Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls

  Kristy slapped the heel of her hand against her forehead. “—and phone numbers,” she finished for Alan.

  He nodded.

  “Alan, you are a rat!” she exploded.

  (The vague rustlings and eating sounds from the kitchen stopped suddenly.)

  “A huge, gigantic, smelly—”

  “All right, simmer down, young lady,” said Officer Drew. He turned to Alan. “How did you get hold of the book every morning?”

  “I would … borrow it. From Kristy’s desk when she wasn’t looking. I mean, the book was so neat and easy to read.”

  (Thanks to Mary Anne.)

  “Do you know that that was an invasion of privacy?” asked the officer.

  “Well …”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” said Kristy. “So you looked in the book. How come you wanted to scare me?”

  “Well,” said Alan again, “I didn’t. I wanted to—to ask you something, but I just couldn’t…. I didn’t have the nerve. And I couldn’t ask you in school.”

  “But you had the nerve to steal our book and spy on me, not to mention pull my hair, trip me, take my lunch, and make up stories about me to tell Mr. Peters.”

  “Son,” said Officer Stanton in a more kindly voice, “what did you want to ask her?”

  Alan mumbled something that nobody could understand.

  “Louder!” shouted Rob from the kitchen.

  “Finish your sandwich!” I yelled back.

  “What, Alan?” asked Kristy, sounding nearly civil.

  “I wanted to know if you’d go to the Halloween Hop with me.”

  If I were Kristy, my eyeballs would have fallen out of my head along about then. But Kristy just said, “Oh, gosh, is that all? Of course I’ll go with you…. Thanks.”

  And at that moment, the Feldmans and the Newtons returned. They were home early.

  Needless to say, the grown-ups were pretty surprised to walk into the living room and find their baby-sitters talking with two policemen and a strange boy.

  Mrs. Newton gasped, and Officer Drew jumped up and helped her into a chair. “It’s all right, ma’am,” he said. “The girls had a little problem, but they handled it well. The children are fine.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  “They’re in the kitchen, eating dinner,” I added.

  Officer Drew was eyeing Mrs. Newton’s round belly warily. “Are you sure you’re okay, ma’am?” he asked her.

  “Just fine,” she said breathlessly, “but, Claudia, Kristy, what happened here?”

  I looked at Kristy, hoping she’d want to explain. “He’s your boyfriend,” I whispered.

  “You were the one who called the police.”

  I took a slow breath. Mrs. Feldman had gone into the kitchen to check on the kids, but Mr. and Mrs. Newton and Mr. Feldman were all ears. “Well,” I began, “we got three strange phone calls after you left. We’d pick up the phone and the caller wouldn’t say anything. And that was what happened to the Goldmans before they were robbed last night. Then, during dinner, we heard noises outside, and when we went into the living room, someone was at the window. So I called the police.”

  “You did the right thing,” said Mrs. Newton. “That was very responsible of you.”

  “Except that the prowler turned out to be him” (I jerked my head toward Alan) “spying on Kristy.”

  “Well, you didn’t know that,” said Mr. Newton.

  “I guess we’d better go now,” Officer Drew said, standing up. “Let me just get my hat.” At that moment, Jamie ran into the living room and handed it to him. “Thank you, young man. And you” (the officer turned to Alan) “are coming with us.”

  Alan turned pale. He swallowed noisily. “I am?”

  “Is he in trouble?” asked Kristy.

  “No, we’re just going to give him a lift home. On the way, we’ll have a chat about privacy and the proper use of the telephone. He can consider this a warning.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Alan. As he followed the policemen out the front door, he glanced over his shoulder. “See you in school tomorrow, Kristy. Bye, Claudia.”

  “Bye,” we said.

  “Was he a bad boy, Kristy?” asked Jamie as soon as the door had closed.

  “Just a little bit bad,” replied Kristy.

  “Hey, do we get Cookie Surprises or what?” Rob called to me from the kitchen.

  “You certainly do. You were very good, all of you.”

  Kristy and I fixed the kids the dessert I had promised—chocolate-chip cookies with little scoops of ice cream on them. Then it was time to leave. Since it was dark out, Mr. Newton offered to drive us, but we live so close by that we said we’d walk. Besides, I wanted to talk to Kristy.

  “So?” I said when we reached the sidewalk.

  “What?”

  “Are you out of your mind? For years you’ve hated Alan Gray. Hated his guts. You said so just a few weeks ago. And all we’ve been hearing since school started last month is how Alan sitting in back of you is about as unfortunate as … as …”

  “Hat hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know. Well, it’s just that Alan finally proved something my mother’s been telling me for years. Only I didn’t believe her until now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That boys tease you because they like you. I have to admit that sometimes I still think Alan is kind of a jerk, and I wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten in a little trouble tonight. I mean, hanging around the window and frightening us with those phone calls … He deserves to sweat, just like we did. However—Claudia, a boy likes me.” Kristy paused, then, looking mystified, went on. “Besides, he is sort of cute. And I guess some of the things he’s done were funny … if you look at them a certain way.”

  I grinned at her. “Now you see how Stacey and I feel. That’s why we sit at the lunch table with the boys. They like us. At least they don’t hate us. And it’s pretty nice to be asked to a dance, isn’t it?”

  Kristy nodded, looking confused. “I don’t quite understand all this,” she said slowly. “I mean, how am I going to explain it to Mary Anne? And, oh, gosh, can you imagine what my brothers will do when they see me getting ready to go to a dance?”

  “Well, you can’t back out now. Look, two nights from now, it will all be over. I think Mary Anne will understand. And Stacey and I will help you get ready before the dance. So don’t worry.”

  We had reached our houses. “Thanks, Claudia,” said Kristy. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Bye.” I sounded a lot more cheerful than I felt. As I crossed the street, all I could think was that Emily and Dorianne were going to the Halloween Hop, Stacey was probably going to the Halloween Hop (even though it would be with Pete Black, not Sam Thomas), Mary Anne didn’t care about the Halloween Hop, and now Kristy was going to the Halloween Hop. And I wasn’t. The boy I wished I could go to the Halloween Hop with didn’t know anything about me, except that I had once dropped a plate of Jell-O in his lap.

  I opened the front door to my house, let myself in, called hello to Mimi and my parents, and went to my room. I closed the door and lay down on my bed. Planning on being depressed for a while, I pulled a piece of saltwater taffy out of the stash in my pencil jar.

  I was chewing away thoughtfully when someone knocked on my door. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone, except maybe Mimi.

  “Who is it?” I yelled.

  “Janine.”

  Groan, groan. I wanted to talk to Janine less than I wanted to talk to a snake. “I can’t talk now!”

  “I think we’d better. This is urgent.”

  “Oh, all right. Come in.” (Mimi would have been proud of me.)

  Janine slipped into my room, closed the door quietly behind her, and perched at the foot of my bed. “What were the police doing at the Newtons’?” she asked me.

  I popped another piece of taffy in my mouth before I had finished the first one. “Tap-dancing,” I managed to say.

  “Claudia ??
?”

  “How’d you know they were there?”

  “Mrs. Gordon was giving me a lift home from the university, and I saw the squad car driving away. I didn’t think it could be too serious. There were no flashing lights. But I didn’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  “You didn’t?” I asked, feeling somewhat amazed. It’s not that Janine is a tattletale, it’s just that it’s unlike her to be imaginative enough to think I might be in some kind of trouble that I wanted to cover up.

  “No.” Janine shook her head.

  “Well, thanks,” I said. “I mean, it’s okay if they know. I’m going to tell them about it in a little while. But thank you for waiting to talk to me first.”

  Janine smiled and spread her hands as if to say, No problem—which of course she wouldn’t have said, not being one to use slang if she could help it.

  “What did happen?” she asked. “Will you tell me first?”

  “Sure,” I said enthusiastically, sitting up. “Would you like a piece of taffy?” Remembering what Mimi had told me, I planned on making the most out of that sisterly, but unusual, moment.

  “All right,” said Janine.

  I handed her a peppermint piece and began telling her about Alan. “So then,” I said, “I snuck—”

  “Sneaked.”

  “—whatever—into the living room, and someone was at the window!”

  “What did you do?” she asked, her dark eyes shining.

  “I called the police.”

  “You didn’t scream?”

  “Nope. Just went to the telephone.” I told her the rest of the story.

  “Gosh, you certainly were brave,” Janine said appreciatively.

  “I guess so,” I replied. “I didn’t feel brave at the time, though. I just knew that Kristy and I had to protect the children.”

  “I’m really proud of you.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes. I’m proud you’re my sister.”

  “Wow, I—Thanks…. Janine?”

  “What?”

  “How come you don’t come to my room and talk to me like this more often?”

  “Because you usually tell me to shut up or go away or mind my own business.”

  “Well, that’s because you usually start talking like some big show-off professor. When we were little, we used to have fun. You talked like a kid.”

  Janine frowned. “Am I talking like a professor now?”

  “No. But … but you’re always telling me all this stuff I don’t want to know, like how the fear process works. Who cares?”

  “I do. Those things are interesting to me.”

  “Not to me.”

  “What is interesting to you?” asked Janine.

  “Oh, mysteries and scary stories and baby-sitting and painting.”

  Janine nodded. “What happened tonight was exciting.”

  “Yeah!”

  “I’m glad you let me come in and talk.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Maybe we could do this more often?” Janine sounded a bit timid.

  “Sure. I have a lot of other candy hidden around my room.”

  Janine smiled. “I’ll tell you a secret. I do, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Mm-hmm. It’s my vice.”

  I wasn’t sure what a vice was, but I wasn’t about to ask. “I didn’t know that.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.”

  “Same here.”

  “Well, let’s go tell Mom and Dad what happened.”

  “Okay.”

  So we did. Mom and Dad and Mimi were pretty proud, too. After that, Janine gave me one final review for the math test the next day. She didn’t seem to bug me as much as usual. Everything was fine until I got into bed.

  Then I thought of two things that made me feel sort of chilly all over. The first was that Trevor hadn’t asked me to the dance.

  The second was much worse. If Alan had been making the scary calls to Kristy over the past couple of weeks, then who had been making the calls to me? I’d gotten them several different times when I’d been baby-sitting, and the Phantom was still at large…. Was it possible, just possible, that he was after me?

  No, I decided a few seconds later. It wasn’t very likely at all. The Phantom went after jewelry, not people. And especially not people who didn’t have any jewelry. How would Nancy Drew think if this were a mystery and she was the sleuth? I wondered. She would analyze the clues. She would review all her information.

  Well, I thought, Kristy had received mysterious phone calls. I had received mysterious phone calls. Kristy’s caller turned out to be Alan, a boy who secretly liked her. Maybe my caller was a boy, too! After all, Alan had looked in our record book. Maybe he had shown it to someone else.

  Who could have a crush on me? Rick Chow? Maybe. Howie? I needed more clues. I rolled over on my side and fell asleep.

  The awful mystery was cleared up the next afternoon on what turned out to be a red-letter day. First, I took the math test. I worked very carefully and was the last kid to turn my test in. I wasn’t sure how well I’d done, but I knew I had tried my best, which is not something I can say often.

  But boy was I surprised when Mr. Peters found me at my locker at the end of the school day and said, “Congratulations, Claudia!”

  “On what?” I asked warily.

  “I started grading the test papers at lunch today. Yours was on top. I thought you’d like to know that you got an eighty-six.”

  “Really? An eighty-six? What is that, a B?”

  “A B or a B-plus, depending on how the rest of the class does. I can tell you’ve been working hard. It’s really showing. Keep it up.”

  “I will, oh, I will! Thank you!”

  As if that weren’t enough excitement, I was baby-sitting for Nina and Eleanor Marshall a couple of hours later when the phone rang. I picked it up nervously.

  No one was there.

  “Darn,” I said, as I replaced the receiver.

  “What?” asked Nina.

  “Oh, just a—a wrong number.” Was it my secret caller? I actually began to hope the phone would ring again!

  Immediately, it did. I grabbed up the receiver. “Hello? Who is this? Say something, please!” I waited, and after a moment an unfamiliar male voice said, “Claudia?”

  I caught my breath. “Y-yes?” The voice cleared its throat. “Um, this—this is Trevor. Trevor Sandbourne.”

  I very nearly fainted. “Nina,” I whispered, placing my hand over the mouthpiece, “go get out the Sesame Street puzzles. I’ll help you and Eleanor with them in a few minutes.” I uncovered the phone as Nina and Eleanor ran off. “Trevor?” I said. I couldn’t believe it!

  “Yes. You … know who I am?”

  “Oh, yes. I mean, of course I do. You’re the poet. You write for The Literary Voice.”

  “That’s right,” he said shyly. “What I was wondering is—I mean, I know this is lastminute, but could you—would you like to go to the Halloween Hop with me?”

  This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. In a few minutes, I would wake up and find that the phone call was just part of a very real dream, like Dorothy’s trip to Oz.

  I pinched myself. It hurt. “I’d like to, Trevor. Thanks.”

  “You mean you can go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, good. I’ll meet you there … at the dance. Friday at four, okay?”

  “Okay. Trevor?” (I had to ask him.) “How did you know where to reach me? This isn’t my house.”

  There was a pause at Trevor’s end of the phone. “I sort of found out from Alan Gray.”

  “Aha.”

  “I—I know you know about Alan and the baby-sitting book. And, see, every time Alan took it, he’d check to see where Kristy’d be sitting … and then he would write down where you’d be sitting and give me the information. He knew I liked you. He caught me writing a poem about us once.”

  “A poem? About us?”

  “
Yeah …”

  “Do you still have it?””

  “No,” said Trevor sheepishly. “I threw it away. I was so embarrassed. Alan started singing some dumb song about kissing in a tree. Everybody heard him.”

  “So that’s how he found out,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, he felt bad about teasing me, since we’re friends, so he began looking up your appointments for me. It was just his way of apologizing…. I guess now I owe you an apology. I’m really sorry, Claudia. Alan told me what happened last night. He didn’t want to get me in trouble, so he didn’t mention my name in front of the police. But when he got home, he phoned me and said I better straighten things out with you, no matter how sh—how hard it is for me. I’m sorry I’ve scared you with the phone calls. I really like you. I’ve been noticing you all year. I was just afraid to talk to you.”

  “That’s all right, Trevor. I’m glad you finally did. I like you, too. I’ll see you Friday.” I hung up the phone. I was going to go to the Halloween Hop after all! What a day!

  “Hey, girls!” I called to Nina and Eleanor. “We’re going to celebrate. Get your coats. I’ll treat you to ice cream cones!”

  So we celebrated. We celebrated the happiest day of my life.

  The Halloween Hop was terrific. Kristy and Alan were there, and so were Stacey and Pete. Stacey looked like she was having fun. Maybe Pete would help her forget about Sam Thomas. Mary Anne didn’t go and seemed quite happy about it.

  On Thursday night, the night before the dance, Stacey and Kristy and I ran around to each of our houses as a group, trying on outfits for the others to approve. We had made a unanimous decision not to go in costume. We wanted to look nice. Besides, the boys had said they wouldn’t be caught dead in costumes. Stacey and I ended up with baggy jeans and new bulky sweaters. We couldn’t talk Kristy out of a plaid jumper and red turtleneck, but the next day, Alan didn’t seem to care. When we got to the school gymnasium (after dashing home, changing out of our school clothes and into our dance clothes, then dashing back), Alan met Kristy with a grin on his face that was as big as the ones on Trevor’s and Pete’s faces.

  After I hung up my coat, Trevor and I stood at the punch table and laughed about his phone calls and the Jell-O accident. When we ran out of things to talk about, we danced. To be honest, Trevor isn’t much of a dancer and neither am I, but we had fun—lots of fun—anyway.