Baby-Sitters' Haunted House Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Beginning

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  That was the first thing I wrote for my summer English project. I had to write a l-o-n-g composition during vacation. That’s because I didn’t exactly pass English this year. (You may have noticed that my spelling is pretty bad.) I’m one of those people who have a lot of trouble with writing and reading. Even when I try my best, I’m always making mistakes in spelling, and I’m a very slow reader. Don’t feel too sorry for me, though, because I’m talented in anything that has to do with color and design. (Sorry if that sounds conceited, but that’s what everyone says about me.) My friends say that I have a unique sense of style, too, and it shows in the way I dress. I have this knack for putting odd pieces of clothing and accessories together in ways that really work. I just don’t have a knack for putting letters and words together.

  Fortunately, my English teacher, Mrs. Hall, understands my problem. She gave me extra help during the school year. But I still failed. Mrs. Hall was almost as disappointed as I was. So she came up with this idea that if I wrote a very good composition over the summer, maybe I could raise my grade in English to a passing level. When I asked her what I should write about, she said to write about anything I wanted and that it could be fiction (you know, made up) or nonfiction (something that really happened).

  I like fiction, especially mysteries. I’m a big Nancy Drew fan. But since I’m not the type who can imagine stories like that and write them down, I was left with nothing to write about but the truth. So I decided to take notes on what happened to me every day, like a diary. Toward the end of summer I’d read over my diary and use it as an outline for a composition. The day I wrote my first entry in my diary was the day I agreed to sit for Karen and Andrew Brewer.

  I got the job through this great club I belong to — the Baby-sitters Club, or BSC. In fact, Karen and Andrew are the stepsister and stepbrother of the BSC’s president, Kristy Thomas. Kristy is president partly because she started the club, but mostly because she’s the best person for the job. She’s smart and organized. She also has a take-charge, no-nonsense kind of personality. Believe me, that’s what you need to keep the BSC running smoothly.

  Anyway, as I said, I began the notes for my summer writing project with that entry about baby-sitting for Karen and Andrew. As I closed my notebook I was more than a little worried that my composition was going to turn out to be boring with a capital B. Why would Mrs. Hall — or anyone else for that matter — want to read about me and a couple of kids looking for things to do on hot summer days? It would end up being a boring story about people trying not to be bored.

  As it turned out, what happened to me, my friends, and our baby-sitting charges was as exciting as any made-up story, even a Nancy Drew mystery. I could never have imagined that soon we would all be spending two weeks in a haunted house.

  “I say we start vacation off with a day at the mall,” I told Dawn Schafer, Mary Anne Spier, and Shannon Kilbourne. “I need a bunch of art supplies. And some beads for making earrings. Besides, the mall is air-conditioned. What do you say?”

  “I’m baby-sitting all day tomorrow,” Dawn replied. “For the Prezziosos.”

  “I’m sitting, too,” Mary Anne said.

  “Then let’s have a sleepover tonight,” I suggested. “One with pizzas, ice cream, the works. Guys, this is vacation.”

  “I’m sitting tonight,” Shannon said.

  “Me, too.” Mary Anne, our club secretary, was looking over our baby-sitting schedules in the record book. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. “And Claud, you’re scheduled to sit for the Newtons. Actually, we’re all pretty booked up this week. Especially you, Kristy.”

  “Good!” Dawn, Shannon, and I said in unison.

  We blamed Kristy for our fuller-than-ever workload during the first week of vacation.

  “Why are you guys giving me a hard time?” Kristy asked. “I told you, if we turn down jobs at the beginning of the summer we’ll look bad.”

  “Come on, Kristy,” Dawn said. “A day or two off wouldn’t have ruined the club.”

  “Everyone needs a break,” I added. “We’ve all been studying and taking finals. One of us even has homework this summer.” I bit into a Twinkie for comfort.

  “I’m sure you’ll do a good job on the composition, Claud,” Mary Anne said. “Don’t worry about it.” Mary Anne cares a lot about people’s feelings and tries to make everyone feel good. But even sweet Mary Anne wanted a break from sitting. “It does seem like we’re awfully busy,” she told Kristy.

  “Look,” Kristy said, “you guys elected me president. I’m just carrying out my duties. I know what’s best for the club.”

  After a few seconds of stony silence we started talking again about what we would do with our free time, if we had any.

  “The beach,” Dawn said. “I’d go into the ocean and not come out until Labor Day.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kristy watching the clock. She was determined to start the meeting on time. No slacking off just because it was vacation!

  I guess it sounds as if all we do at our meetings is bicker. But it wasn’t five-thirty yet, so the meeting hadn’t officially started. Besides, everyone was pretty wound up over the last day of school. Anyway, I’d better fill you in on all this Baby-sitters Club stuff.

  The idea of the BSC is that we work together to provide a baby-sitting service. We meet three afternoons a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — from five-thirty to six. Our clients know that’s when to call to make baby-sitting arrangements for their kids. The BSC always meets in my room. Why? Because I have my own phone line, which means our club calls don’t tie up anybody’s family phone.

  Another feature my room offers is a good supply of junk food. I collect it and share it. No one goes hungry during a BSC meeting, not even Dawn, who’s into health food. That’s why, while we were complaining about our overstuffed schedules, I was looking for something healthy for Dawn to eat. I found an unopened bag of rice cakes under my bed and handed them to her. “I got these for you,” I said. “Though you could just chew on shredded paper and it would taste the same.”

  “Not to me,” Dawn said with a grin. “Thanks, Claud.”

  “Don’t mention it. It’s my job as vice-president, right?” Actually, I am vice-president of the BSC. I don’t have many official duties, but I take my unofficial ones — such as snack providing — seriously!

  I plopped down on the bed next to Dawn and opened a bag of nacho-flavored cheese twists. “I still wish we’d planned a little time off,” I told Dawn.

  “Me, too,” she replied. “Maybe I could have gone back to California for a few days.” Dawn’s our alternate officer, which means if one of our officers is absent she takes over her job. (Our club has eight members right now, by the way.) But lately she’s been alternating between California an
d Stoneybrook. Dawn’s father and her brother Jeff live in California, which is where Dawn lived before her parents divorced. Recently, Dawn spent a few months with her father and brother, but now she’s back in Stoneybrook where she lives with her mother, her stepfather . . . and his daughter, Mary Anne Spier. The same Mary Anne Spier who’s our BSC secretary.

  Here’s the neat thing. Mary Anne and Dawn were best friends before their parents got married. Now they’re sisters, too. In a way, I think that makes things even harder for Dawn. She’s torn between her California family and her Stoneybrook family. She loves them both and enjoys the life in both places.

  I think if it were up to Mary Anne, she’d vote for Dawn to live with her in Stoneybrook all the time. She really loves being part of a family with a mother, father, and sister in one house. You see, when Mary Anne was a baby, her mother died, so for years and years it was just Mary Anne and her dad. Then came the happy ending: he re-met and fell in love with his old high school sweetheart, who also happened to be Dawn’s mother! The rest is history — happy history for Mary Anne.

  As I said, Mary Anne is secretary of the BSC. That means she keeps our record book up-to-date. The record book is not to be confused with the BSC notebook. We all write in the notebook about every single sitting job we take. Then we all read the notebook once a week. That way, we keep up on how things are going with the different kids we sit for. No one gives me a hard time about my bad spelling. But writing in the notebook is not one of my favorite things to do.

  Mallory Pike (Mal), on the other hand, loves to write in the notebook. She wants to be a children’s book author and illustrator someday. So, for Mallory, writing in the BSC notebook is just practice for her career as a writer. Mallory is a terrific baby-sitter. She had a lot of experience taking care of kids before she joined the club. She has seven younger sisters and brothers, including ten-year-old identical triplet boys. Jobs at the Pikes’ always require two sitters. (By the way, I have only one sibling — my sister Janine who’s sixteen.)

  Mallory is one of the two junior officers of the BSC. The other is Jessica Ramsey, known as Jessi. They’re called junior officers partly because they’re young (Jessi and Mallory are eleven while the rest of us BSC members are thirteen), and partly because they aren’t allowed to baby-sit at night yet, except for their own brothers and sisters. Jessi and Mal both love sitting and are extremely responsible.

  Jessi has an eight-year-old sister, Becca, and an adorable baby brother named Squirt. Jessi is a terrific ballet dancer. She takes lessons in Stamford, which is the city closest to Stoneybrook. Jessi and Mallory are best friends.

  My best friend, Stacey McGill, is a former member of the BSC. In fact, she’s also my former best friend. Recently, there was a big fight between Stacey and the BSC, and as a result of that she quit — or was fired, depending on who’s telling the story. She and I haven’t completely made up, but at least we’re talking. No one else in the club is even speaking to her. It’s still a big mess, and I’m pretty torn up about it.

  Stacey was the treasurer of the club. Dawn, as the alternate officer, has taken over that job.

  With Stacey gone, Shannon’s been coming to the meetings more often. Shannon and Logan Bruno (he’s Mary Anne’s boyfriend) are associate members of the BSC. They are both responsible sitters we can call on in a pinch.

  Anyway, there we were, still trying to figure out how we could fit a little fun into our overbooked lives, when suddenly Kristy yelled out, “This meeting of the Baby-sitters Club will come to order.” I guess it was the second time she’d said it because she sounded a bit angry.

  Jessi, Mallory, and Mary Anne said, “Sorry, Kristy,” and gave her their full attention. But Dawn, Shannon, and I kept on talking. What finally shut us up was the ringing of the telephone.

  “Hello, Baby-sitters Club,” Kristy said cheerfully into the phone. She was glaring at us. “Oh, hi, Lisa,” she continued. “Yes, we’re all glad that school’s out. . . . No, we’re working just like always. No one’s going on vacation for awhile.”

  Dawn, Shannon, and I groaned — quietly enough so Lisa wouldn’t hear, but loudly enough so Kristy would. Jessi and Mallory shot us a Look. I think they were a little shocked at how unprofessional we were acting. Mary Anne looked as if she wanted to groan, but didn’t. She would never do something that could hurt Kristy’s feelings. Kristy is Mary Anne’s other best friend. They’ve known each other since they were in diapers.

  “Two weeks starting tomorrow?” Kristy asked Lisa. “Sure. We’ll get right back to you.”

  Kristy hung up the phone and looked around the room at us. “Lisa and Seth need a sitter for Karen and Andrew for the next two weeks,” she said. “Seth’s assistant in the workshop broke her wrist. Lisa’s going to fill in for her.”

  I told you that Karen and Andrew are Kristy’s stepsiblings. Their father, Watson Brewer, is married to Kristy’s mother. I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you about Kristy’s big, extended Brewer-Thomas family. When her mother married Watson Brewer, Kristy, her mother, and her three brothers — Charlie (who’s seventeen now), Sam (fifteen), and David Michael (seven and a half) — moved into Watson’s mansion. (Yes, Watson is rich, very rich). Karen and Andrew live with their mother, Lisa, and her second husband, Seth Engle, half the time, and stay with their father and his family the other half. (They switch houses every other month.) There’s one more child in this extended family — Emily Michelle Thomas Brewer. She’s a sweet two-and-a-half-year-old that Watson and Kristy’s mother adopted. We all love to baby-sit for Emily. So does Kristy’s grandmother, Nannie, who takes care of Emily while everybody else is working or at school. Nannie lives in the mansion, too.

  Anyway, Kristy gets along great with Andrew and Karen. Whenever a baby-sitting job comes up for them, Kristy has first choice.

  “Mary Anne,” Kristy asked, “am I free to sit for Karen and Andrew?”

  “You’re booked pretty solid during those two weeks,” Mary Anne said. “We’d have to do a lot of switching around.”

  “Who else could do it?” Kristy asked.

  “If Mallory could take Claudia’s job Friday morning with the Newtons, Claud could do it,” Mary Anne told us.

  “It’s fine with me,” Mal said.

  “Then I’ll take the job for Karen and Andrew,” I said. I guess I was feeling a little guilty about my bad attitude earlier in the meeting. Taking care of Karen and Andrew would be a lot better than going to school every day. At least I was still on a vacation from school.

  “Great,” said Mary Anne.

  The phone rang again. “I’ll get it,” Dawn said. She picked up the phone, smiled at Kristy, and said cheerfully into the receiver, “Hello, Baby-sitters Club.” I guess she was feeling a little guilty, too.

  “So Karen says that Andrew and I should pretend we’re animals — only she’ll tell us which ones.”

  While we were waiting for our Wednesday BSC meeting to begin, Claudia was filling us in on her job taking care of my stepbrother and stepsister, Andrew and Karen. They’re great kids. I wished I could have taken the job.

  Claudia lifted her mattress and retrieved a bag of Tootsie Rolls she’d stashed there.

  “What animal did she tell you to be?” I asked.

  “A pony,” Claudia said. “Only I had to walk backwards on my hands and knees so my ponytail would be . . .”

  Dawn and I finished the sentence: “. . . a pony’s tail.”

  “Right,” Claudia answered. “And she told Andrew he was a frog. Which of course he loved.”

  Claudia plopped down on her bed, tore open the bag of Tootsie Rolls, and passed it around. “But here’s the best part,” she said. “Karen made herself a parrot. A talking parrot.”

  We laughed. It was just like Karen to figure out a game that let her be the only one who could talk! I love how her mind works.

  By then Mal and Jessi had arrived and it was time to begin the meeting.

  I think Dawn, Shannon, and Cla
udia were sorry for having behaved so unprofessionally at our last meeting, because everyone quieted down before I even said, “This meeting of the Baby-sitters Club will now come to order.” To tell the truth, for one of the first times I can remember, I wasn’t really in the mood for a meeting myself. I’d been playing a pickup game of softball with some of the kids on my softball team (the team name is the Krushers and I’m the coach). I was thinking that Claudia had a point. Maybe we all did need a vacation.

  The meeting went along in the usual fashion. There were three calls in the first fifteen minutes. We assigned the jobs and called the clients back so they’d know which sitter to expect. Then Lisa Engle, Karen’s and Andrew’s mother, called.

  I answered the phone. By the time I hung up, everybody else was practically jumping out of their skins with curiosity. It had been a long conversation, and they’d only heard my side of it. Which meant they’d heard things such as, “seaside town” and “mansion” and “I’ll have to ask Claudia.”

  “What?” they asked in unison as I hung up the phone.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said. “Friends of Lisa and Seth — people named the Menderses — have just inherited a mansion in Reese, Maine.”

  “That’s an old whaling town on the Atlantic Ocean,” Mary Anne said. “I read about it in a travel book. I was —”

  “Mary Anne!” Dawn shrieked.

  “Sorry,” Mary Anne said. “Go ahead, Kristy.”

  “So,” I continued, “Mr. Menders inherited this mansion from an uncle. The thing is, the Menderses don’t know if they want to live in it.”

  “Why wouldn’t they want to live in a mansion?” Claudia asked.

  “Maybe there are ghosts in it,” Dawn teased.

  “They’re not sure if they want to move out of Boston,” I explained. “They have two jobs, four kids, and a life in the big city.”

  “Reese is a pretty small town,” Mary Anne added. “It’s one of those resort towns with only a couple of thousand people. But the population doubles or triples in the summer.”

  “Anyway,” I continued, “the Menderses are going to go there for a long summer vacation. They’ve invited Seth and Lisa to visit for ten days to help them decide what to do.”