Mary Anne's Bad-Luck Mystery Read online

  Kristy was off and running with another of her famous ideas.

  Just as planned, Charlie arrived at our house a little after ten-thirty. Kristy was with him, of course, and they had already picked up Jessi and Claudia. As soon as I got in the car, Kristy began making sure I’d brought along the things we’d need.

  “Got everything?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Flashlight?”

  “Check,” I replied.

  “Sheet?”

  “Check.”

  “Mask?”

  “Check.”

  “Great. And I’ve got the tape player.”

  “I’ve got two flashlights, a mask, a sheet, and the string,” added Claudia.

  “Perfect,” said Kristy. “We’re really going to get ’em! … Are you scared?”

  “Terrified,” I admitted. “You?”

  “Terrified, too. But there’s nothing like a little revenge….” Kristy grinned wickedly. Charlie was keeping quiet. He must have thought we were all loony.

  “Hey, you didn’t tell Logan about this, did you?” Kristy asked suddenly.

  “Not on your life. I don’t think he’d have let us go into the cemetery without him. He’d want to come along and protect us. Worse, he might have tried to stop us. He might have phoned in an anonymous tip to our parents or something. Even so, not telling him wasn’t easy. I tell him almost everything.”

  “Yeah,” said Claudia wistfully. Then she snapped out of it. “Good for you,” she said briskly. “I just hope the rest of us can keep this secret. Some of us have pretty big mouths.”

  We all knew Claudia meant Kristy. Even in the dark, I could see Kristy stick her tongue out at Claudia. But I didn’t think Kristy would blow this. It was her idea. Too much was at stake. Could Charlie be trusted, though? I sort of wished we hadn’t let an outsider in on our plan. Even an outsider with a car.

  We stopped at the Schafers’ and the Pikes’ and picked up Dawn and Mallory. Then we headed for … the graveyard.

  “Um, excuse me,” Mal spoke up at one point, “but I have a problem.”

  Inwardly, I groaned. We didn’t need any problems. “What is it?” I whispered.

  “Well, my brothers and sisters and I always hold our breaths when we go by graveyards. I’m not positive about this, but I think it’s so that we won’t breathe in any souls of dead people and get possessed. Once when we were out with our father, he parked the car in front of a graveyard while he mailed a letter. We all nearly turned blue. But now we’re going to be in a graveyard for at least an hour. And I can’t hold my breath for more than a couple of minutes.”

  Everyone tried not to laugh, although Charlie wasn’t very successful.

  “Mal, I understand that you’re worried,” I told her, “but I have gone by graveyards a million times and never held my breath. I’ve walked around in graveyards and never held my breath. And to my knowledge, no soul has ever possessed me.”

  “I’ve never held my breath, either,” said Dawn and Claudia.

  “I used to,” Jessi admitted. “But when I stopped, nothing happened. Nothing happened when I stopped saying ‘Rabbit, rabbit,’ on the first day of a new month, either. I don’t think you need to worry, Mal.”

  “Right. Worry about this,” said Dawn. “We’ve just reached the graveyard.”

  “Pull up over there,” Kristy commanded Charlie, “and wait for us. Remember everything I told you. Be prepared to go for help, okay?”

  “You girls are crazy,” was Charlie’s only reply.

  “Now,” said Kristy, facing the rest of us like our gym teacher. “On to Old Hickory’s.”

  Kristy wanted us to march to the tombstone in a line, but nobody wanted to be either first or last, so we went in a huddle. We tiptoed through the silent, moonlit cemetery, passing stark white tombs and every now and then a bunch of flowers or a wreath of greens.

  “Here it is,” I said after we’d walked halfway across the cemetery.

  “Here?” squeaked Jessi. “In all these trees? It’s pitch black! Why are there trees here?”

  “Old Hickory’s nephew planted them. More stuff his uncle didn’t want, but he went ahead and put them in anyway,” Claudia said.

  “Okay. Enough talk. Get to work, you guys,” ordered Kristy. “We better rig up the ghosts first.”

  It was surprisingly easy. We stretched a length of twine from the top of Old Hickory’s tomb to a tree branch not far away. Claudia and I had each sewn a curtain ring to the middle of the sheets we’d brought along. We attached the ring of one sheet to the tree-end of the twine and left the “ghost” up in the tree. We hung the other “ghost” from a branch of a second tree in the dearing.

  Altogether, the six of us had six rubber masks, seven flashlights, and Kristy’s tape player, not to mention the ghosts. Kristy played us a sample of her Haunted House sound-effects tape. My hair nearly stood on end.

  Kristy was just rewinding the tape when Dawn said, “SHH! I heard something.” We stood stock-still, listening.

  Not a sound.

  Kristy checked her watch. “It’s eleven twenty-five,” she whispered. “Even if that sound wasn’t them, we should probably get to our posts. I bet they’ll be along any minute now.”

  “Our posts?” Mal repeated.

  “Yeah. This is very important. Listen up.” Kristy gave out a bunch of orders. When she was finished, we scattered. I put on my mask, grabbed my flashlight, and hid behind Old Hickory’s tombstone with the tape player.

  I was smushed up against the grave — on Halloween, near midnight, under a full moon. I had just proved something. Charlie was right. We really were crazy.

  Kristy, also wearing a mask, climbed the tree to the ghost that was attached to the twine. Claudia handed a flashlight to her.

  Dawn hid with the other ghost, holding her flashlight and wearing a mask.

  Claudia, in charge of lighting, hid behind another tree. She was holding two flashlights and wearing a mask.

  Jessi and Mal crouched beside other tombstones, each wearing a mask, each carrying a light.

  Then we waited.

  We waited and waited and waited. It seemed like forever. When I dared to flick on my light long enough to read my watch, I saw that it was only 11:32.

  That was when we heard the voices.

  None of us said a word. We didn’t have to. We knew what we were supposed to do.

  The voices came closer. They grew louder. Just as I had suspected, they belonged to Cokie, Grace, and maybe three or four of their friends.

  We didn’t wait much longer. Up in the tree, Kristy let out a low whistle. It sounded like a bird call. That was our signal. (The other girls never even noticed it.)

  I turned on the tape player — full blast.

  Claudia began shining her flashlights around in weird patterns.

  Kristy shone her light on the ghost in the tree and let him loose. He glided right down to Old Hickory’s tombstone, where I caught him.

  “Aughh! Aughh!” shrieked Grace.

  “Help!” Cokie screamed.

  But we weren’t finished.

  Dawn turned her light onto the second ghost, the one hanging from the other tree, and Jessi and Mal stepped from behind the graves, each holding her mask in front of her face with the flashlight lighting it up from behind. It was a pretty horrible spectacle — even for me, and I knew about the “special effects.”

  One of Cokie’s friends was standing as still as a corpse and crying softly, “Oh help, oh help, oh help,” over and over again. The others looked like they were getting ready to run away.

  “Now!” ordered Kristy.

  She jumped out of the tree, and the six of us surrounded Cokie and Grace and the others. We were all holding flashlit masks before our faces. Really — I’m surprised nobody had a heart attack.

  The next few moments were pure panic and confusion. The other girls tried to run away, but we wouldn’t let them. At last we put down our masks. The girls got a
look at us.

  “You!” exclaimed Cokie, taking everything in. “You little sneaks!”

  “Us? Sneaks?” said Kristy innocently. “Look at you guys.”

  For the first time I noticed that Cokie’s crowd wasn’t empty-handed. They were also carrying sheets and masks and stuff.

  “Is this what was supposed to happen?” spoke up a new voice. It was a male voice.

  “Charlie!” Kristy shouted angrily. “I told you to stay in the car!”

  But it wasn’t Charlie who stepped into the clearing. It was Logan.

  I was thoroughly confused.

  “Logan?” I asked incredulously.

  “Mary Anne?” he replied, just as incredulously.

  “Somebody better explain what’s going on here,” said Dawn.

  “Well, it won’t be me,” said Cokie, smirking.

  “Or me,” said Grace and the others.

  “Then I’ll talk,” Logan cut in. (Cokie groaned.) “I was eating this nice, pleasant dinner tonight,” he began, “when the phone rang. This voice told me to go to some grave in the cemetery at midnight tonight if I wanted to see something really amazing. Well, I’m curious and I like a little adventure, so I decided to go. Only I left early because I had no idea where the grave — Ol’ Hiccup’s or something — was. But when I got to the cemetery, who did I see, but Charlie Thomas, and he directed me to the grave, and I found my good friends” (Logan sauntered over to me and put his arm across my shoulder) “scaring the pants off these guys. Boy, are you cowards,” he said to Cokie and Grace.

  Grace looked absolutely crestfallen.

  But not Cokie. “Talk about cowards,” she said, “your girlfriend here was scared to death of the necklace we sent her, just because we said it was a bad-luck charm.”

  “So you did send it!” I exclaimed. “The chain letter, too?”

  “What chain letter?” Cokie replied. She looked blank. I knew that the girls really hadn’t sent it.

  “But why?” asked Claudia. “Why did you send Mary Anne the charm and ask us to come here tonight?”

  “Why do you think?” snapped Cokie.

  “Believe me, if we had the vaguest idea,” said Kristy, “not only wouldn’t we be asking you, but we wouldn’t be standing around in this graveyard in the middle of the night.”

  Cokie crossed her arms. Everything about her said, “I’m not talking.”

  But Grace spoke up. “Oh, we might as well tell them.” (She said them as if she were referring to a swarm of flies.) “We just wanted to make you — all of you, but especially Mary Anne — look like, well, like jerks. We kind of wanted Logan to get fed up with you….” Grace’s voice was fading away. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but I think she was blushing.

  “Fed up?” Logan repeated, only he really said, “Fayud up?”

  “Yeah.” Grace kicked at a stone with the toe of her sneaker. “You spend most of your time with Mary Anne and the girls in the Baby-sitters Club. There are other girls at Stoneybrook Middle School, you know.”

  “Of course I know,” replied Logan. “I’m not blind. And when I see anyone I like as much as Mary Anne and her friends, maybe I’ll do something. But right now Mary Anne is — is my …”

  Now Logan and I were blushing. I think he wanted to say girlfriend.

  “Plus, I like baby-sitting,” Logan finished up.

  “So there,” Kristy said to Cokie. She turned to the rest of us. “Come on. Let’s go. Charlie’s waiting.” She turned back to Cokie and the others. “We’d offer you a ride,” she said sweetly, “but the car’s full. See you in school on Monday.”

  “Oh. Oh, you’re not, um, going to tell anyone about this … are you?” asked one of Cokie’s friends nervously.

  “Who? Us?” I replied.

  And Logan just said, “Maybe, maybe not,” and smiled smugly.

  Then my friends and I gathered up our equipment and walked off.

  At Kristy’s house later we laughed so hard that her mother had to come into her bedroom twice to ask us to quiet down. She wasn’t mean about it or anything, but she did point out that there were seven other people plus a cat and a dog in the house who were trying to sleep.

  However, in Kristy’s room were six people who were so relieved they were nearly hysterical.

  “It’s over! My bad-luck mystery is over!” I said, after Mrs. Brewer left for the second time. I tried to keep my voice down.

  Kristy’s room is gigantic. (Well, it is in a mansion. I hope I get to live in a mansion someday. Or at least in New York City.) Kristy’s bed is gigantic, too. It’s so big that four of us — Kristy, Jessi, Mal, and I — were sitting on it with room to spare. (That room was taken up by a large bowl of popcorn, an unsteady tray of sodas, and our masks.) On the floor, Claudia and Dawn were lying on top of some sleeping bags. (We hadn’t even needed to bring our sleeping bags to Kristy’s, since the Thomases and Brewers have eight all together.)

  Ever since we got back from the graveyard we’d been giggling, eating, trying our masks on again (turning out the lamps, shining the flashlights behind the masks, and screaming), reliving the adventure in the graveyard, and talking about my mystery.

  “I was so surprised when Logan showed up,” said Dawn. “I know this is really awful, Mary Anne, and I’m sorry, but when I first saw him, I thought — just for a split second — that he was in on whatever Cokie and Grace were up to.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I told her. “That crossed my mind, too.”

  “Boy, we really got them!” cried Kristy, gloating. “We really faked them out.”

  It was one-thirty, and not one of us was sleepy. We could only talk about the night and the mystery.

  I took a handful of popcorn from the bowl. “You know,” I said, “now that the mystery is over, I think I’ll keep wearing the ch — I mean, the necklace. It really isn’t a charm. And knowing that it’s a symbol of faith, well, I don’t know. I just like it. It reminds me of Logan and me. We’re faithful. Especially Logan. He’s been very faithful to me.”

  Jessi was frowning.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Something’s bothering me,” she said slowly.

  “What?”

  “Something Cokie said in the cemetery. Only … I can’t quite remember.”

  Jessi looked so serious that we all stopped to think.

  “Do you remember what she was talking about?” Mal asked Jessi.

  Jessi shook her head. “No. I just remember thinking that the mystery wasn’t solved after all.”

  “Well, let’s see,” I said. “We know that Cokie and Grace sent the necklace. And they were going to try to scare us at Old Hickory’s tonight, so they left the letter on my front door, too.”

  “Weren’t Cokie and Grace both at the dance last night?” asked Dawn. “How could they have left the letter?”

  “Well, then one of their friends must have done it. Anyway, they were behind it. And it was probably Cokie who phoned Logan tonight. What else is there?” I asked. “The mystery’s solved. We don’t even have to worry about spells and bad luck anymore.”

  “That’s it!” exclaimed Jessi. “I knew something was wrong. It’s the bad luck. The chain letter. Cokie said she didn’t send it.”

  “I think she meant it, too. She looked confused,” I added.

  “And,” Jessi continued, “the chain letter started the mystery. If Cokie and her friends didn’t send it, who did?”

  A hush fell over Kristy’s room.

  “A better question,” I went on, “is — would Cokie and Grace have done what they did if I hadn’t broken the chain?”

  “Huh?” said Claudia.

  “I mean,” I said slowly, trying to think of how to explain my new fear, “maybe there is good and bad luck after all. Maybe Cokie and Grace were my bad luck. If I hadn’t broken the chain, maybe they’d never have sent the necklace to me or tried to trick us or anything.”

  “Whoa,” said Kristy under her breath.

 
“Remember?” said Dawn. “Our bad luck started as soon as Mary Anne threw away the chain letter — which was before Cokie and Grace sent the necklace.”

  Dawn and Claudia exchanged a frightened look. In an instant, they had moved the popcorn, masks, and soda to the floor, and squeezed onto Kristy’s bed with the rest of us club members.

  “I wonder how long bad luck lasts,” said Mallory.

  “Maybe we need a spell after all,” I added. “Where are our library books?”

  “I had to return them,” Claudia replied. “They were overdue.”

  “Well, let’s try to remember some of the spells,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” said Kristy. “No. Not that again.”

  “We have to … don’t we?” I asked.

  “We do not,” Kristy replied sharply. “Well, hey — we could make up our own spell.”

  “We could?” asked the rest of us.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Because we don’t know magic, that’s why,” said Mal.

  “Oh, who cares? All we need is, like … Mary Anne, pull out one of your eyelashes for me —”

  “No way!”

  “Better yet,” Kristy went on, “go get Boo-Boo. We’ll take a sample of his fur.”

  Get Boo-Boo? I thought. Boo-Boo was crazy. I’d be taking my life in my hands. “Why don’t I just go get scrapings from the underside of a sea snake?”

  My friends began to laugh. I put the popcorn back on the bed. The slumber party felt more like a slumber party again.

  “You know,” I said, “when you think about it, even if bad luck really was visited upon us when I threw out the letter, I think it’s over now. I mean, those of us who went to the dance had fun. And we pulled a good trick on Grace and Cokie. Our luck is changing.”