“What do you know?” she said. She put her boxes down and groped for a switch plate. “I am not going up these stairs in the dark,” she announced.
“What are you afraid of? Bogeymen?” asked Claudia.
“Yes,” replied Stacey. “We didn’t have bogeymen in New York.”
Stacey found the switch then, turned on the light, and we climbed the stairs cautiously.
“Phew, is it ever dusty here,” said Claud.
“Really,” I agreed, and sneezed.
We reached the top of the stairs, put our boxes on the floor, and just stared.
“Whoa,” said Stacey. “Would you look at this.”
Claudia and I were speechless. The attic was small, but it was crammed with stuff. I saw an old rocking chair, a brass headboard for a bed, several stacks of old magazines, a bird cage, a box full of books, one of those big, dome-shaped radios, a huge trunk, and more.
“I wonder who all this belongs to,” Stacey whispered, and shivered. “Not the last people who owned the house. It looks like it’s been around forever. Anyway, why wouldn’t they have taken it with them?”
“An awful lot of people have lived in this house,” I pointed out. “If every family left a few things behind, then —” I swept my hand around as if to say, “Well, you see what can happen.”
Stacey took a step forward and tripped over one of our stacks of boxes. “Sheesh! There’s barely room for these. But we’d have a lot more space if we got rid of that.” She pointed to the trunk.
“Got rid of that?!” I cried. The trunk was handsome. Dusty, but handsome. Its lid was rounded. It was made of a rich-colored leather, and the fastenings were brass. “You can’t get rid of it! It’s beautiful!” I exclaimed. “Besides, think what might be in it.”
I crossed the attic, stepping over the boxes, and reached the trunk. I tried to open it. “Uh-oh,” I said. “It’s locked.” I tried to lift it. I couldn’t get it even an inch off the floor. “It must be stuffed,” I added.
“I wonder what is in it,” said Claud, joining me. Her eyes had sort of glazed over. I knew she was thinking of Nancy Drew and mysteries.
“Girls?” called Stacey’s mother then. “What are you doing up there?”
“Come see what we found,” Stacey yelled down the stairs.
Mrs. McGill, sneezing, climbed the stairs to the attic. “Goodness, it’s crowded up here!” she exclaimed.
Then Stacey showed her the trunk. “It is pretty,” she said to her mother, mostly, I think, so as not to insult Claud and me, “but it’s taking up way too much space. And it’s locked, so we can’t even see what’s in it.”
“It is taking up an awful lot of space,” Mrs. McGill agreed. “We should probably just throw it away. We’ll put it out for the garbage collector.”
“No!” cried Claudia and I at the same time.
“Nancy Drew and Miss Marple want to see what’s in the trunk,” Stacey informed her mother.
“Well, you’re welcome to have it,” said Mrs. McGill.
Claud and I looked at each other. How would we decide who got the trunk?
Claud solved the problem. “You take it, Mal,” she said. “My room’s a crowded mess already. Besides, it’ll be easier to get the trunk to your house. You live much closer by.”
So I called the triplets and they agreed to lug the trunk out of the attic, down the stairs, through the yards to our house, and up to the room I share with Vanessa.
I had to pay them a dollar each, but it was worth it.
When the trunk had been unloaded in my bedroom, Vanessa just stared at it. “Where did that come from?” she asked.
I told her the story.
“And where are we going to put it?” she wanted to know.
“At the foot of my bed.” I managed to shove it over.
Vanessa grinned. “Okay. Now let’s open it.”
“Can’t,” I told her. “It’s locked.”
“Locked!” Vanessa sounded angry, but then this poetic look came over her face. “I think,” she said dramatically, “that I shall write about a mystery trunk.” Vanessa grabbed for pencil and paper, a poem already forming in her mind.
But all I could do was stare at the beautiful trunk. I was sure it held secrets.
The next day, Monday, I ran straight home after school, eager to look at my trunk.
It was still unopened.
The evening before, the triplets had begged me to break the locks so we could get inside it, but I wouldn’t let them. I wanted the trunk opened, too, but I didn’t want to ruin it.
“Try bobby pins,” suggested Adam. “They always work in the movies.” So we did, but nothing happened.
“Try a credit card,” suggested Byron. “That works, too.”
His brothers gave him withering looks. “It doesn’t work on trunks,” they informed him. “It works on doors to people’s houses.”
“How about a coat hanger!” cried Vanessa.
That drew more withering looks.
“Coat hangers,” said Jordan, “are for getting into your car when you’ve locked yourself out.”
“Isn’t there a key somewhere?” asked Nicky, joining us in the bedroom.
I shook my head. “Nope. Stacey and I searched the attic.”
“Maybe it’s taped to the bottom of the trunk or something,” said Vanessa.
The six of us searched every inch of the trunk.
No key.
“Well,” I said. “That’s that. At least for now. I’ll think more about this tomorrow.”
* * *
Monday afternoon arrived and I didn’t have any new ideas. I could tell that the locked trunk was driving Vanessa crazy. She was writing poems like a demon, and casting long, soulful glances at both the trunk and me.
Finally she said, “I bet you could smash those locks with a hammer.”
“No way,” I replied. “That would ruin the trunk.”
I was glad when it was time to leave for a BSC meeting. I wouldn’t have to watch the tortured poet anymore.
Our club meetings are held from five-thirty until six every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. I like to get to club headquarters (Claudia’s bedroom) a little before five-thirty. If you are even a speck late, Kristy starts the meeting without you.
So I was pleased to enter headquarters at 5:25 that day. When I did, I found Claudia, Kristy, and Mary Anne already there. Claud was fishing around on the shelf of her closet, probably looking for junk food. Mary Anne was seated on Claudia’s bed, reading the club notebook (I’ll explain about that in a minute), and Kristy was in her official presidential position — sitting in Claud’s director’s chair, wearing a visor, a pencil stuck over one ear. She insists that our meetings — that the club itself — be run in as businesslike a way as possible.
This must be a good tactic, since the club is so successful. Let me tell you how it began, and how we run it.
As I said before, the club was Kristy’s idea. It came to her one day when her mom needed a sitter for David Michael, and neither Kristy nor one of her big brothers was available. So Mrs. Thomas started making phone calls. She made call after call, and while she did so, Kristy was thinking, Wouldn’t it save time if her mother could make one call and reach a lot of baby-sitters at once, instead of calling one person after another?
So she got together with Mary Anne and Claudia, who were her neighbors then (they’d grown up together), and the three of them decided to start a club to baby-sit in their neighborhood. They also decided that they needed a fourth member, so they asked Stacey to join. Stacey had just moved to Stoneybrook (for the first time) and was a new friend of Claud’s.
The club was a huge success. Soon they needed a fifth member and invited Dawn, who was getting to be friends with Mary Anne, to join. Then when Stacey had to go back to New York, the other girls asked Jessi and me to take her place.
How does the club run? Well, thanks to advertising (a little ad in the Stoneybrook newspaper and a lot of fliers
in mailboxes), people around here know when we meet and call us during those times to line up sitters. When one of us answers Claud’s phone, that person takes down all the information about the job. Then Mary Anne checks our schedule to see who’s free, and we call the client back to tell her (or him) who the sitter will be.
Each of us has a special job to do in order to keep the club operating smoothly.
Kristy’s job as president is to come up with new ideas for the club, to run the meetings, and to solve problems.
Claudia, our vice-president, doesn’t actually have a job, but because she’s the only one of us with her own phone and private phone number, we meet in her room so that we don’t have to tie up our parents’ lines. Since we invade her room three times a week, we think it’s only fair that she be the VP.
Mary Anne is the secretary and has the biggest, most complicated job of all of us. She is in charge of the club record book (not to be confused with the club notebook). The record book is where all important club information is written down — our clients’ names, addresses, and phone numbers; special information about the kids we sit for; and most important of all, our schedules. Mary Anne has to keep track of Jessi’s ballet classes, Claudia’s art lessons, my orthodontist appointments (did I mention my disgusting braces?), and other things like that, in order to know who’s free when, so she can safely schedule sitting jobs for us. She has never once made a mistake.
Stacey is the treasurer, in charge of collecting our weekly dues every Monday and keeping an eye on the money in our treasury. We use that money for several things. One is for fun club stuff. Since we work so hard we like to treat ourselves to sleepovers or pizza parties every now and then. Another is to pay Kristy’s older brother Charlie to drive her to and from meetings since she lives so far away now. The third is to buy new items for our Kid-Kits. Kid-Kits were one of Kristy’s big ideas. We’ve each got a cardboard box that is decorated with fabric and paint and stuff, and filled with our old toys, books, and games. We take our Kid-Kits along sometimes when we baby-sit, and the children love them! But things get used up, and every now and then we have to buy new crayons or a coloring book or sticker book.
Dawn is our alternate officer, meaning that she can take over the job of any officer who might be absent from a meeting. She’s kind of like a substitute teacher. It’s a hard job because she has to know what everyone does. (When Stacey was back in New York, Dawn became the treasurer, but now that Stacey has returned, Dawn gladly took over her old job. She isn’t wild about math, and Stacey is.)
Jessi and I are junior officers. To be honest, we don’t have jobs. “Junior officer” simply means that since we’re eleven we’re only allowed to sit during the daytime — not at night unless we’re sitting for our own brothers and sisters. But we don’t mind. We get plenty of after-school and weekend jobs.
Two more things about the club, just to show you how officially Kristy runs it. One, she makes us keep a club notebook. In the notebook, each of us is responsible for writing up every single job we go on. Then we’re supposed to read the book once a week to see what’s happened while our friends were sitting. We learn how they handled problems with kids and things like that. I think everyone but Kristy and me hates writing in the notebook. I like it just because I enjoy writing, and Kristy has to like it, since the notebook was her idea. Two, our club has a couple of associate members. They don’t come to meetings, but they’re good sitters whom we can call on if a job is offered to the club that no one else can take. One of our associates is a friend of Kristy’s named Shannon Kilbourne. The other is none other than … Logan Bruno, Mary Anne’s boyfriend!
Well, I think that’s everything you need to know about the running of the club.
* * *
By five-thirty, the seven of us had gathered in Claud’s room and were eating pretzels. (Pretzels are one snack food that Stacey can eat and Dawn doesn’t consider too junky.) Kristy had opened the meeting and we were waiting for the phone to ring.
“Did you get the trunk unlocked?” Stacey asked me while we waited.
“No, darn it,” I replied, and then she and Claud and I had to explain about the trunk.
“We can’t find a key, and bobby pins don’t work,” I added.
“Did you try dynamite?” asked Kristy.
We laughed.
We were still laughing when the first job call came in. For a few moments, no one could calm down. At last Stacey composed herself, picked up the phone, turned toward the wall so she wouldn’t have to look at us, and spoke to Mrs. Barrett, who has three little kids. The Barretts live near Dawn and me.
Mary Anne checked the schedule and the job was given to Dawn.
Then Kristy said, “Okay, we have to settle down. We have to be businesslike.”
So we did settle down. But every time I thought about blasting the trunk open with dynamite, I wanted to start giggling again.
Wow. Dawn used to have disastrous days with the Barrett kids. She called them the Impossible Three. The Impossible Three are Buddy, who is eight and in third grade; Suzi, who is five and in kindergarten; and Marnie, who’s just two. Only they’re not so impossible anymore.
The reason they used to be impossible was that Mr. and Mrs. Barrett has just gotten a divorce and Mrs. Barrett was not used to coping with three little kids by herself, running a household, and looking for a job. But now she’s found a part-time job — a good one — and is much more organized. So things have been going better for the Barretts. I was hoping that Buddy’s reading problem was just a small setback.
Anyway, Dawn rang the Barretts’ bell five minutes before Mrs. Barrett had asked her to arrive. Us baby-sitters have found that getting to a job a little early is a good idea. (Of course, if you can’t get there early, definitely be right on time.) But arriving early gives the parent, or parents, a few extra moments for explanations or to say a special good-bye to the kids. The sitting job starts off in a more relaxed way.
Usually.
Dawn’s job wouldn’t have started off well no matter when she’d arrived. That was because she walked into a crisis.
The doorbell was answered by Suzi, who whispered dramatically to Dawn, “Fight! In the kitchen! Buddy did something bad!”
Oh, no, thought Dawn, as she went inside.
She was greeted by the sound of Buddy saying, “I do try. I don’t fool around in class.”
“But honey —” Mrs. Barrett began.
“Mom,” interrupted Buddy, “I’m a good enough reader to read most of Mr. Moser’s note. And he says you should help me at home.”
“I know he does. I just don’t know when we can — Oh, hi, Dawn.” Mrs. Barrett paused as Dawn entered the kitchen.
“Hi,” Dawn replied, feeling embarrassed. “Do — do you want me to take Suzi outside or something?”
“No, no. That’s all right. You don’t have to leave. We’ve just got a little problem. Buddy’s teacher has suggested that I try to spend some ‘quality time’ with him in order to improve his reading. You know, flash cards, reading aloud, that sort of thing. But I’ve got three kids and only so much ‘quality time.’ I don’t see any way to stretch that time.”
“I don’t want flash cards anyway,” mumbled Buddy. “Besides, I can read.”
“I know you can read,” said Mrs. Barrett wearily. “Mr. Moser is just saying that you don’t read quite as well as the other kids in your class.”
“So what?” countered Buddy crossly. He was sitting at the kitchen table, kicking the legs of his chair with his heels.
“I can read,” spoke up Suzi importantly. “I can read lots of words. We’re learning in kindergarten.”
Buddy threw his sister a murderous glance.
Mrs. Barrett didn’t seem to notice any of this. Instead she said, “I don’t think Mr. Moser knows what he’s asking. I work at home in the mornings so that I don’t have to pay for a sitter for Marnie. Then I go to the office most afternoons and some evenings. When I’m not working, I’m tryi
ng to cook, clean, and play with each of the children. How am I supposed to be a reading teacher, too?”
Dawn felt pretty bad for Mrs. Barrett and Buddy, but she wasn’t sure what to say. It didn’t matter. Mrs. Barrett flew off to work in her usual rush then, saying, “Marnie’s napping but she should be up soon. Buddy and Suzi have just had juice and cookies, so no more snacks. Marnie can have some milk when she gets up, though. Her special cup is on the counter.” She quickly kissed Buddy and Suzi. Then she was gone.
“Okay, you guys, what do you want to do today?” asked Dawn. “It’s getting sort of drizzly out, so we better stay indoors.”
Before the kids could answer, Dawn heard Marnie upstairs. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” she was singing.
“I better go get Marnie,” said Dawn. “I’m sure she’ll need to be changed, so I’ll be a few minutes. Why don’t you two play with Pow in the rec room?” (Pow is the Barretts’ basset hound.)
Buddy and Suzi obediently headed for the stairs to the rec room, but Buddy looked like he’d just lost his best friend. Dawn paused, thinking, then dashed upstairs to Marnie.
“Hi, Marnie-O,” she greeted her.
Marnie was standing in her crib. She was surprised to see Dawn instead of her mother, and for just a moment her lower lip quivered.
Dawn pretended nothing was wrong. She sang “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” very softly, pulled up the window shade, and straightened the things on Marnie’s changing table. By the time she turned back to the crib, Marnie was smiling. She likes Dawn.
Dawn picked Marnie up, laid her on the changing table, and said in a low voice, “Do you want me to … tickle, tickle?”
“No! No!” shrieked Marnie, laughing.
Then Dawn played peek-a-boo with Marnie, changed her diaper, took her down to the kitchen, and gave her some milk in her two-handled cup.
“Dawn?” called Buddy from the rec room.
“Yes?” Dawn replied. She was putting the milk carton back in the refrigerator.
“Suzi’s bothering me.”