Stacey and the Haunted Masquerade

  “The Mischief Knights?” I asked. I was glad that he seemed to be taking the prank well. Some of the teachers were becoming pretty cranky about the Mischief Knights, especially after Thursday’s window-soaping episode.

  Mr. Rothman nodded. “They left their mark,” he said, pointing to a smeared “MK” written in peanut butter above the doorknob. He smiled and shook his head. “I can’t believe I was taken in by this trick. I did it to one of my teachers when I was in — let’s see — seventh grade, I think.”

  I tried to imagine Mr. Rothman in seventh grade and decided he probably would have looked pretty geeky, with that tall, lanky frame. I smiled to myself. Just then, somebody grabbed my arm and pulled me into the room.

  “I have to talk to you,” hissed Cokie.

  “Huh?”

  “Quick, before Grace gets here,” she said, glancing toward the door nervously.

  “What’s up?” I asked. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what Cokie wanted to talk to me about.

  “It’s about Grace,” Cokie whispered, shaking her hair back from her face. “You know how she’s been bragging about that boy she’s going to bring to the dance?”

  “I might have heard her mention him,” I said, confused. “So?”

  “So I’m not convinced he exists,” said Cokie, raising her eyebrows.

  “Cokie, what are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Okay, he’s supposed to be from Lawrenceville, right? And she met him through her cousin? Fine. But why doesn’t she have any pictures of him?”

  “Well, if they just met —” I began, but Cokie cut me off.

  “Not to mention that every time she describes him he sounds different. Like, the other day she said he had green eyes, but the week before she told me hazel.”

  “Big deal!” I said. “Green and hazel are pretty close.”

  “Okay,” she said. “How about this, then? Ten minutes ago, when we were at her locker, Grace showed me a letter she supposedly received from this guy. Ted, his name is.”

  “And?” What was Cokie driving at?

  “Well, ‘Ted’s’ handwriting looks an awful lot like Grace’s. Think about it.” She leaned back and crossed her arms.

  “Cokie, I just want to know one thing,” I said, exasperated. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Because, for some bizarre reason, Grace likes you,” she answered. “And I thought you kind of liked her, too. I’m worried about her. What’s she going to do when the night of the dance arrives and she can’t produce this Ted? She’ll never live it down.”

  Right, because you won’t let her, I thought. But I didn’t say anything out loud, since just then Grace herself walked in. I looked her over carefully, as if I could discover by her appearance whether Cokie was right or not. But Grace looked like her normal self. She was wearing thermal leggings and a blue plaid flannel shirt, and when she plopped herself down on a chair near Cokie and me she let out a big sigh.

  “I hope we’re not doing all of this work for nothing,” she said.

  Immediately, I forgot about the mystery of Ted. “What?” I asked.

  “My mom says that the school board might call off the dance if community pressure keeps building.”

  “Oh, you mean because of those letters to the editor?” Cokie asked. “But that’s just one old crank.”

  “Mr. — Mr. Wetzler,” I said, recalling the name. “I’ve seen those letters.” We all had. This nutty guy had been writing letters to the editor of the Stoneybrook News, protesting our dance and a whole bunch of other stuff in the school budget.

  “ ‘Why should honest citizens pay so that teenagers can cavort in a gym, risking another tragedy?’ ” Cokie said mockingly. She was quoting one of the letters.

  “ ‘Social studies and science? Yes! Shindigs? No!’ ” I said, quoting one of the protest signs I’d seen in what I figured was Mr. Wetzler’s yard, which I pass on my way to school every day. We laughed. “Don’t worry, Grace,” I assured her. “Nobody’s going to take that nut seriously. I mean, tragedy? What’s he talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “He’s just one more thing to worry about.”

  “What else are you worried about?” I asked, leaning forward. Maybe Cokie was right, after all.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think the pressure of finding a date for the dance can be pretty tough on some kids.” She bent down to pull something out of her backpack.

  Cokie and I exchanged glances over Grace’s head. Cokie gave me an “I told you so” look.

  “I overheard some seventh-grade boys talking about how they could never work up the nerve to ask somebody to the dance,” Grace said, straightening up.

  “Hmmm,” I murmured. Whether or not Grace was actually talking about herself, this was an issue we should deal with. “Maybe we should make sure our posters say it’s fine to come alone.”

  “Oh, right!” said Cokie, laughing. “Who wants to come to a dance alone?”

  “I would,” said Rick Chow, who had just joined us.

  “So would I,” said Grace. “That is, if Ted weren’t coming with me.”

  “Not everybody has to have a date,” said Todd Long, who had come in right after Rick.

  Cokie’s face was flaming. Once again, everybody had sided against her. “Okay, fine,” she mumbled. “We’ll put it on the posters.”

  “I think that’s a capital idea,” said Mr. Rothman, who had finally finished cleaning up the peanut butter. “Now, how are the plans for decorations coming?”

  “I found a whole bunch of cool old picture frames in my uncle’s barn,” said Rick. “I was thinking we could make a creepy portrait gallery with them, you know, with fake spider webs draped all over them?”

  “Excellent,” I said admiringly. “I bet Claudia would love to do some of the portraits. She could probably make them look as if their eyes were following you around.”

  “I shopped for the basics,” Todd reported. “I bought a bunch of red light bulbs and about ten rolls each of purple and red streamers.”

  “We can store everything in my classroom,” said Mr. Rothman. “Anything else?”

  “My grandmother has this incredible glass punch bowl,” Grace offered. “It’s huge, and it looks just like something Morticia would use at a party. Anyway, she said we could borrow it.”

  “Great,” said Todd enthusiastically. “Maybe we can figure out some way to use dry ice so it looks like the punch is smoking. I’ll talk to one of the people on the refreshments committee.”

  By the time our meeting broke up, everybody was excited about our plans for the dance. Except Cokie. She still didn’t like the Addams Family theme, but she was stuck with it. As far as the rest of us were concerned, we were beginning to feel as if we were all set for the dance.

  That’s why it was such a shock when Rick ran to me on Friday morning as I was heading for social studies class.

  “Did you hear?” he asked me. His face was pale.

  “Hear what?” I asked.

  “About what happened to all that stuff Todd bought. You know, the streamers and the light bulbs?”

  “What about them?” I asked.

  “Gone,” said Rick. “The streamers are cut into shreds, and the light bulbs are smashed.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  He shook his head. “I wish I was,” he said. “Todd is really bummed.”

  “I don’t blame him. Was it the Mischief Knights?”

  “If it was, they didn’t leave a note or anything. But I don’t think it was them. It’s not their style.”

  I nodded. He was right. “But who, then?”

  Rick shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Anyway, I have to run. We’ll figure it out at the next meeting.” He took off down the hall.

  I headed in the opposite direction, walking slowly and thinking hard. Who would want to wreck the decorations?

  Suddenly, I had an awful thought. What if Cokie were right about Grace, that T
ed really didn’t exist? Maybe Grace was trying to sabotage the dance, so she wouldn’t be caught in a lie.

  I shook my head. It was too ridiculous. Grace would never be so destructive. Would she?

  “Nah,” I said out loud. And as I walked into social studies class, I reminded myself not to jump to conclusions. The vandalism was terrible, but it was probably just a one-time thing. Anyway, it would be wrong to blame it on an innocent person.

  “So? What do you think?” Claud stood back from her bed, where she’d laid out two of the five huge red-and-purple posters she had made. She had asked me to come to Monday’s BSC meeting a little early so she could show them to me.

  “They’re awesome,” I said finally. “They’re the best posters I’ve ever seen.” They were, too. When I had asked Claudia if she wanted to help out by making the posters for the dance, I had known she’d do a good job. But I never expected the posters to look as professional and as eye-catching as they did. “These look like something you’d see plastered on a bus in New York,” I said. “Like an ad campaign from a top agency.”

  “Well, you helped design them,” Claud pointed out. “You’re the mastermind. All I did was follow your orders.”

  “The whole committee designed them,” I reminded her. “Well, except Cokie. She didn’t like this idea.”

  “She’ll like it now, when she sees the posters,” Claudia said.

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Guess what? I was right. Cokie didn’t like the posters. She saw them the next morning, when the decorations committee met half an hour before homeroom in order to hang the posters in the halls.

  Rick thought the posters were “incredible.”

  Todd said they were “wicked.”

  Grace couldn’t believe how “artistic” they were.

  Cokie? All she noticed was that Claudia had misspelled “masquerade” on one of the posters.

  That made me mad. Claudia had worked hard, and she’d been especially careful about her spelling. You have to understand that for Claud to spell only one word wrong on five posters is pretty close to a miracle. But I didn’t say anything to Cokie. I just ignored her, and so did Grace, Rick, and Todd. Using a stepladder borrowed from the janitor, we hung the posters up; two in the halls near the cafeteria, one near the main entrance, one by the gym, and one by the auditorium. They looked amazing.

  “This dance is going to be the best!” Grace said, stepping back after we’d hung the last poster. “Ted’s going to be really impressed.”

  I knew Cokie was giving me one of her Looks behind Grace’s back, but I pretended not to see it. “I’m sure he will be,” I told Grace. I wanted so badly to believe that there was a Ted, so I wouldn’t have to believe that Grace could have destroyed the streamers and light bulbs. Now that I was with her, it was almost impossible to picture her doing such a thing. Grace has such a sweet, honest face.

  * * *

  “Yeah, well, Carrie had a sweet face, too,” said Claud as she pulled out a purple marker and started on some careful lettering. “And look what happened at her school!”

  I shuddered, remembering. Claudia and I rented the movie Carrie a few months earlier, and I don’t think I slept for a week afterward. I like scary movies, but that one was over the top.

  It was Wednesday afternoon, and my friends and I were gathered in Claudia’s room for a BSC meeting. But we weren’t talking about clients or schedules or any other kind of BSC business. We were talking about the latest bizarre episode at SMS.

  Here’s how I found out about it: When I arrived at school that Wednesday morning, Todd Long met me near the side door. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “What?” I asked. But Todd wouldn’t answer. He just led me through the halls until we were near the cafeteria. The floor was covered with tiny bits of red confetti. “So?” I said. “Somebody made some weird mess here. Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  Todd didn’t answer. He cast his gaze around at the walls, and I followed it. That’s when it hit me. The posters! That wasn’t confetti on the floor. It was Claudia’s beautiful posters, all ripped into minuscule bits.

  I put my hand over my mouth. I couldn’t speak.

  “I know,” Todd said grimly. “They also tore up the one near the auditorium and the one by the main entrance.”

  “But why?” I asked. “What a horrible thing to do.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Todd said. “I want you to see something else.” He led me through the halls again, this time toward the gym. I had no idea what he was going to show me, but I did know one thing: I probably didn’t want to see it.

  “Nice, huh?” Todd asked as we rounded the last corner.

  I looked up at the poster we’d hung there and drew in a sharp breath.

  “At least they left one of them up,” Todd said. He was trying to lighten the situation, but it didn’t work. What I was seeing sent chills down my spine, and no amount of joking was going to make those chills go away.

  Spray-painted across the poster, in drippy, red, bloody-looking letters was this message:

  Todd was looking at me, as if he expected me to say something, but I couldn’t. I was too creeped out. Instead, I helped him take the poster down and roll it up. We’d have to make more posters — I knew that much — but would they just be ruined, too?

  Finally, as we walked down the hall toward our lockers (it was nearly time for homeroom), I thought of something. “Do you think it might have been the Mischief Knights?” I asked Todd.

  He shook his head slowly. “I almost wish it had been them,” he said. “That would make this easier to understand. But if they did it, they sure didn’t want anyone to know. They didn’t leave a note, or their initials, or anything.”

  I remembered what Rick had said about the torn-up streamers, that it wasn’t the Mischief Knights’ style. I’d thought he was right about that, and the same thing applied here. Ripping up posters isn’t mischief; it’s vandalism, plain and simple. And writing on them is vandalism also, especially if you’re trying to scare people.

  And people would have been scared, if they’d seen the poster, or heard about what it said. But Todd and I agreed to keep it as quiet as we could. That’s why I had waited until the BSC meeting to tell my friends about it, and to show them the poster, which I’d stuck into my backpack after we’d rolled it up.

  Claudia was already at work on some new posters — that’s what she was doing with the purple marker — while we talked about what had happened and tried to guess who had done it.

  Claudia had a suspect in mind. “Little Ms. Mason,” she said angrily. “Face it, she never liked my posters to begin with. I wouldn’t put it past Cokie to take advantage of the fact that all those pranks have been happening at school. She knew she could do some vandalism and blame it on the Mischief Knights.”

  “I don’t know,” Kristy said, tapping her pencil against her teeth. “I think the Mischief Knights really might have done it. Maybe that other stuff they did was just for starters.”

  “You mean they were leading up to bigger things?” asked Abby, from her perch on Claud’s art books. She was playing with one of the Twizzlers Claud had passed around. She had pulled the strands apart, and now she was braiding them back together.

  “Right,” said Kristy. “Just when everybody was starting to enjoy their fun and games — wham!”

  “What about Grace?” Jessi asked. She was talking into the floor as she did one of her painful-looking ballet stretches. “Is she still a suspect, Stace?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “It really seems unlikely. She’s just too sweet, even if she is Cokie’s best friend. I can’t imagine her tearing into those posters.”

  “But somebody did it,” Mal said. “And whoever it is probably looks just as sweet as Grace. But underneath, he — or she — is different.”

  “Oohh, creepy,” said Abby, grinning. “I’ll never look at my classmates the same way ag
ain. I’ll always be wondering about that nasty ‘underneath’ part.”

  “You don’t have to look far with Cokie,” Claudia muttered.

  “What about the streamers and the light bulbs, though?” I asked. “Why would Cokie have ruined them?”

  Claudia gave me a Look. “Come on, Stacey,” she said. “Think about it.”

  I knew the answer almost before she finished speaking. “Because she hated the color scheme,” I said slowly. Claudia nodded triumphantly.

  “But is that really a reason for doing such a terrible thing?” Mary Anne asked suddenly. We all turned to look at her, and she blushed. She had been quiet during our meeting so far. “I’ve been thinking,” she continued. “Maybe we’re limiting ourselves by only looking for suspects at SMS.”

  “Where else should we look?” Kristy asked.

  “Well, we could look in the community,” Mary Anne said in a small voice. Then she sat up straight, and her voice became stronger. “We could look at Mr. Wetzler.”

  I gasped. “Mr. Wetzler! Sure! He’s a definite suspect. Good thinking, Mary Anne.”

  Our meeting broke up soon after that, even though we hadn’t come up with any answers. But less than twenty-four hours later, we were back in Claudia’s room for an emergency meeting and we were talking about suspects again. Why? Because there had been another act of vandalism at the school. Somebody went wild with the red spray paint again, only this time it wasn’t on a poster. It was on the walls of the gym. Here’s what it said:

  That’s all. $10. In figures about eight feet high. Nobody had a clue what it meant. Especially Mr. Kingbridge, who made a special announcement to plead for an end to the vandalism, and to tell us that he might cancel the dance if it didn’t stop. That’s why Kristy called the meeting.

  “Okay,” she’d said as soon as we had gathered in Claudia’s room after school. “We have a genuine mystery on our hands. And the BSC never leaves a mystery unsolved, right?” She looked around expectantly.

  “Right!” we replied.

  “Right,” Kristy echoed. “Let’s do it. We don’t want this dance to be canceled, do we?”