Mallory and the Mystery Diary

  “David Michael?” she called.

  Andrew and Karen looked up from their toys.

  “Have you seen David Michael?” Kristy asked them.

  They shook their heads.

  “Oh, brother. You’d think he’d tell me if he was going back down —”

  “Morbidda Destiny,” interrupted Karen in a whisper.

  “What?” said Kristy.

  “The witch next door. I can see her house out the window. I bet she’s a friend of Old Ben Brewer’s and has powers in this attic and she and the ghosts have got David Michael —”

  “BOO!!”

  Everyone jumped a mile as David Michael burst out of an old wardrobe in a corner of the room. Emily began to cry.

  “David Michael,” said Kristy sternly, “you scared us to death.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I didn’t mean to make Emily cry. Honest. But wouldn’t hide-and-seek be a good game to play up here?”

  Everyone had to agree that it would, since they hadn’t discovered all the hiding places already. So a game began. Kristy helped Emily dry her tears and then they worked together as a team.

  The afternoon passed quickly. Kristy was looking for the zillionth hiding place that was big enough for both herself and Emily, when Karen, standing by a window, cried, “I see the Pink Clinker! I see the Pink Clinker! It’s coming up the drive!”

  “I think this is the end of hide-and-seek, you guys,” said Kristy. “Let’s go downstairs and see Nannie. She won’t believe what we did today.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Karen. “We stayed up in the attic for hours and didn’t see a single sign of ghosts.”

  “Are you surprised?” asked Kristy, who confessed later that she’d been hoping for a little excitement, maybe a mystery like mine.

  “I guess not,” replied Karen. “Ghosts only come out at night anyway. This attic might be okay during the day, but I wouldn’t want to come up here at night.”

  “Me neither,” said Andrew and David Michael.

  “Me neither,” said Kristy.

  She picked up Emily, and she and her brothers and sisters went downstairs to meet Nannie.

  Kristy was sitting in Claud’s director’s chair, her visor in place, a pencil stuck over one ear. She was wearing her usual jeans-and-turtle-neck outfit, and she was busy trying to get the meeting underway.

  “Order! Come to order, please!” she was saying as she tapped a pencil on Claud’s desk.

  The rest of us were gathered and ready to go. Jessi and I were sitting on the floor, leafing through the club notebook. Jessi was wearing a long, heart-covered sweat shirt over her dance leotard and a pair of pink pants that (although you couldn’t see this) I knew were held up at the waist with a drawstring. I was wearing boring old jeans, but a top that I liked a lot — a big white long-sleeved T-shirt that said I KIDS across the front.

  In a row on Claud’s bed were Mary Anne, Stacey, and Claudia. Mary Anne, who can be pretty funky in her own shy way, was wearing a very cool short printed jumper over a striped shirt. You might think that those two things would clash, but they didn’t. They looked great together. The jumper was white with a small red print, and the shirt was white with narrow, widely-spaced stripes. Claudia called the outfit “a fashion risk that worked.” Claud herself was wearing jeans, a plain white blouse, a pink sweater, white socks, and loafers. She said she’d gone back to the fifties for the day. Stacey, on the other hand, was in a much more typical outfit — a short-sleeved blue-and-white jumpsuit with cuffed pants. Parts of it were striped, parts were solid. On her feet were high-topped sneakers laced only halfway up so that she could roll the tongue of the shoe down (extremely cool), plus she was wearing a lot of jewelry. I think Claud had made some of it for her.

  Last but not least was Dawn, sitting backward in Claud’s desk chair, resting her arms on the top rung of the back. Her outfit was fairly normal — pants and a baggy sweat shirt — but on her head was a small straw hat! I couldn’t believe it. Talk about fashion risks.

  Anyway, Kristy was calling us to order, and we were all straightening up and paying attention.

  “Treasurer?” said Kristy to Stacey.

  “Dues day!” Stacey cried (as if we could forget). “Pay up, you guys.”

  Grumbling and groaning, we reached into our pockets or purses and forked over the weekly dues. Stacey collected it, tossed it in the treasury, added up the new total (she can do this practically just by looking at the money), and announced what was in the manila envelope.

  “Thirty-two dollars and forty-one cents. We’re in good shape. Anybody need anything for the Kid-Kits?”

  “Crayons,” said Kristy.

  “Can of Play-Doh,” said Claudia.

  “Stickers,” I said.

  Stacey handed each of us some money, reminding us twice to bring back the change. She looked as if parting with the money were painful.

  Then the phone began to ring. After three job calls, things settled down. In fact, we reached a moment of silence.

  “It must be twenty of six,” said Jessi. “Silences are almost always at twenty of or twenty after the hour.”

  I stretched my head up to look at Claud’s digital clock, the club’s official timepiece. “Nope,” I replied. “It’s quarter of.”

  “Oh, well,” Jessi said, and shrugged.

  When a few more moments went by without another call, I said, “Um, Stacey? Have you noticed anything unusual at your house?”

  “Unusual?” repeated Stacey. “Yeah. It got neat. Every last thing has been put away.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant, have you noticed anything strange at night, in the dark, especially after you and your mom have gone to bed?”

  “You mean like ghoulies and ghosties?” teased Claudia.

  “Well … yes,” I answered. “I’m serious, you guys. I’m dying to know if Sophie ever proved that her father was innocent. If there are no wandering spirits at Stacey’s, it might mean that she did.”

  “It might also mean there are no such things as ghosts,” spoke up Kristy.

  “Come on, Stacey. Have you seen anything?” I asked again.

  “We-ell, I have heard a few funny noises.”

  “Like what?” I asked excitedly.

  “Oh, scratchings and blowings. Mom says I’ve forgotten what country nights are like. She says the noises are just squirrels or the wind. Stuff like that. One night I did see something white in my room. It was at the foot of my bed,” (I heard Mary Anne draw her breath in sharply) “but I think it was just moonlight.”

  “Couldn’t you tell for sure?” I asked. “Did it move or anything?”

  Stacey shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Well, haven’t you seen moonlight before?” I pressed.

  “Only here in Stoneybrook. And at Camp Mohawk. In New York, it’s impossible to tell moonlight from streetlights and lights from other buildings.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  The phone rang then and we arranged a job for Mary Anne with the Perkins girls, who live in Kristy’s old house.

  When that was done, Kristy said, “You know, I’ve been thinking.” (Isn’t she always?) “We’re going about this all wrong. We’re solving the mystery backward. Instead of trying to find out whether Stacey’s house is haunted, and then deciding if that means that Sophie and Jared’s spirits are still hanging around — which is pretty unlikely, all things considered — why don’t we just try to solve the original mystery?”

  “How can we do that?” I asked. “Everything happened over a hundred years ago.”

  “Oh, you never know what kind of information you can turn up once you start looking,” replied Kristy. “For instance, we know that Sophie calls her grandfather ‘Grandfather Hickman’ and that he was rich and lived in a mansion across town from Stacey’s house. You don’t suppose Grandfather Hickman could have been James Hickman, do you?”

  “Old Hickory?” squeaked Mary Anne.

  “Oh, my lord!” exclaime
d Claudia.

  There’s a legend in Stoneybrook about a recluse nicknamed Old Hickory, who was the meanest and stingiest, but also the wealthiest man in town, and who died decades ago, leaving his fortune to some long-lost nephew. In his will, he specifically said that he didn’t want a big funeral or even a gravestone. But his nephew felt a little guilty, since he was inheriting so much money from someone he didn’t even know, so he had a gravestone as big as a statue put up for his uncle in Stoneybrook cemetery. Now people say that the graveyard is haunted by the ghost of Old Hickory, who’s angry about what his nephew did.

  Mary Anne is particularly sensitive about this subject because some girls at school played a trick on her (well, on all of us, really) and made us go to Old Hickory’s grave at midnight last Halloween. They had planned to scare us, but we ended up scaring them!

  “Gosh, I wonder,” said Dawn. “Grandfather Hickman … Old Hickory. And — and this is sort of a long shot, but you don’t think Jared, Sophie’s father, could be the Jared who’s supposed to haunt the secret passage at my house … do you?”

  “Oh, no,” said Mary Anne quickly. “How could he be? Didn’t the story go that he was the son of farmers who had to leave town in disgrace? Well, so far that much could be true. But then he disappeared. Wouldn’t people have noticed if he turned up again and married the daughter of the richest man in town?”

  “They’re all just stories,” Kristy pointed out. “And most of them are ghost stories, so right away we know we can’t believe them entirely. What we have to do is find out which parts are accurate and see if anything connects.”

  “I should go back and check that old history book,” said Dawn. “You know, A History of Stoneybrooke. I should read the part about Jared Mullray again. I don’t even remember when that story was supposed to have taken place. Hey, Mal, what’s Sophie’s last name? Is it Mullray?”

  I paused. “I don’t think Sophie ever mentioned her last name,” I said finally. “At the beginning of the diary, she just wrote ‘by Sophie.’ I’m pretty sure the only last name she mentions is Hickman, but that wouldn’t be her last name. I’ll read through the diary again, though,” I told Dawn.

  “Well, one thing sort of fits,” said Claud, our mystery-book fan. “If Sophie’s grandfather really was Old Hickory, I think only he would be mean enough to hate Jared so much, no matter what Jared had done, and only he would cut two innocent kids out of his will just because he didn’t like their father. After all, Sophie and Edgar didn’t do anything to their grandfather.”

  “Hey!” exclaimed Jessi. “Maybe Sophie stole the painting. No one would suspect her. And that’s how you usually solve mysteries, isn’t it? You suspect the least suspicious person.”

  “Then we should suspect Edgar,” I said. “Jess, Sophie wouldn’t tell lies in her diary. That’s not what diaries are for. If anything, she’d confess in it. Besides, she was too passionate. She couldn’t lie so passionately.”

  “I think we can eliminate Sophie as a suspect,” said Kristy. “But Claud does have a point about Old Hickory. He really might be Sophie’s grandfather. And that’s how you solve hundred-year-old mysteries. By connecting little pieces of information.”

  “I guess we still have some digging ahead of us,” I said, “but I bet we can do it. I bet we can.”

  “Oh, I have goose bumps,” said Mary Anne. “Even if this doesn’t turn out to be another ghost story, it is pretty spooky. The missing portrait … the nasty grandfather … the dead mother.”

  “I love mysteries,” said Claudia, hugging herself happily.

  “Easy for you to say,” spoke up Stacey. “I’m the one who might have angry ghosts roaming around my house at night.” But I could tell she didn’t really mean it. Stacey isn’t a big believer in the supernatural or astrology or things like that. Even so, she looked just the teeniest bit nervous. The rest of us looked nervous, too. Claudia looked happily nervous, since she loves having a mystery to solve. Mary Anne looked worried and nervous, and everyone else, including me, looked intrigued and nervous.

  All during our ghostly conversation we’d been stopping to take job calls. Now it was nearly six and the phone had stopped ringing. When Claud’s digital clock read 6:00 on the nose, Kristy took off her visor and said loudly, “Meeting adjourned!” The BSC members left Claud’s room, looking pretty thoughtful.

  It was another “Tutor Buddy” day. As you know, the first tutoring session had pretty much been a disaster. The second one hadn’t been any better. But this time I was going to the Barretts’ house armed with a few materials and a lot of ideas. I had finally put Sophie’s diary down long enough to catch up on my homework and give some thought to Buddy’s reading problems.

  Ding-dong.

  Buddy answered the doorbell, looking particularly unenthusiastic.

  I ignored that. “Hiya,” I said, sounding perky, as usual.

  “Hi.”

  Buddy ushered me inside. Mrs. Barrett was home that afternoon and waved to me from the living room. When Buddy and I reached his bedroom, I saw Buddy’s reader and workbook stacked neatly on his desk.

  “Guess what?” I said. “We don’t need those today.” I pointed to his books.

  “We don’t?” replied Buddy. “Mom put them there so I wouldn’t forget my homework.”

  “Well, we’re not going to do your homework this afternoon. You can do it tonight. We’ll look at your assignment before I go, to make sure you understand the directions. Now get this — we aren’t even going to sit at your desk.”

  “Where are we going to sit?” asked Buddy, looking outdoors hopefully.

  “On your bed. I’ve got something special for you.”

  “In that bag?”

  “Yup. Come here and sit down.” I patted a spot on Buddy’s bed and turned on his reading lamp. When he had settled himself against a pillow, I sat next to him and handed him the bag.

  “Is this for me?”

  “Yup. Well, the things inside are on loan from Nicky and the triplets. We’ll have to return them in a couple of days.”

  “Okay.” Buddy looked intrigued.

  Then he opened the bag and pulled out—

  “Comic books? Archie comic books! What are they for?”

  “They’re for you to read,” I told him. “I think they’ll be more fun than your schoolbooks.”

  “Really?” cried Buddy. “I can read these?”

  “Sure,” I replied, but even as the word was coming out of my mouth, an awful thought was occurring to me. Maybe Mrs. Barrett didn’t let her kids read comics. Some parents don’t, and I can understand why. In our house we’re allowed to read comics, but only as long as we read books, too. Mom and Dad said that was fair since they read some pretty junky magazines as well as good books. But not all parents feel that way.

  Or maybe, I thought, Buddy’s teacher doesn’t let his students read comics. Or maybe Mrs. Barrett had said, “No comics until your grades improve, Buddy.”

  “You are allowed to read comics, aren’t you?” I asked Buddy.

  “We-ell, I don’t know. My teacher said they’re trash. But he didn’t say we couldn’t read them.”

  “What does your mother say?”

  “About comic books? Nothing.”

  “Then we’re going to read them,” I said.

  My reasoning was that Buddy didn’t think reading was fun. He didn’t enjoy it. If I could show him that reading can be fun, maybe (later) he would start reading things besides comics, like mysteries or animal stories. And when his reading improved, his schoolwork would become easier.

  I fanned the comic books on the bed between Buddy and me. “Pick one,” I told him.

  Buddy considered the selection seriously. At last he chose a book. He opened it to the first page.

  “I like comics!” he announced, sounding truly excited for the first time since I’d started tutoring him. “I like the pictures!”

  “Try the words,” I suggested.

  Buddy drew in a deep breath
— and began reading. He read haltingly at first. Then he began to sound more confident. When he stumbled over the words “ice-cream cone,” I said, “Look at the picture. Does that give you a clue?”

  “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Ice cream … I mean, ice-cream … cone?”

  “You got it!”

  “Hey!” Buddy sounded quite pleased with himself.

  He read along. When he came to a word he didn’t know, he looked at the pictures and then sounded the word out. Buddy had been right. He could read more easily when he read words “together,” instead of single words on flash cards. And he certainly read better when he liked what he was reading.

  After Buddy had read two episodes in the comic book, I said, “Okay, we’re going to stop now.”

  “Oh,” groaned Buddy, “just when we were having fun.”

  “The next thing will be even more fun. I promise,” I told him. “Do you have some notebook paper at your desk?”

  Buddy nodded.

  “Great. Go get it. And a couple of pencils with erasers, too, please.”

  Buddy did as I asked.

  I took a piece of paper and, with a pencil, divided the paper into squares. Then I handed the paper back to Buddy. I put a book under it so that he could write on the paper.

  “What’s this for?” asked Buddy.

  “Well,” I began, “you’ve just read some comics. Now you’re going to make your own. They can be Archie comics, or any comics. You could even invent new characters.”

  “I’m going to make a comic strip?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “I’ll make one, too.”

  “I don’t know, Mal,” said Buddy. “I’m not very good at drawing.”

  “Just give it a try.”

  So Buddy sat and thought while I divided my own paper into squares. By the time I’d finished, he had begun working.

  My comic was about a mouse, a squirrel, and a crow that lived in some woods and had adventures together. I was dying to peek at Buddy’s paper and see what he was doing, but I didn’t want to make him nervous.