I had a new friend.
On the Monday after Halloween, Mr. Peters handed back our math tests. My eighty-six had worked out to a B-plus. I gave my family the good news at dinner that night.
“Bravo!” said Dad.
“I’m so proud,” said Mom.
Janine got up and actually gave me a little hug.
And Mimi smiled gravely and said, “I knew you could do it, my Claudia.”
Two days later, the police caught the Phantom Caller—for real. They caught him in the act. A Mr. and Mrs. Johnson Neustetter, who lived in a house in Mercer that was more like a palace, got two of the Phantom’s phone calls on Wednesday afternoon. The Neustetters had been following the accounts of the Phantom in the news and alerted the police. On a hunch, the police staked out the Neustetters’ that night. They arranged for the Neustetters to go out (figuring the Phantom was watching the house from somewhere). Sure enough, about twenty minutes after they’d left, the Phantom showed up. The police let him get into the house and all the way into Mr. Neustetter’s safe before surprising him. He confessed to everything.
That night the Phantom was behind bars.
But guess whose mystery didn’t get solved. The Goldmans’. The Phantom said he’d never been in Stoneybrook. So the police decided the Goldmans really had been robbed by a copycat thief. With the Phantom behind bars, though, no one would try that again. It would be too risky.
With that news, Mary Anne was back in the Baby-sitters Club. As soon as she and her father heard the news, Mary Anne begged to be allowed to baby-sit again, and her father gave in.
We celebrated the capture of the Phantom at our next club meeting. I was ready with soda, a big bag of potato chips, another of peanut M&M’s, and an apple and a package of crackers for Stacey.
“Well,” said Kristy, tipping her head back and getting ready to drop a handful of M&M’s in her mouth, “we survived the Phantom Caller.”
“Yeah,” I said. “This club can do anything.” I opened up four cans of diet soda and handed them around.
“Here’s to success,” said Stacey.
“To us,” said Mary Anne.
“To the Phantom,” said Kristy, giggling.
“Here’s to the Baby-sitters Club!” I cried. We grinned and clinked our soda cans.
* * *
Dear Reader,
When I was young, my friends and I used to baby-sit a lot, and sometimes my best friend, Beth, and I would get scared when we were sitting at night. We thought we should develop a telephone code so that we could alert each other in case of trouble. The way the code was supposed to work was that if I sensed trouble I would call Beth, give her a code word, and then she would call the police for me. Of course, we never had a phantom phone caller like Claudia did, and we never had to use our code, but we had a lot of fun scaring ourselves. Later, when I began to write the second Baby-sitters Club book, I remembered my sitting adventures with Beth and used them to help tell the story.
It’s okay to be afraid when you’re baby-sitting at night. That’s natural. I know I was sometimes scared even when I didn’t need to be, and that was because I read a lot of mysteries, especially Nancy Drews, just like Claudia. Since I liked reading mysteries so much, I decided I would try to write one. So Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls became the first mystery in the Baby-sitters Club series. Several more followed, and they were so popular that soon we launched the Baby-sitters Club Mysteries.
Happy (spooky) reading,
Ann M. Martin
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane. There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.)
In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.
Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Ann M. Martin.
Cover art by Hodges Soileau
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First edition, 1995
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
e-ISBN 978-0-545-53248-8
Ann M. Martin, Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls
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