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  Stacey had seen me. I knew it. She raised her voice and said, “So you wanted to scare me away. And you lured us to the basement and somehow turned out the lights.”

  “Simple. Just switch the circuit breaker. You. You don’t belong here. He doesn’t like you. He likes me. Me. ME!”

  As her voice grew louder I raised myself up to my knees and threw my shoulders against her legs. She cried out as she fell forward and the flashlight flew out of her grip. Stacey pounced on it, and Ethan grabbed one of Cybil’s flailing arms. I grabbed the other and held on for dear life.

  Cybil struggled furiously against us for another moment or two. Then she collapsed against Ethan. “I-I’m sorry,” she wailed. “Don’t hate me. Please don’t hate me.”

  Ethan put his other arm around Cybil. “I don’t hate you,” he said soothingly. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go up to your apartment, okay?”

  She lifted a tear-stained face to him. “Okay,” she said, and smiled coyly. “To my apartment.”

  We followed them out of the basement. Ethan looked over his shoulder. “I’ll take it from here,” he said in a low voice.

  So we went back down into the dark basement. We found the fuse box, flipped the switch, and the lights came back on.

  “We better tell Carl to send someone to clean up this mess,” said Stacey.

  “You better tell Carl that Cybil is not just playing dumb jokes,” I said.

  Stacey nodded. “That, too.”

  We went upstairs to Stacey’s apartment. It was strange to see it looking normal, just as if we had never left it. As we let ourselves in, I realized that my whole body felt shaky. We flopped down in chairs and sat without speaking until we heard Ethan knock and then call from the apartment door.

  He looked as tired as we felt. “Cybil’s parents were home,” he said. “They’ve suspected that something is wrong. It helped that she had another — spell — while I was there, when I tried to leave. She’ll be getting some help.”

  He sighed and shook his head.

  Stacey patted him on the arm. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” she said.

  He put his hand over hers. “No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry this had to happen. If I had had any idea —”

  “No one could have,” Stacey said. “What’s important is that Cybil is going to get help and that no one was hurt.”

  “I guess,” said Ethan.

  Stacey moved closer to Ethan. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  I cleared my throat. “Soda, anyone?” I said, and went into the kitchen. I poured out Cokes for Ethan and me and a Diet Coke for Stacey. I made a lot of noise as I walked back into the living room with them.

  Stacey and Ethan looked up. They were smiling and blushing.

  “Hey,” I said. I raised my Coke in a toast. “Here’s to a merry, scary Christmas — and a nice, calm New Year!”

  “I’ll go get Dad and Sharon,” Mary Anne said. She was already grabbing her coat.

  “Take a flashlight,” said my mom.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire asked. She looked as if she were about to cry.

  I grabbed her hand. “Nothing is wrong. Mary is going to have a baby,” I said. “And Mary Anne is going to go for help.”

  “Dad has a cell phone,” reported Mary Anne. “They work even if the electricity is out, don’t they?”

  Mom nodded. Mary smiled at Claire. “Do you like babies, Claire?” she asked.

  This distracted Claire momentarily. She thought hard and then said, “Maybe.”

  “Let’s go turn on all the lights in the house,” I said to Claire. “That way Mary Anne can look over her shoulder and see us, and it will help her find her way home and back again.”

  “Okay,” said Claire.

  I led her out of the room, taking one last worried look over my shoulder at Mary. She appeared to be okay, but what did I know?

  Claire thought it was great fun, turning on all the lights. She even turned on the night-lights in the hall and in the bedrooms. “We can shine flashlights out the windows, too,” she said.

  I agreed that this was a good idea, and we gathered flashlights together. We even put a new lightbulb in a lamp that had gone out. And all the while I was worrying. Would Mary Anne make it home okay? What if she didn’t? What would happen to Mary? And to her baby?

  We went to our parents’ bedroom, in the front of the house, and shone flashlights out the window. I could see the light from the windows around us reflected on the swirling snow.

  And then two headlights pierced the whiteness and an Outback pulled into our driveway. I saw a smaller figure tumble out, followed by Mr. Spier and Sharon. Mr. Spier was holding a cellular phone.

  “Come on,” I said to Claire. I grabbed her hand and we practically flew back downstairs.

  Mary was leaning back in the reclining chair in the den, breathing heavily. Mom had put a blanket over her.

  “Did you see our lights?” Claire asked.

  “We sure did,” said Mary Anne. She bent down and scooped up Claire to give her a hug. “Thank you.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Dad called the ambulance,” answered Mary Anne, “and they said none were immediately available.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “It’ll be okay,” Mom said firmly, looking up and catching my eye. I realized that the important thing was to act calm, even if I didn’t feel that way.

  “I know,” I said, and made myself smile. “I guess you have eight kids to prove it, huh, Mom?”

  “Something like that,” said my mom, returning my smile.

  “So what we’re going to do,” said Mr. Spier to Mary, “is drive you to the hospital ourselves.”

  Mary drew in a sharp breath and her expression became very intent for a moment. Then she nodded and said, “Okay.”

  “We’ll take care of everything here,” I assured Mom.

  “Don’t forget to take the casserole out of the oven,” she said. “In exactly twenty-two minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  With Claire’s enthusiastic help, Mary Anne and I gathered up blankets and towels and extra coats and made a thermos of hot chocolate, then waved good-bye as Mr. and Mrs. Spier and my mom helped Mary carefully into the car. We waved until the red taillights had disappeared from sight.

  Then we walked through the house, turning off some of the lights but not all of them. Claire insisted that we leave them on for Dad and the rest of the family, “so they can find their way home from church.”

  After that, we returned to the kitchen and made more hot chocolate. We took the casserole out of the oven. We put the cookies in a cookie tin.

  And we waited.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Mary Anne said with a little laugh, “Wait’ll Kristy finds out what she missed. She’s going to be so jealous.”

  “True,” I said. I sighed. “But we still don’t know who Mary —”

  The phone rang.

  “It’s working again,” said Mary Anne. “Oh, good.”

  I snatched up the receiver. “Hello? Hello?”

  A woman’s voice said, “I’ve been trying to get through for almost two hours. This is Elena. Elena Papademetriou of Elena’s Jewelry. Is this Mallory Pike?”

  “Yes.”

  “You faxed me a drawing of a ring?”

  “Yes! Yes, do you recognize it?”

  “I do. My nephew designed it especially for his wife, to replace the original one that got lost down the sink. He gave it to her before he left for Australia.”

  I clutched the receiver. “His wife?” I said. “What’s her name?”

  “Lisa Papademetriou. But what is going on?”

  Lisa. Mary had a name. I took a deep breath. “Everything’s fine, or I think it will be. But you better call Sergeant Johnson of the Stoneybrook, Connecticut, Police Department. I’ll give you his phone number.”

  We talked for a few more minutes, then I hung up the phone, and Mary Anne and I clutched each other’s hands w
ordlessly.

  The phone rang again.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “We’re here safely. Did you take the casserole out of the oven?” said my mom’s voice.

  “We did,” I replied. “And we found out Mary’s name.”

  * * *

  “Lisa Papademetriou,” repeated Sergeant Johnson. He looked tired, I thought, but pleased. He’d even made a joke about the blizzard of crime that had been solved in one evening in the middle of a snowstorm. He was sitting in our family room, holding a cup of coffee and one of the cookies we had baked the night before. “With her husband in Australia on a business trip, Lisa set out for Washington, D.C., to visit her family. After her visit, she decided to try a cross-country train trip from New York back to California, but first she wanted to go to Boston to pay a surprise visit to a college roommate.”

  He paused to take a sip of coffee and Byron burst out, “But how did she forget her name?”

  “As best we can figure out, she was on her way to New York from Boston when she got off the train at Stoneybrook. It makes a twenty-minute stop here. Possibly she was involved in a purse snatching, which may account for the blow to the head, if she fell when it happened. It would also explain why she had no ID on her. The train left with her suitcase. Her family in California didn’t know when to expect her, so they didn’t miss her. And her husband wasn’t supposed to meet her until Christmas Day, back at their house.”

  “Boy, is he in for a surprise,” I muttered. Beside me, Jessi, whom I had called practically at the crack of dawn, raised her eyebrows.

  With a smile, Sergeant Johnson said, “Yes, but a nice one after all. Mr. Papademetriou is on his way back from Sydney on the next flight and should be here by tomorrow evening. And it looks as if having the baby started to put Mary — I mean, Lisa — back on the road to recovering her memory. Time and care should take care of the rest.”

  He finished the cookie and the coffee, then stood up. “Well, I’m about to go off duty and I have a little more Christmas shopping to do. You folks have done more than your share in making this a merry Christmas for Mrs. Papademetriou and Nicholas.”

  Nicholas was the name Lisa had given her new son.

  As Sergeant Johnson left, I leaned back and threw my arms out wide. “This,” I said, “has been an amazing Christmas. And it’s only Christmas Eve day!”

  * * *

  We sat together in the darkened church: Kristy, Mary Anne, Dawn, Claudia, Jessi, me, and Abby, with our families around us. Abby whispered to me, “If I poke you, you have to tell me what’s happening. Remember, I don’t know the whole plot of this play.”

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered back. “I know all about it. It’s not my plot, but I am the playwright.”

  Just then, the choir began to sing “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

  The star rose slowly at the front of the church. All around us, parents and relatives said “Ooh” and “Aah.” I watched, entranced, as if I had never seen it before. I didn’t notice crooked wings or bent halos, or that the shepherds were wearing bathrobes and sandals. It didn’t matter.

  My family looked great. Everybody in the play was wonderful. How could it be otherwise? Claudia and Stacey had stopped a stalker and survived the Christmas season in New York. The rest of us had ended the Stoneybrook crime wave and helped Lisa find out who she was. At that very moment, in fact, her husband was probably on his way from the airport to the hospital to see his wife and new son.

  It had been a scary, merry season. But we had made it. It was Christmas Eve, I thought. Joy to the world!

  The author gratefully acknowledges

  Nola Thacker

  for her help in

  preparing this manuscript.

  About the Author

  ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.

  There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.) In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

  Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.

  Copyright © 1997 by Ann M. Martin.

  Cover art by Hodges Soileau

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  First edition, December 1997

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-76882-5