Baby-Sitters' Fright Night Read online

  Each of us keeps something else that makes for better baby-sitting: a Kid-Kit. That’s Kristy’s fun name for yet another simple but brilliant idea. Kid-Kits are boxes filled with old toys, games, books, and puzzles, plus markers, stickers, and whatever else we can think of. We all decorated our boxes, and we change the contents from time to time. On rainy days, or when we have a difficult baby-sitting job ahead — such as a kid who has been in bed a long time with a cold and is really cranky — we take our kits along as a special treat. This works. Guaranteed.

  I have to say, though, that the real key to the Baby-sitters Club’s success is … the baby-sitters! So here’s a little more about the rest of us.

  In some ways, Kristy and I are alike. We’ve been best friends since we were practically babies. We are both short and have brown hair and brown eyes and are fairly conventional fashion-wise. (Although Kristy’s unvarying preference for jeans and a T-shirt or turtleneck has led some people to refer to her look as a “uniform,” while mine covers a wider range of preppy territory, I guess.)

  And like Kristy, I have a blended family, although a much smaller one. I used to be an only child with an only parent; my mother died when I was a baby and my father raised me himself. He was very, very strict. He chose all my clothes and even my hairstyle — pigtails — until recently. That was fine when I was little, but not so fine as I grew older. Dad didn’t realize that the time had come to let me be more responsible about a lot of things, including choosing my own wardrobe. It took some work, but I convinced him to relax a little.

  And he became even more laid-back (for Dad) when Dawn Schafer and her family moved to Stoneybrook from California.

  What do I mean by that? Well, Dawn’s mother had grown up in Stoneybrook, and she and my father had been high-school sweethearts. When Dawn (who had become my other best friend as well as a BSC member) and I found out about the old romance, we helped rekindle it. The next thing we knew, my dad and Dawn’s mom were getting married!

  So Dad and I and my kitten, Tigger, moved into the Schafers’ old farmhouse on the edge of town — a farmhouse with a secret passage and, Dawn believes, a ghost.

  Another trait I share with Kristy is a love of organization. But while Kristy is a firm believer in the adage “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” and does not hesitate to express her opinions loudly and often (some people have been known to call her bossy), I am shy and sensitive. In spite of myself, I cry easily and I am very soft-hearted. And while Kristy is good at talking, I am good at listening.

  I am also the first member of the BSC to have a boyfriend: Logan, one of our associate members. More about him in just a minute.

  Right now, you should know a little more about Dawn, because she is still important to the BSC as well as to me. After all, she is still my sister and one of my best friends.

  She just doesn’t live in Stoneybrook anymore.

  Dawn is tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, with an easygoing disposition and an intense love of all beach activities, including surfing. She doesn’t eat red meat or sugar (she calls sugar “poison”!) and she is very environmentally conscious. She’s also a great baby-sitter.

  Not long after her mom and my dad got married, Dawn decided she missed California and her father too much to be able to make a new home in Stoneybrook after all. Her younger brother, Jeff, had made that decision earlier, and moved back to California. After much painful reflection, Dawn went to join him and her father and her father’s new wife. So now Dawn is a West Coast baby-sitter. She belongs to a more laid-back baby-sitting group called the We ♥ Kids Club. Dawn and I stay in close touch, and she visits whenever she can. I miss her. We all do.

  One baby-sitter who hasn’t moved at all is Claudia Kishi. Claudia, who still lives in the same house on Bradford Court, is a talented artist and a junk food gourmet. In both capacities she has helped the BSC: by designing fliers, to distribute when we need business, as well as by making decorations for various BSC events, and by catering our BSC meetings with junk food from the supply she keeps hidden around her room. Her parents, not surprisingly, do not approve of Claudia’s appreciation for such sugar-loaded snacks.

  But then, they don’t always understand Claudia. Claudia’s older sister, Janine, is a genuine genius who is already taking college courses, because she’s way past what they are teaching in her high school classes. Claudia, on the other hand, has so much trouble with schoolwork that someone in her family goes over her homework with her every night.

  I personally believe that Claudia is a genius, too: the kind of genius who sees the world in a way that doesn’t always make sense to more ordinary people, such as school officials.

  Claudia’s creativity is evident in everything she does, from her spelling to the way she dresses. She has her own personal style, which, combined with her natural beauty, makes her the club knock-out. She makes most of her own jewelry, and creates amazing outfits from secondhand store finds, yard sales, whatever catches her eye. Her long dark hair, pale creamy skin, and dark brown eyes look perfect with everything she puts on.

  Claudia’s best friend is Stacey McGill, our treasurer. Stacey is as good at school as Claudia is bad at it. But when it comes to style, she and Claudia are on par. Like Claudia, Stace is tall with pale skin. But her hair is golden blonde, her eyes are blue, and her style is New York sophisticated. For example, today, while Claudia was no doubt running around Stoneybrook in some tribute to the season that included Halloween colors and themes (last year it was Doc Martens with pumpkin stickers, a hand-batiked shirt in orange and black, plus one orange sock and one black sock), Stacey had gone for almost total black: black jeans, black boots, black turtleneck, silver cropped top over that, black boots with silver side buttons and silver X earrings. She looked stunning.

  Though she’s Claudia’s best friend, Stacey doesn’t share Claudia’s love of junk food. That’s because she can’t. Stacey has diabetes, which means that her body can’t handle sugar properly. It also means no sweets for Stacey, ever, plus she has to give herself insulin shots every day. Stacey has tremendous self-control, though it hasn’t always been that way. It took her awhile to realize that she had to take care of herself and stick to her special diet. Then she had to convince her parents, who are divorced now, that she could handle it all. Which she does, and which may explain why she often seems a little more mature than the rest of us.

  The newest member of the club, who replaced Dawn as alternate officer, is Abigail Stevenson. Abby, her twin sister, Anna, and their mother recently moved from Long Island to a house down the street from Kristy. Abby’s father was killed in a car wreck a few years ago, something Abby never talks about. She’ll talk about everything else, though. I mean, Abby will say anything. She even argues with Kristy. I think she actually enjoys it.

  Despite that, Abby and Kristy get along pretty well. Abby even helps out as the assistant coach of Kristy’s Krushers, a little kids’ softball team that Kristy put together.

  And while Kristy is a dedicated player and rabid sports fan, Abby is what some people call a natural athlete. She’s always in training. She doesn’t walk anywhere if she can run. She’s on the soccer team, and when it’s not soccer season, she, like Logan, is on the lookout for any sport around. She’s very competitive. I’ve heard her say that there is no such thing as second place.

  Abby is also, as she puts it, “allergic to life.” She dubbed her school bus the Wheeze Wagon because she said it sounded allergic like her. (Statements like that are typical of Abby’s wild sense of humor. And she loves puns, the worse the better.) So, like Stacey, Abby has to watch what she eats. She also has to watch what she breathes: Along with her allergies, she has asthma. Abby carries an inhaler with her at all times, in case she has an asthma attack. If she does, the inhaler helps her breathe. And if it doesn’t work, she has to go to the hospital. That’s happened to her once since she moved here, but it doesn’t happen very often.

  Abby has wild, curly brown hair and brown eyes, and wears
contacts or glasses, depending on how she feels. She is a bit of a loner, but I don’t think she is lonely. Abby is probably the most independent person I know, in part because her mother expects her and Anna to be able to take care of themselves, since she works very long hours and has a lengthy commute to her job in New York City.

  Jessi Ramsey and Mallory Pike are our junior officers. They are junior officers because they are both eleven and in the sixth grade, and they aren’t allowed to baby-sit at night except for their own families. They are also best friends, just like Claudia and Stacey, and Kristy and me.

  Jessi is strong but lightly built. If that doesn’t make sense, think of the ballet dancers you’ve seen — muscles of steel, but looking, just the same, as if they might leap into the sky and stay there. Jessi looks like a ballet dancer because she is one. She studies with a special teacher two afternoons a week and she gets up every morning at exactly 5:29 A.M. to practice at the barre in her basement. Her hard work has paid off. She has already had parts in real ballets, including The Nutcracker.

  Like many ballerinas, Jessi often wears her hair pulled back in a bun. She has dark brown eyes and brown skin. Jessi’s fond of wearing leotards even when she is not dancing; she has them in every color imaginable. She lives in an extended family. That means that in addition to her mother, father, younger sister, and younger brother, her aunt also lives with her.

  Horses are another passion of Jessi’s, and one she shares with Mallory. They both love reading, especially horse stories (and mysteries).

  But Mal will never be a ballet dancer. She is not crazy about anything athletic. Her plans are in another direction: writing. She wants to be a children’s book author and illustrator when she grows up. She’s already won an award for her writing and even had a temporary job helping out a famous children’s writer who lives in Stoneybrook.

  Like her seven siblings, Mallory has reddish-brown hair. She also has pale skin and freckles and, to her eternal despair, glasses and braces. And I don’t need to add, I guess, that with seven younger brothers and sisters, she has had a ton of baby-sitting experience.

  Logan, as I mentioned, is my boyfriend. He looks just like the star Cam Geary. At least, I think he does, and anybody will tell you that he is very, very cute. He moved to Stoneybrook from Kentucky and has a nice southern drawl, blondish brown hair and kind blue eyes.

  Shannon Kilbourne, our other associate member, maintains a full schedule at the private school she attends, which is why she is an associate member of the club — she’d never be able to fit regular meetings into afternoons crammed with French club, science club, homework (she’s an outstanding student), and what sometimes sounds like a hundred other after-school activities. She’s the only one of us who has to wear a school uniform. Claudia and Stacey, among others, consider this a hardship. The uniform, however, looks good on Shannon. Like Claudia and Stacey, she’s one of those knockouts who could make anything look good. She has blonde hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones. And as you might expect of someone who excels at everything else she does, she excels at baby-sitting, too.

  I couldn’t help thinking, as I mentally reviewed the club members, that Kristy didn’t have anything to worry about. The club was in great hands. I was just about to point this out to her when the bus slowed down and Mallory pressed her face against the window so fast her glasses clicked against the pane.

  “Look!” she cried, fogging up the window. “There it is! The Salem Gables! And look who is standing in front of it. It’s Martha Kempner!”

  I could not believe my eyes, but it was true. I wanted to leap off the bus, run to her, and tell her how much I admired her — how I read her articles in newspapers and magazines every chance I got, and how I had read every single one of her mysteries. (I knew better than to ask her when she was going to write her next mystery, though. Writers hate questions like that.)

  But first, of course, we had to listen to Ms. Garcia go over our instructions one more time, and then we had to wait for the driver to get our suitcases from the luggage compartment.

  I thought I would die before I finally found mine. I grabbed the handle and dashed into the inn.

  She was still there, standing to one side of the lobby, as if she were waiting for someone. Without giving myself time to think, I walked right up to her. I put down my suitcase, stuck out my right hand and said, “Uh, hi.” Then I turned bright red, which looks particularly dumb when you have red hair. The thought of how stupid I looked made me blush even more.

  But Ms. Kempner didn’t seem to notice. She smiled and replied, “Hello,” a note of inquiry in her voice.

  I pulled myself together and plunged in. “Uh, I’m Mallory Pike. That doesn’t mean anything to you, of course. But I’m a fan of your work. You are the greatest writer. Really!”

  Ms. Kempner shook my hand then and smiled again. “Thank you. Mallory, is it? I’m glad you like my writing.”

  “I love it,” I said. “Totally, totally love it.”

  I realized, with a little shock, that although Ms. Kempner stood head and shoulders above most of the writers in the world in terms of her work, in person she was short. In fact, she was barely taller than me, an average-sized kid. And Ms. Kempner was wearing what looked like three-inch heels!

  Dragging my gaze away from those painful-looking shoes, I heard myself say, to my horror, “Are you here to do research for a mystery?”

  Of course, I turned red again.

  Ms. Kempner didn’t look offended. “My visit to Salem is in the nature of a working vacation, yes. But not for a mystery. I’m doing a piece on the Witch’s Eye.”

  By now the rest of the kids were piling into the lobby, causing the noise level to rise. I could hear Mr. Blake repeating instructions, telling everybody to sign in at the desk, to make a line, and to please keep it quiet, this was an inn not a gymnasium.

  I inched a little closer to Ms. Kempner, fascinated by her words. “The Witch’s Eye?” I breathed.

  “Yes. You don’t know about the Witch’s Eye? You will. It’s on display at the Trove House Museum here in Salem, right at the end of the block. It’s a large, nearly perfect yellow diamond, almost the size of a small egg. Yellow diamonds are not usually considered so valuable, but the color of this one is quite remarkable. And of course, any diamond of that size is going to be extraordinarily valuable.”

  “Why is it called the —”

  “The Witch’s Eye? Well, that’s why I’m here. To try to separate fact from legend about it. The color, I imagine, has something to do with it. But it is also supposed to come with a horrible curse. It belongs to Mrs. Agatha Moorehouse, who’s staying at the inn, too. In fact, there she is.”

  I turned and saw an older woman with silver frosted hair and deeply tanned skin, dressed in bright colors that somehow didn’t go with the cross expression on her face. She was sitting in a wheelchair, frowning up at a younger, sturdy-looking Asian woman who was dressed in jeans and a sweater.

  Ms. Kempner waved at them. Mrs. Moorehouse just looked sour, but the Asian woman waved back.

  “We have an interview and lunch date,” said Ms. Kempner. “But if you are going to be here for a while —”

  “Four days,” I croaked.

  “Then I’m sure we’ll meet again. In fact, I’ll sign one of my books for you if you like.”

  Resolving to find a bookstore instantly and buy all of Ms. Kempner’s books, I nodded. “That would be great,” I managed to say.

  I stood there in a daze, watching Ms. Kempner tap-tap-tap across the old, wide plank floors of the inn to Mrs. Moorehouse and her companion.

  “Mallory! Hello?” It was Kristy, with Stacey, Abby, and Mary Anne right behind her. They swept me into the creaky old elevator and up to my room. Our rooms were all in a row. Abby and Stacey were in one room, Kristy and Mary Anne in the next, and then came mine. I had been assigned a room with another sixth-grader, Eileen Murphy.

  I’d somehow forgotten about that, and I admit my heart sank wh
en I opened the door and saw her there, carefully unpacking her suitcase. Then I thought, what do you know about Eileen, Mal? It’s not as if you’ve ever really talked to her. She’s probably perfectly nice, just a little shy. She’s certainly not a witch.

  I put my own suitcase on the bed. “I’m going to unpack later,” I said.

  “Is it okay that I took this bed?” asked Eileen nervously, staring at the wall above my head. “I mean, I can switch if you …”

  “No, no, that’s fine.” Feeling virtuous, I said, “Hey, we’re all going to go have dinner downstairs. You want to join us?”

  What did I expect — that she would jump at the chance to be a part of our group? That she would be grateful?

  Well, maybe I did. I don’t know. I do know I was annoyed when Eileen bit her lip and shook her head.

  “Fine,” I said, a little shortly. “See you later then.”

  I met the others in the hall, and we went back down to the dining room.

  “This is such a cool place,” remarked Stacey as we seated ourselves at a big, round polished table. “I mean, look at it.”

  For the first time, I took a look at the inn.

  We were in a long, narrow dining room full of tables like ours, and high-backed, upholstered chairs. On the papered walls were pictures of ships and a framed collection of knots used by sailors, neatly labeled. Old-fashioned lamps hung from the ceiling, and through tall windows framed by heavy curtains I could see the twinkling lights of Salem Commons. I had read about Salem Commons in one of the guidebooks. It had mentioned that our inn’s dining room had a view of the Commons, where the militia used to drill.