Baby-Sitters' Fright Night

  “Mr. Blake and Coach Wu and Mrs. Bernhardt have posted their tour schedules for tomorrow,” said Kristy briskly. “We can sign up for all kinds of tours: The House of the Seven Gables, which is what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his book about.”

  “He wrote The Scarlet Letter, too,” I put in.

  “But not the movie version,” cracked Stacey. “Ugh.”

  “Okay, two gables down on the movie,” Abby joked right back, holding up her hands and turning two thumbs down, the way the movie critics do.

  After we’d made our crucial dinner-ordering decisions, Kristy focused her attention on me. “What about that famous author, Mallory? Did you land another job working for a writer?”

  “I wish,” I said. “Martha Kempner writes awesome mysteries.”

  “Salem’s a great place for a mystery,” suggested Stacey.

  I shook my head. “That’s what I thought, too, but she’s not here researching a mystery. Actually, it’s something even more interesting than that. She’s here to write an article on the Witch’s Eye.”

  Kristy and Abby looked blank. Mary Anne frowned hard, as if she were trying to remember where she’d heard of it.

  Stacey said, “Oh, yeah. I remember hearing about that on a class trip to the Museum of Natural History.” She grinned suddenly. “When you are a kid in New York, you take lots of class trips to the museum. It’s one of those famous jewels with a curse, right? But it’s privately owned. I mean, it wasn’t on display in the museum. They didn’t even have a picture of it.”

  “It’s on display now,” I said triumphantly. “At the Trove House Museum on the corner.”

  “Isn’t that your author, Ms. Kempner, now?” asked Kristy.

  “Shh. Don’t stare!” I hissed.

  So of course we all did. Ms. Kempner had just come into the room, with Agatha Moorehouse. Her head was bent slightly as she talked. The same young woman was with them, pushing Mrs. Moorehouse’s wheelchair.

  “That’s the woman who owns the Witch’s Eye, Mrs. Moorehouse, in the wheelchair. I don’t know who …”

  “Naomi Furusawa,” announced Kristy importantly. Seeing how surprised we were, she looked smug and a little sheepish. “I, uh, kind of overheard Mrs. Moorehouse introduce her to Ms. Kempner in the lobby. Ms. Furusawa is Mrs. Moorehouse’s nurse.”

  “What is the curse on the Witch’s Eye?” I asked Stacey.

  “I don’t remember,” Stacey said. “Something awful.”

  “Curses usually are,” commented Abby, rolling her eyes.

  At that moment our attention was distracted by the arrival of more SMS students. With Kristy in charge, we naturally had been the first ones to the dining room for dinner. I don’t need to add that Kristy was very pleased with herself, not only for being first, but for securing a table in the corner of the room where we could watch everybody. Of course that suited me fine, because I wanted to watch Martha (okay, so she hadn’t said I could call her Martha, but I did in my mind, since I was a future fellow writer).

  “Jerk alert,” said Abby loudly as Alan steered toward our table.

  Alan was completely oblivious to the hostile silence that met his cheerful greeting. “Hey,” he said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about the spaghetti. No hard feelings, okay?”

  “Go away, Alan,” said Kristy. Alan put his hand over his heart, pretended to look hurt, and staggered away to his table, where Cary and some other guys were sitting. They all seemed to think this was really funny.

  I thought something else was funny. Funny peculiar. I caught Stacey’s sleeve. “Look at that guy,” I hissed. “The one in the corner, in the navy blue sweater.”

  Stacey glanced in the direction I’d indicated. “Boring,” she said. “Not date material for any age group.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” I said. “I’m talking about the way he’s reading that newspaper he brought in with him. He keeps looking around the edge of it toward Martha, I mean, Ms. Kempner’s table. And he hasn’t turned a single page.”

  “He’s a slow reader. Easily distracted. Too much MTV,” suggested Stacey.

  “I’m serious!”

  “You’re letting this Witch City business affect you, Mal. Just because we’re in a historic inn and there is a famous mystery writer here.”

  “And the owner of a cursed diamond, don’t forget.”

  “Whatever,” Stacey said. “Still, it doesn’t mean that everyone is a suspicious character. Besides, as a spy, his look just doesn’t work, if you know what I mean.”

  “What are you talking about, Stacey?” asked Kristy.

  “Well, the suit is okay. Boring, which is a good thing in a spy, because you don’t want to be noticed. But the sneakers? Puh-lease! That look is so fifteen years ago in New York. Trust me. It’s the spooky atmosphere of this inn that is making you —”

  “Spooky?” Mary Anne’s attention had been caught by that one word. “Spooky? You think this inn is spooky?”

  “Sure,” said Stacey.

  “Haunted, I bet,” Kristy put in. “Listen for footsteps in the corridors. Doors closing. Moans from the closet.”

  “And the sound of marching footsteps from the Commons,” I added, “where ghostly militiamen still drill.”

  Mary Anne’s eyes widened. She looked over her shoulder. Then she took a deep breath and said, “Well, I live in a haunted house. What are a few more ghosts?”

  Abby let out a hoot. “Good for you, Mary Anne!”

  Just then our dinners came, and we settled down to business.

  Suddenly, Kristy looked up, scowling ferociously.

  “What is it, Kristy?” asked Mary Anne. Then she held up a hand. “No gross food jokes. This isn’t the school cafeteria.”

  “Yeah, this stuff’s actually good,” put in Abby.

  Without answering, Kristy twisted around and looked down. Then she jumped up, reached into her chair, and produced a small, very melted-looking piece of ice.

  “My chair is wet. And my pants and my shirt!” exclaimed Kristy. “How did that happen?”

  Another burst of laughter from Alan’s table answered that question. Kristy whirled, and I thought for a moment she was going to bean Alan with the rest of the ice cube. Abby caught her arm just in time.

  “Hey. You want to land in trouble for starting a food fight or something?” asked Abby. “And you know you’ll be the one they blame.”

  “But — but — but —” sputtered Kristy. Steam was practically coming out of her ears.

  “Sit down, Kristy,” said Mary Anne. She reached out and plucked a napkin from another table. “Here, you can put this over your seat.”

  Kristy sat down. “Alan Gray isn’t really in eighth grade. His true mental age is three and a half.”

  “You’ll get him back, Kristy,” said Abby. She grinned. “But wait until you’re not so angry and can think clearly. Remember, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ ”

  We all stared at her. Abby raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “You never heard that?”

  We ate dinner peacefully for a while, a few vengeful grumblings and glares in Alan’s direction by Kristy aside. I kept an eye on the newspaper spy (as I had mentally dubbed the man I was still half-convinced was watching Martha’s table). As I watched, another man, dressed like a banker or a lawyer, rose from his seat at a small table by the fireplace and walked across the room to Martha’s table.

  At about the same time, a large table full of noisy kids (plus two exhausted adults) got up and left. In the relative silence that followed, we could hear snatches of the conversation.

  “… Harvey Hapgood, and I must say, I’m delighted to meet you.”

  I saw an automatic smile form on Martha’s face, and she opened her mouth to say something. Then she seemed to realize, as did I, that the man wasn’t talking to her at all.

  I gave Stacey a nudge. “Listen,” I hissed.

  All five of us immediately became unnaturally silent.

  Mrs. Mooreho
use allowed Harvey Hapgood to take her hand and make a sort of bow over it. He bent forward and lowered his voice, and we couldn’t hear anything but the murmur of their voices for a moment. Then Mrs. Moorehouse threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin. Her voice rang out: “Sell the Witch’s Eye? Absolutely not. Good evening, Mr. Hapgood.” Mrs. Moorehouse swiveled away from Mr. Hapgood, clearly ending the conversation.

  He stood there for a moment, looking a little embarrassed. Then he turned away and went back to his table. Martha watched him go, drawing her eyebrows together. Then she, too, turned back to her table.

  Just then, the waitress reappeared, to see if we wanted dessert. Having haunted houses and ghostly inns on our minds, we pumped her for information.

  “Haunted? Salem Gables? Well, like any old house, it creaks and moans.” The waitress shook her head. “The inn has always been an inn, and I’m sure it has had a lot of fascinating things happen in it. But nothing that produced any ghosts, as far as I know.”

  “No murders? No hidden treasure? No pirates ever slept here?”

  Smiling, the waitress answered, “Pirates probably did. But most of them would have stayed in less expensive boarding houses meant for sailors and seafarers.”

  “Is it called Salem Gables after the House of the Seven Gables?” I asked.

  “Yup. When the current owners bought it — oh, ten years or so ago — and fixed it up to make it a first-class inn again, they wanted to use the word ‘witch’ in the name. But they decided against it. Afraid it would put people off. Some people are as crazy about the idea of witches now as they were back in sixteen ninety-two.”

  As we left, a little while later, I couldn’t help glancing over at the table where Martha Kempner sat. I noticed that she had brought out a small tape recorder and put it on the table. Almost totally ignoring her food, she was leaning forward eagerly, talking to Mrs. Moorehouse and occasionally to Ms. Furusawa. Her legs were crossed and I could see one high-heeled foot swinging back and forth at the edge of the tablecloth. I tried to catch Martha’s eye, but her attention remained focused on Mrs. Moorehouse.

  And the newspaper spy remained focused on Martha. Maybe he was a reporter doing a story about her, I thought. Or an unauthorized biography. But I didn’t think so.

  I really didn’t believe he was just sitting there reading the newspaper, minding his own business, either. As far as I could tell, he still hadn’t turned a single page. Not even my brothers linger over the sports section of the newspaper that long.

  For a moment, I almost wished I had brought along our mystery notebook, so I could jot down a description of the newspaper spy. Then I realized that we didn’t have a mystery. Just my suspicions. Nothing had happened.

  So I didn’t need the notebook at all.

  We spent the rest of the evening piled into Mary Anne and Kristy’s room, which had high ceilings, a gabled window, and twin beds with flowered bedspreads that matched the curtains.

  I couldn’t resist bringing up the newspaper spy again. But everyone thought my theory that he might be an unauthorized biographer of Martha Kempner was totally lame. I had to agree. In fact, it sounded even more improbable when I said it aloud.

  “So maybe it isn’t Ms. Kempner he’s watching,” said Kristy. “Maybe it’s Mrs. Moorehouse.”

  “Yeah. Yeah!” I liked the sound of that better. “To steal the diamond! That’s it!”

  The math-minded and ever-logical Stacey said, “Come on, if he were going to steal the diamond, he’d be casing the museum, not Mrs. Moorehouse.”

  “Boo-hoo, Cassandra Clue,” said Abby, referring to a mystery show some of our clients had created and staged when they’d had to endure a ban on television.

  The phone shrilled. Kristy picked it up and listened. Her eyes widened. She held the receiver away from her ear, and the rest of us could hear, faintly, a high pitched, “Boooooooo, boooooooo.”

  “Alan,” decided Abby.

  “Infantile brat!” Kristy snapped into the phone receiver, and slammed it down so hard, it made my ear hurt. I hoped it had made Alan’s hurt, too.

  “He’s clearly having a second childhood,” growled Kristy. “Not that he ever outgrew his first one.” She folded her arms. “But one of these days, I’ll have the last word with Alan Gray!”

  If the Salem Gables were haunted, the ghosts were very quiet ones. I slept straight through the night and woke to find a brisk, clear day in Salem. Through my window, which didn’t have a gable like the one in Kristy’s and Mary Anne’s room, I could see joggers crossing Salem Commons, dogs playing in the center of it while their owners watched, a sign that said, NO DOGS OFF LEASH, and a few early tourists already snapping pictures.

  After everyone had eaten breakfast we assembled in the lobby to head off to the various events we’d signed up for. I was surprised that Mal wasn’t going with Mary Anne and me on the museum tour, which was scheduled to stop at the Trove House Museum first. I thought she’d be dying to see the Witch’s Eye. But when I found out she was going to go with Mrs. Bernhardt and a guide to visit the House of the Seven Gables, I understood why. (Kristy had signed up for that, too.)

  A third group was going directly to the Salem Witch Museum, with Ms. Garcia. I saw with a sinking heart that Eileen had signed up for that. She was wearing a huge purple dress, a puffy orange windbreaker, and these really clunky shoes. Her hair stuck out in spikes beneath a wool hat that had a pattern of white snowflakes on a red background. She was fashion-challenged. But that wasn’t really what made my heart sink. Everyone has bad fashion days. No, what worried me was the fact that Cokie and company had also signed up for the Witch Museum, and they were already subjecting Eileen to cruel jokes and teasing.

  “Going to visit your great-grandmother, Eileen?” asked Cokie.

  “I hear a dog was hanged a witch,” said Grace. “Maybe that was Eileen’s grandmother.”

  “Poor dog,” said Eileen very, very softly.

  Poor Eileen, I thought. Fortunately, Ms. Garcia showed up at that moment. After one look at the situation, she moved Cokie and Grace to the front of the group and assigned Eileen a partner at the back. (Yes, we were still on the buddy system, just like little kids on first-grade field trips.)

  Abby was taking a different tour of Salem, along with Coach Wu and a couple of other kids who are into sports and athletics. Coach Wu explained, “There’s a red line drawn on the sidewalks through Salem. If you follow that, it’ll take you past most of the key historic places. I’ve done my homework, so I’ll be able to tell you about them while we jog. We’ll make a slight detour over to Chestnut Street, which isn’t on the red line tour. It’s a registered national landmark and has been called ‘the finest, most aristocratic and best-preserved thoroughfare in North America.’ ”

  I saw Abby grin and I knew she was thinking what I was thinking: You can take the teacher out of the school, but you can’t take the teacher out of the teacher!

  Our group was the first to set off.

  Trove House Museum, just down the block from our inn, was one of several historic buildings that were surrounded by a big wall. One ticket allowed you to go in through the main gate and tour any of the houses.

  Everybody else peeled off to other houses, but Mary Anne and I made a beeline for Trove House, which had just opened. We were the first in line. But we didn’t see the Witch’s Eye. We had barely made it up the stairs when an alarm went off.

  In an instant, everything went from museum quiet to utter chaos. A guard charged past us, going in one direction. Then two more hurtled by going in the other, trailed by an agitated man and an agitated woman, both wearing suits. I recognized the agitated man as the one who had punched our tickets when we came through the door.

  “What —” Mary Anne began to whisper. But just then the woman zoomed by again, punching out numbers on a cellular phone and crying, “Lock the door! Lock the door!”

  We flattened ourselves against the wall. Then Mary Anne said, “Are we going to be locked in
here? I’m going to go find out.”

  “Mary Anne, wait.” But before I could tell her I didn’t think it was such a good idea, she had broken the cardinal rule of the buddy system, and we were separated.

  I broke rule number two. I didn’t wait in the place where we were separated so we could be reunited. I did what any normally curious person would do. I walked down the hall, toward the place where all the noise was coming from.

  It was a big room, lined with low glass cases beneath soft track lights. Three more glass cases stood in the center of the room, each with an individual spotlight on it. A group had gathered around the glass case in the center and as I watched, two police officers hurried to join them, along with the woman holding the cellular phone.

  Making myself as inconspicuous as possible, I edged around the door and leaned against the wall.

  “No, I know I set the alarm,” the agitated man insisted.

  The woman nodded. “Naturally, I double-checked it. And there is an automatic activation system at any rate. It goes on by timer, but can only be shut off manually by someone with a key and the code. I turned off the alarm just a few minutes ago.”

  A man in a guard’s uniform said, “And I had just walked into the room to begin guard duty when I noticed the Witch’s Eye was missing. That’s when I triggered the alarm manually.”

  “No overt sign of tampering with the case,” said one police officer, whipping out her notebook and making a note.

  “But who? And how? And when? Who could have taken the Witch’s Eye?” moaned the woman.

  “We’re ruined,” said the man.

  The Witch’s Eye! The Witch’s Eye had been stolen. I drew in a long breath. Was this the curse of the Witch’s Eye at work? I remembered the “newspaper spy” that Mallory had been watching so suspiciously, and how I had dismissed the idea that he was a thief. Had I been wrong?

  Just then a scrap of white paper, half hidden under the edge of the case next to me, caught my eye. I bent down to pick it up. It was part of a sheet of Salem Gables stationery, with a series of numbers on it, printed in black ink. Of course, they immediately imprinted themselves on my brain, too. Numbers have a way of doing that. For example, I was now stuck, at least for a while, with the license plate of the bus on which we’d traveled to Salem.