Abby and the Secret Society

  “I can’t believe you made a hole in one!” Charlotte cried as Haley grinned and lifted her putter (actually a furled umbrella) over her head. They were near the third hole (each hole was marked by a little paper flag with a number on it), which had a teddy bear motif. Then Vanessa took a shot at the hole, and her ball flew past it. She stamped her foot. “That’s my fifth shot!” she said. “Golf is fun? Not!”

  Vanessa even rhymes when she’s mad.

  Jake, Margo, and Becca took turns at the fifth hole, which was a watering can turned on its side. The path to the hole wandered through Mrs. Pike’s flower garden. Stacey wondered how happy she’d be about that once the plants started to come up in the spring.

  “They look like they’re having fun, don’t they?” she asked Stephen.

  He nodded. “More fun than I have at Greenbrook,” he said enviously.

  “So what are you waiting for?” Stacey asked. She gave him a little shove. “Go on and play with them.”

  Stephen smiled up at her. “I think I will!” he said.

  For once, Stacey said, Stephen seemed eager to join the other kids, who looked as if they were having a terrific time. Stacey congratulated herself as she watched Stephen march up the Pikes’ driveway. Finally, he was on his way to making some new friends.

  Then something awful happened.

  “What are you doing here?” Nicky demanded, standing in Stephen’s way with his arms folded across his chest.

  “I — I just wanted to play,” said Stephen.

  “Well, you can’t,” said Nicky firmly. “Not until you’ve been invited to join the club. It’s members only, you know!”

  Stephen’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Then, before Nicky or anyone else could say another word, Stephen turned and stalked off, passing right by Stacey as he walked away from the Slate Street Kids Club.

  Stacey couldn’t believe her ears. How could Nicky have been so mean? That wasn’t like him. She watched, stunned, as Stephen strode toward the sidewalk. Then she turned to look at Nicky, who was shrugging his shoulders as he talked to Adam.

  There was nothing to be done about it, at least not then. Stacey hustled to catch up with Stephen, who was walking quickly. She couldn’t figure out what on earth to say to him to make him feel better.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to say anything. Just as she caught up to him, Stephen passed by the front of the Pikes’ house. Sitting on the steps were Claire Pike and Jenny Prezzioso. Jenny, who’s four, lives near the Pikes. Both little girls looked glum, but when they saw Stephen and Stacey they waved and called them over.

  “What are you two doing?” asked Stacey when she and Stephen (who was still not speaking) had joined the girls.

  “Just sitting,” said Jenny.

  “We’re not allowed to play in the yard,” complained Claire.

  “Why not?” asked Stacey. “Did your mom tell you to stay here on the steps?”

  Claire shook her head. “No, she said we could play. But Nicky and Vanessa said we couldn’t.”

  “They said we’re too little,” Jenny said.

  “They said we’re pests,” Claire added. “And that we can’t join their club.”

  “Stupid club,” Jenny said. “Stupid, stupid club.” She looked as if she were about to cry.

  “Who needs their club?” declared Stephen suddenly. “They wouldn’t let me join, either, just because I’m not like them. Let’s start out own club! It’ll be much, much better than theirs, and when they ask us to let them join, we’ll say no.”

  Claire and Jenny gazed up at Stephen, awestruck. Was this older boy really serious? “Can we do that?” asked Claire.

  “Sure, why not?” Stephen replied. “I know all about clubs. My mom runs one.”

  “Wow,” breathed Jenny.

  “Can we all go back to my house and start working on it?” Stephen asked Stacey.

  “If you’re sure that’s what you want to do,” answered Stacey hesitantly. Somehow the plan didn’t sound so wonderful to her. She wasn’t convinced that Stephen’s background had anything to do with his being barred from joining the older kids’ club, and she wasn’t crazy about the idea of yet another exclusive club starting up. But at least Stephen would be playing with other kids. That was the goal, wasn’t it? She went inside to arrange things with Mrs. Pike (who said she’d call Mrs. Prezzioso), and when she came back out she found Stephen, Claire, and Jenny talking excitedly about plans for their club. Stacey had never seen Stephen look so happy. Maybe things would work out after all.

  “Hidden passageways, maybe. Secret trapdoors, definitely. But penguins?” Claudia giggled and popped another Hershey’s Hug into her mouth. “I cannot believe you guys spent the whole day looking for penguins!” Her giggles escalated until she was laughing out loud.

  Kristy, sitting in the director’s chair, joined in. “I can just see it,” she said. “A Nancy Drew mystery called The Puzzle of the Purloined Penguin!” She could hardly talk, she was laughing so hard. Mal and Mary Anne laughed along with her.

  It was Wednesday, and we had just finished a BSC meeting. We’d all agreed to stay a little late in order to talk over the Greenbrook mystery — but first, it seemed, our friends needed to make fun of Jessi, Stacey, and me for doing exactly what they would have done in our place: following up a lead. The three of us just sat there, watching the rest of them yuk it up.

  Finally the laughter started to become contagious. I couldn’t help myself. I giggled a little. Then I noticed that Jessi was cracking a smile, too. Stacey raised her eyebrows and grinned. “Formal Friends of the Frigid Floes!” she said. That did it. We totally lost it.

  “Someday I’m going to give Cary Retlin a taste of his own medicine,” vowed Stacey.

  “I’ll help you,” I promised. “Whatever it takes, I’ll help you.”

  “I wish you both luck,” Kristy said. “Meanwhile, may I point out that we still have a mystery to solve here?” Suddenly she was Ms. President again. You’d never have known, from looking at her serious face, that she’d been laughing — laughing so hard she’d had to wipe away tears — only moments before.

  “Right, right,” agreed Stacey. “Okay, who has the mystery notebook? Let’s go over what we have so far.”

  “Here it is!” said Claudia, picking it up from her desk. “And, hey! Here are some Twizzlers, just to give us that extra mystery-solving energy boost.” She passed around the package she’d found under the notebook, and handed Stacey a bag of pretzels she dug out of her desk drawer. Then she opened the notebook and riffled through the pages until she found what she was looking for. “Well, we’ve written a lot down,” she said, “but I’m not sure how much of it means anything.”

  “Let’s go over it,” said Kristy. “What do we have as far as leads and clues?”

  “Let’s see,” said Claudia. “First of all, there are the notes that Abby and Mary Anne wrote up when they heard about David Follman from Sergeant Johnson.”

  “That wasn’t necessarily the first time we sensed there was a mystery, though,” I said thoughtfully. “I had a feeling there was something weird about Greenbrook — or, about Dark Woods, anyway — from the very beginning.”

  “I thought so, too,” said Mary Anne, nodding and twirling a Twizzler absentmindedly.

  “Go on, Claudia,” Stacey urged her. “What’s next?”

  “Well, Mary Anne and Abby also wrote up what Dawn’s Granny and Pop-Pop said about Mayor Armstrong. He sounds like a definite bad guy, and he was pals with Mr. Stanton, another of our possible suspects.”

  I shuddered, thinking about Armstrong and his cane with the silver duck’s head on top. He was a creepy old man. I’d gotten a bad vibe from him. It wasn’t hard to imagine him keeping Jewish people — people like me — out of a club. But could he really be responsible for covering up a secret society, and for murdering a journalist who was about to reveal it?

  Suddenly I realized that this was serious business we were sticking our noses int
o. After all, somebody had wanted to shut David Follman up, and he (or she) had succeeded. David Follman would never be able to write about what he knew. But maybe, if we could just stay on the trail, my friends and I could finish the job he’d started. I leaned forward. “What else, Claud?” I asked. “Go on.”

  Claudia read little bits from the notebook out loud. We listened and nodded as she reminded us about the way Mr. Stanton had been lurking around watching Stephen, and about the mysterious structure Claudia had spotted on the blueprints of the maze. That last part seemed to fit in somehow with what Mal and Jessi had written, about how Mr. Kawaja seemed overly protective of the maze.

  Claudia also read my notes about Nikki’s unpleasant encounter with Armstrong. “I hope he never shows up again,” I said. “He and his cane can just stay away, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Sounds as if Nikki’s not too thrilled about having him around, either,” commented Jessi.

  Finally, Claudia read to us from Kristy’s notes about finding David Follman’s scrawled message, in mirror writing, on the floor of the dining room. Then she snapped the notebook shut. “That’s all,” she said.

  “That message is our only real clue, isn’t it?” asked Mal. “We have to follow up on it.”

  “But how?” asked Stacey. “I mean, all it says is a number. If it’s a date, it’s not one that makes sense. It’s years and years earlier than the time David Follman was doing his investigation. What could it possibly mean?”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” said Kristy, holding her head in her hands.

  “What I don’t understand is why he didn’t just use a pen,” said Mary Anne. “I mean, if you want to write a note, isn’t that the easiest way?”

  “For that matter, why did he write on the floor?” asked Jessi. She shook her head.

  “We-ell,” I said slowly. “Where else could you be sure of leaving a lasting message? Nobody ever looks underneath the carpeting.” I thought I was beginning to see how David Follman’s mind worked.

  “Okay, I’ll buy that,” said Kristy. “But what did he use to write with, and why did he choose it? It wasn’t blood, because that would have turned brownish, and the stain is more purpley-red. Maybe it was something he found in or near the kitchen or dining room.”

  We nodded. Each of us had snuck into the dining room at one point or another to check out the stain, so we all knew what it looked like.

  “Let’s be scientific about it,” said Claudia, brightening. “I mean, when I want to create the perfect blend of colors for a painting, I experiment. It’s the only way.” She jumped up. “There’s some leftover wood flooring in the garage. We can try writing on it with different liquids and see what looks closest.”

  “Good thinking,” said Kristy admiringly.

  We headed down to the Kishis’ kitchen, rolled up our sleeves, and began our scientific experiment. It was a relief to be doing something instead of just talking about it. Plus, I have to admit, it was fun.

  We set up the planks of wood on the counter and started to work. We tried red and blue food coloring. We tried cherry-apple juice. We tried canned cranberry sauce. We tried ketchup and spaghetti sauce. We tried every red or purple fluid in the Kishis’ kitchen — but nothing looked quite right. After a while, the wood started dripping. There was hardly any empty space left on it. And it smelled disgusting.

  “It’s lucky my parents are working late,” said Claudia, glancing at the clock. “But they’ll be home any second. We better clean this mess up.”

  “Let me just try one last thing,” I begged, holding up a bottle of grape juice. I drizzled some onto the plywood and rubbed it in. We looked at it hopefully, but then I shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “It’s not right.”

  Discouraged, we cleaned up the Kishis’ kitchen and headed home. I ate dinner and started my math homework, trying my best to put the mystery out of my head for a while. Then, at around eight-thirty, the phone rang. It was Claudia.

  “Abby, listen,” she said. “That grape juice stain? You should see it now that it’s dry. It looks a lot like the writing on the dining room floor.”

  “It does?”

  “Definitely. And you know what else? I remembered something I saw on those blueprints. Guess what’s right under the dining room?”

  I had no idea. “The furnace?”

  “Nope,” said Claudia. “The wine cellar.” She paused for a second to let that sink in. “Think about it, Abby,” she said. “Wine is really just grape juice, isn’t it? Maybe David Follman was trying to tell Sergeant Johnson to look in the wine cellar —”

  “For a 1954 wine!” I finished excitedly. “Claud, you’re a genius! Let’s call everybody else. We have to check it out as soon as possible.” I had a feeling Claudia was right. Maybe we were finally on our way to solving the mystery!

  * * *

  The next afternoon, when the van pulled up in front of Greenbrook, I jumped out and headed straight for the dining room. We had figured out a plan during our trip from school. Claudia, Stacey, and Mal followed right behind me. I ran past the office, hoping Nikki wouldn’t see me. We weren’t sure she’d approve of our plan, but we also knew we’d be helping her out if we solved the mystery. We’d check in with her as soon as we were finished. As I passed the lounge, I thought I caught a glimpse of a man who looked like Stacey’s and Mary Anne’s description of Mr. Stanton. But when I looked again he had disappeared, and I was in too much of a hurry to stop and wonder what he might be doing at Greenbrook again.

  “How do we get down to the wine cellar?” I asked Claudia, after we’d taken one more look at the clue on the dining room floor.

  “If I remember right, there should be some stairs just inside the kitchen door,” said Claudia, leading the way. Sure enough, a few seconds later we found ourselves in a dank, dim basement.

  I sneezed. “This is a wide cellar?” I asked. “It looks like a regular basebet to be. Sbells like wud, too,” I added, pulling my turtleneck up over my nose in an attempt to keep from breathing in any more dust.

  “Try that door,” suggested Mal, pointing to a huge wooden door set into one of the walls. Claudia tugged on its handle, and the door swung open, revealing another dusty, cobwebby room, only this one was full of racks, and the racks were full of wine bottles.

  “Let’s work quickly,” I said, sneezing. “I cad’t stay dowd here log.”

  We split up, and, turning on lights as we moved, we searched through the racks, looking for wine from the 1950s. It didn’t take long to find it. The wine cellar was well-organized.

  “Nineteen fifty-one, nineteen fifty-three,” said Mal, reading the years on the labels as she checked each bottle in the section we’d focused on. “Nineteen fifty-four! Look at this one!” She held a green bottle up to the dim light coming in through a small window. The maroon seal around the cork was broken.

  “Let be see that,” I said. Mal handed me the bottle, and I pulled my trusty Swiss Army knife out of my pocket. I remembered watching my mom open wine, back when she was enrolled in cooking school and taking a winetasting course.

  “Wait!” said Stacey. “Should you really open that? I mean, old wines are expensive, aren’t they?”

  I shook the bottle. Something made a clunking noise inside. “I don’t think there’s much wine in here,” I said.

  “Go ahead and open it,” Mal urged me. “How else will we find out what’s inside?”

  I looked around, and the others all nodded. It wasn’t hard to pull the cork out of the bottle.

  “Ew!” said Claudia, backing away. “Smells like vinegar.”

  “It does?” I asked. My nose was so stuffed up I couldn’t smell a thing. “Well, thed, we bight as well pour it out. Baybe there’s a dote idside it.” I turned the bottle over and poured its contents into the floor drain. As I shook out the last drops, something clinked onto the floor. “What’s that?” I asked. I knelt down to look. A faded yellow golf tee lay on the floor — a golf tee with a message scrat
ched into it. I peered at it, trying to read the tiny letters in that dim light. Finally, I read it aloud to the others. “OPEN WWII (DF).” That’s all it said. Another clue. But what could it possibly mean?

  That night, I slept with the golf tee under my pillow. I was hoping that somehow it would reveal its secrets to me as I slept — but no such luck. When I woke up, I looked at it again, and its inscription still meant nothing to me. The only thing I was sure of was that it was another real clue. There was no way Cary could have faked this one. That golf tee had been placed in the wine bottle by David Follman himself, and every time I looked at it my heart beat a little bit faster. I was positive we were closing in on the solution to the mystery of Dark Woods.

  All we had to do was figure out what OPEN WWII meant.

  After thinking about it all night, I was convinced that the message was on a golf tee for a reason. I couldn’t wait to go to Greenbrook that afternoon and start checking out the golf clubhouse.

  Kristy, on the other hand, was sure the WWII part of the message meant something. “We have to research World War Two,” she said at lunch that day at school. “The message has something to do with that time in history and how it affected Stoneybrook. I’m sure of it.”

  As it turned out, we were both right. But it took a while for us to find that out.

  Since some BSC members (Stacey and Claud) agreed with me about the importance of the golf tee, and some (Mary Anne, Mal, and Jessi) agreed with Kristy, we decided to split up into teams. My team would investigate at Greenbrook, and Kristy’s would do research at the library. We both kept notes for the mystery notebook.

  Kristy’s team spent a lot of time at the library, learning about Stoneybrook’s part in the war. And my team spent a lot of time at Greenbrook’s golf clubhouse, learning about, well, golf.