Mallory and the Mystery Diary

  “That’s a nice story, Char,” Stacey began, “but I don’t see —”

  “Wait. Now let me show you the pictures,” Charlotte interrupted. She scrambled out of the chair and over to Stacey on the floor.

  “Hey!” said Stacey, flipping through the book. “This is a Christmas story! Look, Katie’s parents are decorating the tree in this picture, and on this page there are Christmas decorations up at Katie’s school.”

  “Right,” said Charlotte. “Only you’d hardly know this is a Christmas story if you didn’t see the pictures. Christmas is only mentioned twice, and you don’t know if it’s right around the corner, or a whole month off. Not unless you see the pictures.”

  “But Charlotte, I still don’t see what this book has to do with Sophie and Old Hickory and our mystery. What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Only,” replied Charlotte, “that things aren’t always what they seem to be. Sometimes you have to look past what’s right in front of your nose.”

  Well, Stacey puzzled over that for the rest of the afternoon. She puzzled over it while Charlotte puzzled over our mystery. She puzzled over it while she read two chapters of The BFG, by Roald Dahl, to Charlotte. She puzzled over it while Charlotte beat her at Memory and she beat Charlotte at dominoes. She puzzled over it while Charlotte began her homework. And she puzzled over it while Mr. Johanssen paid her and she rode her bike home.

  She called me right away.

  “Mal?” she said. “It’s me, Stace. I just got back from sitting for Charlotte and she said something pretty interesting.”

  “What?” I asked. I was talking on the phone in our upstairs hallway, where there is absolutely no privacy.

  “She said, ‘Things aren’t always what they seem to be.’” Stacey explained about Katie and the Sad Noise. “I wonder what this has to do with our mystery.”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied, “but I’ll think about it. I like what she said about someone knowing something, too. About there always being a culprit. Maybe Kristy’s right after all. Maybe the pieces to the mystery are all here to be found — if we just look past our noses.”

  “Maybe,” said Stacey uncertainly. “I hope so.”

  “I know so,” I replied, suddenly optimistic.

  “So, Buddy, what did you think?” I asked him.

  I was tutoring Buddy again and had come over with some more special materials. I think Buddy had been hoping for comics. Instead, I had brought over a collection of Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. The fun thing about Encyclopedia Brown is that you — the reader — can really solve the mysteries yourself. If you pay close enough attention to each short story you can find the clue and solve the mystery, instead of just reading about how Encyclopedia Brown, boy detective, solves it.

  So I read one story out loud to Buddy — and he solved the mystery right away!

  “That is terrific, Buddy!” I exclaimed. “I bet I couldn’t do that.”

  “Bet you could.”

  “Could not.”

  “Could. Here. Let me read a mystery to you. Then you’ll see.” Buddy took the book out of my hands and read an entire mystery with only a few mistakes. His reading was so much better. When he finished, I knew the solution right away — but I pretended I couldn’t figure it out.

  “Gosh, I don’t know, Buddy —” I began.

  “Come on, think,” said Buddy, probably the way Mr. Moser sometimes spoke to him. “What did the bully say to Encyclopedia right near the end —”

  “Oh, I know!” I cried. “I’ve got it!” I told Buddy the solution.

  “That’s it! Now let’s do another. This time you read a story to me again.”

  Buddy and I were sitting cross-legged on his bed, facing each other.

  I took the book back from him, but instead of selecting another mystery, I said, “You know, my friends and I are in the middle of a real mystery.”

  “No kidding,” said Buddy.

  “Yup.” I told him about the trunk and the diary. The more I talked, the wider Buddy’s eyes grew.

  When I had finished the story — including the part about the séance — Buddy was so excited he was wriggling around on the bed. “Can I see the diary? Can I, Mallory? Please? I want to read about Sophie’s mystery. Maybe I could solve that one, too. Maybe I could be a detective like Encyclopedia Brown!”

  At first I thought, Buddy is just looking for an excuse to get out of his tutoring session. But then I decided that if he really wanted to look at the diary, that would be just as good a reading experience as any other. Probably better, since Buddy was so interested in solving the mystery.

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t see why we can’t go to my house. You can look at the diary there. But I better warn you. It isn’t easy to read. Even I had trouble with it. The words aren’t really long or anything but, well, can you read cursive yet, Buddy?”

  “Yup,” he replied proudly.

  “All right then. Let’s go.”

  Buddy and I dashed downstairs. While Buddy put his jacket on, I explained to Mary Anne what we were doing. (Mary Anne was sitting for Suzi and Marnie that afternoon.)

  “Good luck!” Mary Anne called after us as we ran out the Barretts’ front door.

  Buddy was so excited that he kept right on running, all the way to my house. When I opened our door for him, he ran up to Vanessa’s and my room.

  Vanessa was surprised, to say the least, to see Buddy appear breathlessly before her.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. She was in a poetry-writing phase, surrounded by papers. I hoped we hadn’t broken her train of thought. “This isn’t Nicky’s room, Buddy,” she said. “And he isn’t home anyway.”

  “I’m not here to see Nicky,” replied Buddy, undaunted.

  “He’s here to see the diary and the trunk,” I said.

  “Hmphh.” Vanessa huffed out of our room with an armload of papers.

  “Is that the trunk?” asked Buddy excitedly, pointing to it.

  “It sure is,” I answered. I was proud of the trunk. I had cleaned it and polished it and even tried to fix the broken locks. It looked more beautiful than ever.

  “Where’s the diary?”

  “Right here.” I retrieved the diary from my nightstand and Buddy and I sat next to each other on my bed.

  Buddy opened the diary carefully. He flipped to January 1st and just stared at the page. “Gosh,” he said after a moment, “this is hard to read.”

  “I know. The ink is faded and Sophie had funny handwriting.”

  “She couldn’t spell, either,” said Buddy, and we both laughed.

  “Good for you,” I said. “What did you find wrong?”

  “This word. Happy. She only put one ‘p’ in it. You would have to pronounce that ‘haypy.’”

  “You’re absolutely right.” I wanted to hug Buddy. If only Mr. Moser could see him now. He would probably send a nice note home to Mrs. Barrett.

  Buddy struggled along with the diary for about ten minutes, sometimes reading to me, sometimes to himself. When he reached the middle of January, he said, “This is really boring. Where’s the mystery?”

  “You have to skip way ahead to when Sophie’s little brother was born,” I told him. I flipped through the diary. “There. Start reading there.”

  Buddy did. To himself. He read for so long that I got bored and began to read a new horse story I’d borrowed from the library. It was after five o’clock when Buddy suddenly closed the diary.

  I closed my book, too, and glanced over at him.

  “I couldn’t find the clue,” said Buddy, looking disappointed.

  “Well, don’t feel too bad,” I told him. “No one else has found any clues, either. This isn’t Encyclopedia Brown, you know.”

  “Maybe the clue’s not in the diary,” said Buddy, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Maybe it’s somewhere else, like in the trunk. Could I look in the trunk, Mal?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “Just be really careful. Some of the clothes in there are so o
ld they’re falling apart.”

  “Okay.”

  Buddy opened the trunk and began feeling around. He dug deeper and deeper through the clothes until —

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “What-oh?” I asked.

  “Mallory, my hand is stuck.”

  “Stuck? How could it be stuck?”

  “It just is.”

  I got up and felt around in the trunk. I followed Buddy’s arm down, down until …

  “It is stuck!” I exclaimed.

  “Told you so.”

  “It’s in a sort of pocket, I think.” I moved aside some clothes and tugged on Buddy’s arm. At last his hand came loose. It had been stuck in a pocket (a very well-hidden one), and it was now clutching a packet of papers.

  “Look what was in there!” said Buddy.

  We spread the papers out on my bed. Like the pages of the diary, they were old and yellowed, only some of these were actually crumbling, so we had to be extremely careful.

  Buddy looked at the page numbered “one.” He bent over so he could read it without touching it. “James Hickman,” he said. “My Confession.”

  Buddy and I looked at each other, our mouths open. Then Buddy began to read out loud, but I was too excited to listen to his slow, careful pronunciation. For just a while, I couldn’t be his tutor. I skimmed ahead silently.

  It turned out that Grandfather Hickman really was James Hickman — so Kristy had been right. He was also Old Hickory, of course. And you will never guess what he did. People might have thought Jared was a mean guy, but he wasn’t half as terrible as Old Hickory. Although I have to admit that if you can believe Old Hickory’s confession, he didn’t set out to do something terrible. He just allowed something terrible to happen.

  Old Hickory wrote that after his daughter died, he was distraught and couldn’t even bear to look at her portrait. He didn’t want to get rid of it, though, so he hired someone he called an “itinerant painter” to paint over the portrait of Sophie’s mother. (I found out later that an itinerant painter was an amateur artist who made his living going from town to town painting portraits and other pictures for people who wanted “art” in their homes.) Then Old Hickory changed the frame around the painting and moved the new painting into another room in his house. That way his daughter was with him — and yet she wasn’t.

  Okay, that much I could understand. But then Old Hickory’s friends (I guess he hadn’t become a recluse yet) began asking where the portrait was. Old Hickory was embarrassed about what he’d done, so he lied and said the painting had disappeared, had probably been stolen. Immediately, the townspeople suspected Jared. They knew how Old Hickory felt about him — that Jared was a good-for-nothing who had married Sophie’s mother for her money and then insisted that she have another child when she was really too weak for it. And the terrible thing that James Hickman had done was to let the people believe they were right. He never admitted to having the portrait painted over — not until he was old and ready to die and bursting with his secret. Then he wrote out his confession, knowing that someday someone would find it and learn the truth.

  “Whoa,” said Buddy when he’d finally finished reading the confession and I had helped him understand the hard parts.

  “I know,” I said. “Double whoa. What a find you made, Buddy! I’m glad you got your hand stuck. Maybe you will become a detective one day.”

  “Maybe,” said Buddy. “You know, detectives ask a lot of questions, and I have one right now.”

  “What is it?”

  “How did this trunk with Old Hickory’s confession in it turn up in the attic of Sophie’s house — with Sophie’s diary and clothes in it?”

  I frowned. “Good question,” I said. “Maybe when Old Hickory’s nephew inherited the mansion, he moved some things he didn’t want over to Sophie’s house. Old Hickory owned that house, too. The trunk was probably half empty, and the nephew just dumped some stuff into it.”

  “Hey!” cried Buddy. “If the nephew moved the trunk to Sophie’s house, he might have moved some other things over there, like, say, an old painting!”

  “Whoa,” I said again.

  “Buddy, you’re a genius!” I exclaimed.

  Buddy blushed. “Maybe, maybe not. I’m just guessing.”

  “But your guess is a good one. Come on, let’s call Stacey and see if she’s home. It’s almost five-thirty. We still have half an hour before I have to get you back to Mary Anne. We have just enough time to take a look around Stacey’s attic.”

  “Oh, boy!” cried Buddy.

  I was on the hall phone dialing Stacey in about two seconds.

  “Stace! Stace!” I said. (I’d been so afraid she wouldn’t be home.)

  “Mal? Is that you? Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, it’s me, and everything is better than all right. You will not believe what Buddy found today!”

  I told her how Buddy and I had come over to my house, and Buddy had gotten his hand stuck and found the confession. Stacey sounded somewhat confused — until I told her our theory about Old Hickory’s things winding up in her attic. Then she got the point immediately.

  “The painting!” she shrieked. “Oh, wow! Come over right now! Both you and Buddy. We’ll make a thorough search. It shouldn’t take too long, since the attic’s so small and we’ve cleared some things out.”

  “You haven’t cleared out any paintings, have you?” I asked, horrified.

  “Nope. So come over now.”

  Buddy and I probably broke a record getting from our phone to Stacey’s front door. I barely took the time to yell to Mom that Buddy and I were going to the McGills’. Then, when Stacey let us in, the three of us probably broke another record getting to her attic. If nothing else, we broke a noise record. I know because Mrs. McGill yelled from downstairs, “What on earth is going on? I have never heard so much noise!”

  But we ignored her and burst into the attic as if we were cops busting a pair of bank robbers or something.

  As soon as we were in the attic, though, we came to a screeching halt. We weren’t sure what to do first.

  “Let’s each explore a different area of the attic,” I finally suggested. “Buddy, you take that end under the window. It’s pretty crowded. Stacey, you take that side, and I’ll take the other side.”

  So we split up. Now that we were looking for something in particular, we came across all sorts of unusual things. Stacey found a helmet that Buddy said was a soldier’s helmet from the First World War. (How did he know that?) I found a dusty music box that played “The Waltz of the Flowers,” and Buddy found an ancient set of magic tricks. (Stacey said he could have them.) And then Buddy made what we thought was the find of the day.

  “Oh!” he cried. “Wow! Back here! Behind these filing cabinets. There’s a whole stack of paintings. They’re leaning against the wall!”

  Stacey and I rushed over. We tried to examine the paintings, but the attic was too dark in that corner. Stacey had to leave to get a flashlight. When she returned, we shined it on all the paintings, one by one.

  “How would we know if something’s been painted over?” Buddy wondered.

  “Or what kinds of things an ‘itinerant painter’ would paint?” added Stacey.

  We were getting ready to give up when I said, “Wait, I haven’t finished exploring my area yet.” I returned to it with the flashlight, leaving Buddy and Stacey examining the magic tricks.

  “Hey, here’s another painting!” I called, finding one propped against an old bureau.

  “What’s it of?” asked Buddy.

  “Ships,” I replied.

  “Let’s give up,” said Stacey.

  “Yeah,” agreed Buddy. “I’m hungry. I want to go home for din —”

  Buddy never got to finish his sentence. That’s because I suddenly screamed, “Oh, I don’t believe it!”

  “What?” said Stacey.

  “I think this is the portrait of Sophie’s mother!”

  “Oh, right,
” scoffed Buddy. “Ships.”

  “Ships sailing over a finger with a ring on it?” I said triumphantly.

  Buddy and Stacey nearly trampled each other trying to reach me.

  “Where? Where?” cried Stacey.

  I shined the flashlight on the lower right-hand corner of the painting. “See?” I said. “The paint has chipped away. There’s another painting under the ships. What do you bet it’s the portrait?”

  “I’d bet a lot of money,” said Stacey.

  “Me, too,” added Buddy contritely.

  “What should we do now?” I asked.

  “Let’s carry it downstairs and show it to my mom,” said Stacey. “She’s poring over the want ads in the paper. I’m sure she’d be glad to take a break.”

  So Stacey and I carried the painting downstairs, and Buddy followed us with the box of magic tricks. Needless to say, Mrs. McGill was a little surprised when Stacey and I lugged the painting (which was pretty ugly, by the way) into the kitchen and leaned it against the refrigerator. She gave the three of us a look that plainly said, “What is going on?”

  So then I had to tell her the entire Sophie story, which was longer since we’d found the confession and the painting. Truthfully, I was getting a little bored telling the story.

  But Mrs. McGill didn’t look bored hearing it. In fact, she looked fascinated. Her eyes grew even wider than Buddy’s had grown when I’d told him the story.

  “How will we know if this is really the portrait?” asked Stacey.

  “Let’s get some turpentine!” suggested Buddy.

  “No,” said Mrs. McGill quickly. “We wouldn’t know what we were doing. We’d wipe away all the paint and lose the portrait, too. I think we should take the painting to a professional art restorer. There’s probably one in Stamford.”