Baby-Sitters' Fright Night

  “And some little dogs. Piñata puppies,” added Archie, who’s four.

  We had soon blown up one big balloon and three puppy ones. We began to wrap the balloons with the strips of newspaper dredged through the flour mixture. We made feet and ears of papier-mâché, too, and set them aside to dry, to be glued on when the bodies of the dog figures had dried.

  “Will we be able to paint them?” asked Archie.

  “Sure,” I said. “Plain old tempera paint will do it. And don’t forget to leave an opening on top so you can pop the balloon and take it out when everything dries, and put the candy in.”

  “How long do we have to wait?” asked Archie.

  “Let it dry overnight,” I answered.

  “What if it doesn’t dry in time?” asked Jackie.

  “It will,” I assured them. I hoped I was right.

  “We could put them in the dryer,” Archie offered.

  “No, silly,” said Shea. “If you put these in the dryer, it would tumble them around and around into pieces.”

  Not to mention what it would do to the inside of the dryer, I thought with a shudder.

  “Let’s put them up high, on a shelf in the den,” I suggested. They could dry there, and they’d be safe (safe from Bo, who was eyeing these soon-to-be replicas of himself with hungry suspicion). It was while I was spreading out some newspapers, with Shea and Archie’s help, that Jackie returned to the kitchen and came up with the idea of making a papier-mâché mask by molding it to his face.

  I wasn’t gone that long, truly I wasn’t. But somehow, in that short space of time, Jackie had wound his whole head with papier-mâché strips.

  It was a horrifying sight. Even Shea jumped when we walked back into the kitchen, and Jackie turned to confront us, globs of papier-mâché in one hand.

  He looked like a disintegrating mummy. Strips of wet, gooey paper dangled from his head and face. Blobs of paste dripped down the front of his shirt like mummy drool. He grinned and threw his hands out. More papier-mâché paste scattered across the kitchen.

  I instinctively ducked.

  “I’m making a mask,” said Jackie triumphantly.

  “Cool,” said Shea. Archie started forward, and Bo began to bark.

  “Whoa. Stop. Wait a minute, Jackie.”

  He stood there, smiling (horribly) up at me through his papier-mâché “mask,” and added, pointing, “I’m going to use the blow-dryer to make it dry faster.”

  How fast does papier-mâché dry? I wondered, fighting a rising sense of panic. My next thought was, thank goodness Jackie didn’t plug the blow-dryer in. He could have been electrocuted.

  “A blow-dryer,” Shea said. “Excellent idea, Jackie.”

  Jackie smiled even more widely. Good grief! He even had papier-mâché on his teeth.

  “Jackie,” I said, “a papier-mâché mask is a good idea. But you cannot use the blow-dryer, and you can’t wear one until it dries. How would you get it off? And besides, it might stick to your skin and hair and that would hurt the way it does when you take off a Band-Aid.”

  Jackie thought about this for a minute. “Oh,” he said. “I guess you are right.”

  “We need to wash that off,” I said. “Before it dries.”

  “But what about our papier-mâché masks?” wailed Archie.

  I looked around, hoping for inspiration. Fortunately, it came. “If you have any plain masks, we can decorate those with papier-mâché.”

  Shea’s eyes brightened and Jackie gave me another papier-mâché grin.

  “Come on,” I said to Jackie. “Let’s go get cleaned up.” I warned Shea and Archie not to touch anything, especially the papier-mâché, and led Jackie to the bathroom.

  It wasn’t easy. But at last I got Jackie cleaned up.

  I returned to find Shea and Archie in the kitchen. They had assembled a huge collection of Halloween masks, from what looked like every Halloween at the Rodowskys’ since the beginning of time.

  Shea looked up as I led his damp, scrubbed, but still irrepressibly cheerful brother into the kitchen. He and Archie were surrounded by a huge heap of newspaper strips, through which Bo was plowing with happy whiffling sounds. “We have some more ideas for Halloween,” he said. “And for new costumes. Are you ready to make our masks?”

  “Just call me ‘that masked man,’” I said. It was a bad joke, from the old Lone Ranger series on television. The Lone Ranger rides away at the end of every episode, and someone always asks, “Who was that masked man?”

  No one laughed. Jackie pulled my hand and made me sit down, and Shea pushed an unmâchéd mask toward me. “You have to make a mask first,” he explained kindly.

  Kristy hammered on our door early the next morning. “Hurry up,” she called. “I want to get downstairs early and grab a table in the corner where we can talk this case over.”

  When Kristy calls, we obey, at least when she has a good reason like this. Abby and I went into high speed and were soon on our way downstairs. We passed Mal at the door of the room she shared with Eileen. “Just come down when you are ready,” she was saying. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll save you a seat at our table.”

  We made it to the dining room early, and secured our corner table. Mallory passed the notebook around, and we read the notes while we ordered. It was all there: my experience in the museum, the description of the scrap of inn stationery with the numbers on it, Mary Anne and Abby’s discovery in the bushes, and what Mary Anne had overheard, plus detailed descriptions of each suspect.

  “It strikes me,” I said, “that you have a lot more notes about Martha Kempner than anyone else. Is she your main suspect, Mallory?”

  Mallory’s cheeks reddened. “No. Of course not.”

  “Descriptions of what she is wearing and everything. No one else rates that.”

  “She’s a famous author,” explained Mallory. “So even if she isn’t a suspect, everything about her is important.”

  “Hmmm,” said Abby. “Now, if she were, say, a famous soccer player. Or basketball player —”

  Kristy sternly called us to order. “Okay, let’s go over this again.”

  We went over everything that had happened, and narrowed our list of suspects to Sean Knowles, Harvey Hapgood, Mrs. Moorehouse, Naomi Furusawa, and Martha Kempner.

  “I don’t know about Mrs. Moorehouse,” I said. “It’s just not logical. She’s in a wheelchair, for one thing. I can’t see her sneaking into the museum and stealing the diamond unnoticed.”

  “Maybe she’s the mastermind behind it, and Naomi is her partner,” suggested Mary Anne.

  “It would make sense if she had insurance. If she doesn’t then no. And you heard her say she has no insurance. She might say that to other people to throw them off track, but she wouldn’t say it to her own partner.”

  “But maybe Naomi isn’t her partner,” Abby pointed out. “It could be someone else.”

  “True. So we’ll keep Mrs. Moorehouse’s name on the list,” said Mallory.

  Mary Anne leaned over my shoulder and studied the notes for a moment, then observed that Sean Knowles and Harvey Hapgood might be in league for the diamond. After all, she had seen them whispering in the hall together, while no one had ever seen them even acknowledge one another publicly otherwise.

  I reminded her that Sean Knowles had some kind of official credentials, and was apparently working on the case.

  It was Abby, of course, who said, “Well, even if he’s a cop or something, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that he’s after the diamond. He could just be using his job as a cover. In fact, he probably stole the diamond, hid in the museum, and just reappeared when the alarm went off. I bet he had it in his pocket when you saw him there, Stacey.”

  “In your dreams,” Kristy blurted out.

  “Happens all the time,” said Abby. Everybody at the table burst out laughing at the indignant expression on her face.

  When we’d stopped laughing, Mal said, “Still, it’s a possibility we can’t ov
erlook.”

  Sean Knowles and Harvey Hapgood both remained on the list.

  Martha Kempner did, too, despite Mallory’s reluctance to include her. “Why would she steal the diamond?” Mallory said. “She’s rich from all her books. And movies. And that series on public television, too, I bet.”

  “Maybe she did it for publicity,” Mary Anne said. “With the diamond stolen, she might be able to turn the article into a whole book.”

  “But she doesn’t need to do that,” Mallory insisted. “Any publisher would jump at the chance to publish anything that Martha Kempner wrote.”

  “Well, she may not have had a motive we can see, but she had the opportunity and the ability,” said Kristy, “so we have to leave her on the list.”

  In the end, the only person we crossed off our list was Naomi Furusawa, and we left a question mark next to her name. We eliminated her on the basis of the wig evidence. With her long, black straight hair, why would Ms. Furusawa need to wear a wig of long, black straight hair?

  “Unless she was using it as a double-blind,” said Abby.

  That’s when Mallory put the question mark next to the nurse’s crossed-off name.

  At that moment, Eileen appeared at the entrance to the dining room. Mallory gestured to her to come join us and we stopped talking about the mystery.

  Looking up, I realized that the dining room was nearly full, mostly with kids from SMS. Since it was a Saturday morning, I figured most of the adults (except our chaperons, of course) had probably taken the opportunity to sleep late. I also noticed that Cary Retlin and Alan Gray and a couple of other guys from the group had managed to snag a table right next to us. Alan was acting goony, as usual, but Cary was sitting with his back to us, apparently staring at his plate. I wondered if he had overheard any of our conversation. I didn’t have quite the same kind of grudge against Cary that Kristy did, but I was wary of him. The less he (or anyone else, for that matter) knew of what we were doing, the better.

  I turned my attention back to our table just as Eileen pulled a chair out. She was starting to sit down when Alan seemed to leap out of nowhere to yank the chair out from under her.

  Mallory grabbed Eileen from one side and Mary Anne grabbed her from the other, keeping her upright.

  The room fell silent. I heard what sounded like the beginning of one of Cokie’s laughs, but it stopped mid-bray.

  Alan stood there, holding the chair and looking foolish.

  “What are you going to do for your next trick, Alan,” said Kristy loudly. “Pick your nose?”

  “Quit being a bully, Alan,” said Mallory, almost as loudly. “You — and Cokie — and everyone — you’re just like those witchhunters, going after people because you can. It’s not fair. It’s not right. And it’s stupid and ignorant.”

  Well, what could Alan say to that? Not much. Not after all this time spent in Salem, learning about the evils of witch-hunting and persecuting innocent people for being different.

  Alan looked around. Then, sheepishly, he put the chair back and returned to his table. Cokie still hadn’t dared laugh or say one nasty thing.

  Our confrontation with her last night and our stand against Alan this morning had stopped the witch-hunt of Eileen that had sprung up in our own class.

  I hoped it would never happen again.

  After that, breakfast was a pretty quiet affair. I finished quickly, knowing we had another long day of sightseeing ahead. I went up to my room, hoping to squeeze in a few minutes’ work on my project before it was time to go.

  I reviewed my notes and jotted down a couple of new ideas. Then I went to the closet, hunting for some comfortable shoes. I bent over to pick up my sneakers, and as I straightened up I came nose-to-combination lock with a small wall safe set into the back of the closet. Now why hadn’t I noticed that before? I wondered. “A five-digit safe combination for this room is available at the front desk,” read a sign pasted to the safe.

  “A safe,” I muttered. “A safe.” The numbers on the scrap of inn stationery flashed before my eyes. Five numbers. Five numbers that could — no, had to be the combination to a safe somewhere in this inn!

  “I have it!” I cried. “I have it!”

  “The flu?” guessed Abby, who had just returned to the room. “The meaning of life?”

  “No,” I said triumphantly. I shoved aside coats, dresses, and hangers, and pointed to the wall safe. “Not the meaning of life. The meaning of the five numbers I found on that piece of paper in the museum.”

  I had just come out of my room when I saw it: a small, folded square of white paper, lying on the carpet next to Mr. Hapgood’s door. For some reason, I picked it up. At the same moment, Stacey burst out of her room, proclaiming that she’d solved the numbers clue. Anyone could have heard her, including Mr. Hapgood.

  “Shhh!” I hissed, pushing her back into her room. I snagged Mary Anne and Mallory and, since we were due downstairs in about one minute to join our groups for sightseeing, I called an emergency meeting of the BSC upon our return.

  “Go on down,” I told them. “I have to, uh, pick up my camera.” Since my camera was one of those small, disposable ones, no one could tell that I already had it in my coat pocket. “I’ll catch up,” I added.

  I hurried back to my room and closed the door. Then I smoothed out the paper on my palm and my heart started to pound. It was obviously part of a larger sheet of paper that had been ripped up. On it were the words, “must destroy the evidence in the mu —” and on the line below, “— econd floor in the north cor —” The rest of the words had been torn away.

  My head began to spin. The paper must have fallen out of Mr. Hapgood’s trash container when the cleaning staff had emptied his garbage. This proved he was involved in the theft. And that he had a partner.

  I had to get to the museum before the thieves destroyed the evidence. I didn’t know what the evidence was, but I would worry about that later. At least I knew where it was: second floor — which must be the room on the second floor where the diamond had been — north corner.

  But how? How could I escape the buddy system?

  Sneakiness.

  I told Coach Wu I was going with Mr. Baker’s group, and told Mr. Baker I was going with Coach Wu’s group. After ducking a question from Abby, who was in Coach Wu’s group, I made myself scarce until everybody had left. I hated to do it, because our teachers trusted us and this was no way to repay that trust. But with luck no one would notice the switch, and I could slip back into the fold later without anyone being the wiser.

  I told myself that there was another good reason not to tell Mary Anne or the others about this clue. The less they knew, the less they could tell if a teacher did start asking questions. I have to admit, though, that part of me was just dying to solve this mystery alone. I guess I was still miffed at missing so much of the action on Thursday.

  The museum, of course, was still closed. Yellow crime scene tape crisscrossed the front entrance. I circled the building, trying to look inconspicuous. How was I going to get in? Suddenly, I saw a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase, emerge from a side door. He looked at his watch, shook his head, and hurried away.

  I darted forward and grabbed the door with my fingertips just before it slammed shut.

  “Ow,” I said, through clenched teeth. But what are a few smashed fingers when you are about to solve a mystery? I pried the door open and slipped inside.

  The door slammed behind me, and I jumped. Then I grabbed the knob.

  Too late. The door was locked. My heart sank. Did this mean I was locked inside? Suddenly the museum looked big and shadowy and dark. Where were the other exits?

  Forgetting, momentarily, about the clue, I walked as softly as I could down the long hall. Old-fashioned doors with frosted-glass windows, the kind with names of people and departments stenciled in black and gold script, lined the hallway. Some light shone dimly through the glass, but the doors themselves were locked.

  How was I going to get out? r />
  I walked on until I reached a large, solid door, and pushed it open.

  I was in one of the exhibit rooms of the museum. As the door closed behind me, I fumbled instinctively along one wall. I flicked what felt like a switch, and a row of lights on the far wall went on. I headed for them. Glass cases glinted dimly as I passed, and I could see the sparkle of jewelry and the oblongs of white paper that labeled the collections. But I ignored these. The diamond hadn’t been in this room. It had been in a room on the second floor. I reached a door in the far wall and pushed it open.

  I was now in a room full of furniture, from what I could tell by the dim light. I found another set of light switches, pressed one, and lit up the replica of a ship’s captain’s quarters on the far wall. I spotted another door across the room. Feeling like a rat in a maze, I started toward it, weaving in and out among beds and chairs and lamps.

  The lights went out when I was halfway across the room.

  I froze.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, I told myself.

  My heart felt as if it were going to leap out of my chest. My knees turned to jelly. My mouth was as dry as if it had been filled with sand.

  Don’t panic.

  The door was straight ahead, remember? I told myself. It probably led to the main hall. Maybe the lights I had hit were on a timer switch. When I reached that door, I could turn on the lights in the next room.

  I inched forward, paused, and considered trying to go back. But that way out was locked, and besides, what if I knocked over one of the chairs or lamps I had dodged crossing the room? I was pretty sure no major antique or valuable was directly between me and the door.

  I slid my feet forward, hands out, groping.

  I touched something soft.

  “Urrgh,” I said, before my hands discovered that what I was feeling was the back of a chair, not someone’s shoulder.

  Chill, I told myself. Who would be here anyway? The museum was closed, and even if Hapgood and his accomplice were headed for the scene, they hadn’t arrived yet.