just then, the other two triplets came running into the hall. “Byron, listen to this one!” shouted Adam, who was laughing so hard that his face had turned bright red.

  “When your stomach feels all funny, if you’ve eaten too much honey, all you have to do is puke, puke, puke!” began Jordan, who was also laughing and could barely get the words out. “When you’re urpy, when you’re burpy, all you have to do is —”

  “Please, stop them!” begged Margo. “Or else I’ll —” She looked a little green.

  Mal, who had followed the triplets into the hall, spoke up. She’s well acquainted with the fact that Margo has a weak stomach, and she knew it was no joke. “That’s enough, guys,” she said. “You can go on writing poems about anything you want, but don’t force them on someone who doesn’t want to listen.”

  “But —” began Jordan.

  Margo turned toward him and puffed out her cheeks a little. He backpedaled quickly out of her way. “Let’s go, guys,” he said. “We can concentrate better on our writing if we do it up in our room.”

  The three of them ran off, giggling like hyenas. Mal and Jessi looked at each other and shook their heads. “What can you do?” Mal asked, shrugging. “It’s not as if I really expected them to write poems about love or the beauty of nature.”

  “Why do they have to write poems at all?” wailed Vanessa. “I’m the poet in the family. They don’t even know how to make good rhymes!”

  “Vanessa,” Jessi said gently. “All poetry doesn’t have to —”

  “What do you know?” interrupted Vanessa, standing up. “I’m going up to my room. I hate you all!” She stomped up the stairs, and a few seconds later Mal and Jessi heard a door slam.

  “So far, so good,” said Mal, smiling. “Now, how are you doing, Margo? Feeling better?” She bent down to smooth back her little sister’s hair.

  “Uh-huh,” said Margo. “I guess so.”

  “Then why don’t you go find Nicky and Claire and Becca,” suggested Mal, “and see how they’re doing with their writing.” She gave Margo a little push in the right direction — toward the rec room — and then turned to Jessi.

  “What do you think we should do about Vanessa?” she asked. “I can see why she might be upset. After all, it’s as if everybody’s trespassing on her territory. Up until now, she has been the poet in the family.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jessi. “How about if we leave her alone for a little while, and we’ll think about it. I bet she’s up there composing a poem about how awful her family is. Let’s give her a chance to settle down a bit.”

  “Okay,” said Mal. “Meanwhile, let’s go see what the others are up to.”

  The two of them headed for the rec room, where they found Nicky, Margo, Becca, and Claire seated around the table the Pike kids usually use for art projects. The three older kids — Nicky (he’s eight), Becca (also eight), and Margo were just sitting there, looking bored, while Claire, tongue between her lips in concentration, printed careful letters with a crayon. Claire’s five and is just beginning to read and write.

  “How do you spell ‘the’?” she asked.

  Nicky rolled his eyes. “T-H-E,” he answered impatiently. “This is ridiculous,” he added in a lower voice.

  Claire didn’t seem to hear him. Mal told me later that she was concentrating so hard on making her letters correctly that she probably wouldn’t have heard a fire truck if it drove through the rec room.

  She finished writing and sighed contentedly. Then she frowned. “How do you spell ‘mouse’?” she asked.

  “Just finish your part and pass it along!” said Nicky. “Everybody’s waiting for their turn.” He gave an exasperated sigh.

  Claire sniffed. “But I’m not done yet,” she said. “No fair!”

  Mal sensed a tantrum in the making. “What are you guys doing, anyway?” she asked quickly.

  “We’re writing a story together,” said Becca.

  “It’s one of the activities from that book you showed us,” said Margo, pointing to a book about teaching kids how to write that Mal had brought home from the library.

  “Each of us writes a sentence or two, and then we pass it along. It’s really fun,” said Margo.

  “It could be fun,” Nicky said, glaring at Claire. “If certain people didn’t take so long to write their dumb little sentences.”

  “Nicky!” Mal said. “That’s mean.”

  Claire burst into tears. “My sen-sentences are just as good as yours!” she cried, rushing into Mal’s arms.

  “Nicky, why don’t you read us what you guys have written so far?” asked Jessi, hoping to defuse the situation. “It sounds like
a neat idea.”

  Nicky grabbed the piece of paper Claire had been working on. “I went first,” he said. “Here’s what I wrote: ‘Once upon a time, there was a strong, brave prince named Nicky. Only he didn’t know he was a prince. He thought he was just a regular boy.’ ”

  “Great start,” said Mal.

  “Then Margo went,” continued Nicky. “Here’s her part. ‘The prince had a beautiful sister, too. Her name was Margo, and she didn’t know she was a princess.’ ”

  Margo smiled happily.

  “Then Becca wrote this part,” said Nicky. “ ‘One day, Nicky and Margo decided to go for a picnic in the woods near their house. Little did they know that there was a dragon roaming in those very same woods.’ ”

  “Excellent!” said Jessi.

  “Yeah, but now listen to Claire’s part,” said Nicky. He read out loud, in a babyish voice, “‘The cat ate the mouse.’”

  Mal and Jessi exchanged glances and tried very, very hard not to giggle.

  “I mean, what does that have to do with anything?” asked Nicky indignantly. “There’s no cat in the story.”

  “It’s the only word I know how to write!” Claire howled. “I can’t help it. Anyway, I think your story is stupid.” She curled up on Mal’s lap and stuck her tongue out at Nicky.

  “Okay, okay,” said Mal. “Time out. There has to be a solution to this problem.”

  “I think I have one,” said Jessi. “Claire, would you like to try making a picture poem?”

  “What’s a picture poem?” asked Claire suspiciously.

  “It’s an illustration of a poem you’ve made up in your head,” said Jessi. “You don’t have to write at all.”

  “I can just draw?” asked Claire.

  “That’s right,” said Jessi. “And if you want someone to write down your poem for you, maybe Nicky or Margo could help.” She raised her eyebrows at them, and they nodded.

  Claire climbed off of Mal’s lap and started to rummage around in the crayon drawer.

  “I think I’ve solved another problem,” said Mal, who had picked up the book after Jessi put it down. “Here’s a whole section on different kinds of poetry. It covers blank verse, sonnets, quatrains — whatever those are — and every other kind of poem there is. I’ll show it to Vanessa, so she’ll see that not all poems have to rhyme. And once she’s studied this book and learned about poetry, she’ll make a perfect emcee for our poetry slam.”

  “Excellent idea!” said Jessi.

  By the end of that afternoon, all the kids were content, and the Pike house was (relatively) quiet, as everyone wrote and wrote and wrote.

  Or, as Vanessa put it later, “Poems are great, and poems are fun, poems make life better for everyone!”

  The mystery notebook is another BSC tradition. Remember when I said that the BSC has helped to solve a bunch of mysteries? Well, after the first few, we figured we needed a central place to keep track of clues and suspects and things. (Up until then, everybody had made notes on whatever was handy: paper napkins, math tests, etc. It wasn’t a very efficient system.) Now, whenever we have something important to write about a mystery we’re working on, we do it in the mystery notebook. And, once I started writing about the mystery of Eli’s appearance, everybody else did, too. The notebook was passed around a lot for a few days.

  My first entry was about some sleuthing I did to follow up on the one measly little clue I’d turned up so far: that drugstore receipt I’d found in the driveway.

  I had almost forgotten all about it. Then, after school on Tuesday (the same day that Jessi and Mal were having so much fun at the Pikes’), I suddenly remembered.

  I ran home from school, as usual, and went inside to find Erin playing peek-a-boo with Eli on the couch. He was gurgling with laughter as she hid her face behind a pillow and said, “Where’s Erin? Where’s Erin?” When she pulled the pillow aside and said, “There she is!” Eli’s face would light up with this huge smile. Obviously, he was very satisfied with his nanny.

  I couldn’t find anything to dislike about Erin, either, although you wouldn’t find me smiling at her quite so happily. I still thought her behavior was odd. For instance, one day I walked into the kitchen while she was reaching into the lowest vegetable drawer. “Hi, Erin,” I’d said. That was all. But you’d have thought I’d pulled a machine gun on her. She straightened up fast, blushed, stammered, and finally just ran out of the kitchen.

  Anyway, she and Eli were happy together, and that was the most important thing. I knew there was no way we could have kept Eli without her help, so I tried to overlook her behavior.

  That day, I said hi to Erin and I bent down to greet Eli. “Hello, snugglebear,” I said softly, rubbing noses with him. “How’s my little pumpkin?”

  He smiled up at me, a little cross-eyed since our faces were so close, and I could have sworn it was a special “Hi, Abby” smile. My heart melted. I was falling more and more in love with that boy every day.

  It wasn’t easy to turn away from him, but I’d run hard that afternoon and I was more than ready for a hot shower before settling down with my homework. I gave Eli one last kiss on the cheek and headed upstairs.

  After my shower, I decided I’d better do some laundry. With a baby in the house, the dirty clothes sure were adding up fast. I began to gather my clothes and throw them into a pile. That’s when I found the receipt. It was in the pocket of a pair of jeans I hadn’t worn for a week, just where I’d stuck it the night I’d found it.

  When I discovered it, I forgot about the laundry and sat down to think. A drugstore receipt wasn’t much of a clue, I knew that, but what other leads did we have? None. We had a baby in our house, and nobody knew where he’d come from, and unless I started to work harder on figuring things out we might never know. Oh, sure, the police were on the case, but how could they track down Eli’s mother? It wasn’t as if they had many clues, either.

  Anyway, it didn’t take me long to figure out what I had to do. My first order of business was to make sure that the receipt really was a clue, and that it wasn’t just something my mother had dropped. I looked at the receipt more closely and noticed that it was for a prescription that had been filled at the drugstore’s pharmacy. Then without allowing myself to pause, I reached for the phone and dialed the number under the store’s name at the top of the receipt. I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say but when the man at the other end said hello, the words just tumbled out of me.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to sound older than thirteen. “This is Rachel Stevenson. I’d like to order a refill for my prescription, please.”

  “Hold on just a moment, and I’ll connect you with our pharmacy,” said the man. A few seconds later (my heart was thudding while I waited), another man picked up the phone and I repeated what I’d said. I didn’t know what I’d do if he asked me what the prescription was for, since I didn’t have the faintest idea.

  “Hold on, Ms. Stevenson,” he said. I heard the faint clicking of computer keys as he tried to look up the prescription. There was a pause and then more clicking. Then he came back onto the line. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t seem to find your name in our files. Are you sure you have the right pharmacy?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m sure. Maybe you have me under my maiden name — Goldberg?” I knew my mother sometimes used that name. If I wanted to make sure the receipt wasn’t hers I had to check everything.

  “Hold on,” he said. More clicking. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I have an M. Goldberg, but no Rachel here anywhere.”

  “Okay, well, thanks,” I said. I hung up, disappointed. Sure, I’d proved that the receipt didn’t belong to my mother, but now what? How was I going to find out where it had come from? My one little clue was really nothing but a big dead end.

  Jessi and Mal spent the week doing their best to find out more about the woman from their writing class. They hovered around her before and after class, listening to conversations. They found out where s
he worked and trailed her whenever they could in the afternoons, after school. And every day they became more and more suspcious.

  Why?

  Because no matter where they saw her, no matter what time of day it was, they noticed one thing. She never had a baby with her.

  She never picked up a baby from the sitter’s, or brought a baby to writing group. She never bought baby food or diapers at the grocery store, and she walked right by the kids’ clothing store without even looking in the windows.

  She was definitely, they thought, acting like a woman who had given up her baby.

  Then there was that conversation they overheard at the dry cleaner’s. They’d followed their suspect in without her seeing them. As Jessi and Mal hovered behind a display on fur storage, the woman at the counter asked her how her little boy was.

  “Little boy?” asked the woman. “I — I don’t have a little boy. You must have me mixed up with someone else.”

  Jessi and Mal noted how flustered she was. It seemed to them that she was acting guilty, like someone who had something to hide. But had she really, really left her baby on our doorstep? Until they had solid proof, there was no way they could be sure.

  Kristy had her own ideas about the mystery. From the very first time she met Eli’s nanny, she was sure that she was somehow involved. It wasn’t that she thought Erin was Eli’s mother, but she was certain that Erin was somehow mixed up in his appearance. “She knows something,” Kristy insisted, her eyes narrowing. “And even though she doesn’t have her own car, I’ll bet anything she knows someone with a green one.”

  Kristy came to my house on Friday afternoon with Emily Michelle. I brought them into the living room. “You love babies, don’t you, Emily?” Kristy said, as she helped her little sister pull off her sweater.

  “Baby!” said Emily Michelle, who isn’t much of a talker yet. She reached for Eli.

  Erin, who was holding him on her lap, smiled. “Isn’t she adorable,” she said. Eli waved his hands at Emily Michelle and grinned his terrific baby grin.