Mary Anne and the Silent Witness Read online

  “Whoa!” exclaimed Kristy.

  “That changes a lot,” said Stacey. “That means that the door must have been opened after the fire started. So — so whoever started the fire must have been in here, with the door closed.”

  “Not only that,” said Kristy suddenly. “I think they may have tried to put out the fire, too.” She had been rummaging through a pile of rags, and she held something up. It was a fire extinguisher. “I can’t believe I just found this now,” she said, looking it over more closely. “And check it out, the gauge says ‘empty.’ Somebody used this up.”

  We all looked at each other. “Well,” I said, “this tells us something. I don’t know what, but it’s something.” I tried to sound enthusiastic, but in reality I was feeling discouraged. Even though we’d discovered some new clues, we were really no closer to figuring out who had started the fire.

  “I’m done!” Luke declared just then, as he carried two piles of magazines back into the garage. He dumped one pile into the trash can and put the other one on a shelf. “Can we do something else now?”

  Kristy, Stacey, and I exchanged looks. I shrugged. So did Kristy.

  “Sure,” said Stacey. “Let’s go for a walk.” I knew she wanted to keep the kids out of the house, where their dad was trying to work.

  “Okay,” agreed Luke.

  “Yay!” shouted Amalia, bouncing up and down on Stacey’s back.

  “Want me to take Amalia for a little bit?” I offered.

  “Sure,” said Stacey. Kristy and Luke walked ahead while we stopped to make the trade.

  After a minute, we caught up. Amalia was encouraging me to trot by kicking her heels into my sides and calling, “Go, horsie, go!”

  “Nice horse, Amalia!” I heard someone call. I looked across the street and saw Cary Retlin and his brothers playing catch in their yard. I stuck out my tongue at him.

  “Can we go over and play with them?” asked Luke.

  Stacey hesitated.

  “Why don’t you go on over by yourself, Luke?” suggested Kristy. “We’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  Now Luke hesitated. As usual, he didn’t seem to want to be far from his sitter — or sitters, in this case.

  “Go ahead,” I urged him. I could tell that he was torn.

  “Okay,” he said. “See you later.” After checking for cars he crossed the street.

  “Great. This gives us time to poke around the area some more,” said Kristy.

  “Poke!” squealed Amalia, poking me in the shoulder. “Come on, Pokey!” She kicked her heels into me again, and I started to trot along.

  “Who lives here?” asked Kristy, pointing to the house we were walking by. “Is that Mr. Fontecchio’s house?”

  I shook my head. “No, he’s the next-door neighbor on the other side,” I told her. “I don’t know whose house this is.”

  All of a sudden, Stacey stopped in midstep. “Well, whoever they are, I think they’re about to have a flooded basement,” she said. She pointed to a basement window on the side of the house. It was broken, and a hose, which came from the back of the house, was hanging down into the cellar.

  “Oh, no!” I cried. I checked the driveway and saw that it was empty; nobody seemed to be home. Meanwhile, Kristy ran over to take a closer look. She pulled out the hose, and, sure enough, it was running. “I’ll turn it off,” she called. She tore off around the side of the house to find the tap.

  Stacey had run to the door of the house and was knocking on it, but nobody answered.

  “Let’s go tell Mr. Martinez,” I said.

  That did not turn out to be the greatest idea. Why? Well, because Mr. Martinez, who happened to know that his neighbors were away for two weeks, decided he’d better call the police. And the police were suspicious — of us! It took Mr. Martinez ten minutes to convince the officer he was speaking to that we had been busy watching his children, and that we had had nothing to do with the vandalism.

  Once again, I had managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “I wonder if somebody’s trying to frame us,” Kristy mused as we headed back outside a few minutes later. Now she was carrying Amalia, who was thrilled to have three “horsies” so that she never had to walk.

  “Mr. Martinez sure was nice about it,” commented Stacey.

  I agreed. After he’d hung up, I’d apologized and told him we’d understand if he didn’t want us to baby-sit for his kids anymore. After all, who wants sitters who are always under suspicion? But he had insisted that he was very happy with the BSC — to Kristy’s obvious relief.

  Then we’d had a very interesting conversation about the Martinezes’ old baby-sitter. I asked why she’d left, and he told us that he didn’t know. “Maybe Allie was scared by the fire,” he’d said. “She quit right after that.”

  Allie! That was the name Amalia had called me. Maybe she was the owner of that Stoneybrook Day School notebook Abby had found. Maybe we needed to find out more about this Allie person.

  “Without notice?” Kristy asked Mr. Martinez, interrupting my thoughts. He nodded.

  Kristy couldn’t believe that, and she said so as we walked over to the Retlins’ to collect Luke. “I can’t imagine abandoning a client with no notice, just because of a little fire.”

  “Maybe there’s more to it than that,” said Stacey.

  “Maybe this has something to do with why Luke doesn’t trust baby-sitters,” I suggested. “I think we should find this Allie and talk to her.”

  We had reached the Retlins’ yard. As I watched Cary play catch with the younger boys, I suddenly remembered the soot on his shirt. This seemed as good a time as any to confront him about it. I decided that the direct approach was best, so I took a deep breath and walked right over to where he was standing. “You know, Cary,” I began, “I’m curious about why I’ve seen you — and your brother — with soot on your clothes. You didn’t have anything to do with that fire at the Martinezes’, did you?”

  He just looked at me and laughed. “You’d better brush up on your detective skills, Mary Anne.” He pointed to a ladder propped against his house. “We’ve been helping my dad clean the chimney, that’s all.”

  I nodded. I just don’t trust Cary Retlin, and I didn’t believe a word he was telling me.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” he said, as if he were reading my mind. “Well, here’s a little tip. Check under Luke’s bed. According to Steig, there’s something important there.”

  “Okay, Cary,” I said tiredly. “Sure.” I knew he was just trying to send me on one of his wild-goose chases. He’s done it before when he knew the BSC was involved in a mystery. He’d probably planted a mouse trap under the bed or something. I just shook my head and walked away.

  Mysterious clues. Frame-ups. No real suspects. And time was running out. Solving this mystery was hard enough, without Cary’s “help.”

  “Can you believe it?” asked Kristy, smacking the back of her hand against the newspaper. She’d spotted the article at breakfast that morning and had brought the family’s copy to school to show the rest of us. “We had absolutely nothing to do with this — we may have even saved that house from being flooded — and what happens? More bad publicity!”

  It was lunchtime on Wednesday, and Kristy was completely ignoring her “Fish Sand. on Bun w/Coleslaw,” as that day’s menu put it. Instead, she was ranting and raving about how our experience the day before had made it into the paper.

  “Don’t worry, Kristy,” I said, squeezing some tartar sauce out of a little pouch onto my Fish Sand. “It’s just the police blotter. They have to report every call they receive. It’s only two tiny lines, and it doesn’t even mention any names. Plus it explains that we had an alibi.”

  “Meanwhile, here’s something else interesting,” said Abby, who had grabbed another section of the paper. “It sounds as if Fowler has a good alibi, too; he’s out in California again. He’s quoted as saying that he’ll definitely be back for tomorrow’s town counc
il meeting, though.”

  Kristy groaned. “I can’t believe that meeting is tomorrow night,” she said. “We have just over twenty-four hours to crack this case and prove that Fowler is up to no good.”

  I frowned. “I just know that was him out by the mill that night. Unless — unless it was his twin brother! Either way, he must be connected with the vandalism. If only we could prove it!”

  “I still think he may have been connected with the fire at the Martinezes’, too,” added Claudia. “Which means he also may be the one threatening Luke to keep quiet.”

  “Oooh, that man!” I said. It made me so mad to think of anyone threatening a little kid.

  Kristy sat up in her seat. “I know!” she said. “Thinking about those threats reminds me. What if we stake out that phone booth at the corner of Essex and Main, the one the call came from that day I was sitting for Luke? Maybe we’ll find something out.”

  It seemed like a long shot, but I agreed to check it out, if Logan would come with me.

  We talked a bit more at lunch that day about all the possible leads we could follow up (including keeping an eye on Cary Retlin, who was hanging around near our table looking suspicious), and by the time we threw out the remains of our Fish Sand.s, we had a plan. Kristy and Abby had agreed to find Shannon after school and see if she could bring to the BSC meeting a Stoneybrook Day School yearbook that might feature Allie, the Martinezes’ previous sitter. Claudia, who was sitting for the Martinezes that afternoon, agreed to keep a close eye out for clues. And Stacey said she’d head back to the library to try to find out more about Fowler. We’d check with Jessi and Mal later (they eat lunch at a different time) to see what they wanted to do. There wasn’t much time left. We needed to mobilize the whole BSC detective team.

  As it turned out, Jessi joined Stacey at the library, while Mal came with Logan and me to stake out the phone booth. The three of us met right after school and headed downtown. Logan suggested stopping for a bite to eat at the Rosebud Café (he’s always hungry), but I didn’t want to take the time. “Maybe later,” I said. “First let’s check things out.” I glanced at my watch. I couldn’t stop thinking about how soon the town council meeting would take place. The future of Miller’s Park was at stake. We had to do everything we could to save it and put Fowler out of business once and for all. Any so-called businessman who would stoop to threatening a kid deserved to be put in jail.

  When we arrived at the corner of Essex and Main, Mal spotted a bench at a nearby bus stop, within sight of the phone booth. “Let’s sit here,” she suggested. “We can watch all the action.”

  Ten minutes later, we realized that “action” wasn’t exactly the word. I mean, the corner of Essex and Main is a fairly busy one, but there still wasn’t much going on. And nobody was using the phone booth. It just stood there, empty. Once in a while somebody walked by it, but nobody stopped to make a call.

  Mal and Logan and I sat together quietly, waiting to see if anything would happen. After a while, I noticed Logan yawning. I had to admit that what we were doing was pretty boring, but stakeouts always are. You wait and wait, and sometimes nothing happens.

  To distract myself, I started to look around at all the stores on the block. On one side of Essex I saw Pierre’s Dry Cleaners, Zuzu’s Petals (a flower store with lots of tulips in the window), and Greetings, which looked like a new card shop. On the other side were Sew Fine, a sewing store I shop at sometimes, Baby and Company, a children’s clothing store, and the pet store, which is called Fur ‘n’ Feathers (I buy toys for Tigger there once in a while). On Main, the stores are less interesting: a drugstore, two banks, a coffee shop, and a hardware store. None of the Main Street shops have pretty window displays or cute names, unless you count the pyramid of paint cans in the window of Ted’s Tools, which is the name of the hardware store that sits on the corner near the phone booth.

  I remembered that Claudia had once gone into Ted’s Tools, following up a lead on another mystery we worked on — and solved — not too long ago. It had sounded like a neat place, the kind of old-fashioned hardware store that carries everything you can imagine.

  The sun was warm, and my mind drifted as I sat on the bench. I thought about all the clues we had written down in our mystery notebook, and how none of them added up to much. I thought back over the events of the past week, and shuddered when I remembered that moment when, standing in the middle of a small clearing with a brick in my hand, I’d heard the word, “Freeze!”

  “Ugh,” I said out loud. Logan and Mal looked at me.

  “What?” asked Logan.

  “I was just thinking of how awful it was when Officer Cleary was shining that light on me,” I explained. “I just stood there, holding that brick, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say.”

  Logan reached out and patted my shoulder, and Mal gave me a sympathetic smile. I looked down at my hands, almost expecting to see a brick in them. A green-painted brick. “Hey!” I said suddenly. “I wonder why the vandals were using a brick with green paint on it. It’s not the kind of thing you find just lying around.” I looked up again and saw the Ted’s Tools sign, and something clicked in my brain. I stood up and headed for the store. Logan and Mal followed me, as if they knew exactly what I was thinking without my having to tell them. When we stepped into the store, a little bell rang and a salesman approached us.

  “Can I help you?” asked the man, who wore a name tag that said “Ted.”

  “I was just wondering,” I said, not even bothering to figure out a cover story, “if you’ve sold any green house paint recently.”

  “What shade?” he asked. He didn’t seem to be curious about why I wanted to know.

  I thought for a second, picturing the brick. “Forest,” I said firmly. “Forest green.”

  Fortunately for us, Ted seemed to have a brain like a computer when it came to local home improvement projects. He scratched his head. “Why, I haven’t sold much of that at all recently. In fact, I think the last batch of forest green I sold was to — to the Robbins family, for that extension they’re building.”

  I thanked him and we headed out. I wasn’t sure if we’d learned anything meaningful, but our stakeout was over. It was time for our BSC meeting.

  When we arrived, everyone else was already there, poring over the Stoneybrook Day School yearbook that Shannon had brought. Shannon hadn’t been able to think of an Allie in her grade, so she was leafing through the pages, looking for one in the upper grades.

  Suddenly, she stopped and pointed to a picture. “Now I know who she is,” she said. “Allie Newbern. She’s a tenth-grader. I’ve seen her in the halls lots of times, with her boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend?” asked Abby. “That must be the B.R. I saw scribbled all over that notebook of hers that I found at the Martinezes’. Do you know his name?”

  “B.R.!” I exclaimed, excited all of a sudden. “This may sound weird — but what if the R stands for Robbins?” Since I’d just heard that name over at Ted’s Tools, it was on my mind.

  Shannon flipped the pages, looking for the name Robbins. Sure enough, three pages later we found a picture of a boy named Beau Robbins. Shannon shrieked, “That’s him! That’s her boyfriend!”

  “And check out his address,” said Kristy, who had grabbed a Stoneybrook phone book and flipped it open to the Rs. I read it, and realized that the Robbins family lived right around the corner from the Martinezes.

  “Whoa,” I said softly. “I’m starting to see some connections here.”

  “We’ll have to head over there right after school tomorrow,” said Kristy. “If we’re lucky, maybe things will come together for us. We don’t have much time before that meeting, though.”

  Stacey agreed. “And it doesn’t look as if we have any other leads, either,” she added. “Jessi and I couldn’t find out anything else about Samuel Wolf. We hit a total dead end.”

  * * *

  After school the next day, Kristy came home with me. Shannon’s mom drove he
r over, and then the three of us walked over to the Martinezes’ neighborhood. We passed their street and kept walking, right up to a green house — a forest green house with what looked like a brand-new brick addition.

  As we came closer, I spotted an older — maybe high-school age — boy and a girl in the yard. There was something familiar about the boy, but I didn’t figure it out until we had passed the house. (We were pretending to take a casual stroll.)

  “That’s him!” I hissed to Kristy. “I didn’t recognize him from the yearbook picture, but now I see it. He’s the one I saw in the woods with Fowler!”

  Kristy nodded, excited. “And did you see what they were doing?” she hissed back. “She was smoking. And he was rolling a cigarette. They might be the ones who dropped that empty pack of tobacco!”

  “Let’s take another look,” whispered Shannon. “Just to be sure.” We strolled back the other way, and suddenly our cover was blown. Allie had spotted Shannon.

  “Hi!” she called. “Don’t you go to Stoneybrook Day?”

  “Uh, yes,” answered Shannon nervously.

  “What’s up? What are you doing in this neighborhood?” asked Allie. She seemed friendly. Beau just lounged on the grass, smoking and ignoring us.

  “I — um, I baby-sit for one of your neighbors,” replied Shannon.

  Allie smiled. “There are some great kids in this neighborhood,” she said. “I’ve done some baby-sitting around here, too.”

  Suddenly, I remembered the threatening notes and phone calls Luke had been receiving. All the clues, I realized suddenly, pointed toward one conclusion, a conclusion I didn’t want to reach: Allie, this friendly girl, was connected to all the strange happenings at the Martinezes’. And that included the threats to Luke. How could Allie call herself a baby-sitter if she did things like that? Without even thinking about it, I stepped forward. “How could you!” I cried.

  “How could I what?” asked Allie, looking confused.

  “How could you threaten a little kid like Luke? How could you start a fire in somebody’s house, or try to flood somebody’s basement?” I was so angry I barely knew what I was saying. “How could you vandalize a neat old place like the mill?”