Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls Read online

  Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, crash!

  “Ow!” yelled Stacey.

  “What?”

  “My toe. I walked right into something.” Stacey felt around. “A table, I think. Okay, let’s keep going.”

  Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

  “Stacey?”

  “What, Charlotte?”

  Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

  “I hear something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

  “There it is again. Stop moving.”

  Stacey and Charlotte paused, holding their breath and listening.

  And then Stacey heard it—a creak.

  “Where’s it coming from?” she asked.

  “Sounds like the basement,” whispered Charlotte.

  “Well, let’s make sure the door to the basement is closed. Where is the door to the basement?”

  “Right here.” Charlotte moved past Stacey, running her hand along the wall. “Yup, it’s closed.”

  “Okay. Good. Be quiet for a sec.”

  The girls stopped and listened again.

  Creak. Creak, squish, creak, squish, creak, squish.

  In the dark, Charlotte’s hand found Stacey’s. She held on tight.

  Creak, squish, creak, squish.

  “Something’s coming up the stairs!” cried Charlotte softly.

  “Shhh,” was all Stacey said, but she told me later that what she was thinking was, Ohmigosh! It’s the Phantom. He turned off the electricity to distract us, and now he’s sneaking into the Johanssens’ house through the basement!

  Creak, squish. The sound was closer. It had almost reached the top of the stairs.

  Stacey was just about to tell Charlotte to start heading for the back door when the creaking stopped. It was followed by a woof!

  Stacey jumped about a foot, but Charlotte exclaimed, “Carrot! Oh, it’s just Carrot! He must have come in through the basement again. There’s a broken window down there.”

  “Who’s Carrot?”

  “Our schnauzer. He must be sopping. I’ll try to find a towel so we can dry him off.”

  And at that moment, the lights came back on. Stacey and Charlotte looked at each other and began to giggle. Then they did dry off the poor, rain-drenched Carrot, and they even watched some more of Spook Theatre.

  Outside the storm died down, and the rest of the evening was peaceful. The phone didn’t ring once while Stacey was at the Johanssens’.

  Saturday, October 25

  This evening I baby-sat for David Michael. The rest of the Thomases went out for dinner with Watson and Karen and Andrew, but David Michael had to stay at home in bed because he’s got a cold. I like baby-sitting for David Michael. He’s almost like my brother. I’ve known him since he was born. And he’s usually pretty good. But tonight, since he’s sick, he fell asleep very early, and I felt all alone. I couldn’t think of anything except prowlers and weird phone calls and especially the Phantom. The weather was fine—a little breezy but not stormy—and there were lots of funny shows on TV, but I was still spooked….

  Spooked isn’t the word. Mary Anne was practically out of her mind. She was just sitting quietly on the couch, watching an old I Love Lucy episode, when suddenly she got goose pimples all along her arms. She jumped up, turned down the volume on the TV, and listened. Nothing. Not a thing. Even so, she dashed upstairs to check on David Michael. He was lying on his side, breathing noisily, a box of Kleenex next to him. Mary Anne left the hall light on and went back downstairs.

  She closed every open closet door and turned on two more lights. Then she closed off the laundry room, in case someone was hiding in there. Finally, she pulled down the venetian blinds in the den. But still she didn’t feel safe, even though Louie, the Thomases’ dog, was in the house with her.

  What if someone sneaks inside while I’m watching TV? she thought. That was when she decided to rig up the burglar alarms. All three of them.

  Now, the thing about Mary Anne Spier is that she may be quiet, and she may be shy, but she does have a good sense of humor and a good imagination. You’d have to, to think up the alarms that Mary Anne rigged in the Thomases’ house.

  Well, actually, the first one wasn’t much in terms of imagination. It was the alarm Mary Anne had described at our emergency club meeting the week before: a big stack of pots, pans, and cans from the kitchen built up against the inside of the door into the garage. If anyone tried to get in from the garage, the door would push the stack over and it would crash down, alerting Mary Anne, who would be able to escape out another door and call the police. The burglar might even be so startled that he’d turn around and leave.

  Mary Anne finished her alarm, sat down in front of the TV again, and immediately decided she ought to rig up the front door, too. She was pretty sure a prowler wouldn’t come right through the front door, but you can never tell with prowlers. She was out of pots, pans, and cans, though, so she had to think of something else. She looked at a shelf full of David Michael’s toys, and her eyes fell on a large bag of marbles.

  “Aha!” she said aloud.

  Mary Anne took the marbles into the front hall. Then she found a long piece of string. She placed the bag of marbles on a table next to the door and attached the string to a little hole near the opening of the bag. She tied the other end securely to the doorknob. This was Mary Anne’s idea: The prowler quietly opens the door; the string pulls the marbles to the floor; they spill everywhere, not only making a racket to alert Mary Anne but causing the prowler to slip and fall when he steps inside.

  Naturally, as soon as Mary Anne finished her second alarm, she decided she needed one for the back door. It was the only way she would feel safe. Then she would have all the doors covered.

  Mary Anne had to think a while before making that last alarm. By then, she was out of marbles as well as pots, pans, and cans.

  What else could make a lot of noise? Mary Anne thought.

  Blocks? Maybe.

  Tinkertoys? Nah.

  Music! Music could be good and loud. The plans for Mary Anne’s final alarm began to take shape.

  First, she tiptoed upstairs to Kristy’s room to borrow her portable stereo. Then she looked through the music collection in the room Sam and Charlie share. She selected one called Poundin’ Down the Walls by the Slime Kings and slipped it in.

  Back downstairs, she sat on the rug in the den to think, the stereo in her lap. How could she arrange for the stereo to turn itself on?

  She thought some more. How did she turn it on? She pressed the PLAY button, of course. Okay. How could she get something else to press the PLAY button? Better yet, how could she get the back door to press the PLAY button?

  In a flash of brilliance, she had the answer. Mary Anne leaped up and carried the stereo into the kitchen. She sat down on the floor again and examined the skinny, rubber-tipped doorstop attached to the bottom of the back door. Perfect.

  Mary Anne set the stereo about two feet from the door. She lined the doorstop up with the PLAY button. Then she opened the door. The doorstop hit the stereo and it fell over. But that didn’t stop Mary Anne. I need to … to shore it up or something, she thought.

  She dragged a heavy, round footstool in from the den and set it just behind the stereo.

  She opened the door again.

  The doorstop hit the PLAY button, and Poundin’ Down the Walls blared out. Mary Anne smiled. Satisfied, she hit the STOP button, turned the volume up to ten, and went back into the den. She curled up on the couch with her tattered copy of The Secret Garden and began to read.

  She was in the middle of one of her favorite parts—the one where Mary discovers poor, sickly Colin hidden in Misselthwaite Manor—when she heard an ominous creak from the front hall. Actually, Mary Anne told me the next day, it was just a little creak, but her head was filled with the dark, shadowy hallways of Misselthwaite, so almost any noise would have sounded ominous.

  Mary Anne look
ed up sharply. She jumped to her feet. “Louie!” she whispered urgently. Where is that dog when you need protection? she asked herself. She tiptoed to the den door and peeped into the hall.

  There was Louie. He was standing at attention, staring at the front door.

  The hinges creaked slightly.

  Louie whined.

  And all of a sudden, the door flew open, pulling the marbles to the floor and scattering them loudly.

  Louie barked twice.

  But no one came in.

  Mary Anne let out a sigh of relief. “It’s just the wind, Louie,” she said shakily, “like the wind off the moors in Yorkshire,” she added, thinking of her book. “I must not have closed the door all the way.”

  But Louie didn’t look convinced. He sat at the screen door, silently begging to be let out to patrol the property. Mary Anne opened it for him and then set to work gathering up the marbles. She put them back in the bag but decided not to rig the alarm again. She settled for locking the screen door and double locking the inside door.

  Then she returned to The Secret Garden. In the story, Mary was having her first conversation with Colin. Suddenly, Mary Anne heard a soft thud.

  And then—to her absolute horror—Poundin’ Down the Walls blasted on in the kitchen!

  Mary Anne let out a bloodcurdling scream as she gazed at the partly open back door. She was just about to make a dash for the front door when Louie strolled into the kitchen, sniffed curiously at the stereo, and headed for his water bowl.

  “Louie!” exclaimed Mary Anne in a half gasp, half shriek.

  She’d forgotten that David Michael had taught Louie how to throw his weight against doors. If they weren’t latched properly, they opened, which was occasionally useful to Louie. Mary Anne probably hadn’t closed the back door tightly after she’d tested the music alarm.

  “Some baby-sitter I am,” she scolded herself, “leaving doors open right and left for anybody to walk through.”

  “Bary Add!” called a voice.

  Mary Anne looked around to see David Michael standing sleepily on the stairs, his old stuffed dog in one hand.

  “Bary Add, cad you put the busic off?” he asked. “I don’t like it. It’s too loud.” He blinked in the bright light of the hall.

  “Oh, my gosh! I’m sorry, David Michael,” cried Mary Anne. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. Really.”

  She dashed to the stereo and turned it off. “That was an accident. I’m sorry…. How are you feeling?”

  “Stuffy. Ad by head hurts.”

  “Oh,” said Mary Anne sympathetically. She remembered that Mrs. Thomas had said David Michael could have half a children’s aspirin if he needed it. “Do you want some aspirin?” she asked him. “It’ll make your head feel better.”

  “Okay,” said David Michael wheezily.

  “You go back to bed and I’ll be right up.”

  Mary Anne felt better since the house wasn’t so quiet. She brought David Michael the aspirin, and then she sat on his bed and told him a story about a tiny man named Mr. Piebell, who lived in the woods on the twelfth floor of an oak tree apartment building with his miniature collie, Louie.

  David Michael fell asleep with a smile on his lips.

  Mary Anne was just closing the door to his room when she heard a tremendous crash downstairs.

  The tin-can burglar alarm! It had gone off, and Mary Anne was trapped upstairs where there was no escape route! Heart pounding, she tried to figure out what to do. Should she wake David Michael and bring him into Mrs. Thomas’s room while she called the police? Should she risk everything and make a dash for the front door? What if it was just Louie fooling around? Maybe she should call Stacey and try out our code. If only she could remember it …

  “Mary Anne?” said an uncertain voice from downstairs.

  Yikes! It was a man’s voice!

  Mary Anne shrank into a corner of the hallway. “Mary Anne?” it called again more loudly.

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar. How does the Phantom know my name? wondered Mary Anne.

  Then she heard another voice call her. It was Kristy.

  Mary Anne dared to peep downstairs. Kristy, Sam, Charlie, Mrs. Thomas, Watson, Karen, and Andrew were standing in a group at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her.

  “Oh,” said Mary Anne, trying to sound nonchalant and realizing that the first voice had been Watson’s. “I thought I heard you. I just gave David Michael some aspirin and got him back to sleep. He woke up with a headache.” She trotted down the stairs.

  “Um … Mary Anne … if you don’t mind my asking,” said Mrs. Thomas, “what are all those cans and things doing by the door?”

  “Oh, those?” replied Mary Anne. “Those are just … just … Actually, they were sort of a burglar alarm. I meant to put them away before you got home.”

  Kristy began to giggle. Charlie snorted.

  “And my stereo?” asked Kristy.

  Mary Anne demonstrated the back-door alarm, this time with the volume turned down.

  “Ingenious,” commented Watson.

  “It certainly looks as if David Michael is safe with you,” said Mrs. Thomas.

  Mary Anne nodded. She knew she was blushing furiously.

  “You could start another business of your own,” said Sam. “Mary Anne’s Surefire Alarm Systems.”

  Mary Anne blushed even more furiously.

  “Come on,” said Kristy after Mrs. Thomas had paid Mary Anne. “I’ll walk you home.” And she did.

  Boy trouble.

  So far, the Baby-sitters Club had managed to keep boys and boy trouble pretty much out of the meetings.

  But not on Monday, October twenty-seventh. At that meeting, we were trying to discuss baby-sitting problems, but the subject of boys kept coming up instead. Kristy started it.

  “Do you know what Alan Gray did to me today?” she asked, a look of pure disgust on her face.

  “What made you think of Alan Gray?” I asked. We’d been talking about Charlotte Johanssen.

  “Everything makes me think about him,” said Kristy, throwing her hands in the air. “He bothers me all the time, every single second of every single day.”

  “He’s not bothering you right now,” said Mary Anne.

  “Yes, he is. He bothers me just by living. Alan Gray is so horrible whenever he’s around me that he’s all I can think about.”

  “So what did he do to you today?” asked Stacey.

  “He hid my math homework, and then when it was time to hand it in and I couldn’t find it, he jumped up and said to Mr. Peters, ‘Excuse me, but I know where Kristy’s paper is. Her little brother ate it. Kristy wouldn’t give him breakfast, and he was starving.’”

  I giggled.

  Kristy turned on me, eyes flashing.

  “Well, I’m sorry, I think it’s kind of funny.”

  “You would.”

  “Oh, Kristy,” I said with a laugh. “Calm down.”

  “But it’s not just that,” she went on. (I could see that Kristy was determined to be upset.) “I think he’s getting worse. On Friday, he hid my shoes. On Thursday, he called me a skinny pipsqueak in front of the class, and twice last week I caught him looking in my desk in the morning. Every day it’s something. He never stops.”

  “Why don’t you talk to … to Sam about it?” suggested Stacey.

  “My own brother? No way. Besides, he’d never understand. He’s girl crazy. You should have seen who—or maybe I should say what—he took to the movies last Friday. She’s a freshman in high school, and she had spiky yellow hair with green stuff at the ends and these little lace gloves with the fingertips cut out. Now, what is the point of wearing gloves if—”

  Kristy stopped talking when she realized that the rest of us were staring at her.

  “What? What is it?” she finally asked. Then she noticed Stacey, who was sitting on my bed, gazing sadly down at her hands.

  “Sam took a high school girl to the movies?” she asked softly.

>   “Yeah, I—Oh, no. Stacey, I’m sorry.” Kristy had forgotten all about Stacey’s crush on Sam. “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. He is interested in you. Really.”

  “Then what about that girl—”

  “Tamara? You mean, why did he take her to the movies? Honestly, I don’t know. But she was so weird Sam’ll never be serious about her. I’m positive. I think he went out with her just to shake Mom up.”

  “I thought he liked me,” said Stacey.

  “He does, he does,” Kristy assured her.

  “What do you mean when you say she’s weird?” asked Stacey carefully.

  “Well, the green-tipped hair, for one thing. And the clothes. Her clothes were just … just weird.”

  “Like mine?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, no, not at all like yours,” said Kristy, beginning to blush. “Nothing like yours.”

  I glanced at Stacey. For the first time since I’d met her, she didn’t seem so sophisticated. In fact, she looked like a lost little girl. Two tears slid slowly down her cheeks.

  “Oh, no! Please don’t cry!” exclaimed Kristy.

  Mary Anne jumped up from her spot on the floor and sat down next to Stacey. She can’t stand for people to be upset.

  The phone rang, and I answered it. It was Mr. Willis from down the street. I’d baby-sat for his kids once before.

  “Yes?” I said. “This Saturday? Sure, sure … eight P.M…. sure. I’ll be there.” I hung up the phone and noted my job in our record book.

  When I looked up, everyone was glaring at me, even Stacey. It was my turn to find out what I’d done wrong.

  “Okay, what is it?” I asked.

  “Did you just accept that job?” Kristy demanded.

  I felt my stomach drop. “Yes,” I whispered.

  “But, Claudia, you know the rule.”

  Of course I knew. I’d just forgotten. “I’m supposed to check with everyone else first.”

  Kristy nodded. “I’m free on Saturday.”

  “So am I,” added Mary Anne.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’m not,” said Stacey, “but I wish you’d asked me. You didn’t know I was busy.”